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He curates a lot of the page and does a lot of the writing around it, I do a lot of the digging and and reaching out to people who I haven’t spoken to for years. So we merged our two creative processes together. Then this really beautiful intergenerational project developed, because he knows about social media, and he’s a writer, whereas I had the connections with a lot of older folks. He’s a a young Black gay man whom I’ve known for a few years and we’ve done some work together, and he was like, “Uncle Marc”-because he calls me uncle Marc like a lot of young Black gay men do, which I quite like-”Can I help you with your Instagram page?” And I was like, “Why?” and he’s like, “Well, you know…”. Then Jason Okundaye emailed me when he saw the Instagram page. I set up the Instagram page and put out an email to a few friends saying, ‘Hey, look I’ve got this idea’. I was in the shower, and Black and Gay, Back in the Day came to mind as a title.
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#Gay bars london black men archive
I was inspired by a similar archive called Black in the Day, which was doing exactly the same thing with Black people in general. As I was doing that I thought, wouldn’t it be really cool if there was a digital archive of images from that time as well. Having lived through it myself I was inspired to create a music playlist called, It’s A Sin – The Black Album ( Apple / Spotify), because as much as I loved the show I don’t think that the music in it reflected my lived experience as a Black gay man growing up during that time and going out then. Obviously it told the tale of the AIDS epidemic in the UK in the 1980s. Marc Thompson: “It was Saturday, January 31st and It’s A Sin had just been broadcast on Channel 4. James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: What was the inspiration and motivation behind creating the archive? Members of the People’s Group, Littlehampton, 1985. Courtesy of Black and Gay, Back in the Day.
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With the Instagram page quickly gaining thousands of followers, The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann spoke with Marc Thompson about his motivation for creating the archive, his intergenerational collaboration with writer Jason Okundaye on the project, what he’s discovered through curating the page, plans to take Black and Gay, Back in the Day beyond social media, and why he thinks Paris is Burning remains such a significant piece of LGBTQ+ culture. With a commitment to “represent the ordinary lives of extraordinary Black queer people”, through these images, not only are some forgotten key community figures memorialised, but so are the clubs, bars, and organisations that formed an integral part of Black LGBTQ+ life back in the day. When it comes to Black History Month and LGBTQ History Month in the UK, Black British queer lives “fall through the cracks of both of those”, according to social justice activist and sexual health campaigner Marc Thompson who recently launched an empowering new archive on Instagram, Black and Gay, Back in the Day which celebrates Black queer Brits pre-2000.