Letting Go

The trough must be the most communal form of urinal. The steam is thick with anticipation. Will I suffer the humiliation of pee shyness? Could I make a new friend? In The Bell 2002, a stainless-steel trough holds an assortment of urinal blocks, also known as urinal cakes, mints, cookies, and biscuits (or ‘pisscuits’). I can’t help but think of them as homosexual mnemonics, like Proust’s madeleine soaked not in lime-blossom tea but boozy urine.

From 1982 through 1995, The Bell on Pentonville Road in London’s Kings Cross, then an insalubrious liminal zone, catered to a clientele of queer women (‘Bell dykes’) and an increasing number of gay men (‘Bell boys’). Many were activists with flattop haircuts, uniformed in Doc Martens, Levi’s 501s, and badgeladen bombers. Others rocked more severe or foofy styles, inflected by punk and goth, signalling anger and mourning in response to social alienation. In a 1987 interview, then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher cast doubt on the very existence of society: ‘There is no such thing! There are individual men and women, and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people, and people look to themselves first.’

Under the long shadow of such individualist philosophy and amid rampant anti-gay hostility, the crowd at The Bell – including artists like Derek Jarman and Michael Clark – formed its own shifting, ephemeral society. Imperfect, sure: one former bartender recalled how the pool table had to be put away come evening to prevent rivals from weaponising the cues. But people also came together as allies; it was a hub for causes, including the Gay Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. Its regulars called it a refuge.

By the time Wolfgang Tillmans shot this image, the venue was operating under a new name with a different clientele. But the artist located a site of remembrance, at once filthy and gleaming: a portal to the past and the pub he once knew. The lowly urinal may be an unlikely object of reflection compared with, say, a disco ball or a backbar mirror. Urinals, though, are not only sites of erotic encounter or compare-and-despair neurosis, they also accommodate moments of quiet contemplation – a little relief from the chaos and drama of the night.

For me, the most significant nightspots have been the ones that enabled me to let go. We may arrive to individuate, yet – in the centre of the dancefloor or in the darkest corners, rubbing shoulders, crossing streams – we surrender to the sound and form an aggregate. Not a monolith, but some amorphous unit, if only for the duration of one song, one lyric. This is what’s lost when a space like The Bell comes to an end: a place in which to find other people and lose oneself.

^{The Bell was presented by Tate Patrons in 2007 and is included in the ongoing display Around the Fountain, Tate Modern.}

^{Jeremy Atherton Lin is an American writer based in St Leonards-on-Sea. His latest book, Deep House, is published by Allen Lane.}