Podcast Corner: Gay times on dancefloors from Cork to New York
Damian Kerlin hosts the Memories from the Dancefloor podcast
Hosted by Damian Kerlin, a Derry-born journalist and publicist, Memories from the Dancefloor (winner of Acast Amplifier, an incubator programme to discover, establish and promote new podcast ideas) seeks to celebrate LGBTQ+ venues in the UK. Think the world-renowned Heaven and its founder Jeremey Norman, who we meet at the start of the first episode.
“I came back from New York full of enthusiasm to open a club, because not only was it that I wanted London to have a gay centre where gay men could feel liberated and at home, but I also wanted an American bar experience,” he says.
Having the spaces and venues are key to any scene - one of the reasons why Kerlin wanted to make this series. "Growing up in Northern Ireland, there were not many LGBTQ+ venues. Derry only had one, which was on the fringes of town. You had to go looking for it. That was my experience of growing up gay - nobody seemed to mind as long as it was out of sight.”
He adds: “We are more than who we are attracted to. Our culture, art, and existence are built on reliance on each other and our community. I wanted to celebrate that, and what better place to start than with our iconic queer spaces.”
The first episode, which is only 21 minutes long, concludes with Amy Lame, who will be familiar to BBC Radio 6 listeners and is London’s night czar. She talks about a survey into venues shutting and why - it’s as similar a story in Ireland as it is in London: “The reason why these places and spaces were closing were because of threats from developments, rise in business rates, and rise in commercial rents that pushed us away.”
Episode two of Memories from the Dancefloor will focus on Birmingham’s legendary Nightingales.
If you want to go further afield - and back to the 1970s and 80s heyday - Night Fever is a podcast that talks to the leading figures in New York’s storied nightlife. You’ll hear wild, delirious stories across its two seasons to date.
Closer to home, Invisible Threads was a fascinating eight-part series from Go Loud in 2021 in which older gay people told their stories, often about their repressed feelings of identity. For example, Sean Vail, who now lives in Skibbereen, Co Cork, was honourably discharged from the US army after revealing his sexuality.
