I spent Wednesday night in a room full of people I have admired for years.

The Attitude Awards is one of those evenings where you look around and have to remind yourself you are allowed to be there. There are people who changed things, people who took risks when it cost them something and people whose names I knew long before I could even imagine being in the same room as them.

I do not take nights like that for granted, after 16 years of advocacy work, from content to Pride to politics to community to now. It still feels like a pipe dream, as someone who makes things and tells stories rather than someone with a title and an institution behind them… It’s a privilege I’m still getting used to.

What strikes me about those evenings is how much of the room is built on people who are no longer in it… Every award, every speech, every bit of progress being celebrated traces back to someone who did something difficult and often thankless, frequently at personal cost, and who is not around to see what it became – You feel that in the room.

I spent a lot of the night thinking about a specific someone who, sadly is no longer able to fill such a room.

James should have been in that room. The Vivienne should have been on that stage, probably hosting it, definitely upstaging everyone on it. Instead a lot of conversations circled back to the same absence… And I understand that is what the first years after a loss are like: you keep noticing the shape of where someone used to be.

Which brings me to legacy, and what we actually mean by it.

We talk about legacy as though it is something a person leaves behind, fully formed, like luggage, but it’s not. Legacy is something the living decide to maintain, or quietly decide to let go of. It takes effort, and people prepared to do unglamorous work for years after the flowers have gone, long after it stops being the thing everyone is talking about. Nobody inherits a legacy – people build one, deliberately, or they don’t.

That’s harder than it sounds, because the window to ‘create’ said legacy closes quickly. Our collective grief is loud for about six months and then the world moves on, entirely reasonably, because it has to. What happens after that is a choice on whether anyone is still doing the work when it has stopped being emotional and started being admin.

For the last several months I’ve been working with James’s mum, Cassie, on Bring The Vivienne Home, a campaign to commission a permanent lifesize statue of The Vivienne at the entrance to Liverpool’s Pride Quarter. It has been, by one hell of a distance, the hardest thing I’ve worked on, but not for the reasons you may think – not the fundraising, though that is hard, but what it asks of everyone emotionally, and the fact that doing it properly means doing it slowly, when every instinct says move faster.

People occasionally ask whether a statue is the right use of money, and whether it would be better going to a charity. And y’know what, it’s a fair question. The honest answer is that campaigns like this create giving. Money raised in someone’s name only works when the thing itself means something to the people giving – House of The Vivienne does that for addiction support in North Wales, whilst the statue does it for Liverpool.

I’ve worked in the third sector over a number of years, be it Pride, Sahir and now The Proud Trust – individual giving is one of the hardest income generators there is. People either just don’t have the money, or don’t want to give it away unless they feel a connection to where it’s going. Fighting for a local LGBTQ+ charity was difficult when in the same lists as a children’s health charity… you just can’t argue with sick kids, y’know? So to say we could put the potential £30,000 we could raise at an upcoming fundraiser to another use is admirable, but it simply wouldn’t exist.

But there is also another argument – permanence does something a donation cannot. Liverpool was the first British city to officially recognise an LGBTQ+ quarter, and in recent years that Quarter has lost venues, lost footprint, and lost visibility. A permanent piece of public sculpture at its entrance is not sentiment. It is a marker that says this part of the city is not up for quiet erasure, and it will still be saying it in fifty years, when everyone involved in the campaign is long gone.

There is something else worth saying – Liverpool decides who Liverpool commemorates. James chose this city at sixteen. He built The Vivienne here, in venues on and around Stanley Street, years before anyone outside the city knew the name. The people who want this statue are the people who were there, those who loved and want to see a lasting tribute that acts in a multitude of ways, and, in true Viv style, will be the first of its kind.

The last few months have not been smooth. The campaign has had to restructure, we have had to pause, and there have been weeks where progress was invisible from the outside. It has kept going because James’s mum, Cassie, has been immovable, because Liverpool Business Improvement District stepped forward when it mattered, and because people kept giving when there was nothing new to show them.

If anything, the difficulty has clarified it. Easy things do not test whether you meant it.

So I will keep going.

Nights like Wednesday are a reminder of what it costs to build something that outlasts you, and of how many people never got to see what they built. James will see his. We will make sure of it.

The Vivienne is coming home.

I haven’t written a blog for a while, and if I’m being open about why, it’s because I haven’t had the headspace to. There’s been a lot going on up there, and I think I’m closer to burnout than I’ve been willing to admit, even to myself.

On the surface, it probably looks like things are going well, and in many ways they are. There’s work coming in, projects I care about, and Bring The Vivienne Home moving from an idea to something real. But underneath that, there are deadlines stacking up, briefs that shift without much direction, and the never ending admin of self-employment that nobody really warns you about, like chasing invoices for work you delivered months ago, to the point where I’ve had to take formal legal steps just to get paid.

That’s the part of self-employment that wears you down quietly. When you work for yourself, the work stress and the money stress aren’t two separate things, they’re the same thing, and you can’t switch one off without the other following you to bed. Saying no to work feels risky when the bills still need paying, so you say yes, and then you say yes again, and before long you’re spread across more than you can realistically hold.

And I’ll hold my hands up here, some of that is on me. I have a need to feel busy and productive all the time, as if my worth is measured in how full my calendar looks. Rest feels like falling behind. Passion projects become another workstream. Even the things I do for love start to carry the weight of obligation, and that’s not fair on them or on me.

Maybe I need to organise my time better. Maybe I need to be more upfront with people about my capacity, rather than quietly absorbing more until something gives. Those are probably both true… but they’re easier to write than to do when you’re also trying to make sure the rent goes out on time.

Then there’s the part that’s harder to say out loud.

I’m lonely. Not in a dramatic way, but in that background, persistent way that’s been there for most of my life. And I think that surprises people, because on the surface I’m seen as someone who’s well connected. I can walk into a room at an event and know half the people there, have a chat with everyone, and leave having made a few more connections. But knowing lots of people in rooms doesn’t translate into having a circle outside of them. When the event ends, everyone goes home to their friends, their partners, their group chats, and I go home, and it’s just me and Theo.

That’s the misjudgement, I think. Being visible and being known aren’t the same thing, and being surrounded by people isn’t the same as having people. I’ve never really had a circle of friends, the kind you see in holiday photos and Sunday afternoon plans, and as I head towards 36 in December, there’s a voice in the back of my head asking whether I’m going to end up the single old gay, still busy, still working, still going home to an empty flat.

I think the loneliness and the busyness feed each other. When you don’t have much of a circle, work fills the space, and when work fills the space, there’s less room to build anything else. It’s a loop, and I’m not entirely sure how to step out of it yet.

I don’t have a neat ending for this one. I’m not writing it because I’ve figured anything out, I’m writing it because I needed to get it out of my head and onto the page, and because I suspect I’m not the only one feeling some version of this.

If you’re self-employed, running on fumes, and quietly lonely with it, I see you. I’m right there with you.

I’m writing this on the train home from Manchester, four days after I arrived for Manchester Village Pride, and I’m still processing it in the best possible way.

This was the first event delivered by a new organisation fronted by the local businesses in and around the Gay Village, and I’ll say this straight away: they got so much right. In previous years, and most noticeably in 2025, the village felt really, really overcrowded, with a sense that ticket sales had been prioritised over the overall attendee experience. This year felt different. Yes, there were the usual pockets of large groups of people outside the likes REM, BarPop, Onbar and the junction by Church and the Leven Hotel, but there was also space to breathe, to take it all in, to actually be present rather than just survive the crowd. And for me, that space is everything, because what I value most at a Pride event that gets the balance right between performance, community and wider purpose is the room to reflect.

Which brings me to the harder conversation, because Pride events remain one of the most contentious talking points both within our community and outside of it, and I think that tension is worth sitting with rather than flattening.

Nearly sixty years on from Stonewall, we are in a moment that feels quite dark for our community, and I really don’t want to minimise that. The case for visibility, for protest, for making noise, is real and urgent… But, I’ve never fully accepted the idea that protest means only one thing. Visibility. Joy. Showing the world the breadth and brilliance of our community. These are all forms of protest – the demonstration that we aren’t letting those against us win.

The fact is, we live in a multifaceted, multicultural, and an increasingly multi-opinion society, and the question of how Pride reflects that complexity is one that needs to be asked, but the answer is, actually, a difficult one to come by. We should never accept bigotry, ignorance or prejudice, but acknowledging that nuance exists in many of the conversations around us isn’t the same as accepting those things.

One of the quieter points of tension during Manchester Village Pride was around HBO’s involvement as a sponsor and supporter, and I do understand the instinct behind the criticism, and I’m not dismissing the very real concerns many people have around the incoming Harry Potter series and JK Rowling’s position. However, I’d push back on the idea that one production completely defines an organisation of HBO’s scale – what about the queerness woven through House of the Dragon, The Last of Us, Looking, and, come on, Heated Rivalry? A company like that operates across multiple business units, each with their own management structures feeding into a wider group, and decisions made in one part of it don’t reflect the values or output of the whole, not unlike how many large corporate entities operate across different arms before you reach group level. Boycotts can be powerful, but they need to land in the right place to have impact, and I’m not really sure this one does.

This connects to something I feel more and more strongly about, which is that some of the push away from mainstream support for LGBTQ+ causes hasn’t only come from the likes of Trumpism and its various global counterparts. Some of it has actually come from within our own community. When the conversation turns to pinkwashing, it often focuses on what we see, a rainbow logo in June, a Pride float, a sponsored banner, without any consideration of what that organisation might be doing internally for its LGBTQ+ staff, or the charitable work it does under the radar and without fanfare – as many shout “they should just be doing it!” Many of them are!

And at a moment when Pride events are cancelling across the country, when small LGBTQ+ charities and community groups are downscaling or closing entirely due to lack of funding, we need to think very carefully about who we’re pushing away and why.

Because the question isn’t abstract. It’s this: is it better to take money from an imperfect organisation, money that in many cases comes directly from queer people and allies working within it, to fund a service that genuinely needs it, or to turn it away on principle and watch that service close? I know where I land on that, and I think the community needs to have that conversation more honestly than it currently does.

The anger I see directed at people who hold more pragmatic views on these questions frustrates me, not because I don’t respect the need for anger, I absolutely do, but because it’s so often pointed at the wrong targets. Imperfect allies are not the enemy. People who are trying to work within broken systems while also pushing against them are not the enemy. Saving that energy for the people and institutions actively working against us seems not just more effective, but more honest about where the real threat is coming from.

I really do believe that we are at a crossroads as a community… The world is difficult right now in ways that require us to stick together, to find common ground with those willing and wanting to work alongside us, and to resist the urge to demand ideological purity from people who are, broadly, on our side. That doesn’t mean abandoning principles, it just means being strategic about where we direct our energy, and honest about what we’re actually trying to achieve.

Manchester this weekend gave me hope. The village felt like a community reclaiming something, doing it with care and intention and a clear sense of what it’s actually for.

I came home tired, in the best possible way, and more convinced than ever that the conversation we need to be having is not about who’s pure enough to stand with us, but about how we build something worth standing for.

I don’t get to London often, but when I do, it tends to leave a mark… and this weekend was no exception. I’ve come home sitting with a feeling I’m still trying to properly articulate, somewhere between gratitude, inspiration, and a (not so) quiet hunger to do more.

It started on Friday afternoon at the Chancery Rosewood, at the tenth anniversary of the Peugeot X Attitude Pride Awards Europe, supported by British Airways. I was there as the guest of my friend Carl Cashman, and without his invitation I wouldn’t have been anywhere near it, so I can’t thank him enough for taking me along!

The Pride Awards focus on the ones doing the work in communities, in schools, in activism, in sport, often without the visibility their efforts deserve. Among this year’s ten winners were Ryan O’Neill and Kaue Garcia, the Keighley Cougars owners who have made trans inclusion central to a rugby league club’s identity, and Dean Atta, the BAFTA-winning poet whose work centres Black queer stories with real craft and tenderness. You can read the full list of winners on Attitude’s website.

The Pride Icon Awards went to Placebo, Cat Burns and ABC journalist James Longman, and the evening was hosted by Emma Willis with performances from Delta Goodrem and Heather Small. Russell T Davies was in the room, which, given everything I’d written recently about Tip Toe, felt VEEERRRYYY significant… gutted I didn’t take the opportunity to speak to him!

Being surrounded by people who have spent years doing the work, taking risks, building platforms, creating space for others, does something to you. It’s humbling in the most specific way, not in a self-deprecating sense, but in the sense of being reminded how much is possible and how much further there is to go.

I left wanting to be in more rooms like it, not for the sake of it, but because I genuinely believe that the more visible Proudly Said becomes, the more people it can reach and the more space it can create for voices that don’t always get to be heard.

The following morning was the Pride in London parade, marching for the first time alongside Carl and the Attitude and Peugeot group, and it was something I hadn’t quite prepared myself for emotionally. The scale of the crowd, the noise, the visible weight of support lining the streets, affected me more than I realised.

Check out my wee Instagram reel here.

What struck me most was how many organisations, city bodies, employers and institutions were there out of simple, genuine desire to be present. There was an infrastructure of allyship on display that felt hard won and something that had been worked at for a long time. The anti-LGBTQ+ messaging on the streets was almost invisible, though a glance at the online commentary told a very different story, and that gap between the physical reality and the digital one is important to take note of.

But I want to be careful not to romanticise it entirely, because London is London. The scale of what happened on Saturday is a function of being the capital, with funding, population, political weight and cultural infrastructure that Liverpool cannot replicate in the same way, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone. The more useful question to bring home isn’t how do we do this, but what are the underlying conditions that make it possible, and how do we cultivate those locally in a way that’s true to what Liverpool actually is.

The Will and the community is there. The infrastructure and institutional buy-in is a more complicated conversation, and one worth having openly and honestly.

I came home from this weekend feeling inspired and a little hungry for what comes next, which is usually a sign that something was worth doing. There’s work to do, locally and beyond, and weekends like this one are a good reminder of why it matters.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently writing about fear, about the world feeling darker, about the rhetoric that’s crept back into public conversation, about what it means to be LGBTQ+ right now and sit with that unease. So when I say that last night at the Queer Student Awards in Manchester felt like a genuine exhale, I mean it in the most specific way possible.

I was there to capture the highlights of the evening for the awards, smartphone in hand, moving through a room full of young queer people being celebrated for the things they’re doing in their schools, their colleges, their communities. And honestly, I wasn’t entirely prepared for how it was going to feel.

The Queer Student Awards, founded by Steve Keith, exists to recognise the contributions of LGBTQ+ students across the UK, the ones who are setting up GSAs, running awareness campaigns, supporting their peers, making noise in spaces that don’t always make it easy for them. The youngest winner on the night was 14. Fourteen. And when his name was called, he jumped up and ran to hug his mum, and I think that image is going to stay with me for a very long time.

Because here’s the thing about that… We are living through a period where young LGBTQ+ people are being told, in various ways and from various directions, that their existence is up for debate, that their identities are a problem to be managed, a conversation to be had, a policy to be reviewed. And in the middle of all of that, a 14 year old boy is standing in a room in Manchester being cheered for being exactly who he is and doing something extraordinary with it.
That tension, between the world as it is and the world as it should be, stuck with me all evening.

What struck me most was the energy in the room. These weren’t people waiting for permission to exist or to act… they were already acting, already building, already showing up for each other in ways that many adults twice their age haven’t managed. There’s something both humbling and hopeful about being in a space like that, particularly when the broader conversation around LGBTQ+ rights feels so relentless and so exhausting.

I’ve written recently about fear, about Tip Toe, about the violence that hides behind little things. And I stand by all of it. But last night reminded me that alongside the fear there is also a generation of young queer people who are not waiting for things to get better before they start making them better. They’re doing it now, in classrooms and common rooms and school corridors, often with very little support and a great deal of courage.

The highlights video is coming soon, and I can’t wait to share it. But in the meantime, if you haven’t come across the Queer Student Awards before, go and find them – what Steve and the team have built is something really important, and last night was proof of that.

Some rooms you leave feeling heavier. Last night wasn’t one of them.

Something has been bothering me for a while, and the recent conversation around Tip Toe, and the wider political landscape it reflects, has brought it into much sharper focus… There seems to be a growing assumption, particularly in certain corners of social media, that being LGBTQ+ comes with a pre-assigned set of political beliefs. That our identity places us, automatically and without question, in one particular box. And, honestly, I think that’s worth pushing back on.

Just to be clear about where I’m coming from, and my position – I’m a liberal. I stood in the 2024 General Election for the Liberal Democrats, and I’ll be standing in the 2027 Council elections. Before that, I served as an elected Alliance Party representative in Northern Ireland. My political identity is not something I’m coy about, even if I don’t shout it from the roof tops like others, and it is, I’d argue, a perfectly natural home for an LGBTQ+ person, not least because the Liberal Democrats have a long and consistent track record of fighting for LGBTQ+ rights, while also holding space for a range of views and respecting the ability of people to hold them.

BUT! My political identity and my LGBTQ+ identity are not the same thing, and I’d challenge anyone who tried to tell me they should be. They definitely have overlap and cohesion, but not to every issue.

What unites us as a community is not ideology. It’s experience. It’s the prejudice we’ve faced, the rights we’ve had to fight for, the spaces we’ve carved out for ourselves in a world that hasn’t always welcomed us – that’s the common thread, and it’s a powerful one, as the response to Tip Toe has shown. When Russell T Davies holds a mirror up to the threats facing our community, we recognise ourselves in it collectively.

But recognising shared experience is different from assuming shared politics, and I think we’re on a genuinely dangerous path if we start treating political pluralism within our community as a kind of betrayal. The global population will never speak with one voice, and it would be foolhardy to think otherwise. But, what we can do is work together in common interest, find the ground we share, and engage honestly with the things we disagree on, including with each other.

I’m a pragmatic person, and I like to think the best of people, trying to listen even when I disagree, and I think robust, respectful debate is healthy. What I don’t think is healthy is the assumption that because someone is LGBTQ+, they must hold a particular economic position, or support a particular party, or view the world through a specific ideological lens. We are not a homogenous group. We are individuals with different backgrounds, different experiences, different priorities, brought together by something real and significant, but not by a requirement to think identically.

The one caveat I’d always hold to is this: pluralism has limits. Viewpoints that would endanger our community, reduce our rights, or treat us as less than equal don’t fall under the banner of reasonable difference of opinion. That is very important, and it shouldn’t be blurred. But within that, there is enormous space for disagreement, for nuance, for people to hold genuinely different views about economics, governance, and the role of the state, without that making them a bad LGBTQ+ person or a traitor to some imagined collective.

We fought for the right to be seen as individuals. It would be a strange thing to then demand that we all think as one.

I recently finished watching Channel 4’s Tip Toe finale, and I’m still sitting with it in a way I wasn’t entirely prepared for. Russell T Davies described it as the strongest thing he’s ever written, and said he had to write it “because the world is getting stranger, tougher and darker, and frankly, the fight is on.” Watching that final episode, I understood exactly what he meant, because it didn’t feel like watching a drama, but more like watching a mirror being held up to something I’ve been trying to articulate for months and haven’t quite managed to.

The show follows Leo, a gay man who runs a bar on Canal Street in Manchester, and his neighbour Clive, and over five episodes it traces how prejudice doesn’t just happen… but creeps in gradually, through small moments and wrong turns and the slow radicalisation of someone who, at the start, just seemed like a difficult neighbour (even though the 5 episode arc takes place across ten days, we can assume Clive has been indoctrinated over a longer period from things he says).

Whilst the finale is absolutely horrific, emotionally and visually, it’s the epilogue that does something I found genuinely devastating, as a culmination of some of the accusations laid against Leo: it tells you what becomes of every character, and the final note it lands on is that within 18 months of Leo’s death, a search for his name returns the result “Leo Struthers, convicted paedophile.“

It wasn’t true… but it was allowed to be. His legacy, even in the wake of one of the worst deaths imaginable, falls victim to the same bigotry that killed him.

I watched that and I felt sick, because it isn’t fiction – it’s one of the oldest and most corrosive weapons used against LGBTQ+ people, the accusation of being a predator, a paedophile, a danger to children, and it gets deployed with a casualness that its users are rarely made to account for. I’ve experienced it myself, something I’ve spoken about publicly and to the Irish press, and three years on from leaving Northern Ireland, I’m still dealing with iterations of it. Seeing it depicted so unflinchingly on screen, and seeing how it outlives a person, how it gets to rewrite someone’s story after they’re gone and can no longer defend themselves, was one of the most affecting pieces of television I’ve watched in years. That is the highest possible compliment I can give to Russell and to Alan Cumming, whose portrayal of Leo, warm and funny and stubborn and quietly terrified in equal measure, is something I’ll carry with me for a long time.

Then there’s Clive. David Morrissey’s performance is remarkable precisely because Clive is not a monster, and that’s what makes him so hard to watch. He’s someone you find yourself shouting at, wanting to grab by the shoulders and ask when he last had a single thought that wasn’t fed to him by something he saw online. He’s someone who had choices, who had a person standing right next to him whose humanity was entirely visible, and who chose, again and again, to believe the algorithm over his own eyes. The horror of Clive is that versions of him exist everywhere, in comment sections and around dinner tables and in positions of influence, people who have outsourced their critical thinking to outrage and who have stopped asking whether any of it is actually true.

And whilst I’m applauding the cast, a specific mention for Iz Hesketh, who plays Zee. Someone I’ve crossed paths with, and it was a joy to see them in something this significant, particularly at a time when transgender and non-binary identities are being debated, dismissed and weaponised in the public conversation – the importance of authentic representation, of transgender and non-binary performers playing transgender and non-binary characters, cannot be overstated. The portrayal is quiet, considered, and lands exactly as it should. Go on, Iz.

But the reason I’m writing this isn’t really about the show. It’s about what the show is reflecting back at us, and whether we’re honest enough with ourselves to look at it properly.

Because the world that Tiptoe depicts isn’t a dystopian fantasy or a worst case scenario, but the world that’s been assembling itself around us for a few years now, in increments small enough that it’s easy to dismiss each one individually:

• The social media commentary that grows steadily nastier, and bolder.
• The casual erosion of DEI.
• The reemergence of rhetoric we were told was consigned to history.
• The way ignorance has been handed a platform and, more dangerously, a sense of legitimacy.

None of it feels like a crisis individually, and that’s precisely the point – Leo says it in that final scene, reflecting on whether the LGBTQ+ community’s increased visibility was a mistake: “every tiny little thing that happens… it seems like little things, but there’s a violence behind it.” I’ve been thinking some version of that thought for months without being able to say it that cleanly.

As an LGBTQ+ person, I’m finding the current landscape genuinely frightening in a way that’s difficult to admit without feeling like you’re being dramatic, and part of what Tip Toe does so well is validate that fear without sentimentalising it. It shows you how quickly things can escalate when prejudice is left unchallenged, how the people who enable it are rarely the ones who consider themselves hateful, and how the communities on the receiving end are left to absorb the consequences while the conversation moves on. It’s something that a lot of us are living inside of right now.

So yes, this is an applause for Russell T Davies for writing something this necessary, and for having the nerve to end it the way he did without softening it into something more comfortable. And it’s an applause for a cast who brought these characters to life with honesty and without flinching, including Morrissey, who made Clive exactly as ordinary and therefore exactly as terrifying as he needed to be. But more than anything, it’s me trying to put into words something I’ve been carrying around for a while, which is that the fear a lot of us feel right now is not an overreaction, and it is not nothing, and we are allowed to name it.

Every tiny little thing. And there is a violence behind it.

I, recently, published a piece on here asking whether the lights are going out on Liverpool’s queer scene. If you haven’t read it yet, I’d encourage you to, because what I’m about to share is a direct response to it.

Writing that post helped me realise that feeling concerned isn’t enough. Saying something publicly is a start, but it isn’t the same as doing something… So I’ve done something.

There is now an open letter addressed to Liverpool City Council, its partners and stakeholders, asking them to acknowledge that the decline of LGBTQ+ safe spaces in the Pride Quarter is a real and serious problem, and to provide some actual answers about what, if anything, is being done to protect what’s left.

The letter covers Liverpool’s LGBTQ+ history and why it matters. It references the Eberle Street refurbishment in 2016, designed in part as a tribute to the legacy of Garlands, a venue that closed within a year of that investment being completed. It covers where the scene stands now. And it sets out what the community is asking for.

Organisers and leaders of LGBTQ+ groups and organisations across the Liverpool are being asked to add their names to it. The more voices behind it, the harder it is to file away and forget about.

You can read the full letter HERE.

If you lead or represent an LGBTQ+ community group or organisation, or simply want to add your support, and you’d like to sign it, get in touch at hey@proudlysaid.co.uk with your name, organisation, and role as you’d like them to appear.

OMG closes on Saturday. The conversation about what comes next starts now.

We recently heard the news that OMG Liverpool is closing its doors for the final time, as of Saturday 6th June, and it’s tempting to view it in isolation, just one venue, just one closure. But it isn’t isolated, and that’s what makes it so difficult to sit with.

OMG experimented over its eight years in the city, tried different things, different formats, different identities within the few venues the parent company owns. Dorothy’s Show Bar, Dorothy’s Diner. For whatever reason, those iterations didn’t quite land, and ultimately the venue is closing. You can acknowledge that honestly without it diminishing the loss, because the loss is real.

When you take stock of what we’d genuinely class as queer venues in Liverpool right now, the list is short. Lisbon, Masquerade, Superstar Boudoir, and upstairs at the Poste House. Heaven operates as an after-hours venue. The Haus of Fun complex caters largely for hen parties, and look, in this economy, you do what you have to do. And GBar, once a cornerstone of the scene, feels like a venue that has quietly drifted from the community it was built for.

That’s it. That’s the scene.

And here’s what makes that so stark. According to the 2021 UK Census, 123,367 people across the Liverpool City Region described their sexual orientation as gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, queer, or other, a figure equivalent to the entire GLB population of San Francisco, one of the most recognisable LGBTQ+ cities on the planet. And yet our welcoming spaces are dwindling.

So what’s driving this? There are two conversations happening at once, and both are worth having.

The first is the broader reality of running a bar or club right now. The hospitality sector recorded two venue closures per day during the first nine months of 2025, driven by rising business rates, National Insurance contributions, energy bills that remain significantly higher than pre-crisis levels, and a cost-of-living squeeze that has made people more cautious about how and where they spend. These pressures don’t discriminate, and queer venues are often smaller, more independent, and without the financial cushion of a larger operator behind them, which makes them even more exposed.

The second conversation is harder, and more specific to us as a community. Are we actually giving new venues a chance? There’s something to be said for the fact that many of us are creatures of habit, and new spaces can open, struggle to build a loyal crowd quickly enough, and close before they’ve had the opportunity to become what they might have been. That’s definitely not an accusation of any sort, it is, however, a pattern worth reflecting on, and both things can be true at once.

What concerns me most is what this means for Liverpool’s so-called Pride Quarter. The rainbow adorned street signs are still there, but the spaces they were meant to represent are thinning out, with gentrification creeping in and bringing with it certain types of venues that don’t have our community’s safety or welcome at the centre of their offer. The physical geography of queerness in this city is shrinking, even as our population remains enormous.

And the ripple effects matter. Liverpool attracts a significant student population, and a meaningful proportion of those students are LGBTQ+. Will the absence of a genuine, thriving queer scene factor into where young queer people choose to study? Will we see fewer spaces for emerging drag performers and queer artists to develop their craft, with more people chasing the same shrinking number of residencies? These aren’t hypothetical questions, they’re the logical end point of the trajectory we’re on.

The honest answer to what we do about it is that there isn’t an easy one. Queer venues need to be queer owned, run by people who genuinely understand the community’s needs, its concerns, its safety. But the capital required to open and sustain a venue like that is significant, and very few queer individuals or organisations are in a position to take that on, particularly in this climate.

OMG Liverpool closing is not just a venue shutting its doors. It’s another light going out, and right now, we can’t afford to keep losing lights.

There’s a particular kind of stress that comes with being self-employed… It’s not that dramatic, movie version of stress that you see, you know, the kind with a ticking clock and a boardroom showdown – it’s quieter, and a little harder to put a name or label on.
It’s the background hum of knowing that if things go wrong, there’s no one else to pick up the pieces and keep things moving.

Right now, things have gone wrong. Not catastrophically in any single way, but in that typical frustrating manner where it feels like everything is messing up all at once.

My MacBook has been sitting in the Apple Store for over a week with a keyboard fault, which means no video work, no proper workflow, just alternating between my iPad and iPhone and a whole lot of improvising to do simple clerical tasks to keep me ticking over.

My car is in the body shop for a few days.

I’ve spent the last week and a half being ill.

And underneath all of it, the delightfully quieter stress of self-employment, wondering whether the effort you’re trying to put into your work is being matched on the other side.

There’s an unspoken pressure when you’re self-employed to always be grateful, always be available, always be the one chasing. And sometimes you are, and that’s just the harsh reality of building something… But it doesn’t mean it isn’t exhausting.

Managing without the right tools, whether that’s your laptop, your car, your health, or just the energy that comes from feeling like your work is valued, is something nobody really prepares you for. Sure, you adapt, because you have to. You find workarounds, you lower your expectations of yourself in the short term, you try to protect the things that matter most. But adaptation has a cost, and that cost is usually invisible to everyone except you.

I don’t have a neat conclusion to this one, as I’m still in the middle of it.

I know the MacBook will come back, the car will be ready and I’ll feel better. But the broader questions about sustainability, about making sure the relationships and projects that fill your working life are genuinely reciprocal… it’s those things that don’t resolve as easily.

Sometimes the most honest thing you can say is: this is hard right now…

And that’s where I am.