My own private London A gay life in the first year of It’s a Sin (Part two of six: The Semi-gay Pub)

Robin Rowland
10 min readMay 13, 2021

(Contains spoilers and may trigger some AIDS survivor readers. Names in quotation marks are pseudonyms. Many of the names from the 80s aren’t mentioned because I don’t remember. Other names are real, taken from my occasional diary or letters I wrote)

Serving sandwiches when I was a barman in the “semi-gay pub”

After I arrived in London, it took me about a week to get the paperwork sorted out so as a dual citizen so I could actually have no legal problems finding work. I started going to the Job Centre on Kensington High Street, searching the job boards and talking to the job counsellor.

One day the job counsellor left his office, looked at the crowd of about fifteen or so people in the waiting area. He pointed to me and two other guys and called us over to the counter. “Do you want a day’s work for cash?” he asked. We all said yes. “The baby shop across the street has just had all its Christmas goods delivered and they want three ‘good looking young men’ to unload.” Off we went across the street. Given that it was on Kensington High Street, it was an upper crust expensive store. I guess they didn’t want their customers watching as just anyone did the unloading. That was my first job in London.

A couple of days later, the counsellor told me about a job as a barman at a local pub, short…

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Robin Rowland

Independent visual journalist in Kitimat, BC, Canada. Author of five books, more at robinrowland.com