Why London’s LGBT communities need their own base more than ever

In the coming weeks, as rainbow flags flutter at Pride marches across the country, Tory politicians will cynically present themselves as champions of LGBT rights. Theresa May will almost certainly record a video celebrating great strides in the struggle for equality – strides she voted against repeatedly. Don’t let them get away with it. Some will decry this as unfair, as uncharitable: forgive, move on, celebrate those who change their minds, judge them by their current record. But that’s exactly it. Tory cuts are wrecking LGBT services across the country, emphasising the need for people to organise afresh.

You have won your battle for legal equality, goes the mantra: why continue to campaign and protest? LGBT people still grow up in a profoundly homophobic and transphobic society. They experience bigotry from the playground onwards. Some are rejected or discriminated against by relatives, peers, workmates. They fear holding hands with their loved ones in the street. Internalising this rejection leads to much higher levels of mental distress among LGBT people and, with it, the corrosive self-medication of alcohol and drug abuse. According to Stonewall, almost half of trans pupils and students have attempted suicide. There are other injustices, too: up to a quarter of young homeless people are LGBT, a gross over-representation.

That’s why LGBT services and charities can be lifelines. But ideologically driven cuts are devastating them. Take Pace, a London-based charity that specialised in mental health for LGBT people but, because of cuts, shut down after more than three decades in 2016. Gay Advice Darlington and Durham helped thousands of people each year for more than two decades: last year, cuts closed it. Other charities that have been fighting closure include groups catering for thousands in the Isle of Wight, in Bournemouth, and Eastleigh, Hampshire. According to a study commissioned by Unison in 2016, cutbacks led to LGBT people facing long waits for specialist mental health counselling, sexual health services and youth support. In the first four years of the coalition government, it was estimated that LGBT groups had their incomes cut by up to 50%.

It’s not just the cuts to LGBT-specific services either. HIV charities such as Positive East, which lost £300,000 18 months ago and was forced to make redundancies, have had their funding slashed. Mental health trusts have suffered real-terms cuts, disproportionately affecting LGBT people. Because of family rejection boosting rates of homelessness, cuts to housing benefit disproportionately affect LGBT people.

That’s why the new London LGBTQ+ Community Centre initiative is so vital. Unlike other major western cities such as Los Angeles and New York, London doesn’t have one. “The LGBT spaces that exist now are pubs and bars, where the prerequisite is you have money and buy alcohol,” says my friend Michael Segalov, one of the driving forces behind the project. The planned space would provide a focus for London’s LGBT communities – whether for charities such as the Terrence Higgins Trust or for debates, screenings and sports. “It could be somewhere you can go if you’re a parent of a LGBT person,” Segalov explains, “a place for much-needed intergenerational contact, and a hub of cultural and social events.” Here is a potential space, too, for people to organise to assert their rights in the face of, say, the current vicious anti-trans media campaign, which mimics the anti-gay moral panics of the past, or cuts to services. As Stonewall’s Laura Russell tells me: “The spike in hate crime we have witnessed recently shows why spaces where LGBT people are free to be themselves are so vital and why grassroots community resources are under such pressure.”

This is a project that shows what support for LGBT rights really means. It’s not easy platitudes about equality, or about accepting and celebrating the differences of others. Equality is not simply a question of legal rights. A society that still shows hostility to those who deviate from heterosexual and patriarchal norms continues to inflict terrible damage on LGBT people, generating specific needs that must be catered for. Yet government figures hypocritically wrap themselves in the rainbow flag while stripping away vital support.

The rights and freedoms won for LGBT people were won by them and their straight allies working together. That coalition is needed again. A new centre will provide a focal point for those communities that still have far to go until equality is secured. From the scrapping of section 28, to an equal age of consent, to anti-discrimination laws, the struggles of the past have resulted in great gains. Now that spirit must be revived.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist