There is another reason for Henry’s aversion to licensed premises: He works as a doctor in the A&E department of a London hospital. “It’s an opportunity for people to open up a bit more in a different way, not in a sexual or disinhibited way – you’re opening up to talk about things that actually interest you, which I don’t think would happen in a noisy bar where you’re drinking.”
“I think it’s really important to have a space where there’s no expectation of getting drunk or where you might be more uninhibited than you want to be,” he says.īut it's about more than simply avoiding a hangover. I ask a young man called Henry, sat downstairs, why he is here. Meanwhile, services specifically aimed at LGBT people with alcohol and drug problems – such as Antidote in central London – are sparse and overwhelmed by demand. According to Moncrieff, the evidence shows no such abatement. Alcohol is used as a coping mechanism, to self-medicate for some of the issues we face: discrimination, worse mental health.”īut in 2018, with what some might consider to be less discrimination and with alternatives to bars in online groups and dating apps, the culture of queer boozing would, you might expect, be declining. Alcohol finds us.Īs Monty Moncrieff, CEO of London Friend, the LGBT health charity supporting Queers Without Beers, explains: “Often the first places we go when we’re coming out is the local gay bar, and it means that alcohol and potentially other drugs are there while we’re forming our identities – that’s where people go to associate with other people and explore who they are. The statistics, however, miss the backstory: of the early isolation many LGBT people feel, growing up in a closet not of anyone’s making, but out of which everyone has to escape – or perish of jumping from the closet into the LGBT scene, populated by others also seeking escape and of the low self-regard that so often lingers. Gay men and women are, for example, about twice as likely to binge drink at least once a week, compared with the general population around 16% of LGBT people drink at levels suggestive of dependency (compared with just 3.8%) and, according to one study, 47% of trans people drink at harmful levels. Every survey of the comparative drinking habits of straight and rainbow folk brings the same news: By any measure, we have a problem. LGBT people drink too much – even more than the rest of the British population. There is a huge potential market among the queer community. She was one of those people, she says, and thus the nights her low- and no-alcohol organisation Club Soda runs – both here and across country – are aimed particularly at this group. There is, she says, “no definition of alcoholism” – which is exactly what someone might slur during an intervention – and instead describes two categories of boozers: “dependent drinkers” and “everyone else who’s a bit of a twat”. This pertains to her previous drinking problem. Willoughby has an impressive quiff and the perky, rolled-up-sleeves demeanour of someone who would have been a godsend in a bomb shelter, and calls herself a “bit of a twat”. It feels wildly, sweetly enthusiastic, like a freshers’ week event but without the certainty of regrettable sex. There is no music, and obviously no alcohol, but instead a rising din of chatter, as if conversations are lighting up by sheer determination to connect.
It is just 10 minutes after the opening, on an arctic Wednesday in January, yet dozens of people are already draped around tables on the ground floor, or gathered downstairs by a fireplace, apparently unencumbered by the prospect of an entire night out sober. William Morris wallpaper and a whiff of veganism abound. They trialled Queers Without Beers in east London first before finding the permanent central London spot here. The “bar” is a monthly night housed in a two-storey, wood-panelled café in Bloomsbury that should probably win an award for its name: Queers Without Beers.
It belongs to Laura Willoughby, the cofounder of London’s first alcohol-free bar for LGBT people. “The G ’n’ T is made in Skipton!” bellows a voice nearby with the enthusiasm of someone who deems this a selling point. I do not know what any of these are but Seedlip certainly sounds like you swallowed something memorable. A drinks menu sits erect on the counter boasting of “Teetotal G ’n’ T”, “Square Root Soda”, and “Seedlip & tonic”.