Oxford Street 1981

This post is inspired by a post by Darp about Oxford St and it's losing it's "gayness". My thesis is of course, that Oxford St was never an exclusively gay location - in fact far from it - and as it got the gay mafia makeover in the mid to late 1980s, the seeds of its destruction were planted.

In early 1980s, when I was washed up on its bitumen shores, Oxford St was as much a punk, post-punk, goth, alt-rock hang out as a gay one. There was a restaurant/bar called French's with a downstairs venue where bands used to play. They used to have skinhead bands some nights - I remember having to endure walking past a footpath full of skins milling around outside. These weren't your PYL-type spotty teenagers but proper, nasty, kick-your-head-in thugs.

DCM was a gay bar called Patches, the Oxford and Albury where in full swing, there was a gay pub down in Flinders St, maybe called the Flinders Hotel. This pub was opposite the glorious Taxi club (still operating) where you could get chatted up by a Pacific Islander transvestite, and a place to head for a 4am drink after seeing bands at the Trade Union Club in Foveaux St Surry Hills, or getting kicked out of the Hopetoun Hotel, or the Paddington Green Hotel, when the band stopped at midnight.

There was also the Exchange hotel (a sort of gay-straight crossover bar full of androgenous pretty boys) but many of the other pubs were just simply pubs.

By the mid-80s things were getting more serious on the gay side of things with the gay mafia moving in on venues and tarting them up. We used to drink at the Beauchamp when it was a old-bloke bar. It didn't become a 'gay bar' until the 1990s, or the late 80s at the earliest. The Burdekin was also an old-blokes watering hole with a Friday night jazz band (average age: 60) until it got turned into a hetero yuppie pick up joint sometime in the 90s, as the gay scene faded from Oxford St and moved to Newtown.

So you know, things aren't fixed in stone at all. I remember in the mid 90s being screamed at by some young suburbanite dressed in the gay uniform, "Straights get off Oxford St". I gave him a gobful back for his lack of respect and told him to fuck off back to his a-historical suburb. Oxford Street was NEVER an exclusive gay thoroughfare.

Of course nowadays it's only a street I zip cross on my way to somewhere else more interesting. By the late 90s it was an awful trashy drunk da-boyz looking for pussy and a fight hangout - Kings Cross without the local flavour. I'll take the Cross proper.