Xxl gay nightclub london

XXL was a gay nightclub in London and Birmingham which catered to the bear sub-group. [1][2][3] The club was founded by Mark Ames and his then partner David Dindol in They separated in , after which Mark purchased his ex-partner's share of the club. In XXL London created Bear Necessities, now called XXL London Bear Pride, a weekend-long celebration of everything “big, gay, and hairy,” with events happening across the country.

Utterly famous, men-only, completely no-attitude megaclub with a dedicated following. Their motto of One Club Fits All means that it’s a liberating space for everyone including Bears, Cubs, Chubs, Muscle bears and their many admirers. XXL is a weekly men-only club with a mixed following of Bears, Cubs, Chubs, Muscle bears and their admirers. XXL’s aim is to cater for men of all ages, backgrounds, tastes and sizes with our “one club fits all” ethos and warm welcoming zero attitude door policy.

London gay club XXL is facing closure after plans for a £ billion development have been given the green light. The 1, capacity club, which has been open for 19 years, is one of London's oldest gay clubbing institutions, and the last gay club in the capital's Southwark area.

Queer communities, and more specifically gay communities, have always had a complex and messy relationship with the masculine. This relationship is a quagmire, most obviously visible in the microcosm of nightlife. Personally, I spent years avoiding clubs like XXL a muscle-bound gay club near London Bridge on the premise that it simply wasn't my vibe, sensing that its 'One Club Fits All' slogan didn't quite ring true for my body.

When my friends suggested going there a few weeks ago, I swallowed my discomfort, naively presuming that it would be short-lived. I was told that I would be refused entry unless I changed or took it off. I acquiesced, shrunk myself, and complied, in the knowledge that the humiliation would be over soon enough, and I would be with my friends who were already in the club ahead of me.

As I walked in, the bouncer had one last sting. He let me know that, should I put the offending top back on while inside the club, I'd be thrown out. I wasn't the first person this had happened to at XXL, nor will I be the last. Door policies like these, and indeed the culture they represent, are all too familiar — not just in XXL, but in gay clubs and spaces all across the world.

Gay culture is endemically fixated on the masculine. You can see it in the celebration of Tom of Finland's muscly, aggressively homosexual, racially homogenous military-industrial fetish, or the use of Greco-roman 'God' imagery in circuit party and club advertising. The latter, in particular, is a thinly veiled attempt to create some pseudo-spiritual link to a heavily revisionist antiquity, when 'men were men!

is xxl london still open

Historically, this valorisation of the hypermasculine to the exclusion of the feminine , rose partly in opposition to caricaturish feminine representations of homosexuality in pop culture. It set out to prove that a gay man could be as much of a man, if not manlier than his hetero counterpart. In a time where gay men lay gaunt, dying painfully in hospital beds from the plague that ravaged our community, the aesthetics of 'good health' became a-la mode.

It represented a kind of hope in the face of death and destruction. But to theorise about where the shift in the culture came from, regardless of its understandable roots, is not to justify it. It has damaging repercussions, beyond purely aesthetic questions of who is considered attractive and who is not. Even the most femme-presenting drag queens and the the twinkiest gay men still crave the beatifying proximity romantic or otherwise of the visibly hypermasculine.

These values are reified in sexual and social hierarchies that dictate access to spaces, resources, kinship, and ultimately safety. I have replayed those moments outside XXL that night in my head over and over again, trying to understand why I compromised with the bouncer. I am ashamed that I did not tell him to go fuck himself; that I didn't walk away. I have been wracked with guilt over my own complicity in furthering this toxic hierarchy.

The simple truth is that compromise is often so much less lonely than protest. There are a multitude of ways in which people who present as femme in queer spaces often internalise the shame that others project onto us. The only thing as familiar to me as my queerness is compromise. There is compromise in the sweater I wear over my crop top on public transport. There is compromise in the secreting of the large, bejewelled earring that twinkles gauche in the sunlight into my pocket as I leave the house, in the lacefronts snatched into Sainsbury's bags, drag beats washed off in club toilets before long night bus journeys.

My body and the life I live in it is marked by compromise. Adornment is often portrayed as necessarily superficial, but the ways in which we choose to dress our bodies when we move through the world are as essential as air. Compromise is ultimately a word for the little violences we inflict upon ourselves and call survival; the little incursions we accept for fear of conflict or bigger violences. The sum total of these compromises ensures that I am a little less me everytime I walk outside.