[category]
[title]
As Lewis G Burton, founder of Inferno and London Trans+ Pride, told us, “religious people have churches, queer people have clubs”.
These spaces are an intrinsic part of the queer experience, an infrastructure holding a community.
Today, that infrastructure - which survived, amongst so many other threats: criminalisation, Section 28, and the AIDS crisis - is under serious pressure.
The gap between what this community deserves and what it currently receives from government, from funders, and from the wider hospitality industry is stark - and potentially dangerous.
Queer nightlife in the UK is at an existential crossroads, and we’re seeing sparks of what might come next.
Alongside the closures, the costs, and the bureaucratic indifference, we’re witnessing the opening of new venues, and a rise in small, agile nights which tap back into the squat culture of previous decades. A new generation of queer promoters is building community with ingenuity and next to no institutional support.
METHODOLOGY
The quantitative findings in this report are drawn from an online survey of 147 respondents, recruited from the combined audiences of Time Out and Gay Times in January-February 2026.
We also conducted a number of in-depth qualitative interviews with leading figures from the UK’s queer nightlife scene - bringing our quantitative data to life with expert insights from across the scene.
Our cohort of venue founders, promoters, performers, and community organisers, have a collective experience spanning five decades - to provide a deep, informed picture of where the scene’s currently at, and what’s coming next. We spoke to:
Matthew Jacobs Morgan (Coven)
Matthew Jacobs Morgan is the founder of COVEN, a multi-disciplinary artist and cultural producer working across nightlife, performance, film and music. Through COVEN, he has built an artist-led creative ecosystem where emerging culture can experiment, gather and be seen.
Founded in summer 2025, COVEN became the only Black-owned queer bar/club in the UK, quickly establishing itself as a defining platform for boundary-pushing DJs, musicians and performers. In its first year, the venue hosted hundreds of artists including King Princess, Princess Julia, BUMPAH London and Felt Sound System, alongside collaborations with A24 and Feeld.
COVEN’s club nights and live music events regularly sell out, welcoming thousands of guests and generating strong bar revenue while maintaining a high level of cultural credibility and production quality. The platform now reaches over 450,000 people monthly online and remains committed to championing bold, genre-defying work - particularly from queer and marginalised artists shaping the future of culture.
Lewis G Burton (INFERNO, Trans+ Pride)
Lewis G. Burton is a London-based artist, DJ and cultural producer with over 15 years of experience in the city’s nightlife and creative scenes. They are the founder of INFERNO, a long-running queer party and cultural platform known for its focus on community, performance and radical self-expression.
Alongside their work with INFERNO, Lewis is a founding member of London Trans+ Pride, helping to grow it into the largest trans pride in the world. Their practice sits at the intersection of nightlife, art and activism, using spaces of gathering as sites for connection, resistance and cultural production.
Danielle St James (Not a Phase)
Danielle St James is a prominent figure within the LGBTQ+ community in the UK. Danielle founded Not A Phase, a charity that supports trans adults through community-focused projects, campaigns, and corporate consultancy. After Danielle discovered that there weren’t any UK charities focused solely on supporting trans and gender-diverse adults, Not A Phase was born in 2020. Now an award-winning national organisation, the charity aims to give the trans and gender nonconforming community space to thrive, while working with organisations on D&I strategies to promote positive change.
Jack Scollard & Jordan Hearns (SMUT Press)
Jack Scollard and Jordan Hearns are practising artists based in east London. SMUT Press is a shared collective project from them founded in 2022. Emerging from collaborative work across audio/visual, installation, and publishing, the project supports and commissions queer artists to produce printed matter. The project has since expanded to include quarterly events that connect communities across nightlife and artistic production.
John Sizzle (The Glory, The Divine)
John Sizzle is Co-Owner and Managing Director of The Divine along with partners Jonny Woo and Colin Rothbart. London born with a history of drag performance going back 25 years, John has been an East London fixture, creating parties and performance with Jonny Woo throughout that time.
The Divine is a multi-use space and their second project after the success of The Glory which ran for 10 years in Haggerston. Both venues have an 'open door policy' for queer performers and artists to put together their own shows, whether that be theatre, comedy, spoken word, live music or dance. Offering a free of charge space for them to develop their art, explore queer identity and creating and celebrating the queer arts.
Camille Jetzer & James Nasmyth (The Roses of Elagabalus)
Roses of Elagabalus is a Dalston-based cocktail bar and restaurant designed to house queer performance within an intimate setting. The no-phones policy is a deliberate invitation to disconnect from the digital and reinvest in the physical: the art, the atmosphere, and each other.
Inspired by the spirit of venues like the Cave of the Golden Calf, its founders spent a decade scouting establishments from across the globe to inform the birth of Roses. This meticulous attention to detail extends from the curation of the space to the precision of the cocktail menu.
Their commitment to community runs deep, with the upcoming launch of Roses Radio positioned as their next phase of championing queer voices - with a focus on emerging artists.
THE BIG NUMBERS:
74% regularly attend LGBTQIA+ nightlife events (at least monthly)
77% agree the number of queer nightlife spaces in their area has decreased
82% feel their sense of community has been damaged by venue closures
1 in 2 feel gentrification has negatively impacted the queer nightlife scene
Just 7% feel well represented by the queer spaces on offer in their area
6 in 10 don’t feel there is sufficient government support for queer nightlife
This report is structured around three key questions the data and interviews kept returning to: what we’ve lost, who is keeping the scene alive, and where we go from here.
SECTION 1: WHAT WE’VE LOST
The unavoidable truth at the heart of this research is that the UK has lost queer nightlife venues.
- 77% of respondents felt the number of queer spaces in their area has decreased in the last few years.
- 82% say these closures have directly impacted their sense of community.
- Only 7% feel well represented by what remains.
Every eviction notice, every last order, and every boarded-up window speaks to the untimely dispersal of a vital community space.
Our experts on closed venues:
Dani St James arrived in London from Cardiff in the early 2000s. Back then, Soho was still in its heyday, with bars propping up every street and clubs open until 4am. Queer nightlife was part of the furniture of central London. She discovered Area in the railway arches by Vauxhall station - and started forming the network of friends she still turns to today. The venues haven’t been so lucky, though: “Every club that was a haunt of mine back then is now closed down” - unless you can afford a table at the Box.
John Sizzle’s been going out in London since the late 1980s - starting out in backstreet queer spaces found by word of mouth. He’s witnessed, first hand, the boom years of the 90s, contraction of the 00s, and the ebbs and flows of the last decade and a bit. When asked about his favourite queer venue which had closed its doors, there could only be one answer: his era-defining venue, The Glory: “The ceiling was falling in, it was all prosecco fountains and sweat [...] everything was better and cheaper. Choices are limited now”
This sums up the volte-face from abundance to scarcity. Look around London today and you’ll be hard-pressed to find the sprawling, thriving gay Soho of the early 2000s Dani describes. Closures like GAY in October 2025 exacerbate the sense that areas are being stripped of their identity and history, as Jeremy Joseph points out. This compression, this limitation, is the lived experience behind the numbers.
No borough is safe from the developer’s chequebook and it shows:
“The Yard in Hackney Wick was so important - now it’s blocks of luxury flats everywhere, and Queen’s Yard is under threat.” Lewis G Burton succinctly sums up how all too many vital, iconic queer nightlife spaces have been levelled or converted.
The factors driving venue closure are structural and compounding.
In other words, they’re inextricably baked into the experience of owning / running a dedicated venue, and their impact deepens as venues across the UK face the same pressures - pushing everyone, but particularly more marginalised groups, off the map.
Dani St James tells it to us straight: ‘You’re constantly being pushed somewhere else’
Rising running costs (including everything from recent national insurance hikes to rent and licensing fees) come in as the main offender here, with 80% of our community agreeing they contribute to venue closure.
This strain on venues keeping the lights on is unfortunately something that’ll chime with hospitality businesses up and down the country. "It's not just a queer thing - but queers feel it more" (Matthew James Morgan) and also “There’s no support from anywhere in hospitality across the board - but queers feel it more because we’re a niche market” (John Sizzle)
Following this is a lack of government funding at 64%; there’s a sense across our research panel that queer nightlife isn’t taken seriously as the cultural export it is - and resulting frustration that there’s so little protection from the government for it as an integral part of queer culture.
Our panel agrees that more funding for queer nightlife is the #1 most effective way to preserve communities, collectives, and venues.
There’s an urgency to this: unprompted and independently, over half of our interview participants told us that queer nightlife saved their lives.
- “These spaces are more important than ever. They’re not a luxury” (Lewis G Burton)
- “I only worked out who I was by sneaking into gay clubs as a teenager [...] queer hospitality has always offered trans people the chance to connect with one another.” (Dani St James).
For trans+ people in particular, these spaces are a lifeline - where identity is encountered and community built. It’s not an overstatement to say that lives depend on their protection and survival.
2: WHO’S IN THE ROOM
Crucially, though, and even in the light of a cost of living crisis, these closures aren’t at all due to people no longer showing up at venues.
The LGBTQIA+ community shows up for each other, consistently and en masse. Nearly ¾ of our participants told us they attend queer events or spaces at least monthly - which doesn’t speak to a passive audience in decline, nor a dwindling demand for queer nightlife.
Instead, our research discovered a community that’s completely dedicated to being in the room with each other, and champions other queer voices and organisers:
- 99% say a predominantly LGBTQIA+ crowd is important when they’re choosing an event
- 83% prioritise events with queer organisers and promoters
However:
- Only 30% say it matters that the venue is a formally dedicated LGBTQIA+ space
- Venue proximity matters to just 10% - the community are prepared to travel for the right space, music, and crowd
What makes a space queer is who is running it and who is in it. Preserving promoters, organisers, and communities, and the people in the room matters just as much as preserving bricks and mortar venues.
Community-building and looking after one another are absolutely at the heart of this. There are three ways that’s showing up across queer venues:
- Familiarity
- Infrastructure
- Intimacy
But how does this look in practice?
For Matthew Jacobs Morgan, founder of Coven, creating a space with familiarity at its heart was key - he wanted people to “recognise each other when they come in”. This chimes with John Sizzle’s policy at the Glory: the same security staff every week, managers that were accessible, and a crowd of regulars.
This principle of creating a “mini-utopia” also has a lot to do with infrastructure.
79% of respondents rated safer space policies as important when choosing an event - these frameworks, now increasingly common across mainstream nightlife, were first developed in queer spaces, by queer promoters.
INFERNO, run by Lewis G Burton since its inception, has had an in-house welfare team from the start - trained to handle harassment, discrimination, and the particular pressures facing younger and newly out members.
At Dalston’s incredibly chic Roses of Elagabalus, the no-photos policy was a non-negotiable way of fostering intimacy from the start. “Taking away the anxieties which distract makes this a private space where you can be with whoever you like” (James Nasmyth and Camille Jetzer). This safety is privacy, the freedom to be present in the moment. Intimacy is at the heart of the elevated philosophy behind The Roses: “The messaging around queerness should also feel luxurious - allowing you to step into somewhere you feel looked after”. (Jetzer)
Representation
Especially in the light of a declining number of nightlife spaces, it’s telling that just 7% of respondents feel very well represented by those currently on offer.
Across the interviews, the representation gaps in venues and promotion are clear: working-class people, trans people, people of colour, and those outside major cities like London. Venues have different ways of trying to combat this:
- INFERNO champions trans, female identifying, and non-white DJs in their programming.
- The Roses run residencies - pairing established names with emerging artists - giving performers time to develop their sound within the space
- To SAOIRSE’s Body Movements festival, championing young queer talent is a no-compromise concept behind the business - enabled by initiatives like the emerging artists scheme.
- La Camionera varies their programming to meet different strands of the community with consideration - with a typical week playing host to slightly more relaxed, older-skewing coffee catchups and younger, slightly rowdier singles nights alike - ensuring everyone can feel welcome and comfortable.
Our experts agreed that removing these gaps is of paramount importance. Ensuring representation is crucial to the scene’s survival, as Michelle Manetti notes that “FLINTA* folx are so much better at supporting spaces and parties within their community, and show up for each other. When something [specifically catering to the community] opens, people really get behind it - so they have a greater chance of success.”
This is how we create a queer nightlife scene that’s truly intersectional, giving people across the community spaces where they feel seen and protected.
3: WHERE WE’RE GOING
What we’re witnessing now - as a direct response to the increased pressures on bricks-and-mortar venues across the UK, and a community prepared to rip up the rule book in order to ensure representation - is the re-establishment of queer nightlife on the fringes, and a return to (or rather, reinvention of) squat culture.
Mainstream visibility isn’t a priority for 73% of our respondents; the community isn’t asking to be absorbed into the mainstream, but to be given the resources and spaces to exist on its own terms.
Jack Scollard and Jordan Hearns of SMUT Press reckon that impermanence is key: “The best clubs exist in flux, in the gaps”. But, they recognise what this agility costs - from a Berlin canal party knocked down for a motorway expansion to Dublin’s Jigsaw, which was scattered in the pandemic.
From the opposite direction, John Sizzle agrees that this more agile approach “is the future. Light on their feet, not dealing with the same problems. Things don’t have to be solid”.
This impermanence demands self-sufficiency and agility. The grassroots model is reframed as a distinct event format & way for the community to show up, rather than a consolation prize for wanting a bricks and mortar space.
Matthew Jacobs Morgan’s Coven is living this - built on a community who recognise each other at the front door. This intimacy is a choice, and chimes with other community-focused nights popping up right now; nights like Club Are, Aura, Wormhole, Playbody, Spit at Dalston Superstore operate on the same principle, and with the same agility and low capacity.
As Scollard, whose SMUT Press nights stick to 400 guests or fewer, points out, “keeping it small suggests they’re in it for the right reasons” - seeing queer nightlife not as an industry, but as a community which happens to be extraordinary at throwing parties.
Michelle Manetti is behind this shift into the grassroots: “It's now more than ever that we need to throw our support at the smaller, DIY, home-grown spaces and communities to protect them at all costs.”
Smaller, more agile nights and festivals are kitted out to survive in flux and uncertainty.
51% of our survey participants reckon that community-led models are the way forward for queer nightlife. There’s a confidence that the queer community, which has always built in the gaps with tenacity, is doing so again now.
LGBTQIA+ nightlife is still alive and kicking, and it’s building in the gaps. In warehouse spaces, rooms above bars, railway arches, old fabric shops - anywhere that’s not been noticed by developers yet.
What’s needed now, though, is not more resilience from the people who have sustained it.
It’s for the structures which surround the scene to finally show up.
“Dance is an act of resistance - there are so many occasions in history where dance and music have been used as a means of survival.
Queer people have the right to be here, and to exist, and to dance. It’s about us figuring out a way, by hook or by crook” - Matthew Jacobs Morgan, Coven.
Queer nightlife in 2026: IN SUMMARY
A Critical Loss of Physical Infrastructure The landscape of queer nightlife is shrinking rapidly. 3/4's of respondents report a visible decline in local queer spaces, with urban re-generation cited as a key driver. Iconic and vital venues are being replaced by developments that fail to serve their cultural heritage.
The Representation Crisis Quantity isn’t the only issue, quality and inclusivity are crucial too. Only 7% of the community feel well-represented by the venues that remain, suggesting that as our available spaces dwindle, the diversity of programming and safety for focussed community groups is being disproportionately erased.
The Power of Community Over Convenience Despite the decline, the desire for connection is unwavering. 90% of respondents are willing to travel specifically for the right combination of music, crowd, and safety. This pull factor proves that queer nightlife is not a casual convenience but a vital destination-based necessity for social survival.
Autonomy Over Assimilation The community is not looking for mainstream acceptance; they are looking for sovereignty. 73% of respondents expressed their content with 'off the beaten track' venues, preferring independent, grassroots spaces over being absorbed into generic mainstream nightlife, but with the resources to exist on their own terms.
The Funding Mandate Investment is the #1 priority. Our panel identified direct funding for queer collectives and venues as the single most effective tool for preservation. To save these spaces, more robust financial support is vital to allow communities to maintain their identity while securing their physical future.
Thank you for reading.
Full report available for free at https://forms.timeout.com/the-right-to-dance
Credits
Words by Rosa Boîtel-Gill (Creative Strategist)
Anna Norfolk (Insights and Trade Marketing Director, Time Out)
Chyna Sudbury (Designer, Gay Times)
Jordan Robledo (Culture Writer, Gay Times)
Robson Carter-Browne (Partnerships Manager, Time Out)
Solomon Thomson (Managing Director, Gay Times)
Get in touch via: