Interesting snippet of British LGBTQI history relating to Motown

[psychedelic jacques]

Last night I watched a BBC documentary I recorded a couple of months back called Queerama. It was a sort of trawl through British LGBTQI history using lots of archive footage, movie clips etc.

One scene showed original 1960s [pre 1967 legalisation] footage of a group of men dancing in a club. The song they were dancing to [and it was clear that this was playing on the original videotape and not superimposed over it, due to the sound quality and, indeed, the synchronicity of their dancing] was clearly motown; an instantly recognisable melody, but it nevertheless took me a good 30 seconds or so to place it as it wasn't anything obvious. When I got it, I thought it was a very interesting choice: "There's No Love Left" by the Isleys.

Worth a watch [possibly still on iPlayer]

[theboyfromxtown]

What I have always found quite extraordinary is that when I met fellow Motown fans......and I am going back to the late 60's and early 70s when we were all teenagers.....the Motown fans that I met, we all seemed to be in sync with much more than just our mutual love of Motown. In those days, we weren't "out and about" because if truth be known, many of us were still too young to even want to know whether we preferred Arthur or Martha. But as it turns out, slowly but surely, all of us ended up playing in the same playground. And what is so very gratifying is that some 40 or even 50 years later I am still on good terms with those same people.