Austerity cuts in the UK are affecting the LGBT community adversely, especially amongst its younger population in a capital as expensive as London. An exhibition by highly talented graphic design artist, and this week’s cover photographer, Francisco Gomez de Villaboa is seeking to illustrate this issue through the power of arresting image, startling symbolism and using faces from across Europe living in the gay East End. QX decided to find out more…
By Patrick Cash (Twitter.com/@paddycash)
Francisco Gomez de Villaboa, who shot the QX cover image this week for ‘Dish’, is a politically motivated artist. Speaking of his current ‘X-Press Yourself’ exhibition at the White Rabbit gallery, he says: “Many countries in Europe are suffering from a protracted economic recession and this exhibition aims to create solidarity across the LGBTQ communities in these recession hit states. The aim is to awaken an awareness of the situation across our continent and bring about the possibilities to change it, whilst simultaneously showing people filled with energy, reflecting their personal concepts as they contribute to and enjoy this country’s rich and multicultural environment.”
These people filled with energy are faces that may be familiar to the creative East End gay scene. Claudia Torres, the transsexual barmaid from The Joiner’s Arms, holds a tri-coloured flag and looks to the smoke-covered sky in an ingeniously interpretative recreation of Eugene Delacroix’s painting ‘Liberty leading the people’.
Hair stylist Declan Sheils is a burning Buddha in an image inspired by WB Yeats’ poem ‘No second Troy’; film designer Oliver Garcia is Philip II of Spain with a hand full of colourful blood (representing the poor support of Spanish art by the governments); in ‘Golden Damn’, artist Emmanouil Balomenos is struck down by a helmeted gladiator in front of the Parthenon’s ruin, depicting ‘the damnation that citizens have to suffer every time a government changes drastically’.
Evidently this exhibition speaks volumes for our belonging to the continent of Europe and the particular beauty of free, open migration across EU borders. All of these talented and energetically interesting people – whether Spanish (as Villaboa is himself), Irish, Greek, Cypriot or whichever nationality – have been drawn to London as a still-standing beacon of artistic creativity, education and hope, in a continent ravaged by economic recession. Yet, there are threats to London’s laudable status as such, coming from its own current UK Coalition government.
The austerity measures, which have been increased with the most recent budget, target the poor and vulnerable – the young and elderly – hardest, whilst the richest go on getting richer. We then have Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, writing an opinion piece entitled ‘We should be humbly thanking the super rich, not bashing them’ whilst many comment, like senior Observer economics writer William Keegan, that the Conservative chancellor George Osborne is implementing austerity cuts not so much to reduce the deficit, as to effect further tax cuts for the wealthy. A policy that could actually be holding back economic recovery.
How does this affect, then, the LGBT community in Britain and London? Trade union Unison have recently commissioned a NatCen Social Research report named ‘Implications of austerity for LGBT people and services’. It outlines that, although the extent to which these implications were experienced varied among participants, there were four main effects of austerity on LGBT people detected at a personal level. These were: greater financial hardship from redundancies, real term pay cuts and changes to benefit rules; problems finding accommodation where they could feel safe and that was LGBT-friendly; a reduction in sexual health and mental health services that addressed specific LGBT needs (which was reported on by QX last year); and greater feelings of marginalisation and invisibility as specialist LGBT services and support disappeared.
It is this last sentiment that activists Peter Purton, Disability and LGBT Rights officer for the Trade Union Centre (TUC), and Anton Johnson of the South Eastern Region TUC (SERTUC) LGBT network, are worried most about. Purton says: “There has been significant impact on services used by particular sections of our communities, both in the public sector (as a result of massive and continuing reductions in funding) and in the voluntary sector (as a result of losing grants)”. He outlines these services as youth support, hate crime (homophobic hate crime is second most numerous after race hate, but specialist support has been slashed), housing, mental health, NHS and domestic abuse.
“Let’s keep London as a bastion of light for others”
Hence, part of the very reason for the ‘X-Press Yourself’ exhibition, described both in the simplicity of its title as well as in the startling power of its aesthetics: express yourself, do not hide away and do not let yourself be hidden away.
In one of the most memorable images ‘The Illusionist’, Cypriot design artist Hermes Pittakos poses levitating off the ground staring through blindfolded eyes at his shimmering, exotically plumed rainbow coloured arm. Rich with metaphor, Villaboa explains his thinking: “‘Normality’ is an illusion. What is normal for me is alien to those who consider themselves ‘normal’. The constraint of self-expression in modern society through symbolism is the over arching theme behind my portrait”.
This constraint of self-expression is as applicable to communities as it is to individuals. Our annual gay Prides are feasts of vibrant, carnivalesque visibility, full of colour, which demand to be seen; perhaps as a reaction to a history of enforced invisibility. It doesn’t seem likely that we’ll head back to that point in our society, but as we speak LGBT citizens in Russia are forced into silence, and as transsexual Tessa Haulke, who we interviewed last week, warns: “As austerity tightens the belts, history has shown us people are less likely to be convivial toward each other and if you add in the possibility of allowing a politician to sow division by exploiting difference and pandering to ignorance, then there is the very real possibility of very bad things happening to trans people and to LGB people, too.” There were reports last year, re-emerging this week, of ‘camps’ in austerity-torn Greece for immigrants, HIV-positive and transgendered people.
Let’s keep London as a bastion of light for others, let’s be proud that we are a mecca for those hardest hit in Europe and let’s keep our creativity alive. Oppose invisibility, oppose the cuts.
• To read Unite officer David Sharkey’s analysis of LGBT austerity cuts, visit: qxmagazine.kinsta.cloud/blog-event/austerity-for-lgbtq-communities/
• The ‘X-Press Yourself’ exhibition is currently displaying at The White Rabbit (125 Stoke Newington Church Street, N16 0UH).
