Under the Cover of Night

In this exclusive book excerpt of Club Commons, author Anjali Prashar-Savoie remembers the legacy of The Gateways and poses the question: who gets to define what liberation looks like?

Whilst undertaking research for my new book, Club Commons, about London's queer nightlife, I came across a moment in time that became a bit of an obsession. In 1971 the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a radical anticapitalist queer liberation movement and the group behind London's first Gay Pride, protested outside The Gateways, the city's longest-running lesbian nightclub.

Activists chanted for the women inside to literally and metaphorically come out: out of the basement, out of the closet. This was a time when being spotted there could cost a mother custody of her children, others their jobs, and when police harassment and entrapment of gay people was widespread. The club's discretion, its refusal to advertise, its manager's watchful presence at the bottom of those narrow stairs, were rituals of preservation.

This standoff between the GLF and The Gateways and what it represented about competing ideas of liberation and the politics of visibility, gripped me. On the one side, The Gateways manager Smith felt that “we are abnormal” and that “everything is beautiful the way it is” and did not want to overly politicise the club to continue operating with limited police intervention. For her, discretion was survival and visibility was dangerous. On the other hand, the GLF felt that staying underground reinforced the shame that kept queer people oppressed and were explicitly tying queerness to leftist activism.

I needed to find out more. For months, I trawled through comment sections of defunct blogs, waded through radio archives and combed through documentaries. I found nothing beyond the fact that it happened. Finally, at The Bishopsgate Institute, one of the largest archives of queer history, I came across a newsletter documenting the exchange between the activists at The Gateways, word for word, its pages alive with disagreements about freedom, safety, queerness, partying, politics and what it means to be out.

The reason this moment captured me, and why I chose to open the book’s first chapter with it, is the tension it holds and how little time has settled it. In an era where queer nightlife is shaped by increasing regulation, commercialisation and social media, the same questions resurface: who gets to define what liberation looks like?

The Gateways and the Gay Liberation Front remind us that queer people have always disagreed over partying and politics and that tension can be where we swim through to solutions. But only if we know that they exist.

Many queer stories never happened in the public realm to begin with. Many were hidden, hushed, erased, rarely documented in order to protect people's safety. Without sharing queer stories, we're trapped in a cycle of thinking we're the first, that the only timescale that matters is the current moment. But listening to people who have been partying on dirty, sexy dancefloors long before I was born has reminded me that queer nightlife lasts beyond a single night out. There is something comforting in knowing you are dancing in somebody else's footsteps. After years of dedicated campaigning by women who danced there, The Gateways, now closed, was eventually honoured with a blue plaque, a reminder that queer women's history is still fighting for its place.

Club Commons reaches into other stories, past and present, each one expanding what feels possible now: the founding of Sistermatic, a Black lesbian sound system that ran a crèche at their parties in the 1980s Brixton; abolitionist approaches to security; DJs striking against corporate ownership and in solidarity with Palestine. In a moment of accelerating club closures, worsening working conditions and regressive anti-trans politics, with women, POC, and trans-led spaces bearing the brunt, sharing stories of how and why queer people partied across time is an act of political imagination.

Nightlife, like the night itself, is where things become less clear but more open. Where edges soften, where you might find yourself, or lose yourself, or stumble into something you didn't know you were looking for.

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In the 1940s, 50s, and 60s in London, if you were a lesbian or bisexual woman looking to socialise, dance, and meet others like you, you might have been directed to an unmarked green door “down the end of King’s Road”. During that time, lesbian clubs were often referred to by location rather than by name to protect attendees, whose movements, gatherings, music, and dancing were largely ostracised. In some cases, they were even policed or outlawed. This clandestine network of word-of-mouth directions was a key safety strategy that allowed people to party in peace.

If you decided to follow the vague directions, you would find an unremarkable door to The Gateways, more intimately known as The Gates. Upon entering through the door, you descended a dim, narrow staircase. At the bottom, you were met with the watchful gaze of Gina, the club’s manager whose winged eyeliner accentuated her hawk-like eyes. If you were lucky enough to make it past Gina, you were welcomed into thick smoky air, and a sultry atmosphere that vibrated with a cacophony of women chatting, dancing, and smoking; a women’s haven in Chelsea’s underground. Gina’s control over the door marked the threshold between safety inside and the hostile outside world. This was never about needless exclusion; it was a key effort to protect those inside from harm.

The origins of The Gates were as serendipitous as they were significant. In 1931, Ted Ware – Gina’s husband, a well-travelled and open-minded man – won the lease to the venue in a poker match. Not long after picking up the keys, Ware was at his local pub one evening when a few regulars appeared miffed. The regulars – a group of plucky lesbian women – had been told they were no longer welcome. They were being banned from the pub.

In The Gates’ era, lesbian and bisexual women faced ostracisation and violence, making it difficult to socialise openly in public spaces. A cocktail of sexism and homophobia made gathering and community life challenging. A BBC documentary from the 1960s captured the daily discrimination they endured, describing how these women were met with “suspicion, intolerance, and disgust.” Pubs, clubs, and other social venues were openly hostile, leaving many lesbian and bisexual women isolated. So, when Ted found out his pub mates were being excluded, he did what any honourable man would do: he invited the lesbians back to his club. They didn’t leave for the next forty or so years, and so this small basement became a refuge in a hostile world. And, like any haven, it required protection.

The club’s unremarkable green door was not bulletproof to the prejudice of the world at large. From drunken fights to an actual explosive thrown down the stairs, managers of the club responded with strategies designed to protect both the space and its community. In the face of persistent threats and homophobic antagonism, discretion, selective door policies, and word-of-mouth promotion became tools of survival.

This ethic of protection was embodied in Gina’s constant presence at the bottom of The Gateways’ stairs. While on the surface, her position there might be read as controlling, it was actually about safeguarding a fragile ecosystem. She assessed each visitor, ensuring they understood what kind of space they were entering. Her caution kept prying neighbours and suspicious authorities at bay. Even unfounded rumours of women having sex on the doorstep would trigger complaints and police raids. Gina’s strict door policy was essential to the club remaining open. At its height, The Gateways didn’t advertise at all. It operated entirely through word of mouth. “We all knew we had to go into cellars which were hidden from the outside world,” recalled Sandy Martin, a patron of The Gates. “You didn’t have to explain yourself.”

This hidden world of nightlife also became the entry point for those trying to understand homosexuality from the outside. For the 1965 BBC programme The Time of Day, reporter Wendy Jones began her exploration of lesbian life by focusing on these underground clubs, framing them as some of the only places where lesbians could be found:

“I had to go to dingy cellars where strangers are under suspicion and doors are closed to outsiders. I met them around the bars and the jukeboxes. In the secret world where every member is a woman. Where women dress in men’s clothes, call themselves via men’s names and dance with other women. To find the extremists of the lesbian way of life, you have to go to these places, have to talk to the women who work ordinary jobs in the day, wear feminine clothes, took no different to any other girl on the Tube train. But in the evenings, they relax. They go into the protective shadows of the shabby nightclubs which cater for them, and where two women can be in love without the curious stares of the public. They can stop pretending. Stop trying to appear normal for the sake of their reputation, their jobs, or perhaps their parents.”

I was reminded of this while working in queer clubs decades after The Gates closed. Despite changes in legal rights for queer people, I noticed that party organisers still gravitated toward tucked-away venues with hidden smoking areas and discreet entrances. This was to avoid unsafe interactions or street harassment. The basement, the backroom, the unmarked door were protective veils in a world that demands constant vigilance. Just like at The Gateways, discretion remained a form of care, a way of holding space. These seemingly minor logistical choices were, in fact, rituals of preservation. Human rights lawyer Marcus McCann writes in Park Cruising, “Queer people especially know that our lives can be offensive to others. We hold hands on the street. We kiss our lovers in public … When we engage in behaviour that straight couples can engage in without comment, we are told it is gross, it is disgusting, we should not do it in public.”

The Gateways offered a reprieve: an escape where lesbian and bisexual women could flourish, less encumbered by external threats. These efforts reflect the ongoing reality that queer joy must sometimes be carefully guarded, that the light of day is not safe for everyone. In my own experience, the desire to step back – to strategically conceal – was about creating temporary ease. A moment to breathe amidst the chaos. A moment to feel human. The club, and the cover of night, offered that for many lesbian and bisexual women at the time.

In the 1980s, when the popularity of The Gateways began to dwindle, London’s streets were dirty and dangerous. Debbie Smith, who appears in the film Rebel Dykes as one of the women on the S/M scene (as it was then called) described how their lives often began at sunset:

Under the glow of streetlamps, they set out on nightly journeys through pubs and clubs, deliberately avoiding the straight world. The cover of night became a space of possibility. It stood in contrast to the surveillance of the straight world by day, where “it was dangerous just to be who you were.” And activities by way of night, of course, included clubbing and partying.

In 1967 – the same year male homosexuality was decriminalised – The Gateways enacted further protection for its patrons by becoming a women only members club. Just one year before this, a BBC documentary detailed how unsafe public life was for lesbian women like Steve Rogers, who faced daily public mockery and violence. Steve, a more masculine-presenting woman, had been institutionalised and imprisoned for her gender expression, a testament to the extreme measures society would take to correct queerness. Creating a space for women was a progressive move at a time when women’s legal and economic rights were restricted. This was years before the Equal Pay Act (1970) addressed gender wage discrimination, the Matrimonial Causes Act (1973) granted women greater autonomy in divorce, and the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) made it unlawful to discriminate against people because of their sex. Prior to the latter, while women in the UK could legally open a bank account in their own name, in practice banks commonly required a male guarantor or co-signatory, showing how this was a world designed for enforced dependency.

For lesbian and bisexual women, these systemic barriers were compounded by widespread homophobia. As such, venues like The Gateways became crucial connectors, years before the activism of the Gay Liberation Movement reoriented sexual practices as empowering political identities. A women-only club created a rare third space beyond the home and workplace, where they could exist freely in a time when being open about your sexuality could lead to police harassment, job loss, or social exile. The popularity of spaces like The Gates was a testament to their necessity. From that initial group invited by Ted Ware, word spread fast. The Gateways flourished. It went on to stay open four nights a week for nearly fifty years. The club’s legacy lives on not only in its remarkable longevity, but in the visceral memories it left behind.

Anjali Prashar-Savoie is a writer, DJ and party organiser exploring nightlife, labour and care. Her work bridges dancefloor knowledge and cultural analysis. She holds an MA in Art & Politics from Goldsmiths and a BA in Social Anthropology from SOAS. Anjali lives on a boat in London where she continues to dance, write, play tunes, and throw parties with friends.