Blackpool's LGBTQ+ Story on Screen

Funny Girls goes national

For most of the country, the first glimpse of gay Blackpool came through Funny Girls. Once the show moved into the restored Odeon in 2002, its glamour made it a natural backdrop for television.

• The Royal Variety Performance. The Funny Girls cast appeared at the Royal Variety Performance twice, in consecutive years in the mid-2000s. In 2005 they performed "Swine Lake", a comic ballet number, joined on stage for one night only by a dancer from English National Ballet. For a drag troupe from a seaside showbar, it was the ultimate national stage.
• Blackpool (2004). The venue appeared in the television musical drama Blackpool, a story of an arcade owner and a murder investigation set against the town's amusements and nightlife.
• Reality and lifestyle shows. Funny Girls has turned up in all sorts of programmes as the place to take visitors for a night out. In 2011, for example, a hotel-review competition series that visited a Blackpool guest house sent its contestants off for an evening at Funny Girls.
• Behind the scenes. In 2013 a documentary photographer and filmmaker spent time with the cast and choreographer during rehearsals for the Christmas show, filming the work that goes into each production for a national newspaper's website.

Television did not always help. Basil Newby has said that a fly-on-the-wall emergency-services series filmed in the town in the 2010s, which showed Blackpool at its roughest, hurt business at Funny Girls and across the scene.

There Is A Rainbow Over Blackpool Tower

One of the very few films about queer Blackpool held in the town's own archives and collections is the documentary There Is A Rainbow Over Blackpool Tower. It was shown as part of We're Here..., the first exhibition of queer artists at Blackpool Pride, staged at the Winter Gardens in 2013, and screened again at Central Library during Pride in June 2022 at a show-and-tell event with Showtown. Its makers and date are not well documented, which is all the more reason to treasure it.

Something for the Boys (2018)

The artists Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings made Something for the Boys, a short film of about sixteen minutes, in Blackpool in 2018. It presents the town as a historic resort under the strain of austerity and shifting identities, setting the old-fashioned nostalgia of a Victorian seaside town and its exuberant gay scene against memories of the AIDS years and the politics of the time. Funny Girls star Betty Legs Diamond appears in it, alongside a dancer, among the town's most opulent venues. The film has been shown at a major London art fair, bringing Blackpool's gay bars into the contemporary art world.

We're Still Here! on film

The We're Still Here! heritage project, led by the artists Garth Gratrix and Harry Clayton-Wright through Abingdon Studios, has made a short film alongside its oral histories, and its recordings of Blackpool LGBTQ+ people can be heard online. In 2022 the project put photographs of early-1990s nights at the Flamingo and the Flying Handbag on show outside the Grundy Art Gallery, and the photographer has since published books of his archive of northern queer nightlife.

Queers in Blackpool (2024)

The short film Queers in Blackpool, by the filmmaker James Barnett, best known for his much-loved videos of his parents, documents Queer Amusements, a multi-artform festival that ran in the town from April to September 2024. The festival was commissioned through a national programme supporting new queer arts outside the big cities, with the Blackpool arts space Aunty Social as a partner and Arts Council funding.

The film mixes interviews, performance footage and photography with playful nods to Blackpool's entertainment past, from Orville the Duck to Cinderella's carriage. Funny Girls veteran Miss Titty Kaka and festival curator Harry Clayton-Wright feature, along with artists and organisers including the spoken-word writer Jane Claire Bradley and the community organiser Catherine Mugonyi. It had its world premiere at the Blackpool Film Festival in November 2024, screened before John Waters' Female Trouble.

Queering Blackpool (2025)

The most ambitious film yet about the town's queer history is Queering Blackpool, a feature-length documentary of about ninety minutes. It grew out of a doctoral study by Dr Helen Eadon-Sinkinson, a former Blackpool resident and university lecturer, completed in 2019. That research, an ethnographic study of drag queens in Blackpool, argued that drag identity in the town is shaped not only by performers' play with gender but by Blackpool's own history of raucous working-class leisure and its present-day struggles. Some of the original participants' identities had to be hidden, so the study itself was partly told through a short film.

The full documentary, made with the filmmaker Alexander Blackburn over about a year, traces the rise of Blackpool's drag and LGBTQ+ scene from its pioneers to the new generation. It includes interviews with Basil Newby, DJ Zoe, Indiana Aphrodite Isherwood and Shirley Knot, along with rare archive footage, much of it never shown publicly, featuring stars such as Lily Savage, Grace Jones, Sister Sledge and the Village People. Eadon-Sinkinson, who remembers the Flamingo and the Flying Handbag as places where young women felt safe, describes it as a celebration of the people bold enough to start things.

It premiered at the Backlot Cinema in Blackpool on 6 June 2025, at the start of Pride weekend, with an after-party at Sherlock's on Queen Street, and went on to screenings elsewhere, including a Chester cinema with a question-and-answer session.

Sport on screen

Not every Blackpool LGBTQ+ story has been about the stage. In May 2022 the Blackpool FC youngster Jake Daniels came out publicly, becoming the only openly gay male professional footballer playing in the UK at the time. In 2024 he spoke about masculinity in football in a television documentary, and his decision has been widely reported as one of the most significant moments for LGBTQ+ people in British men's football.

Watching today

Several of these films turn up at festivals, Pride screenings and heritage events in the town, so keep an eye on the programmes at Showtown, the Grundy Art Gallery, the Backlot Cinema and the town's film festival. Screenings and availability change, so check before you go.