A Missed Encounter: Stuart Hall and Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM)

Abstract

In 2014, the movie Pride written by Stephen Beresford and directed by Matthew Warchus brought to the attention of a national and international general public the story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), which had been largely forgotten within the London LGBTQ community itself. LGSM were a solidarity group active in the 1984-85 British miners’ strike. They formed in London a few months into the strike and forged a coalition with the miners based on material support, solidarity, and a shared will to resist the attacks launched by Thatcherism in the 1980s on organized labor as well as black, feminist, and gay and lesbian communities and movements. Pride was released only a few months after Stuart Hall’s passing in February 2014. Hall has been one of the key interpreters of the 1980s in Britain. His work at the time shed light on the conjunctural triangulation between the rise of Thatcherism, the crisis of the left, and the consolidation of ‘identity’ as a terrain of political struggle broken open by intersecting social movements such as feminism, black power, and lesbian and gay liberation. Despite the powerful resonances that exist between the story of LGSM and Hall’s thinking on the renewal of the left in the 1980s, Hall adopted a very skeptical position on the miners' strike and experience of feminist, black, and lesbian and gay support groups for the miners barely appeared in his analyses. In this article, I interrogate this missed encounter between Hall and LGSM.