Introduction Rowena describedliving in Manchester as a studentin the late 1990s and goingout clubbing to the gay village before it had become a destination for straightpeople as well. Though she was on the receiving end of homophobic abuse on thestreets, she loved living in Manchester at a time when it was emerging asBritain''s cutting-edge queer capital, with Brighton down south enduringas the more familiarseaside ''gay Mecca''.1 Rowena''s straightstudent friends thought her social life was ''so much morecool than anything they did''. ''They knew that'', she said, ''because all theirnightclubs were rubbish.'' On one weekend in1998 Rowena moved from the bars to the clubs and ended up at Manto on CanalStreet to chill out as the next day dawned. The area was still edgy, not leastbecause rival drug gangs were operating in the clubs and through some of the bouncers. Suddenly, as she and herfriends chatted, ''some guys with machine guns turned up'' and shot out the wholeplate glass front of the bar: We had to hide under the tables. And nobody was injured,amazingly.

But the police, who were there withinminutes because you could hear the sirens,circled the outer premisesof the gay village until these guys had gone. And they wouldn''tcome in. They didn''t want to endanger themselves and they were probably paidoff by the drug people,I don''t know. But they certainly didn''t care about protect-ing the lives of gay people.2 Rowena''s story givesan intense flavour of the pleasures and dangers of Manchester''s queer bar and club life in the 1990s. Behind her testimony are intertwined local contextswhich make the experience particular to this post-industrial city. These contextsinclude the much-touted Mancunian ''give-it-a-go'' spirit and council support for lesbian and gay rights which, togetherwith the newly vacant warehouses, allowed for the development of the village in the first place. Another thread is the heightened suspicionof the police here - the legacy of an especially repressive regime from the 1960s throughto the 1990s.

Queer beyond London hinges on local dynamics like these as it traces and com- pares the queer dimensions of Manchester and three otherEnglish cities: Brighton, Leeds and Plymouth. It shows how the local economy,population, city government and local historyand culture shaped experiences of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) identityand community in theseplaces. It showstoo how people''sgender, the moneythey had, their class, ethnicity, age andeducation, and much more besides, affected how they engaged with the queerfabric of their particular city. The book demonstrates, unsurprisingly, thatLGBTQ lives have been lived fully and in diverse ways ''beyond London'', the city that has tended to be at the centre ofexplorations of the country''s queer past and present.3 Unfolding the queer historiesof other English cities showsus that London was not necessarily hugely significant to LGBTQ people livingelsewhere. Of course, events in the capital - and not least in parliament - had a regional impact.But that impact was felt differ-ently in different places depending on local circumstances and dynamics. Thepartial decriminalization of male homosexuality in 1967 is regularly taken as a key turning point, for example, and insome ways rightly so.

But to many in naval Plymouth the change in the law feltlike an irrelevance given that male and femalehomosexuality were forbidden in the armed forces until 2000. A cul- ture and habitof discretion remaineddeeply embedded therewell into the newcentury, directing but certainly not closing down queer possibilities in this city. That measure in 2000, meanwhile, hadmuch more impact in Plymouth than inBrighton, Leeds and Manchester where other local events shaped LGBTQ lives more immediately and dramatically than those hittingnational headlines. In Brighton,the foundation of the University of Sussex in 1961 broughtin many more students who changed the tenor of queer life in thisseaside town. In Leeds, the years 1975-1981 were traumatically markedby the serial murders byPeter Sutcliffe, fuelling deeply felt anger at misogyny and violence againstwomen, and contributing to the radical lesbianfeminist politics in the city. The active support for gays andlesbians by Manchester City Council (MCC) from 1984 and a horrific homophobicmurder in Plymouth in 1995 shifted the relationships between LGBTQ communities and the authorities in those places. Thatlocal events and contexts like these would matter to LGBTQ people in different citiesis probably self-evident, so why did it strikeus as the idea for a book? Over the last decadeespecially, our work has drawn us into a com- munity of independent anduniversity-based queer historians and to a range of LGBTQ projects whichexpanded our awareness of the breadth and depth of regional and local queer history. These projects, plus associated websites, pod- casts, screenings, artinstallations and walking tours, have proliferated in Britain in the 2000s, oftenshowcased as part of LGBT+History Month each February(since 2005) or in the rich programming of LGBTQ community history con-ferences nationally and internationally.

4 We became fascinated by what such projects revealedindividually but also in conjunction with one another,and by how they might tug atmore London-centric queer histories. It is probably no coincidence that we decidedto work togetheron these ideas while we were both outside the capital, Alison in Leedsand Matt in Brighton, where fellow queer historian and project team member Justin Bengry was also living.In these cities weencountered distinct queerhistories which exposedgaps in more establishedaccounts of the LGBTQ past.