Queer joy and support for Palestine face police harassment

Hampstead Heath Constabulary escalated crackdowns on a yearly George Michael Memorial Party following last year’s support for Palestine. James Holland reports and explores the importance of politicised queer joy.

On the morning of 14 June, as the sun rose on the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, members of the Hampstead Heath Constabulary were rising too. A dozen officers would spend the day harassing queer partygoers at the 9th annual Fuck Off This Is My Culture Sexual Freedom Party, a celebration of George Michael organised by AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) London and the Radical Faeries. By the end of the day a squad of officers would face off against the crowd of revellers, being met with chants of ‘shame on you’ and repeatedly rebuffed.

The organisers and attendees were shocked by the aggressive policing, an escalation from previous year following the event’s support for Palestine last year. The scenes were eerily reminiscent of darker times in London’s policing of its queer population, driven by the British state’s increasing authoritarianism as it imposes support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza against overwhelming public opposition.

Fuck Off! This is My Culture!

This is My Culture, a protest-cum-free party, is organised by ACT UP London drawing on the queer radical tradition to marry militant AIDS activism, reclamation of queer public space, radical faery ecological-hedonism, and, most of all, a love for the wit and legacy of George Michael. Held annually in Hampstead Heath’s officially-unofficial gay cruising area, it takes its name from Michael’s response to being ambushed by the press when visiting the Heath ‘Are you gay? No? Then fuck off! This is my culture!’ A one-time member of the Young Communist League, Michael was an outspoken critic of Thatcher and Blair, a fundraiser for HIV/AIDS organisations, and a campaigner for LGBT rights. 

Dan Glass, an organiser of the event and founder of Queer Tours of London, said the event was conceived to honour ‘the revolutionary unapologetic queerness’ of Michael and ‘his incredible legacy of sexual freedom, defiance, wit, and hilarity.’ He stressed the spiritual and political importance of claiming space and continuity with a history of queer struggle, citing the ACT UP mantra to ‘remember the dead and fight like hell for the living.’

The party has been running since 2017, and has steadily gained in popularity as a event where London’s queer community, always down for a party but unevenly politicised, come out from profit-driven private venues into a historically significant public space to mix dancing and fucking with speeches, performances, and political demands for equal access to the means of flourishing for all.

I love Fuck Off This is My Culture! I’ve been going for years now. It’s a yearly family gathering. An unapologetic convergence of unruly unconforming bodies and minds, mincing down in their hundreds into the cruising bushes of London. Rowdy and beautiful, jock straps and sequins. No money, no tickets, no selling: a place put together, outwitting the mandates of capitalism with love and the drive for collective transformation. Not the intoxicated nihilism we all tend towards, so often, together. A high frequency, everyone is super alert and caring and attentive. Moments that can embody the future we demand…. The cops felt it too, we joined arms and they had to back off…..

Feedback from one party goer

Describing the event as a ‘direct action party’, Dan highlighted the importance of getting the ‘party kids and old school activists’ in the same event, rejecting an either/or logic where politicised spaces and pleasure-seeking activists are necessarily kept separate. He said, ‘it’s a politicising event, a deeply empowering, spiritually and socially, liberating event.’

Political policing

While the party stubbornly refuses to comply with Hampstead Heath’s bylaws on permitted events – ‘George Michael would be turning in his grave if we asked permission from the police’ said Dan – police have previously taken a more hands-off approach, allowing the party to go on unabated or negotiating a cut-off time. However, in 2024 the party’s demands centred the ongoing genocide in Palestine, a homage to George Michael’s anti-war advocacy, demanding an end to British weapons exports to Israel. In response, there seems to have been a concerted effort to shut down the event, with the police taking a much more aggressive approach.

On the morning of the event, Dan was met by an unknown man wearing a Star of David t-shirt who greeted him by name. Dan, who is Jewish, greeted him with ‘Free Palestine, Shabbat Shalom.’ Having been born in Hampstead and attended Hebrew School nearby, he noted ‘there’s an element of spiritual liberation as a Jew for me’ in holding a pro-Palestinian space in the Heath against a concerted effort by the British establishment to create a hegemonic Jewish identity that is synonymous with Zionism. Echoing events in Germany, the British police are playing their role in suppressing pro-Palestinian Jews to protect a ‘Jewish community’ from which they are de facto excluded.

The political nature of the crackdown was made clear when the party was setting up. While organisers were arranging banners, a lurking police officer said ‘you cannot put the banner up, you definitely can’t put the Palestine banners up.’ The banners were duly repurposed as a quilt, in a loving pastiche of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Chillingly, the same officer, who in the course of police liaison conversations reportedly defended the murder of George Floyd, listed off Dan’s activities from the week before, having been carefully monitoring his social media presence.

By the afternoon, the event was underway with speeches from HIV activists, human rights campaigners, and community organisers paired with morris dancing, a Tesla piñata, and holy procession of George Michael memorabilia. However, when the sound system got going a squad of police attempted to break into the crowd and confiscate the speakers. The police attempted to force their way through, aggressively manhandling partygoers and being a general menace. Nonetheless, the crowd repeatedly halted them, and they were made to retreat. Unfortunately, after several such forays, the party splintered under pressure and eventually relocated to a second location outside of the Hampstead Heath Constabulary’s jurisdiction, where it continued without police harassment.

Reflecting on the day, and the unfortunate retreat, Dan was evenhanded about the decision by one of his co-organisers to move the party. The event attracts a mixed crowd who don’t always have the experience to know their rights and resist police incitement, or nonetheless face particular risks from police violence. Himself a lead defendant on the Undercover Policing Inquiry, Dan knows all too well the personal cost of police malfeasance. However, he stressed that ‘it’s important for people to stand up to the police and stand their ground’ and reflecting on the future of the event remained defiant with efforts made to ‘build the base consciousness, and strength to resist the police’ going forward. In that way, the event represents a flashpoint where a radical queer identity, drawing on a rich history and galvanised by anti-pinkwashing campaigns like Queers for Palestine, might escape the long 90s and renew itself in the 21st century.

Political partying, really though?

That’s all well and good, but readers from the socialist left at this point may have their doubts. Police repression is bad, but surely this sort of thing isn’t ‘serious’ politics, right? 

The queer community is a community that parties. The 20th century gay ghetto was made up of clubs, cruising areas, and saunas/bathhouses. ‘Stonewall was a riot’, but it was a bar first. Modern queer identity has been forged in commercial venues, having been constituted in part by post-war consumer society. It’s not for nothing that Point 7 of the Gay Liberation Front’s Youth Group Declaration of Rights, The Right to Live, challenged ‘the rip-off of gay people in the pubs and clubs’ next to access to clean air. This is a tradition that continues to this day, as young queers make their lives orbiting a constellation of club nights, concerts, and dark rooms.

On Dan’s recommendation I spoke to Prishita Maheshwari-Aplin, author of Roses for Hedone: On Queer Hedonism and World-Making Through Pleasure who gave a speech at the event. Noting that Toi Derricotte’s quote ‘joy is an act of resistance’ has become a cliche at this point, they stressed ‘it’s a really important time for us as a community to be looking at our joy with intention, what our joy can achieve.’

They identify a ‘crisis in hedonism’ reflecting on pleasure-seeking practices which do not ask why and neglect the impact on ourselves and our community. At its darkest edge, this can be identified in the slow drip of drug-related deaths coming out of London’s ‘chemsex’ scene. This is hedonism as pure escape by often traumatised subjects ‘without any regard for their future or the future of their community, partly because we’ve been taught we don’t have one.’  Alternatively, This Is My Culture’s effort to claim a continuity with queer history helps us imagine a queer future. Prishita coins ‘hedono-futurism’ where ‘we do connect to our elders and ancestors, allowing us to look to the future and look after ourselves and communities.’ Following bell hooks, hedono-futurism seeks to ‘invent and create and find a place to speak and thrive and to live’ and is therefore necessarily life-affirming and harm-reducing. 

Drawing on Audre Lorde’s The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power they stress that pleasure-seeking practices provide sources of power that can provide energy for change. It’s ‘that space of togetherness, the connections we form with one another, the connections that we’re able to pull on when things get hard’ which are so essential as resources to both survive and fight oppression. Crucially, pleasure-seeking must resist capitalist logics which plug our pleasure into circuits which ask us ‘to be forever searching for bigger, better MORE’ at the expense of our health and communities. Alternative approaches offer ‘heterotopias’, where our pleasure-seeking worldmaking ‘models more reciprocal, caring and forward-looking ways of living and loving.’

While some part of the left recoil at these fleshy parts of queer life, dismissing them as either frivolous or inegalitarian, dissident sexualities are fundamentally pleasure-seeking. Capital is more than happy to capture these libidinal energies and exploit them for profit, interpolating us into impoverished and atomised subjectivities with disastrous effects on our wellbeing. If we abandon this rich terrain of subject formation, we’re not only missing a trick, but also abandoning a community to be wrecked by forces which have no regard for carefully cultivated solidarity and care queer people need to sustain themselves. An intentional engagement with pleasure-seeking practices has immense potential to both nurture a politicised queer identity in the 21st century and help us all have a better time doing it.

rs21 readers can get involved by contacting actuplondonhealthcareforall@gmail.com and following @thisismycultureparty and @actup_london. See you next year!