Book Club - Paul Flynn
Paul Flynn is a journalist, editor and author. His first book, Good As You: 30 Years of Gay Britain was published by Ebury Press in 2017. Read our interview with Paul as we discuss the inspiration behind his first book, what Pride means to him, and how music has influenced him over the years. Portrait by Danny Moran.
This month we are celebrating Pride and the inspiring achievements of the LGBTQI+ community. Can you tell us a little about what Pride means to you?
I attended Trans Pride in London yesterday and it really brought home to me how important a Pride event can still be, even in a city as cosmopolitan, free-thinking and inclusive as London. Trans people make up a tiny percentage of the British population, yet discussion of trans lives takes up massive media bandwidth, often pointedly excluding transgender voices from the discourse. That’s a constant reminder of how the establishment weights itself heavily against minorities. Pride is a chance to be physically in the majority for a moment, to set the agenda, to walk some of the most prestigious streets of London as a gang. The city looks different for a minute. There’s something powerfully sentimental about that fleeting dreamscape.
Your book, ‘Good as You: From Prejudice to Pride – 30 Years of Gay Britain’ has been quoted as being “one of the most important books about gay culture in recent times”. What inspired you to write this?
In the mid 2010s, some amazing footage from the Manchester Anti-Clause 28 rally in 1988 started appearing on a lot of my old Mancunian friends’ Facebook feeds. It coincided with the passing of the equal marriage bill passing through parliament, the last piece of legislation to give British lesbians and gay men legal parity. I guess I had one of those look-how-far-we’ve-come moments. A journey, from smalltown boy to same sex marriage kept running through my mind. I went to see that rally and, at the time was quite unsure of my own sexuality, certainly of how it might play out in adulthood. Gay men were sort of the scourge of the nation back then. But there were brilliant examples I found first-hand through TV and cinema, in pop songs, at nightclubs right on my doorstep that coaxed me into a much more secure, confident place with it. I wanted to pay a bit of homage to all the throwaway culture which had a lasting effect on me, the stuff that taught me everything school couldn’t, that paved the way for legal parity. I wondered if there was a book in all that.
The book follows your personal journey within the LGBTQI+ community, combined with pivotal UK pop culture moments which had significant impact on your life. In your opinion, how has the UK has evolved to become more inclusive and diverse over the past 3 decades?
I got the most brilliant private message from a teacher at a very well-regarded school in Manchester the day the book came out. He’d read it in one sitting and said he was going to teach it in a personal welfare class for his A-Level students. This was 2017, almost 30 years since the Clause 28 march. That felt immense to me. Clause 28 was designed to abolish the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools. And now, here we are. I don’t think Britain’s in a perfect place – far from it. I do worry that for cis-gendered white middle class gay men, assimilation just turned a handy new demographic into an extra wing of the patriarchy. Equality is a messy business. We know this. But we are so much closer to it than we were when I was a kid.
At Begg x Co music is ingrained into everything we do. As someone who is passionate about music, are there any artists/albums which have influenced you the most?
The emergence of Frank Ocean as probably the most influential musician of the last decade has been amazing to witness. To me, he’s as much an arbiter of gay excellence as Truman Capote or David Hockney. When he sent out the open letter before the release of Channel Orange, stating in detail that the record was written after an unrequited love affair with a man, he made clear that his sexuality was going to be central to his artist’s portfolio. That’s a thorny, potent, complicated thing pull off so perfectly. Channel Orange and particularly the follow-up, Blond, are the records I’ve got the most out of in the last ten years. They’re the aural signifiers of their times. They reframed an entire genre without compromising quality. Less well known, but no less fantastic is Beverly Glenn-Copeland, a transmasculine American musician in his 70s whose catalogue is impossible to categorize. He’s a positive, soulful, joyful avant-garde experimentalist. I’d highly recommend a compilation of his best work over the years, Transmissions, a great introduction to a phenomenal talent. I still adore the work of the early House music pioneers who sound-tracked my teenage and twenties’ running around nightclubs. There isn’t a single Frankie Knuckles production I don’t adore. I never lost my appetite for nightclub music and when I heard the banging single, Lifetime, by Romy from the xx it reminded me exactly of being in a Northern gay club at 2am in the early 90s. That band is such a sensitive amalgam of harmonious perspectives: one straight man, one gay, one lesbian. I’m very much looking forward to Romy’s forthcoming first solo record.
What do you hope for the future of the LGBTQI+ music scene?
Grammys for Mykki Blanco, Ryan Beatty, Honey Dijon and serpentwithfeet would be great, thanks.
Do you have any exciting upcoming projects you could tell us about?
I’ve written a couple of essays for very different books coming out this summer. The first is on George Michael for The Queer Bible, Jack Guinness’s recently published compendium of LGBTQ+ talent writing about their heroes. When Jack first asked me to write a chapter, I had trouble thinking of who to do, just because I’m too interested in people’s flaws to properly hero-worship anyone. I thought George would be a good springboard to write an essay on the complications of having gay heroes but in the writing realised how much I do actually think of him as a hero, in a circuitous, tricky way and how much his early death affected me. The book is very carefully assembled, Jack’s done a great job with it. The second was for the forthcoming Open City publication, Public House: A Cultural and Social History of the London Pub, edited by Cristina Monteiro and David Knight. I wrote a chapter on The City of Quebec, the Marble Arch pub for older gay men and their admirers, known to the regulars as “the elephant’s graveyard.” It’s still one of my favourite bits of hidden London and it was brilliant to tributise both it and the first man who took me there in print.
Buy Good As You: From Prejudice to Pride - 30 Years of Gay Britain here.
Follow Paul on Instagram @paul_flynn.