Proud to be Here

A year before the pandemic, a small show at the Whitechapel Gallery explored how London’s queer spaces had nurtured a culture of support and acceptance among the LGBTQ+ community, but were now increasingly under threat. Many queer venues emerged in the wake of the AIDS epidemic to bring joy to parts of the city that had previously been inhospitable to a community often vilified and shunned even as thousands of mostly gay men in the UK lost their lives. After the financial crisis, these venues began to close at an alarming rate; between 2006 and 2017, London lost 58% of its queer spaces.

The pandemic presented yet another threat to London’s queer culture. But as restrictions made getting together in person impossible, many of the remaining venues diversified quickly, creating online ticketed events that allowed them to reach an audience beyond the city limits and provided vital funds to ensure reopening once restrictions lifted. As life slowly returns to something resembling normality, signs are promising that LGBTQ+ spaces have survived, and maybe even thrived over the past few years.

This should be cause for excitement for Ashley Joiner, whose LGBTQ+-led arts and social action charity lands at new headquarters in the Design District in Summer 2022. Queercircle promises “a community-focused programme of exhibition commissions, collaborative artists residencies and year-long learning and participation opportunities,” on the Peninsula. It aims to provide a holistic environment which celebrates queer identity, champions arts and culture, and supports the wellbeing of the local community.

In its current guise, Queercircle functions as an online toolkit of LGBTQ+-related content, debates, opportunities and campaigning as well as an archive of original interviews and conversations between some of London’s most prominent and emerging queer artists. IRL, it partners with organisations like the Victoria Miro gallery to curate queer-focused events and exhibitions and consults on health and wellbeing projects for the LGBTQ+ community. It’s already an impressive platform, but its ambitions for the future are even more so. For Ashley, Queercircle’s mission is personal.

For his first venture in 2016, Ashley threw a mini-festival at Limewharf on Vyner Street, inviting queer artists to hang whatever work they saw fit. “It was very DIY, people just hung stuff up, and if they wanted to screen something we did a screening, if they wanted to do a tour, we did a tour. I didn’t know what Queercircle should be at that stage, but that weekend seemed to resonate with people – because it was created for us, by us – and I knew there was something there to develop.

“So I spent a couple of years consulting with small groups of artists, curators, community organisers and charity partners, and ran these intimate workshops to really flesh out what Queercircle could and should be.” The intervening few years have seen Ashley’s priorities divided between Queercircle and directing his first documentary, Are You Proud?, which charts the history of the LGBTQ+ movement from the second world war until the present day, asking critical questions of its interviewees about where the movement goes next. The film engages with issues like migrant and trans rights with an intersectional and global perspective, acknowledging that the oppression of any minority group is the oppression of all minority groups.

“There’s a real need for a global view when we're talking about LGBT politics, and the advice I got from all these amazing activists from the last six decades was to just go and try stuff out. All the activists I spoke to were just ordinary people doing amazing things.”

For someone whose life is now so grounded in queer culture and activism, Ashley was a late bloomer, politically speaking. “Really I came into it all accidentally. My ex-boyfriend’s mum, who happened to be a lesbian, asked if we were going to Pride one year, and I responded with a resounding no. I just didn’t really feel that it reflected who I was. And she rightly said to me: ‘You don’t know your history.’

“After that I began to realise just how little I knew. I discovered Section 28 and how queer young people had been oppressed as children in the education system. A lot of people of my generation at that time just didn’t know about that. It’s hard to imagine, but eight years ago, LGBTQ+ politics weren’t widely discussed the way they are now.”

While the awareness of these issues has increased, socially we’re back in a similarly perilous time, with mental health issues on the rise and widespread funding cuts to the arts becoming the norm. Ashley is concerned that the former will be exacerbated by the latter. “During the pandemic, so many of us filled our time with arts and creative endeavours in a way that we hadn’t allowed ourselves to before, and a lot of that was delivered by artists that just wanted to connect with other people online. This was a form of social action as well as a form of mental healthcare. To make cuts to the arts on the back of this is not only shortsighted in terms of the contribution arts and culture make to the economy and health sector, it’s also an attack on free thinking.”

Queercircle hopes to carry the momentum of the pandemic forward when it arrives at the Peninsula, using art as both a form of mental healthcare that sits outside of traditional clinical practice and as a medium for social action to empower young queer artists who are still at risk of being marginalised. Even without a permanent home, Queercircle has enabled new relationships to flourish between London’s artists and activists, bringing together what were previously two disparate groups to learn from each other and evolve together.

“It’s been so fruitful to work with community organisers who understand different social models or types of transformative thinking and pairing them with artists who have this visual language which can articulate things that aren’t easily communicated with words and inspires us to think differently,” says Ashley.

Queercircle has taken on three spaces in the Design District: a gallery, a reading room, featuring an archive of queer literature and art, and a project space for delivering its programme of workshops, community engagement, learning and health and wellbeing, all of which will be free to the public. Ashley’s keen to stress that, while this will be an LGBTQ+-led space, its activities are for everyone, regardless of how they identify. “It’s really about using arts and culture to break down those social divides and help build more unity and understanding, and there’s a lot of work to be done in the area.”

Measuring the impact of its health and wellbeing work is crucial to how Ashley sees Queercircle evolving over time. To this end he has plans to work in partnership with University College London to explore how arts-based programming can tackle social isolation and improve mental health for LGBTQ+ people — one of the first academic studies of its kind in the world.

“We’re monitoring whether the programme has any beneficial impact on increasing motivation, new learning, improved cognitive function, increased confidence, self esteem and social participation. Then the learning from that research and development will inform what we deliver the following year.”

It certainly sounds like the local community will have a lot to gain from Queercircle’s arrival on the Peninsula, but for Ashley, the relationship is entirely reciprocal. “The opportunities we have to partner with other creative tenants in the Design District at this early stage of our journey is really, really positive,” he says. “When I came to London there was no space like this, and my hope is that Queercircle can be a place where people are able to build genuine connections and we can strengthen and empower our communities.”

Queercircle lands at the Design District in early summer. To find out more about its programme, visit queercircle.org