The international chart-topping Manchester band The 1975 have helped finance a new LGBTQ+ community centre for London, making a significant donation that has allowed the project to secure its fundraising target.
Matthew Healy, the band’s frontman, told the Observer: “You might wonder why it is needed, and even ask yourself what exactly is everyone still scared of, but sadly, I think stigma still exists even in London and we still have some way to go.”
Healy, 29, added that he was surprised to find the capital city did not have a place for LGBTQ+ people to meet and support one another. New York, Berlin, Los Angeles and Manchester already have such venues – and London did once. A Gay and Lesbian Centre in Farringdon was shut down in the early 1990s, because of a lack of funding and management disagreements about its core purpose. But now a team of volunteers, including the activist and journalist Michael Segalov, are attempting to set up a new and more welcoming place for London’s large LGBTQ+ community that could have a more stable future.
Segalov, too, had assumed that Londoners in need of friendship, or a safe space to escape from prejudice, already had somewhere to go. The fundraising campaign won support from Hackney Council, the borough that will host the planned centre, and then from the London mayor’s office. Money-raising events, ranging from club nights to community picnics, got the project off the ground, but it was Healy and his band’s 11th-hour response to the project’s appeal to raise £50,000 that has now enabled the creation of the centre.
“When a friend of mine sent me the link, I was quite surprised that such a good idea had not yet raised enough to get over the threshold,” said Healy, the son of actors Tim Healy and Denise Welch. “I am a bit wary of talking about it because I don’t want to appear to be virtue-signalling, but me and the others in the band all felt it was obviously a good thing to put our money towards.”
The musicians, who formed a group in 2002 while at school in Wilmslow and won the Brit award last year for best British band, are currently in the studio working on a third album, A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships. In 2013, their debut album went to the top of the UK album chart. In 2016, their second album topped both the UK chart and the US Billboard 200.
Yesterday, Healy said a large section of the 1975’s fanbase comes from the LGBTQ+ community so the decision to fund the centre had seemed a natural choice.
“Aside from believing in the idea, a more superficial reason is that one of our songs, Loving Someone, has become a bit of an anthem for some people in that community,” he said.
The new venue will host a wide variety of entertainment and group activities, from drag shows to Christmas dinners for the lonely. Key to its purpose will be welcoming older members, who are sometimes left out, and holding events that do not revolve around alcohol.
The centre plans to run a cafe employing LGBTQ+ people, as well as an information and research hub. Three full-time official posts will run the operation, with new personnel selected each year. “The fundamental aim is setting up the centre,” explains Segalov, adding the team has now set the online fundraising target to £100,000. “But it’s also about bringing together a community that can be disparate. We’re trying to bridge those gaps.”
More than half of London’s established bars, clubs and pubs set up for the LGBTQ+ community have closed in the last decade, many of them victims of rising business rates and rents.
At the same time, concerns about public safety among this community have grown. A recent YouGov national survey of 5,000 people suggested that in the last five years, verbal or physical attacks on LGBTQ+ people have increased by almost 80%. Research conducted by the Albert Kennedy Trust also found that 24% of homeless young people identify as LGBTQ+.