East London Queer Icon, Lewis Burton - The Dance Floor as a Place of Material Community Building

I had to stop and think how to frame this podcast under the right light. I faced my interview with Lewis Burton, a person I had known for more than a decade as a friendly opportunity to oppose two views of being gay: the more celebratory (Lewis’s) and the more melancholic (mine). By this I mean that to me, being gay entails a trauma that is not innate but socially constructed throught rejection and these days by a celebration of the excetional which is another form of insult. To me, having dedicated my last three years to becoming familiar with queer debates and literature, my eyes opened and I saw in horror the homofobia entrenched everywhere: academia, friends, family, other gay people. And by homophobia I dont mean a mere unpleasant feeling but the potential for proper disaster when a crisis of The Heterosexual Couple in times of recession or war is confronted with the projective spectre of inherited fantasies about paedophilia and family destruction which to my horror, some gay subcultures are cultivating as fetish. Although this does not necesarily mean that they are paedophilic but instead they chose to flirt with the self destructive feeling of saying out loud among themselves something so obscene that a needed release is felt. In other words, something is going on and it is time that gays and queers stop playing as if they were what they are not: silly narcissistic hedonists. It is also time for straight people to and also, it is time that straight people start revising their own beliefs if they are really committed to end with homophobia.
English authorities repeat like maniacs the word community maybe because in the UK such thing practically does not exist. With the property bubble and the process of gentrification, communities were destroyed. It started, of course with Margaret Thatcher and then came Tony Blain who, as I believe, with his cultural policy in the broadest term put the last nail to the coffin. For him, Britain was London as a multicultural city where everybody lived happily with everybody when actually what happened was that whole communites as in Bernstein’s West Side Story were pushed away or aside to build expensive homes for the upper schalons of the new slavery sistem. With the flexibilization of jobs and the dissappareance of unions, protest became a parody of themselves and a barista could be at his job one day and fired the following day without getting to meet his supervisor face to face. What community can you build on such precarious foundations.

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