At the beginning of The Pharmacist, my two main characters—a young gay artist, Billy, and a rather eccentric old man, Albert—meet on the street in East London, amongst the array of flowers being sold at Columbia Road Flower Market. It’s set twenty years ago, when Shoreditch was still the kind of place that could be home to young runaways fleeing to London. Squats were still a thing. Independent business was sustainable. Ordinary people could afford to hang out and have hobbies. Affordability made Shoreditch very much a queer friendly area where bumping into others of the same species became commonplace. Visibility was key.
An LGBTQ+ rainbow flag hung outside The Royal Oak—another location in the novella—which opened unusually early to serve the traders from the flower market. A side-effect of this was that it became the perfect morning after-party to clubbers who were still going from the night before. Inside was akin to a Hogarth painting. The clientele—from all walks of life—were undiscriminating in their pursuit of hedonism. There was no sense of unequal power, influence, privileges. Everyone just rubbed along. The Royal Oak was full of people from the local council estate, alongside artists, wealthy fashionistas, gangsters and drug dealers.
Chariots Roman Spa doesn’t feature in the novella, but was another vital safe-space for gay men in the area. Sure, it’s exactly the place where Albert might have gone to for a sexual encounter but it’s also where he may have found friends and connected with others like him: these venues were jam packed with diversity at a time when London was considered a sex capital. However, saunas have been given a bad name by ultra-conservatives: we have been told that they encourage risky behavior, while in fact they provided a community space where safer-sex information could be disseminated and men could congregate without prejudice.
Gentrification began as a relatively innocuous affair. There was a general tidying up of the area and some old dives were replaced by glass-fronted coffee shops. But it wasn’t long before the corporatization of the area took over. Rising rents priced creative people out and along with them went those community safe spaces. We lost the George and Dragon, the Joiner’s Arms, the Nelson’s Head and a host of so many other queer establishments. Where those places once were is now dwarfed by gleaming gargantuan skyscrapers, as the city creeps ever nearer.
Community and visibility have been replaced by loneliness and isolation. With the closure of so many valued establishments came the advent of smart-phones, hook-up apps and Uber: a perfect storm, when coupled with instant access to drugs like GHB and crystal meth. The novella includes a some snippets of later would subsequently become known as Chemsex. This new gay cultural landscape is not without its positive aspects. However, now gay men are no longer meeting on bar stools but on a phone screen, we have unwittingly recreated a closet for ourselves. I doubt very much, if The Pharmacist had been set in 2020, that Billy and Albert would have met at all.
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