Researching Black British history often feels like a rescue effort, and a race against time. There is a very real risk that if you don’t preserve certain records, events and memories soon enough, then they might be lost for ever. I think this is true of the histories of all people who have lived within the crowded margins of Western societies. Living under a state which has historically deemed ‘other’ people’s lives to be of little significance means that its institutions – whether archives, libraries, museums, universities or other projects that define the boundaries of historical existence – may deny them a space in public record, leaving them in danger of being forgotten. This institutional lack of interest means that much Black British history is unknowingly contained within people’s most private spheres: photo albums, VHS tapes, seemingly mundane pamphlets gathering dust in an elder person’s attic, or memories of events, people and a different time. These physical, historical materials disintegrate, are lost between homes, or are unadaptable to modern technologies. A Black person in this country may have witnessed and participated in astonishing events or lively subcultures, but the memory and recollection of these will falter and eventually die with them. And so those of us who work to recover the stories and memories of our elders are as much historians and researchers as we are emergency workers.

I remember the importance of these recovery efforts becoming clear to me when I learned the name Ivor Cummings. The Independent published a piece about him in the days following the second National Windrush Day which was observed on 22 June 2019, and the internet was in awe of his uncovered legacy. The academic Nicholas Boston wrote about Ivor Cummings as ‘the gay father of the Windrush generation’, writing that despite historical documentation of post-war West Indian arrivals in Britain and their settlement in this country, ‘an important name in this community’s history continues to go unspoken. The question is: why?’2 Boston writes that Ivor Cummings, who was born to a Sierra Leonean father and white English mother in 1913 and died in 1992, ‘was open about being a black gay man, the modern terminology by which he would likely describe himself were he still alive today’, and it is these facts of his condition which may explain why he had not become a name known to would-be interested parties, even if they were to pursue Black British history with intention. Despite his apparent openness, homosexuality being illegal until the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 means that institutions recording sexuality would, for most of his life, only be doing so under the pretext of crime and punishment. And yet Ivor Cummings was one of the single most important figures to Windrush arrivals: as a senior official in the welfare department of the Colonial Office he found temporary accommodation in the Clapham South air-raid shelter for Jamaican migrants, who then began to populate Brixton, the South London district understood as one of the greatest settlements of British African Caribbean people. Cummings was ‘the person who boarded the Empire Windrush as official representative of the crown to greet the migrants, informing them of their options for accommodation and giving them further instruction on how to initiate their job searches’, his engagement and advocacy for these migrants extending long beyond that first contact, Boston writes.

The enormity of this contribution by Ivor Cummings cannot be understated, and what’s interesting is that his significance was not actually unknown to the state – he had been awarded an OBE for his services in 1947, an entire year before the first Caribbean people walked the gangplanks off HMT Empire Windrush. Despite this, his name only reached many people’s radars through an article asking why it hadn’t yet, and perhaps you’re only learning his name for the first time reading this now. Ivor Cummings’s name is now being written back into the record: by November 2020 a new Wikipedia page documenting him had been created, and the LGBT+ charity Stonewall has designed an inclusive educational resource on him to be taught in classrooms across the United Kingdom.

I haven’t introduced this book with Ivor Cummings because I have any further insight to give of him, or any information at all. The sad fact is that much of what may have been interesting or incredible about his life will have died with him. Like so many others, there are many questions which cannot be asked of him, and we cannot know what it meant to be a ‘coloured queer’ in England during his time in any great detail. The biography which has been constructed in terms of his service and contribution to British history can create an outline of his life and of the man, but without his voice and testimony there will always be missing texture. What is known is only vague: that he participated in 1930s nightlife, and that he was in the company of other Black intellectuals living in Britain, including the British jazz pianist Reginald Foresythe who was also known to be a gay man and who regularly brawled in gay nightlife spaces during the interwar period. But the greatest historical records have more flavour than just the bullet points of achievements and second-hand observations. They have character, they have downtime and after hours, they have best moments and worst moments, fun, rumour and scandals. I’m happy to know that Ivor Cummings met Windrush migrants on the ship, but if I had my time with him I’d equally ask about where he partied, who he liked to sleep with, if he ever fell in love, if he had a nemesis, and if he had heard any good gossip.

I paid special attention to the surfacing of Ivor Cummings’s name because he was a Black gay man, and I am a Black gay man, and proudly so, and I have always innately known that our culture and history in this country did not begin in the twenty-first century. I have for a long time been interested in pursuing a social history of Black gay men in this country, one that is focused on the characters, passions and sensibilities of people like me who came before me – ‘a history from below’ so to speak, that sings about what Black and gay life, behaviour and identity has been like, and how it has sat within this nation. Black history and gay history in this country are marginal and absent from major curricula, and those who have lived a Black gay life are often disinherited from narratives of both groups; research into each sphere of history is often pursued without considering those who have not simply cleaved to false divides of identity. Whatever specific Black gay culture Cummings may have participated in is unknown and undocumented. We can assume that if and where it existed, it was underground, or segregated by class given that the company of other well-to-do Black professional and cultural workers is the most concrete evidence we have of his social patterns. There is nothing more.

Constructing a significant sense of what being a Black gay man meant over the course of Ivor Cummings’s life therefore proves difficult. In this race, time had already won before anyone else arrived at the starting block. But what can be said is that of the mass migration he oversaw, a number of people stepping off the boat will have been homosexuals, or would have gone on to give birth to homosexual sons and daughters. There is therefore a lineage between his housing of Black migrants in Brixton in the late 1940s to the presence of the ‘Brixton Whores’, an outrageous moniker I came to know describing some of the Black gay men of Brixton who resided there in the 1980s and 1990s – that is to say, if Black migrant groups could establish dominant communities in certain districts in Britain, then out of that subcultures and scenes could emerge, whether those be literary, arts, feminist, communist or gay. And from this, you begin to have the making of a Black gay ‘community’, where home ownership and the licencing of bars and venues by older Black gay people meant that younger generations had spaces through which they could form and establish their own identities and networks. Revolutionary Acts is a book about some of these Black gay men, who found scenes and communities in and around Brixton, whether social, activist or both, and made their own imprint amongst them. The men within this book can be thought of as the first ‘out generation’ of Black gay men. Certainly there were Black gay men in this country who came before them, even before the time of mass migration, and they did not necessarily hide their sexualities, but an ‘out generation’ speaks to a developed ecosystem and a social and political scene of Black gay life post-1967 decriminalisation, where people congregated under those terms in house parties, outside toilets, or in institutions and organisations they had built.

I owe this book, and the luxury of pursuing this history, to my friend Marc Thompson, an original ‘OG’ Brixton Whore (others say), or ‘OG Brixton rudebwoy’ (he says), and my first real encounter with this generation of ‘elder’ Black gay men who, collectively, have painted me the most gorgeous, provocative and challenging portrait of Britain, and provided me with an...