This chapter centres on Andy Spinoza’s first encounter with Tony Wilson in 1980. Coming across a flyer for a meeting of the Fabian Society, the twenty-year-old Spinoza was surprised to see Wilson, founder of Factory Records and a noted TV personality, listed as a speaker alongside local MP Gerald Kaufman. Spinoza attended the meeting and managed to score an interview with Wilson for the student paper, though difficulties with a microphone meant his triumph was short-lived.

The so-called ‘baby boom’ generation have lived their teenage years, marriages, family making, divorce, and now ageing into and beyond midlife, throughout a time where across North America and Europe there has been rapid change in practices of and policies surrounding intimacy, gender and sexuality – as well as rapid and dramatic changes in the ways in which people age and experience ageing. The Introduction chapter begins by examining a wide body of work on the sociologies of intimacy, family and relationships and ageing studies. Drawing the literature on ageing, gender and relating together, I show how assumptions about the baby boom generation and its revolutionary character are exclusive, deeply classed and racialised. In this book, I draw on ethnographic research in salsa classes across southern England and oral history interviews undertaken between 2011 and 2020 to document the everyday meanings and practices of femininity and heterosexuality, and the doing of ‘new’ intimacies, among women in midlife. The chapter goes on to describe the methodology of the research: an innovative combination of ethnographic fieldwork in salsa classes and life history interviews. The salsa ‘field’ is described and I discuss the value of sensorial methodologies, particularly in research on gender and sexuality, and then further detail the additional layers of depth and context that the life history interviews provided to the ethnographic present. The chapter concludes with a summary of the remaining chapters.

In this chapter, Andy Spinoza turns his attention to the trend for urban regeneration and how it manifested in Manchester. In the middle of the 1980s, barely anyone lived in the city centre. But by the early 1990s, city leaders had begun to promote urban living. In 1991, the Central Manchester Development Corporation made its first big purchase, 42-44 Sackville Street, which became the city’s first loft development. Meanwhile, the opening of the gay club Manto in 1990 soon saw Canal Street develop into one of the world’s top gay destinations. A major figure in Manchester’s regeneration was Tom Bloxham, who started out selling posters at the student union and in 1993 founded Urban Splash. The development company has played a huge role in transforming the Manchester landscape, developing up-market residential neighbourhoods such as New Islington.

In this chapter, Andy Spinoza describes the situation in Manchester in the late 1970s and early 1980s, following the election of the Thatcher government. Thatcher’s monetarist policies decimated British industry, which affected Manchester and other northern cities severely, causing mass unemployment and hastening capital flight. This left a legacy of desolation and bitterness that proved paradoxically inspirational for many musicians, particularly among Manchester’s thriving counterculture. In 1986, Tony Wilson and others organised the ‘Festival of the Tenth Summer’ to take place at the G-Mex on the anniversary of The Sex Pistols’ famous Manchester concert. Despite spats between various groups, the event was a success, and brought Manchester’s music scene to the attention of people in power.

In this chapter, Andy Spinoza continues his account of Manchester’s regeneration, focusing on the area of Hulme. After being transformed by a modernist makeover in the 1960s, Hulme rapidly deteriorated. By the 1980s many flats were in such poor condition that the council allowed them to be occupied rent-free. As a result, the area became a hub for artists and bohemians, as well as a favourite subject for photographers such as Kevin Cummins and Richard Davis. In 1992, City Challenge funding was secured to redevelop Hulme, though not all residents were enthusiastic. But overall the project was a success, with Manchester leaders working closely with the Conservative government to ensure the development of mixed and varied communities. The IRA bombing that shook the centre of Manchester in 1996 hastened the process of regeneration, attracting millions in funding.

Soviet perestroika and glasnost’ are under way. The increasingly liberalized press finally admits the presence of AIDS on Soviet soil. Meanwhile, Vadim Pokrovskii, a young Soviet virologist, is trying to find the Soviet “Patient Zero” in the USSR. He tours Soviet cities, lecturing on the virus in a hope that those attending will be able to recognize AIDS in the patients under their care. A young doctor named Elena Fabrikova, attending his lecture, realizes that the AIDS symptoms described by Pokrovskii match those of one of her patients. She immediately informs the chief doctor of the hospital where she works, who threatens to fire her if she doesn’t let it slide. Fabrikova invites Pokrovskii to see her patient, and he confirms that Vladimir has AIDS. Scared for his life, Vladimir hopes that he can trust Pokrovskii and decides to confide his secret to him.

Nineteen-year-old Sasha comes to Moscow to pursue his dream of becoming an actor. He gains entry into a prestigious theatrical university, where he meets Pavel, another student who is about to graduate. They are attracted to each other and soon become sexually involved. Pavel takes Sasha on walks around Moscow, showing him the places where people like them meet. Their acquaintance takes place against the backdrop of night disappearances and brutal mass arrests of Soviet people.

Bombarded by numerous complaints from patients suffering from impotence, a group of Soviet psychiatrists decide to hold a series of seminars on sexology to improve the quality of sexological treatment across the country. The seminars, which attract doctors from all over the USSR, result in the formal establishment of a new Soviet science – sexopathology. The newly trained professionals are now keen to study sexual perversions, including homosexuality. One of them is the ambitious psychiatrist Yan Goland, who creates an entire system of psychotherapy of homosexuality. However, his medical practice is a clandestine one: officially male homosexuality is a crime and the rate of convictions for sodomy crimes begins to rise sharply from 1965.

This brief preamble presents a glossary of Manchester place names, from longstanding local appellations to dubious government branding exercises such as ‘the Northern Powerhouse’ and ‘englandsnorthwest’. It guides the reader through the subtle distinctions between the City of Manchester, ‘the City’, Manchester city centre and ‘town’.

Boris Daniel’beck, a jurist from Azerbaijan State University, is outraged – some lawyers are actually lobbying for the decriminalization of consensual sodomy. He expresses his views on the issue in his dissertation, strongly criticizing scholars who argue that homosexuality is not a crime. He is even more determined to outlaw lesbianism. He proposes to do so in front of a panel of experts – distinguished lawyers and republican prosecutors during the defence of the dissertation. Will the members of the commission support his proposal?

Abram Sviadoshch is a young psychiatrist fascinated by Alfred Kinsey’s research on homosexuality. Aware that sodomy is a crime in the USSR and is therefore impossible to explore from a medical point of view, he decides to conduct research on lesbianism and design a method for treating lesbians. A young female trainee, Elizaveta Derevinskaia, assists him in his research. She has never encountered lesbians before and is curious. She convinces some of these research participants to take highly toxic libido-inhibiting drugs to ascertain the effectiveness of Sviadoshch’s radical treatments.

This chapter focuses on a single night at the Haçienda. On 18 January 1989, the TV show The Hitman and Her recorded an episode at the Manchester club. Andy Spinoza was there and wrote up the event for the Manchester Evening News. The filming was announced in advance and drew in a huge, racially mixed crowd of streetwise teens and twenty-somethings, quite different from the indie hipsters the Haçienda typically hosted. But this was only part of a transformation that was already underway: in short order, the club would emerge at the forefront of the rave scene. The night itself provided chaotic entertainment, though it also witnessed an act of violence – improbably involving a nunchaku – that proved to be a harbinger of things to come.

In this chapter, Andy Spinoza charts Manchester’s path to becoming a devolved city region, a change that was trailed in the early 2000s under the Blair government but did not come to pass until the 2010s. Former Labour cabinet minister Andy Burnham became the region’s first executive mayor in 2017, and won a second election in 2021. He has proved adept at harnessing the city’s musical heritage to his agenda, making notable use of the phrase ‘Manchester does things differently’, originally popularised by Tony Wilson. Spinoza had actually brought the two men together in 2002, at a reception for Times editor Robert Thomson. Wilson died in 2007, but Spinoza speculates about whether he would have run for mayor and what his campaign might have looked like.

This chapter dives back into the sensorium of the salsa classes, examining stories of ‘transformation’. The chapter begins with a description of the ‘salsa outfit’ and the hierarchies felt within the class space, most observable in the differences in what men and (particularly) women wore. The detailed description of a ‘styling’ workshop is used to examine the ways in which the teachers taught not only the movements of the dance but how to embody a glamorous (hyper)femininity: in the way you could learn to dress, hold yourself and move around the salsa space in certain ways. Learning to dance and embodying the ‘salsa self’ negotiated the trouble of ageing, and the concept of an embodied lifecourse is developed whereby different life stages were associated with changes in sociality and different ways of dressing. Practices of femininity, such as adopting the glamorous salsa outfit, are not done alone; new friendships with other women in the salsa classes, and new shared practices of glamourising the body, are situated alongside stories told about the friendship practices of their teenage years. Women supported each other, learnt from each other, practised with each other and made sense of men with and through each other. The chapter shows that these female friendships also reinforced gendered heteronorms, particularly in the quest for respectability.

Aleksei Kiselev is a man in his thirties who lives in Rakhia village not far from Leningrad. He is unmarried and has a reputation as an “oddball”, but he is welcome at any local party because he has a gramophone, a treasured and rare item in the postwar USSR. Kiselev has a penchant for men in uniform – soldiers from the Red Army, who often stay overnight in the village on the way to the base. He meets these men at parties in the women’s Barrack Number Five and strikes up acquaintances with them. He invites them to stay the night in his tiny room in the local communal bathhouse, where he lives. Some men accept his invitation, some men decline. One day, however, Kiselev is found dead, hanging on a rope in his room. Was it an unlikely suicide, or something more sinister?

In the Conclusion, I draw together the ways in which, rather than being revolutionary, the women in fact maintained a pervasive concern with being respectable throughout the lifecourse. I discuss how this was informed by the intersections of age, class and race and interrogate how intimacy and romantic relationships produce and reproduce the intimate workings of heteronormativity.