Cruising and protest are vital and enduring parts of LGBTQ+ culture. In this panel discussion, esteemed artists and activists come together to discuss the intersection of queer sexuality and emancipatory politics. Attention to cruising helps foreground historical and ongoing struggles for LGBTQ+ rights, visibility and equality. It also opens urgent questions about the degree to which liberation politics is served by making queer pleasure and desire public.

Our speakers include the nightlife icon Stav B, the artist-activist Emily Witham, and ACT UP author and organiser Dan Glass. The panel will consider the ways in which cruising’s pluralities, conflicts, and subcultures inform LGBTQ+ politics and identity formations. What can the transformations and continuities of cruising across the 20th and 21st centuries tell us about the evolution of queer identity, marginalisation and liberation? How, for instance, have digital technologies affected queer activism and sexual cultures? In what ways can cruising – both past and present – be read as a technique and site of resistance? The discussion will be chaired by Dr Zeena Feldman (KCL).

About the speakers

Stav B (she/her) is a legendary lesbian activist, London nightlife icon and cross-disciplinary visual artist whose work combines spoken word, live art, installation, still and moving images, sound and scent. She is also organiser of the London Dyke March. Stav B’s creative practice is passionately political and explores sexual identity, love, the politics of the female gaze, the aesthetics of beauty, obsession and transformation, nature and evolution, space and spectator. She is currently completing her PhD at the University of Westminster, where is considers dykephobia, marginalisation and the erasure of London’s lesbian spaces.

Emily Witham (she/her) is a working-class artist who curates and organises The London Dyke Market. Referencing both archives and personal experiences her creative practice explores the history of dyke subcultures and contemporary lesbian politics. She is particularly interested in the legacy of butch/femme identities and queer community spaces. Most recently, Emily’s work with leather and heraldry was exhibited in Labours of Love, a group show about the complex relationship between love and work in the queer community. Emily’s work has also been shown at The Barbican, The Southbank Centre, Space Station Sixty-Five gallery and in Joelle Taylor’s new novel The Night Alphabet. Emily is on DIVA Magazine’s 2025 Power List.

Dan Glass (he/him) a multi-award-winning educator, author, performer, film presenter, ACT UP activist and sexual and healthcare freedom movement-builder. Activist of the Year, campaigning role model and BBC Greater Londoner, Dan founded Queer Tours of London - A Mince Through Time, the Queer/Trans Muay Thai & Self Defence movement Bender Defenders, re-formed AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) London and founded the protest-party This is My Culture. Influenced by his grandparents’ stories surviving the Nazi Holocaust and setting up life in Brick Lane, Dan lives and organises by the principles of Never Again Ever, explored in his documentaries Never Again: Fighting the Polish far-right and Censoring Palestine: The weaponisation of anti-semitism. His books United Queerdom from the Legends of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) to the Queers of Tomorrow and Queer Footprints - A Guide to Uncovering London's Fierce History are used as roadmaps for freedom movements across the world. Dan is on the international committee of Training for Transformation and an artist with In Place of War and Beautiful Trouble. He is now writing This is Our Culture - The Revolutionary Legacy of George Michael.

Zeena Feldman (she/her) is Director of the Queer@King’s Research Centre and Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Digital Culture in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. Her research examines how digital technologies impact understandings and performances of traditionally analogue concepts, with particular interest in belonging, identity and wellbeing.