Introduction: Queer Art in Britain since the 1980s

In 2017 a group of women referring to themselves as the “Rebel Dykes” launched a crowdfunding campaign to make a documentary about their history as “a bunch of kick ass post-punk women who lived the life in London in the 1980s”. These women “created their own world, made their own rules, and refused to be ignored”. Rather than let history “tidy them away”, they were taking matters into their own hands.1 What followed was a long and time-consuming process of assembling the resources necessary to become the authors of their own story. As part of their funding efforts, the Rebel Dykes held walking tours of Brixton, where many of them had lived. They hosted a night at the now defunct DIY Space for London that featured a cabaret performance by Frankie Sinatra (one of the Rebel Dykes), and a photo lecture by Jade Sweeting and Janina Sabaliauskaitė, younger artists whose work had been influenced by the photographs and material culture of lesbian life in the 1980s. Merchandise was made and rewards promised. When the documentary was released in 2021 it was as a direct result of this Herculean effort. Alongside still images and archival footage, the film is peppered with ephemera and charged by personal testimony. Where queer curation and scholarship often fixate on questions of scarcity—a perceived lack of archival materials—the Rebel Dykes project makes a different case. It illustrates the fact that, just as often, evidentiary material exists, having been preserved and cared for within community networks for years but that, to gain traction, it requires material resources and the mapping of a historical context.