Lost Spaces: Memories from Gay Bars, Lesbian Clubs, and LGBTQ+ Parties

Lately I keep thinking about that phrase "the past is a foreign country", and how sometimes a space doesn’t have to disappear to feel lost to us.

And I know that sounds like a bit of mumbo jumbo, but stay with me!

Queer spaces are always evolving and changing, and if we don't evolve and change with them, or if we're not there at the time they are evolving, then we risk being left behind.

Which brings us to this week's conversation, which happens to be one of my favourite types of stories - the big scary jump in to the unknown.

And the person leading us through the story is performance artist and theatre maker Emma Frankland, who took the big scary jump when she moved to Brighton, England eight years ago.

In our chat we talk about living on a boat, the visibility of Brighton's trans community, and finding community and solace at The Marlborough, a theatre-slash-performance space which still exists as a queer space, but has had a change of name and a lick of paint since Emma's glory days there.

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I've been getting increasingly sappy with you recently, and I'm not sure whether that's because I'm just getting softer in my older years, or if there's just an accumulation of gratitude that's bubbling to the surface, but... well, either way, just giving you the heads up that this intro is a bit sappy!

So, what am I sappy about? Well, I just love the network of stories that this podcast is building and how there's an overlap between experiences, perspectives, and memories.

And, I love that I'm able to have these conversations and form a real sense about cities that I've never been to and decades that I wasn't alive for all thanks to the stories that my guests share and how they navigated and responded to what was going on for them at the time. And I also love how one conversation can lead to another, which then leads to another.

Which brings me to the city of Edmonton, Canada.

Sometimes when I'm putting this show together I like to imagine that someone has somehow found this show in 50 years time and are having a good ol' giggle at how quaint and ol'timey the things we are talking about are.

And if you are one of these people from the future it's probably worth me telling you about a little thing called the Covid-19 pandemic. This was (hopefully) a once-in-a-lifetime event where a highly contagious disease was sweeping the globe and, so, we were all made to stay in our houses for a good chunk of time to slow down the spread - like, around two years.

It was especially tough because we didn't know when it was going to end, and we kept having these false starts where we were told we were allowed out and then our governments were like 'oh, whoops, no, spoke too soon - get back in your houses!'.

Anyway, I tell you all of this because this week's guest, actor/singer/cabaret artist Jens Radda, had just moved to the city of Melbourne, Australia, from Sydney when the pandemic broke out, and so it had a significant influence on how he settled in to the city, how he made friends, and how he filled his days.

And the periods of 'freedom' (for want of a better word) that he got in between lockdowns were precious and exciting to him because he got to go to queer spaces like the Rainbow House Club.

Other episodes about Melbourne