NIGHTS TO REMEMBER
For a number of reasons, it was only in the 90s that gay pride really began to live up to its name. Venues got rid of their blacked-out windows, and not only were clubbers proud to be seen inside, but they were proud to be photographed there, too. Gay magazines thrived on page after page of snaps of party animals. The first thing many readers did when they picked up the mostly free ‘scene’ magazines was check out how they looked.
Most of the major clubs and magazines were in London, where there were several large, long-established LGBTQ+ communities. But around the turn of the 90s, something happened on the queer scene in the north of England, particularly in Manchester, where a gay village sprang up in a former red-light district next to the run-down canal. “The doors were suddenly wide open,” says photographer Stuart Linden Rhodes. “The closet doors had come off!”
Linden, as he’s known, spent ten years as a self-taught, part-time photo-journalist for a now-defunct gay paper called . He travelled the length and breadth of the UK, but his main patch was Birmingham to Newcastle. He took thousands of, the stuff of legend.
