BANG! Poppers
Words and handkerchief by Paul Hunwick
Growing up in the late seventies and eighties was great in that you didn’t have the stress of digital life but it wasn’t perfect. Racism, homophobia and sexism were rife and nowhere was this felt sharper than at school. In the suburbs, at the edge of the green belt, even being a David Bowie fan came with risk.
At 12 or 13, I lay in bed thinking if I am gay, I’ll just hide it. At 15, I went to Heaven, Europe’s largest gay nightclub and my world changed overnight. The place was full of small town boys running away from homophobic backgrounds like my own and club kids escaping mediocrity. A teacher warned me it was dangerous, that I might get attacked. In fact, it was the first time I’d ever felt safe – and wanted.
Gays, Blacks, transsexuals, ‘alternative types’ - all members of society I’d been groomed to fear turned out not to be monsters. In fact, quite the opposite. They were kind, friendly and interesting. I’d found my tribe. Heaven was my hero. Spiritually, creatively and sexually. Walking the corridor of Heaven was an adventure that required some nerve. The long passage, sometimes known as the meat rack, ran from reception to the toilets. The thump of high energy music would spill out from the adjacent dance floor and cigarette smoke hung in the air. The 25 metre run had a coat check, a shop, tunnels to the dance floor, banquette seating and black doors, behind which were managers’ offices and unmarked staff toilets. The corridor was generally overcrowded, a place you would run into friends and might see a celebrity. It was very sexually charged. Eye contact was taken as foreplay and hands might sometimes grope you from any direction. Getting from one end to the other could easily take twenty minutes.
I was in this corridor the night Boy George screamed at George Michael to come out, both of whom earned their place as sexual heroes. O’Dowd for bringing homo visibility into the mainstream and Michael for not just for going on to become a proud gay man but one who ditched the shame and took up the attitude of ’Yes. I have sex. Gay sex. Lots of it. Get over it.’
The Heaven corridor had four basic smells; cigarette smoke, sweat, Kouros and amyl nitrate. With its in-yer-face branding and punchy packaging, poppers was a dream graphic design job, up there with fruit boxes and Swiss train timetables.
A moustached fan-dancing ‘clone’ called Poppers Bob had the best amyl and he was easy to spot. He was the one on the dance floor with a bottle between each finger, giving his hands a silhouette like those of a Thai dancing lady. Everybody smoked back then and it wasn’t unusual for a lit cigarette to make contact with the highly flammable agent causing a ball of fire. You’d think people would be alarmed but the usual reaction was to shriek ‘Poppers bomb!’, applaud and carry on dancing.
Amyl nitrate was the olfactory soundtrack of the gay eighties and it was almost certainly the inspiration for Tom Ford in 1999 when he launched the fragrance ‘Rush’ for Gucci and in 2010 for Marc Jacobs when he produced ‘Bang’. Boys keep swinging.
This artwork is part of The Wall of Sexual Heroes, a collaborative textile art piece featured in our previous exhibition at the Horse Hospital (2022) and Bow Arts Lab (2023). All embroidered, printed and appliquėd handkerchiefs celebrate unsung heroes of sexual emancipation, activism and innovation.
The Wall is an organic work. If you would like to contribute, please get in touch with The Keeper.
More tales of Sexual Heroes>
