‘You and me together, fighting for our love’
How Bronski Beat’s The Age of Consent defined an era and why it endures 40 years on
On Monday the BBC’s flagship arts programme, Front Row, marked the 40th anniversary of the release of The Age of Consent, Bronski Beat’s debut album, on 15th October 1984. Presenter Samira Ahmed talked to Laurie Belgrave, founder and director of the south London queer bar and performance collective, The Chateau, and novelist, Matt Cain, formerly editor of Attitude.
How far we’ve come. The discussion which ensued would have been unthinkable on a mainstream arts show in those days. And it was inspiring to hear that the album resonated so powerfully after so long and that it continues to embolden subsequent generations of activists.
I was fascinated to hear about The Age of Consent 40, curated by Laurie, which takes place at the Sounbank Centre this Saturday, a reimagining of the album by queer and trans artists of today. I’d love to have been there.
But for me, at least, there was a voice missing from the conversation. That of someone from the same generation as the band members. Someone who could locate the album’s significance in the immediacy of the time. Because for all its relevance to activism now, the 1980s was a very particular moment to be on the frontline of the fight for gay rights.
I will make no bones that this is personal. I was 23 when the album was released. I had come out at 18 and first marched for gay rights through the streets of Manchester at 19.
But the age of consent in England remained 21 and I had already broken the law as a student simply by virtue of who and what I was. Not for nothing had the poster on my bedroom wall at Lancaster University declared, Get Your Filthy Laws Off My Body.
Steve Bronski and Larry Steinbachek were born in 1960, Somerville in 1961. I was their contemporary. We were the tail end of the baby boomers, arriving in the world soon after the Wolfenden Report of 1957 recommended that homosexual acts should no longer be a criminal offence.
The report’s findings were debated in Parliament in 1960 but a motion to implement them was lost and progress stalled. That was to shape the world in which we first grew up. A world of secrecy and blackmail in relation to homosexuality so vividly depicted in Victim, released in 1961 starring Dirk Bogarde and Sylvia Syms.
Credited with liberalising attitudes, Victim was the first British film to explicitly name homosexuality and deal with it sympathetically. But it would be another six years before partial decriminalisation in England and Wales and twenty before the same happened in Scotland where Somerville and Bronski grew up.
Small wonder then, that for me as a young gay rights activist in 1984, The Age of Consent was epoch making. A bold claim perhaps for a record which peaked at number four in the album charts, and despite being nominated for awards, received a mixed critical reception at the time.
But it did go platinum and for a generation of lesbians and gay men it struck gold — emblematic of our experience and the grassroots struggle born out of it, spurred on by the nascent gay liberation movement of the 1970s.
As the Front Row discussion noted, the album’s cover featured a pink triangle, the predominant gay symbol of the day in the years before the rainbow flag took centre stage. Its inner sleeve had a table listing the minimum age for lawful homosexual relationships between men in each country in Europe, accompanied by London Gay Switchboard’s telephone number.
That same number had been etched into the 12-inch vinyl of the band’s debut single, Smalltown Boy, released four months earlier and featured on the album. I had been touched by other pop songs before, most notably The Killing of Georgie, Rod Stewart’s two-part 1976 single which tells the story of a gay man killed in New York city.
Stewart’s trailblazing ballad was extraordinary to me at 15, simply because it used the word gay with empathy. Is that about me, I wondered, but my lips were tightly sealed. And of course, there was Glad to Be Gay, Tom Robinson’s audacious 1978 single. At 17 I knew I was gay but I was far from sure I was glad.
Smalltown Boy was different. It was about us. In the days before small towns hosted local prides, we were all smalltown boys. All sinners. We had all made a version of the lonely leaving home journey portrayed by Somerville in the record’s iconic video.
But to fully appreciate the significance of The Age of Consent you have to locate it not only in the personal but also the political. It was released just three days after the bombing of the Grand Hotel at the Conservative Party conference. And mid-way through a decade of true-blue Thatcherism which, counter intuitively, because of the fightback it unleashed, was to turn society pink.
A deeply divided Britain was six months into the miners’ strike and just two months later we would watch Bronski Beat headline at the legendary Pits and Perverts fundraiser organised by Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners at the Electric Ballroom in Camden. For me it remains the fundraiser that has eclipsed any other I have attended before or since. Captured in the film, Pride, its own 40th anniversary was marked at the same venue in May this year.
Against this backdrop we were beginning to make small gains, not yet in terms of changes to the law but in the culture of institutions and communities. Gains which were to provoke the introduction, four years later, of Section 28.
The week the album was released I was part of a small cadre of activists self-organising the second national lesbian and gay conference of the white-collar union, NALGO, which was to take place the following weekend in Manchester.
At that conference I was to become co-chair of the union’s new national lesbian and gay steering committee which came to dominate my life for much of the rest of the decade. I was also to sleep with another man in a hotel room, still against the law for gay men even after partial decriminalisation.
A month later I and fellow NALGO activists would witness Chris Smith become the first openly gay male MP at a demonstration outside Rugby Town Hall, where the council had defiantly excluded lesbians and gay men from its equal opportunities policy. A far cry from this year’s general election at which 69 openly LGBT+ MPs across five parties were elected, more than 10% of the House of Commons.
The inaugural British Social Attitudes survey which had been published in 1983 revealed that just 17% of the population thought same sex relationships were never wrong. That number was to fall to 11% by 1987 when Clause 27 (which would become Section 28) was introduced, and in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. Both would have a far-reaching effect on our struggle for rights.
The HIV virus had been discovered in 1983 and it was in 1984 that my late partner, Lawrence, became one of the first few hundred men in the UK to be diagnosed with it. Lawrence and I were to meet at the second NALGO national lesbian and gay conference a year later.
Looking back, my late friend, Tim, probably contracted the virus around the same time. He and I had been star struck encountering the three band members one night at the London Apprentice, Shoreditch’s famous gay club, long since closed. Within a decade, both Tim and Lawrence would be lost to AIDS.
This was the world into which The Age of Consent catapulted. It defined the era and created a musical manifesto for our times. Two of its four singles, Smalltown Boy and Why? became, and remain, gay anthems. The other two, It Aint Necessarily So from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and a cover of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love were, in different ways, no less politically loaded.
Larry Steinbachek and Steve Bronski died before their time in 2016 and 2021 respectively. The Age of Consent was in fact the only one of the five Bronski Beat albums which Jimmy Somerville appeared on.
Yet it is Somerville’s unmistakable falsetto which reverberates most indelibly in the album’s echo. I was far from alone in hoping, as it transpired in vain, that he would make a surprise appearance at the 40th anniversary Pits and Perverts celebration.
We may have won the battle for an equal age of consent and many others including equal marriage in the four decades which have passed since The Age of Consent arrived. But that British Social Attitudes number was still only 67% in 2022. And for many those rights still feel all too fragile. The experiences and struggles which the album so memorably and courageously captured are far from over.
So, bravo to Front Row and to everyone involved in the conversation. But when we make gay history, and we must, let’s be sure to capture the voices of those who were there.
