Notes on King’s Bunker: Creating space for Queer liberation
Photography by Alissa Sattentau
Cambridge students are good at amplifying queerness, but there are certainly some voices in the community that are more hidden than others. It’s hard to say I feel either totally hidden or totally seen as a queer lesbian in Cambridge, since I’ve met more of a community of lesbians and genderqueer people that uplift me and help me explore myself here than anywhere else before, but the wider queer scene in at this university almost certainly ignores our voices and spaces. It’s probably a symptom of the general focus on “acceptable” forms of queerness in the wider world too, but the queer spaces in Cambridge overwhelmingly feel designed for gay men (and especially white, cis ones). So much of the general culture of pride, queer celebration, and representation is focused on these voices, so it’s not really a surprise, but judging from some of the brilliant queer friends I have been lucky enough to meet here, the Cambridge student body has it in us to do so much better.
“It’s probably a symptom of the general focus on “acceptable” forms of queerness in the wider world too, but the queer spaces in Cambridge overwhelmingly feel designed for gay men (and especially white, cis ones).”
There are some wonderful queer events in Cambridge, but it is very disappointing that the ones which feel more subversive (if we’re going to call anything that doesn’t fit mainstream “gay” culture subversive) are small, hard to find, exclusive or one-off. While I have been known to frequent queer get down, it really doesn’t feel like it is a space for me or my community- I feel like I am piggybacking off a space of celebration for gay men, and I should feel grateful for the fact that it even exists! Surely, we can ask for more, and we find it sometimes: Whore Moans, or Butchsoc cabaret have been some of the most genuine and comfortable spaces I have ever been in, at Cambridge or otherwise, but these events are one-offs, or difficult to hear about if you are not already involved in communities and social networks to tell you about them. The other problem is the existence of well-intentioned queer spaces within non-queer clubs, such as MASH, whose aggressive bouncers can very quickly turn a queer night into a very unsafe space for any of those queer identities they don’t understand, since they are not represented to the straight mainstream, something of which my girlfriend and I have had very difficult first-hand experience.
Photography by Alissa Sattentau
The other option, then, for queer events, is to happen inside college spaces. Again, this runs into the problem of college management, whose intentions in organising these spaces do not prioritise queer people and their voices to the same degree as student event committees do. While we are so lucky to have the physical space of Bunker, and many college officials who truly share our aims and values, it is hard to run it with genuine priority to the queer, femme and POC voices, especially when subject to stringent regulation from college officials who have been known to publicly express transphobic and racist views. As brilliant as Bunker is, the power that college has over us is extreme, and the rules of college to which we have to adhere force capacity down and ticket prices through the roof, so that the event becomes infrequent and extremely exclusive to anyone outside of King’s. In the eyes of King’s College, Bunker will always just be the King’s end-of-term mingle, and while we make a huge effort to run the event first and foremost for marginalised voices, an event run under the jurisdiction of a college will never be able to achieve this totally.
All of that being said, though, I would never give up Bunker. It is the sole reason I applied to King’s in the first place, and the joy and creativity it allows me in my roles in arts and now incoming co-president has allowed me to feel the most genuinely myself I have ever felt in a Cambridge space. I have absolutely nothing to prove to any of the committee members, and we have such a spirit of collaboration, mutual celebration and support. Creative expression is such a core part of how I learnt to voice my queerness, and Bunker has not only allowed this, but also challenged me to learn to boldly articulate and verbally negotiate our space, which is an essential growing experience for almost all queer people now and forever. Something as simple as being given a room and some paints and complete creative freedom over the walls is like being allowed to take a massive breath in and exhale. That skinny, poorly ventilated room with no natural light feels like the widest freedom in physical space I have ever found, and I can hold the key! Bunker is definitely a way of making my voice as a queer person heard.
“That skinny, poorly ventilated room with no natural light feels like the widest freedom in physical space I have ever found, and I can hold the key! Bunker is definitely a way of making my voice as a queer person heard.”
Photography by Alissa Sattentau
My favourite thing about Bunker is how silly it is! I am so bored of how seriously Cambridge takes itself. Not all queer spaces need to be highly academicized and pretentious. So much of queer joy is the ability to let yourself go, without worrying about being palatable to your surrounding community. Our recent theme, #SWAG, harked back to 2016 nostalgia, and it felt like I was healing my 13-year-old self who just felt so small and wrong and jealous of all the people who were able to make their voices heard. It was childish, it was silly, and it was more healing and freeing than any heavily themed and serious event. Whenever we brainstorm our themes, we always ask what the best and worst possible outfit would be. If the worst is still good, on theme and easily accessible, and the best is super creative and show-stopping, then we’ve done our jobs right.
When I describe Bunker to someone that has never heard of it, I tell them that it is a special secret cellar room under King’s College that is rarely opened, except for a few massive parties a year, which aim to create a subversive space for Cambridge’s marginalised voices to come together for a night of ridiculous, extremely camp, freeing community and revelry. Radical solidarity love and dance!
I wish that Bunker might be able to expand again. I hear stories from its golden days pre-covid, and it feels sad that it is so reduced in capacity, budget and duration. I wish that it were more accessible to non-King’s members, and I wish that King’s might provide more regular bops and reinstate the JCR, so that Bunker could be a true, separate queer space, rather than the only college “mingle”, which must prioritise queer, femme and POC voices whilst also catering to the majority of King’s students for whom this is their only big event. I also wish that we might have the budget and time to expand into some non-college spaces every now and again. Whore Moans was a great example of this- to run an event in a space under queer-friendly management that is not subject to restriction from the college.
Dance music, and especially techno, is so important to queer spaces. It connects club-goers with a worldwide history of queer dance and self-expression, since queer voices have almost always been forced into underground spaces, late at night, on the fringes of society. This kind of music is symbolic of liberation and experimentation, as well as connection to a self-written tradition that keeps the queer community connected and alive. It connects us to our bodies in a way that is all-encompassing. Our voices exist in our corporeality, movement and action through dance as well as in our creative and verbal expression when we come together with the help of this kind of music. It is so universal too- we are all hearing the same thing, and we are all connected in movement: having such a rhythmic physical connection with everyone else within a queer space is so magical. It is also a genre of music that allows DJs to create and experiment more than anything else, and what is queerness if not experimentation!