It resulted in 16 men being prosecuted for having completely consensual, kinky gay sex, in private. Operation Spanner was a British police investigation into gay sadomasochistic sex in the late 1980s.
For example, how many of us are familiar with Operation Spanner? One of the fallouts of this disconnect with our own queer histories is ignorance of the historic scenes and spaces which formed significant sites of both homophobic oppression, and gay struggle. In a way, each generation of queers starts anew, groping towards each other in the dark, slowly building networks of commonality, care and organising. Most of us don’t grow up with queer parents who pass on their stories, experiences and wisdom. (PinkNews)Īs a community we can have a short memory – we live in a world structured through cisheteropatriarchy which makes forging links and sharing knowledge with queers across generational lines complicated. The most apparent being a huge disconnect with our own queer, kinky histories. While The Backstreet has not yet clarified the reason for closure, I can’t help but feel the looming termination of this nearly 40-year-old cruising ground is symbolic of larger forces at play in the LGBTQ+ community.
