A Little Gay History of Wales by Daryl Leeworthy

Author:Daryl Leeworthy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Wales Press

There was a clear sense of separation between gay and non-gay patrons, either using back bars, separate lounges, or through the careful intervention of the bar staff to maintain a distinction between the two. Yet nothing was underground or hidden about bars of this kind: they were a place to which an individual could go if they were ‘in the know’, and could be stumbled upon accidentally. Alternative music venues such as Club Roma on Churchill Way, the New Moon on Mill Lane or Sam’s Bar on St Mary’s Street (previously the Terminus), also appealed to lesbian and gay revellers.

The first deliberately established gay club to open in Cardiff was SIRS, a members-only venue situated above the Matisse Bar on St Mary’s Street, for which a key was required to enter – although these were as anonymous and indistinct as those fitting a standard Yale lock – and whose existence and location was kept quiet. One Rhondda man trying out the scene for the first time explained to a FRIEND volunteer in 1977 that he had failed to find the club when he went looking on a night out. In the opinion of Ar Dâf, the magazine of the Welsh-language student union in Cardiff, the Matisse was a ‘sexist place [because] it costs more for women to go in’. Women were only able to buy half pints, unlike the male customers (a rule which also existed at SIRS), and there was a total ban on jeans, which limited its appeal to younger people. Perhaps because of its neighbour’s reputation, perhaps not, SIRS had an ‘older male clientele’, as one former visitor recalled, but it also had ‘a tiny dance floor which was wired to flash on in random abandon. I thought this highly sophisticated.’34 Following SIRS were clubs such as Hunters, which opened in the Oxford Arcade in 1978 and was owned by Lenny Lancaster, and the Tunnel Club.

In its heyday in the 1980s, the Tunnel was the premier late-night gay venue in Cardiff and drew crowds and performers from far and wide – those who went, went ‘a lot’.35 One of its most popular acts was Lily Savage. In his memoir, Paul O’Grady considered it ‘one of my favourite venues’.36 Barbara Windsor also appeared. Situated down an alleyway, the Tunnel was a long, meandering venue. On the inside revellers danced along to club beats, cheering on drag artists, taking poppers, or watching Mr Wet Y-Fronts competitions on the stage. Like SIRS, the Tunnel had a macho reputation (accompanied by a separate men-only bar) and was unsurprisingly regarded as the most masculine ‘of the capital’s gay nightspots’.37 Paul Burston recalled that ‘the only strangers at the Tunnel were those people who didn’t have big moustaches and a City and Guilds in fan-dancing’. Yet for all its obviously popularity, the Tunnel club was never quite able to become the centre of gay life in Cardiff.

That role fell to the King’s Cross. Behind its doors ‘they were all there – gay men,

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