Throughout the 1990s, Stuart Linden Rhodes was a teacher by day and a writer and photographer covering the north’s gay clubbing scene at night. In the classroom he was known as ‘Stuart’, in nightclubs — like The Haçienda in Manchester and Powerhouse in Newcastle, as lesser known venues in Blackburn and York – he went by his middle name, ‘Linden’.
He tells DJ Mag about the mechanics of this double life. “I was young and foolish,” Rhodes recalls. “I would be in the classroom from nine ‘till five. Then I’d make sure I had everything I needed — my 35mm film, my pen, paper and all the rest of it — get a couple of mates in the car and off we’d go. We wouldn’t get back until some time in the morning.
“If I was doing a feature for Gay Times, I’d go and do the photography, then on the way home I would stop off at the parcel office, put the film into jiffy bags, post it to the magazine, go home, grab a couple of hours sleep, go to work at the college, get home again and write the article. Then I could finally go to bed.” This went on for a decade.
During the 2020 lockdown, when stabbing yourself in the eye became more preferable to watching another true crime documentary on Netflix, he went into his loft, dusted off his old negatives, pulled out his printed articles, and set about a marathon of scanning. This resulted in the birth of the @linden_archives Instagram page.
The body of work depicts an abundance of unmitigated queer joy. But it was set against a backdrop of both heartache and suffering caused by the HIV/AIDS epidemic and a militant era of political oppression. In 1988, Margaret Thatcher enacted the ‘Section 28’ law that prohibited local authorities and schools from “promoting” homosexuality. It also outlawed — much-needed especially in the context of the medical crisis facing that community — councils from funding LGBTQ initiatives.
Rhodes’ work is now being memorialised in an upcoming book, Out & About With Linden, which will be released in March 2022 and includes written contributions from a bunch of people including Boy George, Mel B, and Paul O’Grady. We asked him to take us through some of the imagery.