In A Hopeless Place: Remembering G-A-Y Late (Part 1)

Jack Cullen looks back at the iconic Soho dive that swallowed his early twenties.

IN A HOPELESS PLACE

I want to pay tribute to G-A-Y Late. The cheap trashy club which occupied a big chunk of my early twenties. With its stunning playlist, affordable drinks, wraparound music videos and chaotic charismatic regulars, G-A-Y Late was a brilliant, slightly horrifying and indelible moment in time.

The bar has an unexamined cultural legacy, apexing I think around the early 2010s, overlooked by queer scene chroniclers who tend to focus on Dalston and ‘marginalised’ narratives. But it’s where I found my first drag clique - Baga Chipz, Lady Lloyd, Meth, Silver Summers and Vanity Von Glow - and with my bestie Dylan I would party there with them four times a week.

This post is a fan-girl deep dive into the pop-fuelled oasis at the centre of my Soho years, the gleaming ash tray that caught all of us fag butts when the pubs closed, a vodka-splattered Neverland where the eggy beer kept pouring and Nelly & Kelly were always singing. Welcome to “Remembering G-A-Y Late""

Like many gay Londoners, my first conception of a gay scene was Soho. The East end was hissing away, revolving around East Bloc and The Joiners Arms at that point, but I was too shiny and Sugababes-rising to know about this. Vauxhall was there too, but men in their forties looked like pensioners to me. The thought of getting with a hairy man with a beard repulsed me and “Daddies” hadn’t entered their current golden era. As a regional noughties twink, brainwashed by body dysmorphia inducing gay magazines, I had been programmed to fawn over sharp-jawed waxy men with jaunty highlights, baby blue jeans, tight v-necks and ski-jump noses. I remember when my uni friend Rob went home with a bear, it felt like he’d been sucked into a cult, we were genuinely concerned in our student flat share.

In 2010, Soho and its surrounding districts were rammed with young gay men and women juggling their first junior jobs after graduating. Industries like magazines, film, fashion, marketing and beauty were struggling, but still revolving around Soho and demanding that 21-year-old graduate employees were physically present at work every day until 6pm.

There was no working from home, we didn’t give a shit about the gym, and there was no Instagram to wobble our bums on. We didn’t slide into people DMs, we slid - quite literally - into bars. The only place to be truly seen by other gay men, and to find someone to shag, was out out. We weren’t that preoccupied by our identities or who we were so much as we were possessed by ‘who is going to shag us?’ The gay scene was sex, music, and booze based.

Instagram didn’t take off properly until around 2012, and when it did we used it shyly to post photos of nieces and birthday cakes. We weren’t woke yet, the important tectonic shifts of ‘Me Too’ and ‘BLM’ were nearly a decade away. Nor were we mentally re-arranged by chemsex, or initiated into kinks, or burdened by Grindr’s arduous soul-destroying matrix. We were simple, dumb, twinks, stuck on a loop in a Soho bubble, wondering what Cheryl Cole was upto. The future was far away, we just wanted to sing Call My Name and get laid.

Jeremy Joseph’s G-A-Y empire, with its two bars and one superclub, served this young unruly critical mass of pink collar twinks looking to get smashed, as well as an older raft of men looking to meet us. You might have one ‘classy’ drink somewhere like Green Carnation, Friendly Society, or the Yard, before getting down to business and hitting G-A-Y followed by G-A-Y Late, where we stayed until bar staff refused to serve us or we could no longer see.

Before we’d found our career feet, we found ourselves knee deep in this gauche closed-circuit bar culture of cheap drinks, deafening Rihanna, and chaotic coltish sex. My university days in Leeds - with Headingley’s student nights and “pound a pint” drink deals - had primed me well for this functioning-alcoholic fate. We were the offspring of ‘Booze Britain’ at its peak, and as gay youngsters graduating into the wreckage of a major recession - we had a lot to drink about.

Our insecurities, career uncertainty, emotional unbalance, encyclopaedic X Factor knowledge, and strong desire to wear different Primark outfits every day, was targeted and harvested, and converted into drinks sales. We lapped it up.

Soho was all-but monopolised by Jeremy Joseph. His marketing was nuclear, he funded the free sheets like BOYZ and QX (both of which carried adverts for his bars on Page 3), and he paid gangs of cute gaunt flyer boys, similar to us in age, to pace the streets with limp wads of sherbert neon wristbands.

But as I will go on to examine and appreciate over the next three Substack posts, G-A-Y Late caught the zeitgeist briefly - the resurgence of music videos - and the halcyon days of Bad Romance, We Found Love, and Telephone.

G-A-Y Late’s ethos and aesthetic complimented the faux-luxe TOWIE glam to which we aspired, and G-A-Y Late provided an IRL sandbox for our embryonic sexual identities. We could stretch our legs and play at being adults, and if it all fucked up - which it often did - it was nothing 9 McNuggests couldn’t fix - and tomorrow was a new slay.

In its own way G-A-Y Late was an enchanted place, a sparkly late night hell-hole that became a home-from-home for myself and my best friend Dylan, and our sprawling battalion of over-excited, Gaga-mad, constantly-warring, terminally-pissed, gobby single twinks.

It was dangerous at times, there were predators in the lilac haze, and getting inside was its own Olympic sport. But we understood it. G-A-Y Late was a game, and it was a game that we all liked to play.

Like many others, I pretended during my thirties that these tacky Soho years never happened. In East London we try to give this impression that we just miraculously hatched out of a Hedi Slimane coffee table book one day, with a Chicago house vinyl collection and a bag of cheap coke. But like many cool people - I bare this secret past of being an absolutely feral Shaftesbury Avenue street urchin, spilling snakebites down my legs, throwing-up hot dogs and snogging people called Kevin or Geoff, before being noshed off blind-drunk in red brick alleyways by rickshaw drivers . And rickshaws weren’t fluffy then. I have the kneecaps to prove it.

For five years I was a full time bleach-blond twink, drenched in Paco Rabanne Million (which gay boys embraced first, as always) humming Buttons by Pussycat Dolls, spending my Condé Nast overdraft on pornstar martinis down Balans. I was a typical late noughties Soho twink. With some distance in time, I can see now there is a specialness to this, and I can see the part that G-A-Y Late played in shaping me, for better and for worse.

IT ALL STARTS WITH A FREE BAR

Gay people working in fashion and media would follow a calendar of free drinks events and launch parties, which formed one of the main arteries feeding into G-A-Y Late.

I had almost no money, and nor did my best friend Dylan. But we did have access to my editor’s inbox at Glamour magazine. Natasha was constantly invited to terrible brand parties and after she’d gone home I would scan her inbox looking for invitations that carried the all important alcohol sponsor logos, before promptly RSVP’ing to anything within a 1 mile radius of Oxford Street.

Dylan and I would spend our weekday evenings dining on questionable canapés and often ginger-based cocktails (with far too many mint leaves) courtesy of Wilkinson’s Sword, Barry M, The Kooples, Swatch, PPQ, Anthropologie, or whichever brands were desperate enough and existentially insecure enough to ply children with booze in exchange for tweets.

The next morning I would have to then delete emails from PRs as they tried to chase me up for my ill-promised coverage. I remember my editor once saying to me “Jack, this woman from Cathedral Cheddar keeps calling us, insisting that we attended her ‘30% Stronger Lasts 30% Longer’ grated cheese launch? She says that Glamour magazine has promised her a two page spread, and that we agreed to build Kate Middleton out of cheddar as a cross-collab publicity stunt? She must be insane. If she rings again I think might call the police”

“Good idea yeah, I’ve never heard of her, sounds like a lunatic to me”, I remember sitting at my desk in Primark sunglasses, trying not to be sick, my DELL computer screen steaming up with mojito breath, as I fine tooth-combed Angelia Jolie’s Wikipedia page, looking for something new to ‘reveal’ about her on the magazine’s Twitter.

Dylan and I got in with a gang of slightly older gays that we met at these PR events. By older I mean 24. And because we were young and horny, they would forward us invites to more parties, and before we knew it, we were on the free drinks gravy train, attending launches that we had no right to be at and had just enough brain power to find, let alone understand. There was no Whatsapp then, and while it was probably harder to network without social media, it was also easier to sustain once you were in the clique. Once you were on the round robin event invite emails of some connected gays, you felt seen and secure.

When these events finished, usually with someone being sick into a goodie bag, falling into a cake or knocking a display case over, we would hail a taxi to G-A-Y Late …

TWINK DARWINISM: GETTING INTO LATE

Getting into G-A-Y Late was a skill that we learnt to master. As you approached the top of Shaftesbury avenue you would join the straggly throng of hopeful stumbling Laters, before being streamlined into the long pushy queue full of chain smoking twinks, all of whom thought that they were better than you because they’d once rimmed Joe McElderry.

Secretly swigging small bottles of Lidl gin and vodka, sharing whiffs of off license poppers, and smoking our way through packets of Richmond Menthol Super Kings, was all part of the experience. There would be confused tourists who’d been directed there by staff at the other G-A-Y bar, only to be told after queuing for two hours that they couldn’t come in, sometimes for no discernible reason. Unless we fancied them, we would try to dissuade tourists from queuing, under the guise of being helpful, but of course we were really just trying to speed up our own admission. Girls had it the hardest. Casual sexism on the door was rife. Lesbians with long hair had to more or less go down on their girlfriends if they wanted to be accepted as gay, while straight girls - despite being social rocks and crucial to the wellbeing of bottoms - were looked at like vermin. With bars, everything comes from the top, and Jeremy Joseph is from a time period when gay clubbing was a mens sport. Gen Z on the horizon would be the first generation since the New Romantics to fully re-integrate genders on Britain’s gay scene. As Millenials we were half and half. I wanted girl friends on the periphery to watch my bag, but I was also heavily invested in the idea of meeting other men, and I’d been raised to see myself - a gay man - as superior on the gay scene to anything else. It was all for me. Other types of people were guests and lucky to be included. I don’t agree with this now, but I can remember feeling like that then.

But we weren’t complete c***s and we became experts at training our straight girlfriends, on the evenings that they were present, on how to get in. “Look pissed off and serious” I remember saying to my girl pals, “mess your hair up a bit, you’re a lesbian remember, fold your arms, look like you come here all the time, stop bopping to Rihanna, maybe put your arms around each other”. I’m not particularly proud of these routines, but nor was it fully of my doing, I was adapting at a young age to a prickly unjust landscape, learning how to navigate the gay scene’s twisted dynamics and 1990s hangover in real time. We didn’t have irate Instagram memes, 800 word statuses calling people out, or Zoom seminars about “taking up space”. We just had this. And we learnt how to work it accordingly, while also looking out for ourselves.

We were vile, and we loved it when groups of ugly out-of-town people couldn’t get in and had to do the walk of shame back passed the queue, we’d taunt them sometimes “Bye bitch! Enjoy McDonalds!” Anyone who wasn’t a hot boy or generous with their money was essentially worthless to us. Sometimes we’d snitch on randoms and tell our favourite bouncer that this person or that person was too drunk to get in, there was a playground politics to the place. I remember a particularly vicious Welsh twink pouring water over a girl so that she looked too messy to get in, and then denying it - calling her a drunken liar while she cried. It didn’t really occur to us that these people were human. The gay scene had taught us to cognitively disassociate, tourists were like avatars on the SIMS, there would be different ones tomorrow, why not set them on fire for a laugh. I’m exaggerating, but there was a tense lawless air around the doors of G-A-Y Late.

The club was £2 entry, and sometimes other twinks would ask you if you had any spare change for their fee. They went there penniless, confident that men would buy their drinks.

Sometimes if you looked too drunk, which I tend to look after two wines thanks to my watery light blue eyes, we would be asked to walk in a straight line for the bouncers, and I became skilled at this task. I’d practise it at home in the kitchen sometimes. To this day, you could make me drink a barrel of gin, smack me in the face with a Tudor beam and taser me. I would still be able to walk in a straight line. At least for three metres, which was the length of G-A-Y Late’s dystopic mixed-concrete and tarmac forecourt.

Some of the bouncers were handsome Jason Statham types, they took on surrogate father roles in my too-imaginative head, but they took no prisoners. I can still feel, fifteen years later, the warm sauvignon blanc butterflies as your moment of truth arrived and you were now first in the queue, putty for the bouncers to probe and analyse. If they refused you they were often smug and smarmy about it, your night ruined, no Grindr to turn to, £20 for the sauna your only hope, another morning stinking of chlorine and lube at your desk.

G-A-Y Late’s admission process was like the prequel to Squid Game, and we would brag to each other about how drunk we actually were, once safely inside and out of earshot, our confessions smothered by the klaxon of Kelly Osbourne’s singing voice. I remember those seconds, storming down the carpeted corridor, whispering a hushed “YESS!!” victoriously to Dylan as we sauntered in, another “I’m sober” door scam under our All Saints belts.

It was cut throat, but I look back on these days and think gosh, how innocent we were really. Now at East London after parties I’ll see 20-years-olds smoking crystal meth, setting timers for G, filming themselves on the internet in dog masks, and swapping anecdotes about dealer friends in prison and I think “Crikey. At that age all I knew was vodka lemonade and Keri Hilson featuring Timbaland”.

I’m sure that our East London druggy twink counterparts did exist back then, and I would later make friends who experienced a very different twink story in London, but it was hushed under the carpet, hidden in the back end of Gaydar, we didn’t know about it. I remember seeing the word ‘chems’ on a dating site and thinking it was maybe a science student looking for someone to revise chemistry with. Typing that just now, it nearly brought a tear to my eye, because I know what would happen to me in my early thirties. But that’s for another rainy Substack day. Back to Late…

For our first year in the cult of G-A-Y Late, Dylan and I waited patiently to get in. But then we noticed something. A certain type of person was always let straight in without queueing. Drag queens.

Dylan and I realised, from observing the queue four times a week from within it, that drag queens walked past us, and were admitted immediately - along with anyone that they were with. We realised that as well as PR event gays, there was another clique we wanted to now permeate. We needed to make friends with the drag queens. Using our youthful looks and moral bankruptcy, Dylan and I achieved this. And in doing so, the course of our lives would change forever.

There was Leo, an Amy Winehouse impersonator who eventually became ‘Baga Chipz’. There was Lloyd, a beautiful blond model who wore actual Vivienne Westwood, and there was a sexy Glaswegian twink who called themselves ‘Vanity’. Drag wasn’t cool then. It was brilliant, but it wasn’t cool. We were fascinated by these boys, the same age as us, who dressed up as women and got away with murder. We wanted to know more about them. Our wish was granted…

READ NOW: DIRRTY: Remembering G-A-Y Late (Part 2)

(Thank you for reading this piece. Sharing it with someone else would be fab! Thanks, Jack xx)