Haçienda club night “Flesh” flyers and other archival works to feature in Queer Noise show

Queer Noise: The History of LGBT+ Music & Club Culture in Manchester, is to open 1 July, as part of the major Mancunian exhibition Never Going Underground 2017, at the People’s History Museum, running until September 2017.

The exhibition marks 50 years since homosexuality’s partial decriminalisation and includes rare footage from the iconic Haçienda club night, Flesh, photography from Salford and Manchester’s gay bars telling “overlooked stories from the famous music city,” and article snippets, flyers and badges, from fanzine The Mancunian Gay, gathered from personal archives.

Queer Noise, a smaller counterpart to the larger LGBT exhibition has seen the Manchester Digital Music Archive display how “pubs, gig venues and dance floors gave rise to flourishing, creative and diverse scenes once known as ‘Gaychester’”.

Notable contributions include photographers Kevin Cummins, Jon Shard, and footage by film maker Dick Jewell’s Kinky Gerlinky_. However, archive co-founder and curator Abigail Ward explains that the exhibition involves a wide range of contributors which they hope to expand further. “_Queer Noise spans some of the most famous moments in the city’s cultural history, and highlights the incredible influence of queer artists, club promoters and fans. But queer club culture in this city didn’t just start with punk and end at the Haçienda, it existed and thrived in the post-war period and continues to evolve today…Manchester Digital Music Archive can trace some of these histories through the contributions of our LGBT+ members, but the exhibition also gives us a chance to reflect on the fact that more LGBT+ music lovers, and women in particular, need to share their memories and artefacts with us or face the prospect of their individual and shared histories going undocumented and unavailable for study by future generations. There are so many photos, posters, videos and other items out there waiting to tell incredible stories.”