Serendipity being what it is, I had my head deep in Ian Wade's new book 1984: The Year Pop Went Queer when I came across Peter J Walsh's images of the 20,000-strong demonstration against Clause 28 in Manchester in February 1988. They're an indication that even if pop music did properly come out of the closet in the early 1980s, by the end of the decade Thatcher's government had succeeded in actively frustrating and indeed undoing much of the wider social and cultural progress that had been made.
Thankfully, the clause was later repealed and the situation is significantly improved today, but the photos are also a timely reminder not to be complacent and to recognise that hard-won freedoms and rights can be eroded and removed as well as granted - a fact that is particularly relevant with respect to the current predicament of trans people.
On the other side of the Atlantic to Walsh, and a few years earlier, fellow photographer Nicholas Blair sensitively documented the emergent gay scene in the US. His images have been collected in Castro To Christopher: Gay Streets Of America 1979-1986, a book hailed by Huck's Miss Rosen as telling "an epic story of creativity, community, strength, joy, and resistance on two coasts". Illustrating the perennial struggle against bigotry and discrimination is important, obviously, but so too are positive, celebratory portrayals of the culture and those within it.
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