The rave salvaging toilets for London’s queers

It’s a dark evening in early January. From my vantage point inside east London’s Dalston Superstore, I can see one of the very few people out on the streets battling the freezing wind. The city is a desolate, post-Christmas wasteland, covered with that grey sheen of the first few days of the year.

Above me, the iconic queer bar’s skylight opens up onto the inky black sky. There are a smattering of different groups and couples sharing conversation. Above their heads, a projection of gay porn, images from parties at Superstore and iconic queer faces incongruously play on loop, mismatching the subdued vibe. Even the vibrant paint on the venue’s frontage can’t keep January malaise completely out.

I sit staring out of the window, swirling the straw around my drink when I’m ripped from my thoughts by Lady Gaga (not the first time, to be fair). I look over to the DJ booth and see Ciara and Perrin turning up the volume of the music, before unfurling a length of homemade bunting made from scraps of fabric. They swiftly hang it across the breadth of the space, pulling tools and props from bags for life scattered around the floor.

A little later, I am standing in the corner of the toilets, holding the rope of another length of the bunting up against the wall as another member of the crew nails the other end to the opposing wall. Around me, the team sets up decks and speakers, blow up balloons, tape over lights, replace bulbs with disco lights and spray paint a flag with the words ‘Happy Endings’. The acerbic plastic of the spray lingers in our noses, as the normally unremarkable bathroom is transformed into a completely different world.

The toilet rave is perhaps one of the most instantly recognisable parts of a Happy Endings party. With the exception of a couple of years where Covid restrictions made it impossible, it has been a key feature of the collective’s events at the venue since the very beginning.

“We were always thinking of ways to make the best of the space we have,” Daniel, a member of the collective, says. “Initially we did live sets and had musician friends playing little solo shows in the toilet. It was working really well, but once we tried to have DJ in the toilet after a live gig, we knew that that was the way to go. It was just so wild, fun and intense, we absolutely loved it and turned it into a signature.”

When the party is in full flow, there is very little that can prepare you for it. The combined effect of pounding beats from the speaker wedged into a corner and a single, ominous red light glowing above an end cubicle, makes pushing the door open feel like stepping into a liminal space. People undulate in the centre of the room, constantly shifting and moving to the music, stepping around one another while people go in and out of the cubicles. Someone stands at the hand drier, which bellows hot air into the room as ravers throw it back under, among, or on top of whatever decorations the collective have draped over the space. Mirrors are replaced with foil, and the room somehow feels both claustrophobic and infinite at the same time.

I stand in the middle, among the bunting I had helped to hang a few hours earlier, dancing with the crowd. Through the flashes of fabric and light, I catch glimpses of the faces of my fellow party goers. Joy, ecstasy, pleasure appears around me in Zoetropic fashion. It strikes me how contradictory it feels to see and feel these things, in this space.

Toilets are an inherent part of queer history. Cottaging – the practice of cruising and hooking up with other men in a toilet – is named after a period of time in Victorian Britain where public lavatories looked like small cottages. Perhaps one of the most famous is a cottage in the middle of London’s Hampstead Heath, still in use as toilets today.

It’s a weight and context that’s not lost on Ciara. “Viewing public toilets through the lens of queer history is useful and immensely powerful,” they say. “Historically, bathrooms have operated as more than just toilets, but as sites for queer expression, connection and resistance. Particularly for gay men, there were places they could meet for sex – even at risk of criminalisation and violence. They were places to resist control over how their identities were being policed in wider society.”

Of course, as they so often are, those spaces became contested. Sites of conflict, oppression and trauma. When I studied law at A-level, we learnt about the case of DPP v Cheeseman. The defendant (Cheeseman) was a man cruising in a toilet in the ’80s. He exposed himself to another man after he believed he’d been given the look. To cut a long story short, the man was a cop and Cheeseman was banged up for indecent exposure (he eventually had his conviction quashed on appeal because of an overly expansive reading of the legislation used to convict him).

What struck me when I first read the case, was that police were going into these spaces specifically to catch gay men cruising. George Michael, famously, was arrested under similar circumstances. Jump forward to the present day and toilets continue to be fought-over.

“In the last decade or so, public bathrooms have become an arena for intense political debate, especially within the context of trans rights,” Ciara says. The argument of who gets to use which toilet has morphed into a wider symbol of the struggles over gender identity, expression and human rights. The debate is not about toilets, it’s about maintaining the binary – anything beyond this is viewed as a threat.”

Here in Britain, the subject of who uses what toilet has been a source of fierce dispute. Gender neutral bathrooms (i.e. spaces with private cubicles that can be used by anyone), have been cited by anti-trans activists as sites of risk for sexual violence against women and girls (though there is actually no real evidence to back this specific claim up). The previous Conservative government even laid out a piece of legislation that would “halt the march of gender neutral bathrooms in new non-domestic buildings” in the spring of last year. Meanwhile in the USA, anti-trans toilet laws have existed in places like South Carolina for over a decade. The inauguration of Donald Trump (and his signing of anti-trans executive orders on his first day), looks set to only expand this.

“Viewing our toilet party through this lens is powerful and humbling, and something we will take with us moving forward,” Ciara continues. “We are not just creating a different space to dance – we’re participating in a wider legacy of queer people carving out spaces where they can exist on their own terms, in defiance of a world that often seeks to eradicate us. Every space we transform and reclaim is an act of resistance and a statement about our right to live and love as we desire.”

This iteration of the event is Happy Endings’s ninth birthday. The corresponding theme – Cloud Nine – is not immediately obvious from the colourful bunting, but that doesn’t really matter. A few phallic shaped birthday balloons bob above the hand drier in the darkness of the toilet rave. Every time someone dries their hands, they’re sent flying out into the abyss, entangling themselves in the mass of dancers and toilet goers. ”It’s all quite abstract and conceptual,” Ciara jokes, as we run around the toilet sticking duct tape over spotlights.

“Back in the day we did a medieval theme, and Lasagne, who was our resident drag queen at the time, brought some hay bales from Wales and we sprinkled the hay on the floor. It was a mess to clean up, but looked fantastic.” Ciara tells me. “We also once did a festival theme, brought an actual tent with us and put it in the basement. We've done the Olympics, found a huge fishing net and a buoy and tied them to the roof of the toilet. We did ‘Moist Wormanly Needs’ – a play on Princess Julia’s iconic ’90s hit ‘Moist Womanly Needs’, and we had Princess Julia playing with Lily (Dorothy Perkins) and Emil (Jane Norman) gogo-ing on the bar dressed as giant worms. The list goes on. Our favourite theme more recently was ‘Haçiendings’ – a homage to the Haçienda. We were proud of coming up with that name. We got a load of caution tape and a huge acid smiley flag and tried to emulate the iconic ’90s club, booking our favourite northerners to play and dance on the bar.”

Each event comes with corresponding artwork. “The mastermind behind it for the past few years (as we have had a few artists bring our vision to life) has been Lucie Dupont,” Ciara says. So what makes these parties so special? What draws people back over and over again?

“There isn’t a specific genre that defines Happy Endings, which is evident in the resident DJs who play on rotation month to month, as well as the different guests we’ve had over the past nine years,” Beth, another member of the collective tells me. “Throughout the years, we’ve also had live electronic sets in the basement, bands performing, and once we had a TV set up on the bar showing queer short films, even porn. These multidisciplinary events are something we would love to bring back going forward in the new year so we can showcase and collaborate with artists from different mediums.”

Moving through the space the collective have created, you can’t help but notice the community that fills it. Minutes after the event starts, the upstairs bar fills with people greeting each other with smiles and hugs. For many it's the first time seeing one another this year. Joyful reunions, dancing, drinking and conversation jostle around the beats blasting through the room.

“Pretty much our entire friendship group came from us finding each other whilst working behind the bar at Dalston Superstore or slinging pizzas at Voodoo Ray’s down the road (which was also owned by Dan Beaumont and Matt Tucker, Superstore’s founders),” Ciara tells me. “It’s a massive group of queer people, all immensely creative, talented, and with a shared passion for dance music. There are friends that came on Thursday who were there at the inception of Happy Endings, nine years ago. I guess we just can’t all believe how it has been so long, it makes us feel old. Yet, we still have it in us, somehow.”

With every passing day the world gets a little darker and scarier. As the far right mobilise, with Trump being back in the White House and the Labour government in Britain capitulating further and further towards their politics, it’s a terrifying time to be queer. In times like these, joy is hard to come by, but among it all, there is still a sliver of hope in the spaces that we carve out for one another.

“One of our founding members, Christian, came up with the name before he sadly moved back to Melbourne after we started running the night,” Daniel tells me. “For me personally, it always reminds me of the moment when we’re playing the last track, the lights are already on, and you can see all the happy faces of people who had a great night, made new friends, found love, and had a blast dancing. Some nights can be tough, but they can end with Happy Endings, and life feels good again.”

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