Building Back Queerer? Mainstreaming, Commodification, and Intersectional Inequalities in London’s Queer Nightlife Post-COVID-19

Abstract

Queer nightlife occupies a contradictory position of operating in the spheres of mainstreaming and marginality simultaneously, alongside broader challenges of gentrification, technological innovation and major shocks such as COVID-19. Yet mainstreaming is a nebulous concept, and its role and impact in these issues is often unclear sociologically. Drawing on a mixed-method study of queer creatives who are part of London’s queer nightlife, this article examines the immediate and longer-term impacts that COVID-19 and the resultant social lockdowns had on this mainstreamed scene. We examine the impact on the individual and culture during social lockdowns and the range of polices and interventions during COVID-19. Then, we consider how queer creatives experienced the return to queer nightlife in London and how the closure and iterative re-openings of COVID-19 impacted on the broader viability of queer nightlife and how these experiences were intersectional. Documenting complex ways that the commodification of queer nightlife has both strengthened and weakened its resilience and sustainability, we develop a sociological account of the effects of mainstreaming—framing queer nightlife as a cultural field that, while undergoing processes of mainstreaming, remains subject to dominant cultural forces of commodification, heteronormativity, and intersectional inequalities.