Collection: The Age of Consent Plaid

Bronski Beat’s The Age of Consent was protest you could dance to. Released in 1984, when the age of consent for gay men in the UK was 21 (five years higher than for straight couples), the band literally printed a chart of Europe’s discriminatory laws inside the sleeve turning disco into activism. Jimmy Somerville, Steve Bronski, and Larry Steinbachek were three out working-class gay men making unapologetically queer pop at a time when you could be arrested for kissing in public and Smalltown Boy sparked a national conversation about homophobia broadcast on Top of the Pops…  that synth intro still reminds us that the dancefloor has always been political.