The Safari bar: A gay bar. In a zoo. In Bognor Regis. In the early 1980s
One summer a zoo in Bognor hosted a gay club with fire-eaters, drag acts and thumping NRG music
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We’ve looked at the struggle for gay people to be accepted in pubs and issues, such as Section 28. This week - the last in the trilogy - it’s time to look at how gay people in Sussex had fun. And a particular type of fun. Camp. Ridiculous. And scarcely believable. This is a tale of peevish parrots, sex dives and caged bar staff.
Alf Le Flohic’s book, The Magic Farm and other queer tales, is a must-read when it comes to these stories. It also includes a gay hotel in the 1970s complete with cabaret, private parties in a fruit(y) farm and today’s unexpectedly hilarious account of two DJs carving out a gay space in Bognor Regis.
I can’t thank Alf enough for introducing us to this world.
Hotham Park Zoo in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, according to a local council website, opened in the early 1950s and by the end of the 1970s, was rebranded as Rainbow’s End, selling badges with the tagline: “A world of fantasy”.
“This new name reflected the zoo’s ambition to provide a magical and enchanting experience for its visitors,” the website says.
What this omits is that this magical and enchanting period spawned the Safari Bar, a gay bar playing high NRG music, hosting drag queens and causing merriment that could be heard from considerable distances.
The night was the idea of DJs Barrie Appleyard and Ian Harding, who had met at a club in Littlehampton. Ian knew the manager of the zoo and Ian phoned Barrie saying “shall we try something with the zoo, you know, gay nights or something?”
They found a cafeteria (originally built as a small mammal house) that was tucked away in the back of the zoo and transformed this functional space into a jungle-themed gay bar on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights.
Barrie was in charge of décor. “I covered the till, the bar stools and the shelves behind the bar in fur fabric,” he says here. “The walls were covered in bamboo fencing and we hung flower leis [garlands] over the bar.”
He went to a shop in Portsmouth that sold foam by the block for seating and got some material from a friend who worked in a dress shop they nicknamed Menstruals (real name, Minstrels). He also had the idea of putting bar staff in cage-like bars using bungee ropes but the pitfalls of serving drinks through elastic led them to (wisely) reconsider.
The disco was in the function room, near the bar. “We wanted to make it look even more jungle-themed,” Barrie tells Alf in his book. “So Andy found loads of old artificial Christmas trees in one of the storerooms, took them to bits, then stapled them to the ceiling. Here and there he'd have the foliage trailing down a bit, so it looked like vines.”
Alf hasn’t been able to confirm the exact date of the opening evening but it would’ve been around November 1982. Whatever the case, the Safari bar was open three nights of the week without much disruption.
But one Friday night after 11pm, the zoo manager and licensee Mike Denning was visited by the police with many punters fearing it was a raid. In reality, when officers saw that no one had an alcoholic drink, they left.
Two lesbians did write to Gay News and Barrie remembers Mike saying: “Oh we've had a complaint about a gay bar in the zoo.” “Because in people’s minds,” continues Barrie, “they thought that a gay bar in a zoo meant that the bar was in the middle and all the animals were in cages around it.”
It was very hedonistic but, oddly, benefited from its location with acts from Gerry Cottle’s circus being based at the zoo in caravans and able to perform at nights. One was fire-eater and contortionist Baba Fossett, who is famous for appearing on a Soft Cell video.
Wednesdays was movie night but - fitting with the no-holds barred theme - was really an excuse to play gay pornography with “the music cranked up”, according to Barrie. “We only used to show men’s porn even if the women were there.”
There was a “mini arcade” consisting of two old fruit machines, a pinball machine and a pool table, the latter of which was quite popular with the girls, according to Barrie.
The drag double act Rebel Rebel, AKA Butch and Arthur, worked at the gig with Butch recalling the night well.
“I remember the smell of the place. I remember we had to change in a little caravan that was once used by Gary Glitter, there were pictures of him plastered all over.
“It was weird as fuck, so tacky and camp. I remember me and Arthur giving looks to each other and laughing saying ‘What the fuck, dear?’”.
Barrie remembers Rebel Rebel performing, too. “You should have seen the faces on them,” he says, “when they had to get changed in one of the caravans and run into the function room!”
Arthur, the other half of Rebel Rebel, especially remembered the mud: “It was like trying to run in a Bush Tucker trial". And Butch knows why Arthur specifically remembers the mud: "She fell when she was running to do a costume change. I’m the nimble one.”
Near the bar were spare caravans called the Sex Dives. “So, if there was somebody you wanted to have a bit of nonsense with, you’d say ‘Right, get into the caravans’,” says Barrie.
“In the dark you could walk into the zoo. Right underneath you had little animatronics like the Dwarves’ Diamond Mine. You’d go down there for a bit of how’s ya father as well.”
The Safari bar lasted for less than 12 months and the zoo closed a few years after - but for one summer Bognor was a real hedonistic hotspot in the gay club scene.
For stories like the Safari Club, Alf Le Floric’s book, The Magic Farm and other queer tales, can be bought here