Mancunian Pride : The city, lesbian and gay culture, and local music-making practices

Miyake, Esperanza; Scott, Derek B. and Cowgill, Rachel, eds. (2019) Mancunian Pride : The city, lesbian and gay culture, and local music-making practices. In: Music and the Idea of the North. Routledge. ISBN 1409422917 (In Press)

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Abstract

It was back in 2003 that I first began to investigate the relationship between music and sexuality. At the time I was living in Manchester, the ideal geographical nexus to explore such an intersection – both a ‘musical city’ of the North (rivalling other cities like Liverpool and its ‘Merseybeat’) and the ‘Queer Capital of the North’. More than a decade later, having left Manchester only to come back again, I find myself revisiting some of my old ethnographic haunts. Much has changed across the board since then. Music has migrated mostly into the Cloud, with digital platforms and technologies changing the ways we produce and consume (not to mention prosume) music both individually and together. The socio-cultural, legal, civil, and political landscape for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) community in the UK has changed significantly, too, with the establishment of a new offence of ‘incitement to homophobic hatred’ in the UK (2010), the passing of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act in England and Wales (2013), the election of a number of openly gay politicians throughout the UK, and even the appearance of Prince William on the front of gay magazine, Attitude (July 2016). Manchester itself has been part of a major project involving the decentralisation and regionalisation of power through the efforts of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), leading to the 2014 Devolution Agreement. More recently these social changes have become embroiled within even broader national transformations relating to citizenship and civil rights through ongoing political processes like Brexit

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