The Kings Road in Chelsea.
I mean, it's hard to think of anywhere more quintessentially British.
In fact, they say it's where Rule Britannia was written,
it's where Mary Quant hung out, the Pet Shop Boys met here.
It's called the Kings Road
because King Charles II wanted a private
road between his palaces in Whitehall and Hampton Court
and, as luck would have it, en route, he could just
turn off into a side road and meet with his mistress, Nell Gwyn.
And it's the side roads where the most exciting stuff happens.
This is where the bohemians hung out, the artists drank
and naughty sex happened.
And, although there were many bohemian clubs in Chelsea, there
wasn't a pure lesbian one, like the chic Le Monocle club in Paris.
But in 1931, a club called The Gateways opened,
which was to become the most famous lesbian club in the world.
It was originally a mixed club.
It attracted people from the sexually diverse
communities of Chelsea, people like Radclyffe Hall and her lover,
Una, Lady Troubridge, who lived only a few streets away
from The Gateways. Oh, what can I say?
She was a lesbian novelist, a poet,
probably best known for her lesbian-themed novel - I think
the rather depressingly titled The Well Of Loneliness.
And this was the house that she shared with her long-time companion,
Una, Lady Troubridge, from 1924 to 1928. What a couple!
Can you just imagine some of the scenes here - the salons,
the lunches, the dinner parties?
And then, then they would have dressed up in their suits,
their hats, their monocles - you know, like you do - and hailed
a hackney cab to carry them across the borough to The Gateways Club.
Anyway, my own hackney cab awaits to take me
back to Gateways for the first time in over 40 years.
By the time I first visited it, it had become a women-only club.
It was closed to anyone who didn't identify as lesbian.
Well, this is it, but something's not right.
I remember the lamppost - it shone down. That's definitely the door.
But...I'm sure it was green!
You see, this is what happens to lesbian landmarks in history -
they literally get painted over.
But, you know, I've reached that age - I do what I like.
I can sort this.
Thank you! See that? That's the power of showbusiness!
You know, there's a theory that the song The Green Door was
actually about this green door.
I mean, it's just a story,
but the thing about stories is some of them get hidden,
they get covered over,
particularly the histories of, I don't know, women like me,
who went to Gateways, and they should be revered,
they should not be concealed.
I want to go and find them so I... Oh, ex...
Just two seconds. Hello there. Hi, I'm Sandi. What's your name? Amanda.
Oh, hi, Amanda.
Listen, could you just finish painting this door for me?
I've got a history to uncover.
It's a secret history of what actually
happened behind this green door.
One coat's fine. I'll be right back.
Well, I hope she doesn't get green paint all over her!
You know, I think it's going to be quite a revealing
journey into the secret lesbian history of The Gateways.
And I want to hear first-hand from other women who visited
this iconic lesbian club.
Well, I was a simple country girl, all the way from Penzance.
My landlady was lesbian with her partner.
I got friendly with them, and they said,
"Would you like to come to a club with us?"
And I said, "Yes, I'd love to." This was in 1947.
And as we were driving there, um, my landlady said to me,
"You are gay, aren't you?" So I said, "Yes."
I had no idea whether I was or whether it showed or anything.
The partner I had at that time, who was my first partner, um,
she had a friend who was a gay vicar.
He told us about The Gateways, familiarly known to us all
as The Gates.
With some trepidation, not knowing what to expect, really,
we took ourselves off to Bramerton Street.
I was first taken to The Gateways
by somebody called Peter Woodcock,
who taught graphic design at
Camberwell Art School,
where I was a student, so that would be about '64, '65.
I first went to The Gateways Club in 1985, just after I came out.
At that time, it was all about word-of-mouth.
So off I went with a few friends one night and realised that I'd actually
been living two streets away from it for the last three years.
When I told my dad that I was gay, um, the only thing...
..the first thing he said to me was, "Have you been to The Gateways?"
And I said, "Yes. How do you know about The Gateways?"
Cos when you find it, you've got this door in a gap to navigate
and, you know, it was kind of weird.
Down those dark, seedy stairs and through the dark, seedy door.
I mean, it was heaven! Marvellous, you know? Marvellous!
MUSIC: Spooky by Dusty Springfield
It was a great place to get off, a great place to dance.
Dusty reigned from the jukebox.
Lots of girls, lots of young women dancing.
And I looked around and I thought, "This is heaven!
"I've gone to heaven!"
OK, I was barred twice - the first time for dancing suggestively...
..and I don't quite know how you dance unsuggestively.
I mean, the dancing wasn't all The Gate...
..grinding the coffee thing - The Gateways grind, the very
close dancing, if not actually making love on the dance floor.
God, The Gateways grind!
Basically, what it was was dancing with someone who was
the right height or got into the right position so that,
when you were dancing, you could have an orgasm.
MUSIC: Spooky by Dusty Springfield
It was very surprising, the first time it happened.
Of course, it had its own extra, um...
..vibe because most of the girls were looking around
and looking at each other. People-watching.
You know, it was very...
This was before mobile phones or online dating,
so people would really stare, people would really stare,
and just let you know quite quickly if they found you attractive.
So it was a very high sexual content, I'd say.
I actually felt like I was walking into the lion's den.
It was like fresh meat -
young meat, obviously.
I felt...
They probably didn't,
but I felt like people sort of swarmed towards me.
I was petrified.
But I really went there to
pick women up, really.
You know, I stood at the bar, drank whisky.
It was a bit like a meat market,
you did go down there, stand at the bar, somebody would say to you,
"Do you wanna dance?"
I didn't fall in love with anyone in the Gateways.
I went to bed with them, you know?
I...
I think I was rather, I was promiscuous.
But that helped me, in some ways.
# Don't ever go
# I love you so... #
So here we are. Here we are.
40 years later. Oh, my God. 40 years?! We meet again.
Can't believe it's that long.
I was playing football at Clapham Common up the road
and I would come down,
but there was a big movement at the time,
I don't know if you remember, but people were saying,
"Don't come to Gateways" because it was a meat market. Yeah.
I was like, "Well, I'm a lesbian,
so I'd better get down there,
know what I mean?" Yeah.
THEY CHUCKLE
So you did? I did, yeah.
Well, there was nowhere, really, else to go, was there?
I came here on holiday.
I got off the train at Paddington
and I got into a taxi.
And I said to the driver, "Is there any lesbian clubs,
"do you know of any lesbian clubs in London?"
And he said, "Well, yes, there is one off the King's Road
"called the Gateways."
I thought, "Oh, wow."
So I went out that evening and I found it,
and became a member that night, that very night,
which was good.
These brave stories from the Gateways lesbians about their, er,
what shall I call it? Proclivities and activities
has given me an idea.
But I think first I need to pick up a fellow traveller.
Hey, Lisa!
Lisa Power! Come on in!
Hello! Hey, Lisa, come on in.
Ooh, what we up to?
Well, we are in search of hidden mysteries.
Wow.
Well, not mysteries, actually -
not mysteries to you and me anyway.
Hopefully. I want you to join me
THEY LAUGH
in revealing the mysteries of the Gateways club
and commemorate it somehow
before it's eradicated from people's memories.
I mean, I'm one of those people
who's known that I was gay my entire life.
It just wasn't ever... I didn't have to come out to myself.
But when I started to sort of step out into the world...
It was probably '78, 1979, something like that. Yeah.
And I remember going to Gateways and that excitement.
But it's still a mystery as to how it all started.
Maybe the daughter of Ted and Gina Ware,
the club's enigmatic owners, has the answers.
Going back, I mean, I'm kind of fascinated
by my father's era in the club
because it's, you know, very much before my time.
He's a working class Londoner,
he's not in any kind of environment
where he'd probably even...
..encountered a gay person.
Or, for that matter, a black person, I don't think.
So he wasn't destined to be someone...who...
..went out and embraced diversity.
It was out of the, you know, betting fraternity.
There was a boxing match and he was betting against the odds,
so he made quite a, you know, quite a big win.
And part of what he was given
was the lease on this basement club on the King's Road.
My, my desire is to believe he bet on LaMotta and...
..it was that punch in Raging Bull that won the Gateways.
Now, meanwhile,
he hangs out in Soho
and he goes to a pub called Bag O' Nails.
Old, old Soho gay scene.
And he knew this group of women - lesbian women -
and he was friends with them
and, according to my mother,
he was really the only guy they bothered with.
There was a new ownership at the pub
and it was a husband and wife who took over the pub
and the wife did not want the women. Told them to go.
So they were like, "Well, what're we gonna do? Where are we gonna go?"
You know, "There is nowhere else to go."
"And there's not enough of us to be another place."
And he said, "Well, I've got this lease on this basement
"and it's an absolute dump."
That's how they spent the first winter of the Gateways
and they were all, you know, good pals and having a good laugh
and gradually the word spread
and of course all of his friends from the racing world...
There were a lot of journalists, there were a lot of...
And then the artists were coming in
because we were two streets up from Chelsea Arts Club.
So, I mean, those very early days,
you've got Augustus John, Jacob Epstein
was a member, all of them had a dab on the walls.
This painting hung in the Gateways
for as long as I can possibly remember.
It was painted by a woman called Muriel Mallows.
I don't think she was gay, I...
She used to watch things going on and sketch.
Everybody in this painting is a woman, including...
..drag kings, possibly trans women,
except for one figure who has a hat -
the trilby hat -
and that's my dad.
So it was this really diverse crowd
and the women were the core.
You know, the lesbians started it.
It was for them that he'd got the club.
My mother, she's living with her sister in St John's Wood.
You know, war is done, they're having a pretty good time.
She went to the Gateways for the first time
on her 25th birthday with her sister.
They'd been shopping in the morning in Chelsea
and they went down for lunch.
The Gateways was somewhere they could go as women,
they knew they were protected, they knew they were safe
and they had a great time and...
..he decided he was going to marry her
and she secretly, quietly to herself agreed.
They had quite a romance, married quite quickly.
So the club was ongoing,
Mum and Dad were running it together.
I came along in...
..1955 and, erm...
..they were really pretty happy.
I mean, I remember as a small child,
she was gradually taking the Gateways more and more
as he was getting older
and he was phasing out.
And when I was four years old...
..we had an American guest - Smithy - who came one evening
and shortly after moved in and never left.
I think she just was a bridge in our family -
between my mother and father, between me and my father,
between me and my mother.
And just something about her...
She was just an immensely kind-hearted person.
Hugely kind-hearted person.
Just loved children and such a hard worker, she was so conscientious.
Of course, you've gotta add the American military thing.
She and my mother developed a double act in the Gateways.
I mean, the fun, you know, that they would create.
Gina was... Gina was such an individual.
I don't know who she based her character on,
but she was...
She was glamorous, but...
She should have been a '40s actress.
Well, she was a '40s actress. What am I talking about?
She maintained that.
She had style and grace.
She was a classy broad.
She wasn't a lady. D'you know what I mean?
She was, she was rough around the edges.
But...
But she thought she was grand.
Bigger than life, basically.
I mean, there was this woman who was,
had an air of sophistication,
a very hard business-like, erm,
business-minded woman, I would say.
But fun as well.
Gina ruled like a queen.
She moved around like a stately galleon keeping an eye on everyone.
And she was rather terrifying.
Sexy, but terrifying.
It was her domain and she was the queen
and if she wanted you could come in,
and if she didn't
you wouldn't get in. Simple as that.
And if you dared do anything wrong, you were thrown out
cos I remember on one occasion I'd gone in and I were well oiled.
I'd been drinking my stepfather's homemade wine
and I was really...
And I had a couple of beers and I was gone.
And they threw me out.
Basically, they threw me out cos I was drunk.
So Gina made decisions as to who could come in
and who couldn't and...
The first thing, "Are you a member? What's your name?"
And then sign in.
And then you could sign guests in.
And then, of course, Smithy behind the bar.
I never had any problems with Smithy.
She...
She always was behind the bar with...
She was this strange mixture of being quite jolly,
but also looking bored to death at the same time.
Smithy, all I knew about her was she'd been in the army -
in the American army - and she kind of stayed.
A very...
A very sort of strong, butch...
She was quite tall, quite big lady, but...
You would think she would be intimidating.
No. I don't think she was.
Smithy was a big softie.
She... She loved to laugh.
She was very simple, in that respect.
Somebody else who wouldn't suffer fools, but might listen...
..a bit more.
We would talk about women
in ways that a couple of butches getting together would.
And that was refreshing.
I needed that. You know?
I didn't get that from the English women.
And then I got the Gateways job.
Smithy was manager and Gina had the final say.
She and my mother became gradually, I think, great friends.
I think there was huge love between them.
But I didn't know
whether Smithy was her lover -
I mean, that was the big...
And I asked other people and no-one knew.
I just assumed that they had a very intense,
er, relationship as very close friends,
although I think Smithy was in love with...
Indisputably in love with Gina.
But Gina was married, of course,
and, you know, I think was happily married.
So, you know, maybe she was bisexual.
I always thought that they were an item.
I think most people thought they were an item.
We just assumed they were together.
Does that... No, you wouldn't...
I wouldn't have thought of asking them.
No way.
You always thought that somehow Gina was in charge and in control.
Yeah.
Whether that...is what her daughter remembers,
it will be interesting to see.
Most of the Gateways assumed they were a couple.
They certainly loved each other greatly,
but intriguingly, what she told me right at the end of her life -
and I'm talking about a couple of weeks before she passed away -
I said, "Go on, Mum. Tell me because I get asked all the time.
"Were you and Smithy, you know, together?"
I said, "It's a terrible thing to ask your mother, but tell me."
And, um, cos I wanna know the truth, you know?
And she said, "No, we weren't."
And she said, "But everybody thought that was because of me,
"and it wasn't, it was because of Smithy.
"Smithy's choice."
Gina and Smithy may not have been a couple,
but they were the epitome
of the Gateway's butch-femme code of conduct.
I do think you needed to be in it to understand it.
Hm. Now, I am of an age where, even then, there was a split
and there was the women who were supposedly identified as butch...
Yes. ..and the women who were supposedly identified as femme,
and I was one of those people...
I didn't feel like I was any of those things at all
and I remember trying to go to the bar to get a drink. Yes.
But I wasn't "butch enough" to order a drink.
And all the women who lined the bar laughed at me
and said I couldn't possibly buy a beer.
You wouldn't have been allowed to drink a pint.
You'd have had to have a half-pint, if you managed to get a beer at all!
But, actually, which one of us would be allowed to buy the pint?
Would it be you or me? Oh, God.
Well, I was always quite femme but definitely butch in behaviour.
But I have to say,
I was always very susceptible to a woman in a three-piece suit.
Were you? Oh, my goodness! OK. I did have a three-piece suit,
but I was too short to be seen over the bar!
I went down the club, thinking I was not going to leave
until I had at least snogged some gorgeous-looking woman.
And I saw a group of very attractive women, looking ultra-glamorous.
I mean, the femmes, a lot of them were very glamorous,
so I went over and repeatedly tried to buy them drinks
and repeatedly was sort of brushed off, like, "Get away! Get!",
and was also repeatedly approached by very butch lesbians,
wanting to dance with me, wanting to buy me drinks -
which, of course, at that time, I had, like, zero interest in.
So, that first evening, I left very disappointed.
That's not what I was looking for.
I wasn't looking for this role-playing kind of thing,
cos there was enough of that in heterosexual society.
And I was dismayed and...
However, you know, it was a nice place to be
and I kind of settled into it.
In the Gates, it was very well known for very strict codes of conduct.
There was very much a sense that you had to decide who you were
and you did have to, to an extent, conform to these ideas of the butch,
the butch woman, who is wearing menswear,
she is the one who is buying the drinks,
she is the one who is asking the femme to dance...
..and then the femme woman,
who is, you know, got all the hair and make-up all perfect,
looking glamorous and waiting to be asked to dance.
I think, as well, something else that's really interesting
and important about butch-femme dynamics...
I think they get a lot of stick, and I understand why, in a way.
The history of butch-femme,
it actually has very working-class roots.
The more working-class women who stuck to that,
whereas there was a smaller group of, you might say, more arty
kind of women who were more into, you know,
what the '60s seem to be about, which was more about androgyny
and kind of blurring gender stereotypes
or getting away from gender stereotypes.
I was in the Army in Guildford and I was still in training.
You weren't allowed off camp unless you wore a skirt or trouser suit.
So, if they were going up to London,
they would have a change of clothes with them and get dressed.
And in the '70s, it was very much a butch-femme thing.
My mother bought me a burgundy jacket,
and I had some burgundy shoes with black Sta-Prest trousers,
a green Sta-Prest shirt and a white kipper tie.
And I thought I looked the bee's knees, the real butch was in town,
and I'm going to the Gateways Club and I really loved it.
And I thought I looked fantastic.
And one of the staff sergeants from Guildford came over,
was talking to me and she was absolutely gorgeous,
and I'm thinking, "Oh, my God, this is... These clothes are working!"
And when she left, she says, "Don't forget your violin."
Cos I looked like a gangster!
A lot of women from the Army did go, but the SIB -
which was the Special Investigations Branch -
would also send some undercover people there, as well.
So there was one time when I was called into the SIB,
and when I walked into the office, I looked across, and here was
this woman that I'd actually been snogging with on the Saturday night.
And her face...
She wasn't there as an undercover one, but her face turned white
when she saw me and realised who I was, you know?
So there was no way we were going to expose each other,
so it WAS a safe haven for us, because although lesbians
were legal in the civilian street, it was against military law.
What happened in the Gateways Club stayed there.
And one night, I was coming out of the Gateways -
you know, we had closed.
I was coming out and I recognised the cops,
so I started to speak to them, and they said, "We can't talk about it."
So I said, "Are you looking for someone in particular?
"Why are you sitting outside of the Gateways? What's going on?"
So I think every now and then, they just...
They didn't harass us, but they also... It wasn't comfortable.
Then I discovered that there was a rumour going around
that I was from the police.
Now, whether I looked so straight, I don't know!
And, of course, people were afraid of being spied on, because...
..although it wasn't illegal, there was the possibility
of losing your job or being blackmailed in some way.
And you soon learnt that if you're going to go to the Gateways Club,
because it is run by Smithy and Gina,
there's not going to be any trouble.
Don't make trouble. You know, you'll never come back in.
If you want to keep going back there,
then you go with this attitude that you're just going to have
good fun, good times, and nothing's going to aggravate you
in any size, shape or form.
You know, your worst enemy could be at the other side of the club
and you know that you're just going to enjoy yourself
and not get into any aggravation.
I was really scared, cos people were like,
"If you look at somebody's girlfriend, you'll be in trouble,"
so I kind of still remember as I'm here now
walking in and kind of looking at the floor... Yeah, duck!
"Don't look at anyone, don't look at anyone!" I was so scared.
And I remember someone asking me to dance here, and I danced,
and I asked her her name. And she said, "I didn't ask you to talk,
"I asked you to dance," so it was quite scary sometimes.
There were all sorts of dramas going on at the Gates.
# She's hurt you again
# I can tell
# Oh, I know that look so well... #
There would be, like, fights.
Not often, but there would be sort of scenes going on.
And a lot of it was to do with jealousy.
But I have to confess that Gina had to bar me one night...
LAUGHS: ..because I got very stroppy,
because there was obviously something going on
between this girlfriend and I. And she was down there -
I think it might have been when they'd closed up for the night -
and I was banging on the door at the top...
SCREECHING
..having a bit of a sort of drunken tantrum,
because I wanted to speak to her.
LAUGHS: And I got barred for a week, I think!
But they were very empathetic, Gina and Smithy, and sort of said,
"I don't know what you're doing. You know, you're wasting your time."
Oh, well, that's when Smithy came into her own.
She used to be in there and... "Oh, come on, come on!",
you know, and separate everyone out. So, yeah, I was not a fighter.
But there was always "Keep it down, keep it quiet,"
because they had a good relationship with the police
but, you know, any excuse back in those days to give you any grief
and to lose the licence and all the rest of it.
There may have been drama inside the Gateways,
but the club itself featured in a big-screen drama
in the infamous 1968 movie The Killing Of Sister George.
Killing of Sister George is, I think, a kind of iconic moment
in lesbian cinema. I mean, first of all, think about the date.
This is 1968, just one year after the Wolfenden Report,
after the decriminalisation of homosexuality -
obviously that didn't apply to women, because women didn't count -
but, still, the sort of society at the time
would have meant that queer lives, generally, were hidden, underground,
unaccepted, discriminated against.
So, just one year after the law changed, to have this film -
which is the first English-language film
that's ever featured a kind of...strong, legitimate
female lesbian relationship - was a really big deal.
I think the tag line for the film was something like
"three consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes"
or something.
I remember seeing The Killing Of Sister George
and hating it.
I think I subsequently saw it again and hated it just as much.
It's a terrible film!
I think one of the troubles is it's scripted by men.
You know, and it's all right having men scripting
what they think lesbians are, but you have to...
If it had been against the backdrop of lesbians saying who they were.
So, Frank Marcus, who wrote the original stage play,
there's quite a lot of rumour around why he wrote it
and why he made the relationships explicitly lesbian.
The implication was that his wife, who was an actress at the time,
was apparently a client of the Gateway Club
and enjoyed the company of ladies.
So I think there's lots of really incredible things
to talk about with this film, but the biggest of those, I think,
is the fact that they shot the Gateways sequence -
this ten-minute, pivotal sequence in the middle of the film -
in the actual, real-life Gateways Club.
Not only that, they used the actual real-life Gateways clientele,
the Saturday night crowd, as extras in the film.
What is less clear - about why the clientele agreed to be on camera.
What I imagine none of them imagined was who would have seen the film,
because I think there's a dislocate between, you know,
people...going to the club that they always go to on a Saturday night
and, yes, there being a film crew there, filming them,
and then the idea that, actually, people in cinemas
and on TV screens the world over are then going to see them.
I think that, probably, those connections hadn't been made.
You have to question a little bit about the ethics
of the film-making team at this point, actually,
and the ethics of the management of the Gateway Club.
Bob Aldrich approached my mother.
He pitched it to her that he would like to film in the club,
and she, as is fairly well known...
..said to him, "Well, why have extras?
"Every girl in here, all my members need a day's work.
"And, in any case, they should play themselves.
"They should be themselves if you want it to be authentic."
Smithy said... You know, they kept having to go over her part.
Righto!
"Rightio!" I found that kind of hilarious,
because, obviously, they didn't have acting experience...
Well, Gina had acting experience.
Are they members? Yes, I think so. They are expecting me.
I suppose Coral Browne, for that film...
I don't know if she studied Gina a bit,
but, I mean, Coral Browne in The Killing Of Sister George
rather reminded me of Gina -
that rather glamorous, sort of in-command person.
I think they really made the best of using the real people,
the real Gateways regulars, and did lots of tricksy things with...
There's a sequence here where two of the regulars are dancing together.
One looks over the other's shoulder and just...
..gives a little wink, blows a little kiss.
And then the film cuts to a rather shocked-looking Mrs Croft -
Coral Browne. You know...
I'm not sure that that was actually what was happening at the time,
but that's certainly the way that the film-makers interpreted it.
The sequence where Mrs Croft enters the Gateway for the first time -
she barges past these two door butches
and makes her way into the club.
There's a little bit of a conflict there
between what happens in real life,
what would have happened in real life, and actually
what Robert Aldrich, the director, how he directed her to behave.
Because, actually, what would have happened, had she really been this
pretty woman entering this particular club,
past these two stone butches, they would have stepped aside,
they would have welcomed her into the club,
etiquette would have demanded they would have stepped aside.
It was much sort of seedier than it looked in the film, I think.
Very seedy lavatories, but quite a good place to get up to things.
One of the great kind of trivia moments of the film is when
they pick up the phone, and actually give the Gateway phone number, and
the number they give is the real - was the real - Gateway phone number.
People quickly cottoned on that actually WAS the phone number,
cos that was the one I used to phone my mum on at night,
and I couldn't phone her any more to say goodnight,
I couldn't get through any more.
It was absolutely swamped, and people came from all over the world.
They had a pretty amazing time, riotous time doing it.
Beryl Reid's not queer, you know,
there is no suggestion that she ever was,
but I think what she is is actually a really good actor,
and, you know, she performed her role absolutely beautifully.
I, you know, want to think that it was a right laugh.
I imagine the clientele of the Gateway has probably really embraced
her, you see the photo of them giving her a birthday cake
on the last day of the shoot. Now, I think that's probably
because they recognised one of their own there.
And the cast of the movie weren't the only famous names to have
graced the Gateways.
I used to just rush over,
if I saw an attractive, older, glamorous woman,
and ask to buy them a drink.
One of my first - ha! - successes after many, many failures was
with someone called...
She was calling herself at the time Lindi St Clair.
Well, she told me that she had a private income,
and as she lived in a mews house, I believed every word she said.
But actually it turned out that she was a professional dominatrix
called Madam Whiplash, and later she actually stood for Parliament.
The Madam Whiplash Party, of course supported by her clients.
A lot of her clients were councillors, very high-profile
people, and when I first went round to her flat and discovered the
clothes she had in her wardrobe, I just thought it was absolute heaven.
You know, latex, rubber, leather, really fabulous clothes.
Chamois leather.
And we had a lot of fun.
I had an affair with a much older woman, who was very famous
and very beautiful. Her name was June,
and she had been married to Winston Churchill's son Randolph.
It was all very exciting
and she was the first person who took me to the Gateways.
And so I wasn't really particularly scared about it.
We just sort of fell down the stairs and, you know,
everything took off from there.
So, the thing about the Gateways was that it was a sort of rather
magical place. You could go into the Gateways,
you could either totally be yourself, your authentic self
in a way that you perhaps couldn't be on the street, or you could
absolutely reinvent yourself and be someone completely different,
who you maybe wanted to be for one night.
And one of the people I met was someone,
a woman who approached me, who absolutely wasn't my type,
and who was rather rude, and the first thing she said to me was,
"Oh, you're such a pretty little thing."
So I immediately didn't like her!
She said, "Oh, if you cheer up a bit,
"I might even put you in one of my books."
And I just sloped off, but then...
..later someone told me, "Why did you give her the brushoff?"
You know, "She's got, like, a castle, she's got an island,
"she's a famous person." I thought, "Damn!"
Cos I'd never actually met a famous person, ever! But I suppose
I sort of thought that everyone was a famous person at the Gateways.
Who do you think it was?
Uh, I don't know.
Was it her?
Oh, yes.
By this time, Patricia Highsmith was best known for
her bestselling lesbian novel Carol.
One person I do remember seeing there was Patricia Highsmith,
one evening, I remember she was wearing dark glasses
and standing at the back of the room, and surveying it.
This was her tribe, I suppose.
The same way for us all.
Right at the end of her life,
in the last couple of weeks before my mother died,
I spent as much time as I could with her, you know, she was fading,
she was getting old, and she and I were sat there one night
and we were going through the stories of the Gateways over
the years, and dozing in front of the television, both of us,
and she was really quite frail by this point.
There was an old Stones clip came on the TV.
"Mick, oh, it's Mick!
"Oh, he was a lovely boy!"
I'm going... "What?"
"Oh, he was lovely. He used to talk to me outside the Gateways,
"you know." "What?!"
CHUCKLING
"Oh, yeah, he wanted to come down to the club, you know, he said,
"'Gina, please let me come, I'll wear a dress.'"
And she said, "I can't." And it was after they'd had this...
There'd been this big stink about, you know, is this a women's
club or isn't it a women's club, are we letting men in or not?
But she'd had to draw a line, and at that point was sticking to it,
you know, as honourably as she could.
Famous customers or not, it was the Gateways itself that was
finding its place in popular culture.
I fond the Man Alive clips kind of horribly fascinating.
The swashbuckling approach, the heartiness, the thumping stride,
the tough man's clothes. These things are natural to some
lesbians, but mostly unacceptable to people outside that world.
This means that for lesbians who want to relax in the kind of clothes
and the kind of way that make them happy, there are few places to go.
One of them is a club in Chelsea,
a place where there is no longer any need to pretend.
There they can dance, drink, flirt,
make friends, discuss their problem with others who will understand.
And it isn't just in public places
that life is made more difficult for them.
There's basically the posh bird who's doing the interview.
End of this whole episode of talking
to these lesbians, and these lives,
you got a sense that she kind of fancies, you know, running off
and trying a bit herself
because she's got this, like, look
and she's listening to this tragedy.
These lesbians understand how marriage might destroy them.
Others find out too late, after they HAVE married
and tried to live normally.
It's incredibly moving and sort of shocking.
But I was impressed that they name checked the Gateways
on Call The Midwife. The redhead chick, and then there's
the Welsh chick, and the redhead one didn't want to go because,
"Oh, I'm not like that, I just love YOU."
That line, all lesbians have heard back in the day,
"No, I'm not a lesbian, I just like you."
And they go, and the other one says, "At least we can hold hands."
So that was interesting.
Because then, transgression is so exciting, right,
so the Gateways Grind...
So we didn't see that on Call The Midwife, unfortunately.
The Green Door, that song, Shakin' Stevens, you know,
did the song that people know about.
And then, you know, some people have said,
"Oh, no, it's about prohibition in America,"
but I think, you know, we can appropriate history,
and also I think that the synchronicity
is very interesting because the original lyrics,
saying, "Joe sent you," referring to Joe Meek.
And of course Joe Meek was this big music producer who, you know,
he did the Frankie Vaughan version,
and so people sort of looked at that, and of course Joe Meek
was gay, took his boyfriend there, you know, in the '50s and stuff.
What my mother told me was that Joe told her that he was
producing a record that was going to be a hit,
it was called The Green Door, he had co-written it with somebody else,
an American guy, Frankie Vaughan was going to do it in the UK,
and it was called The Green Door, and it was about the Gateways.
Now, that's what I was told.
Other people say, "No, it was written about a club..."
in St Louis or New Orleans or somewhere,
there's various different stories, but Joe Meek told my mother that.
So green was the colour of the sort of speakeasy,
the sort of naughty place to go, and historically in America,
you know, you had green doors.
Certainly there is an element of the New York speakeasies
in the Gateways.
It's basically a speakeasy with a sort of sexy and mysterious twist
because it's lesbian speakeasy.
But it sort of became one.
But was the Gateways as diverse in race and class
as the original speakeasies?
Gateways, prior to the late 1980s,
needed to envelop everybody.
And, as far as I'm aware,
their policy was very much an all-encompassing one.
There were definitely quite a number women of colour that made it
their place to go.
And it was classless.
There were upper-middle-class girls there with wonderful accents,
there were prostitutes,
it was utterly classless.
What they had in common was that they were lesbian.
And propping the bar was this... Well, there was always this line of,
I suppose they would call them bull dykes, really, Eton crops
and ties and suits and all of that.
And they nearly all seemed to be swimming pool attendants
at Tooting Bec Lido.
For the first few weeks, because once I had become a member...
..I spent a great many evenings there, and people would ask me
what I did, and so I said I was a swimming pool attendant
because I thought that was the thing to say.
But then, if anybody asked me
any kind of technical question or when I was on duty,
it was hopeless because actually I can't even swim!
It's probably why I paint the sea so much, you know, I can't even swim.
So I had to sort of give that up
and let on I was an art student, you know?
I think one of the reasons to really celebrate and to remember
and commemorate a place like the Gateways is
at least there was somewhere. They're sort of isn't...
Weirdly, it's easier now but it's also more difficult
because there ISN'T a place like that any more, is there?
Places were hidden and only known by the in-crowd, but they existed.
And I think that, you know,
things have changed a great deal in that time,
and things are much more open now, but equally there are
far less explicitly lesbian, explicitly gay venues
than there used to be. I don't know where you'd go to meet...
I mean, I'm happily married, so I'm fine, but I don't know
where you'd go to meet somebody now!
Oh, I always went to voluntary organisations.
Switchboard, Gay's The Word, Lesbian Discussion Group -
oh, you can pick up a good woman over an argument!
I think there was an innocence, there was an innocence,
when I'm saying about it being conservative, I think...
..Smithy and Gina just wanted to keep those times as they were
without having to think about feminism
or women's liberation and that kind of thing.
The first time I went to Gateways, I was actually thrown out!
I mean, I knew I loved you.
Now I adore you.
It was entirely unintentional.
I was trying to go in and I wasn't trying to make trouble.
I was with a friend, Jill Posener,
who later became a very, very famous photographer,
but she'd just written the first lesbian play
that was to be performed by Gay Sweatshop,
called Any Woman Can.
So what year are we talking about?
We're talking 1976, I think, or thereabouts.
And we... I was helping her put up posters
in lesbian venues in London,
except that lots of the lesbian venues, such as they existed -
tiny drinking clubs in Soho and so on -
didn't want them and we came to the Gateways and we...
Because it was too obvious or...
Because they didn't want anyone to talk about lesbianism or to...
SANDI SIGHS
You know, it was too showy.
Girls should be discreet, would be the line. Right.
So we got halfway down the stairs at Gateways
and Jill started putting up a poster on the stairway
and one of the proprietors caught her at it and we were bustled out.
But - but - I was allowed to go back later on,
when I was volunteering on Gay Switchboard
because they would let men in on a Sunday lunchtime
and the lesbians of what was then Gay Switchboard -
became Lesbian and Gay Switchboard -
the lesbians would take some of the men down as a special treat,
so that they could see what the Gateways was like
and describe it to the lesbian callers
who wanted to know what they'd be getting. Oh, OK.
So it had a practical purpose? Yeah.
We did it in both directions.
I mean, I got dragged to various gay clubs -
the ones that would let women in, cos a lot of them wouldn't at all.
Equally, you know, we took some of the men down to the Gateways.
That was another thing about the Gateways,
that it never seemed very political at all.
And why should it be?
A group of us went to the Gateways to issue leaflets
or talk about GLF and said more women should join GLF.
And the, um, the owners or the managers were furious about this
and didn't like it at all.
Smithy, who was the more butch one,
just said, you know, "This is absolutely horrible.
"We don't want to be out. We don't want to be any of this.
"And just get out," you know, "just go."
I think she said to me, "I'd like to kick your bum up the stairs."
I mean, she didn't actually attack me,
but she was so angry
and actually I felt rather bewildered,
I couldn't really understand why they would be so angry.
So, having been chucked out of the Gateways, we went back to GLF
and we said, "We should have a demonstration against the Gateways,"
so this demonstration was organised and...
..included men and so we went back
outside the Gateways and demonstrated.
And I suppose they must have called the police
because some people were arrested.
I think one thing about the Gateways was it was in a basement,
so perhaps that eventually made it seem rather under the counter
or concealed and not out,
and of course the whole message of GLF was you must be out, so...
You know, out of the closet, into the street, sort of thing,
so that was what it was about
and I'm not sure that the purpose of the demonstration
was all that clear, but it was about that.
One of the things that was kind of misunderstood about the Gateways,
when people came down complaining about it being closet,
a lot of people there were women
and had their children, and they wouldn't have had their children
if their rotten, estranged husbands... You know.
Cos these things weren't always very merry
and friendly and civilised.
You know, you only had to go to court and say,
"Well, she goes to the Gateways Club, she's a lesbian,"
and that would be it, you'd lose your children.
It wasn't something you could risk.
So Gateways was necessarily protected and careful.
You know, losing your kids is just not negotiable.
I don't care what, you know, anyone says.
So, no, people weren't out,
they were very cautious when they were raising their...
When their children were young.
My mother was very close friends with Gina and Smithy,
and there was kind of a crowd, an in-crowd.
All about the same age. A lot...
Quite a few of them had children.
Andrew and I were very much, I think, as he would say,
children of the Gateways.
Our mothers were very good friends.
Um, his mother became a very good friend of mine, actually.
I used to stay with her - with her partner, Jo.
They've been together many years.
Great love between those two.
Two good women.
Went through a lot together, and survived it.
Made it.
And she had her two boys.
But my mother's sister... Oh, my God!
Who's going to see this?
My mother's sister, um...
..put my father up to accusing my mother
of being a wicked woman,
in court.
But, anyway, whatever it was. Adultery with another woman.
So... But the judge was outraged.
He was completely outraged because my father had not looked after us.
Um, and, er, my mother was wicked.
So we were made wards of court.
But the agreement was, no custody for either parent.
That was...done.
So we just went back to live with my mother.
But we were told, "Don't tell anyone!"
Don't speak about it, cos you're not allowed to.
You know, because if it was found we were gay at that time,
you could lose your job...easily.
You would lose your job if they found out.
And you would lose your flat, as well.
And so, you know, I mean, a lot of the girls,
they had to do terrible jobs.
I don't know if I should mention this but some of them
had to be on the game, quite a few I knew.
Nothing else they could really do that would pay the bills.
For many people, they'd been thrown out.
They'd been told never to come home again.
You know, they didn't have any family connections.
So, you know, what was the alternative?
Live in abject misery and social isolation.
So without places like the Gateways, honestly,
we wouldn't have had the ability to come together and be together.
So my best friend I met at the Gateways.
I was 17, she was 19.
She's my best friend to this day.
I think many, many friendships, um, and relationships were forged,
and won, and lost at that club.
And we have to remember that for a lot of the time
that Gateways was extremely popular,
it was a place of sanctuary and safety in a world
that didn't want us, or where we were completely invisible.
Because when I think about...
1979 was probably the first time
I ever went to Gateways.
It was also the same year that my Cambridge college decided
they wanted to expel me because they had discovered I was a lesbian.
Now, in the end, they didn't do it
because of my excellent academic record.
So if you're going to be gay, at least be clever about it.
Um... But I remember going with the weight of that to Gateways,
feeling that I had been excluded from society in general,
and, thank goodness, here was a small room,
where I could at least be myself for an hour or two.
Absolutely. So I have to be glad that things have changed that much.
I never thought, 40 years later,
I would be able to go back to Gateways,
and I'd be happily married to a woman, and I have a family,
and all of those things might have happened for me
when I was that scared and frightened 21-year-old.
So it came to an end in 1985.
Not just because other clubs were opening
but because things had changed.
My dad died in 1979.
My mum and Smithy were getting older and it was just time to stop.
They'd been running the club together for over 25 years.
For most of that, they were open seven days a week.
They wanted it to end with a bang!
I did go back for the closing party,
which was really, really memorable, and absolutely rammed.
You know, women were spilling out of the club.
# In the morning
# Beats a cup of coffee for starting off the day. #
But it was broad daylight outside.
It was a really sunny, hot day.
So the closing party must have begun, you know,
at, I guess,
an early hour of the day.
It was very celebratory.
It was very packed.
Lots of fun, again, as was always the case.
And lots of drinking, and that sort of thing.
Um, never to be replaced.
Never to be replaced.
I'm just smiling, thinking about the times there, you know.
And, um...
Yeah, it was really good. Really good.
Should be revered.
And I do know a lot of people don't know it even existed.
It would be a crime against lesbian history
for people not to know about the existence of the Gateways.
One of the ways in which English Heritage commemorates
famous people is they put up a blue plaque to them.
Now, I don't think it'll surprise anybody -
most of these plaques are for men.
The interesting thing is, there's a lot of gay men.
There's Oscar Wilde, EM Forster, Ivor Novello, Kenneth Williams,
Alan Turing.
But where are the lesbians?
And lesbian landmarks like the Gateways.
I think it would be wonderful if there's a blue plaque.
Because, you know, there's...
In many ways, it speaks of hindsight.
And it's good that one looks at the Gateways with hindsight.
Because, why should...
Why should the fact that you're lesbian
mean you're herded together
into a small room with the door closed, you know?
This drawing a line under the whole thing of invisibility and no past,
you know, you have to have a past
in order to have a present and a future!
And, for that reason, yes, a large blue plaque!
Will it have Gina and Smithy on it? LAUGHTER
I think it would be the best, best present in the world
if Gateways reopened, and got resurrected and revived.
It would be absolutely amazing.
Somebody has to stand up for that reality,
for that, you know... That smelly little basement,
where life happened.
And, you know, gay women, when there was no place else,
were able to live, and create their relationships
and their families and their homes and live their lives,
and meet each other, and grow businesses.
You know, become women that they weren't especially expected
to be when they started,
because they had that base. It was tremendous.
And for the other people at the Gateways.
Not just the lesbian era, but for the early era, as well.
You know, it was a place where...the bullshit didn't have the upper hand.
Are you ready? As I'll ever be. Let's do this.
So the decision to award Gateways a blue plaque is still pending.
But we are very hopeful that it will be awarded
because, as we have seen, there are simply not enough
lesbian spaces, or places that lesbians have lived,
loved and worked that have been commemorated with a blue plaque.
And, as we've heard, there are hundreds of lesbians,
who have lived, loved, danced, talked, fought, and been seen,
felt safe, been themselves,
including me, beyond that green door.
So in their name, all those brave women, who walked through that door
and down the stairs, those who walked before us,
those who walked with us, and those who will walk after us...
That's my wife!
..in their name, we are putting up this temporary blue plaque
until the permanent one is awarded.