From the closet to the screen : women at the Gateways Club, 1945-85

J. Gardiner

In the 1960s heyday the Gateways Club was internationally known as "the" lesbian club to visit in London. When it opened in the 1930s lesbians were firmly in the closet and butch-femme roleplay predominated as a lifestyle. Yet by 1969, "The Killing of Sister George" had immortalized the Gateways and many of its real life members in a Hollywood movie starring Coral Browne, Beryl Reid and Susannah York, and directed by Robert Aldrich. By her portrait of the club, Jill Gardiner also gives us a social history of lesbian lives, loves and mores from a cloistered secret in the 1950s and 1960s to a battleground between feminists and traditionalists in the 1970s.