Love Underground is Reclaiming the Tube for LGBTQ People
Make it stand out
Compared to a lot of smaller UK towns and cities, London represents a lifeline for a lot of queer people. The largesse and diversity of the city means that it’s easier to be visibly queer here than it is in a lot of other places – whether that means through PDA or fashion choices that challenge the gendered status quo. While this is worth celebrating, however, being queer in public can still be challenging even in London, with the underground often feeling like a particularly contested space. In recent times, a number of high profile attacks on queer people have happened on public transport in the capital, and in general, hate crimes on TfL against groups including LGBTQ people increased six per cent on the previous year in 2022/23.
It’s a grim statistic, but as always, the queer community are endlessly resourceful when it comes to outwardly resisting oppressive circumstances. One project – Anna Schlimm and El Hardwick’s Love Underground – seeks to reclaim the Underground through the medium of art that showcases queer joy on the travel network.
In the project, El Hardwick’s photography is presented alongside a Cruise Code map created by Anna Schlimm, which, in the artists’ words, “uses tube station names and LGBTQ+ colour schemes as signifiers for romantic and sexual desires, was inspired by the legacy of public transport and adjacent spaces as popular cruising spots, queer communication tactics like Polari and the Hanky Code, and the role of badges and buttons in the queer liberation movement.”
We spoke to Anna and El about how they went about creating Love Underground, and why queer representation in London – and on the Tube – remains crucially important.
How did you come to working together on this project?
A: The project came out of this DIY/punk residency with TfL that I put on with my collective holobiont (@holobiont.lol). We called it parasites, the idea was to create opportunities for artists on our own terms, while redistributing the clout of cultural institutions. For our first one we wanted to do an iconic London one, so we chose TfL. That’s how the ‘Alt Art on the Underground’ residency came about. We put out an open call and ended up installing the work of 12 artists on the tube and in stations over the course of a multi-hour performance.
My contribution was Love Underground & the Cruise Code, which uses tube station names and LGBTQ+ colour schemes as signifiers for romantic and sexual desires. Because it was all really DIY, I didn’t really have time to think about documentation beyond taking photos as we were installing, and they were not representative of the deeper references to queer desire and histories that influenced the project. So I really wanted to bring it alive with a photo series, and I’ve always loved El’s work so I reached out to them and was like ‘I did this thing, do you wanna get involved and do something crazy with me’. And El and our models were just the best. We had so many wild days zooming around London at all hours of the day to take pics.
How did casting for the project come about?
A: One of the most important casting considerations for us was that the people in the photos were people from the London queer community. And we really wanted to show a variety of bodies and identities, because cruising is largely associated with gay cis white men in the popular imagination, and for lots of reasons, but especially safety, also still in practice I think. So this whole project in a way is about opening up the possibilities of serendipitous romantic/sexual encounters to a wider group of people. I feel so lucky that the people in the photos took the plunge and trusted us with this. They were all incredible!!
E: Some of the people in the photos are friends, whilst others we reached out to for the first time and we felt so grateful they entrusted us. Like Anna says, cruising isn’t just an experience for cis gay men. As a trans pansexual person who strongly identifies with faggotry, I’ve definitely felt like cruising in those spaces has been inaccessible. It’s also something I’ve discussed a lot with other fag-identifying transmascs whilst working on my personal photo and interview project ‘t-fags’ (a collaboration with my partner, artist Orion Isaacs) – cruising feels like a huge part of our identities, and yet it’s not always safe or straightforward to engage in when you’re trans or gender non-conforming. So we really wanted the casting to represent cruising as a queer act that isn’t just explored by one part of the LGBTQ+ community.
Why is coded queer communication still relevant today, particularly in London?
A: I think it’s relevant in lots of ways. We exist in a place and time where it feels safer than in many others to present and to love the way we want to. But that is not a given, even with changing norms and in a metropolitan city, so I think coded communication will always create a sphere of liberation and a sense of community for people in the know. It’s about being able to recognise and find each other, a signal of sorts. Like being hidden in plain sight. I also like the idea of having all this ephemera that asserts that we are/were here. Buttons and badges from the queer liberation movement throughout time were a big inspiration to the project, and I think they say so much about the people and the time. Hal Fischer’s work on Gay Semiotics, The Hanky Code and Polari were also foundational inspirations to the project, which comes through in the visual coding and the punny language of the Code. So I guess the aim was a sort of updated, more inclusive version of these things. And also to create something fun that claims space for desire in London’s privatised landscape.
E: We talked a lot about trains as a popular space for flirting and observing other queers too. It’s not surprising that so many missed connections columns in newspapers occur on trains. It feels like having a cruise code specific for public transport counters the increasingly digitised world of dating. In the pre-online-dating world, when I was nineteen, I actually met an ex-partner at a bus stop – and we’re still friends. I also think it’s important to consider that most “public transport” in this country is not publicly owned. So I think there’s something really radical about reclaiming spaces that are privately-owned, yet meant for public use, for queer, anarchic, erotic encounters.
Travelling to and from queer venues can often be a source of anxiety for visibly queer people - how did this feed into the project?
E: Anna wrote out these really amazing consent forms ahead of the photoshoot, and we tried our best to be really communicative with the models before, during and after taking the photos to make sure everyone was comfortable. But we also wanted this project to be about taking up public space with queer expression. It always feels safer to be in groups, so I hope the process of taking the photos felt empowering as the models had us there with them too. The magic of cruise codes though is that they are covert – if you know, you know. It’s a way of being visible to your community whilst stealth from everyone else.
A: Safety was a recurring consideration while I was developing the idea. I don't remember if I was specifically thinking about travelling to and from queer venues. I was more occupied by the worry that people might abuse the Code in some way. So the printed map has a whole section on safety and conduct and lists a sexual assault hotline. I guess taking up space always comes with a risk, and we were really aware of that during the photoshoot too. Like El said, we put a lot of thought into making it as safe and accessible as we could for everyone involved. The covert-ness of the code is in no way meant as a stand-in for openly being our wildest queerest selves. Like I said earlier, it’s much more about signalling to each other. I had this idea of an erotic commons in my mind, and working towards a world where we feel safe being seen.
How important is claiming common spaces for queer people?
A: To me, the idea of claiming space for queer people and queering a space – as in troubling the normative use of a space – like public transport are related and subversive acts. Like the tube could be a place for you to travel to your extractivist finance job, or a place where generative, radical relationships are seeded. I’m not saying that cruising can fix the state of the world or the constant cognitive dissonance we experience, but I do think that it can start to challenge whom and what we perceive as normal. I think it can unsettle straight consensus reality, and point towards other possible worlds. Audre Lorde wrote this text Uses of The Erotic - The Erotic as Power, which has been hugely influential to me since I first read it many years ago. In it she talks about the Erotic as a life force inside us, that if we tune into, can help us recognize and live in accordance with our needs and desires, which in turn can help us break out of obedience and oppression. To me, this is kind of what Love Underground is all about.
In London we can see that, even with a high enough population and demand for LGBTQ+ venues, independent queer spaces are endlessly shutting down. So much public space is designed with heteronormativity in mind, so queering it says that actually – whether there’s the funding for queer spaces or not – we’re going to take up space and create new narratives, which are often more rich and interesting than the spaces were originally intended for (eg. the cruising spots of public lidos, heaths and toilets). This also exists in tandem with living in a country that has miniscule amounts of public land. So by being in common spaces, we are saying: we belong here, and we have always belonged here.
Project: Anna Schlimm and El Hardwick | Models: Wet Mess, Destiny, Carlotta, Nathan, Paul, Magda, Madeleine, Anjali, Hugh, Roro