And everybody would just be there”Īlthough both were clear in emphasising that it wasn’t all a bed of roses, I wanted to know what they made of the idea of two girls sharing a secret kiss upstairs at a house party like in Lovers Rock. “You’d have a gay following and a straight following. We spoke about what it meant to spend those nights with friends, strangers and community. I spoke to DJ and sound artist Ain Bailey and poet Dorothea Smartt about their experiences of Black queer nightlife in the 80s and 90s.
These girls’ very brief appearance in the film begs the question: where would you go and see many pairs of women like this one? They were a space for the communal enjoyment of sweet, slow Lovers Rock music, home-cooked food, and company away from racist nightlife around the city. The context, or lack thereof, was curious: did they know each other? Will this happen again for them? It half doesn’t matter, because that is what parties are about: there isn’t a backstory behind every kiss shared at parties in real life, so there shouldn’t be one just because it’s two Black women.īlues parties, such as the night shown in Lovers Rock, took place in Black people’s homes from the 1970s. For many of us, what stood out in Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock – in addition to the amount of times ‘Silly Games’ was sung – was that snippet of a scene in which two girls share a kiss in an upstairs bedroom.
