During the 1980s, a diverse body of artwork and theory emerged across the UK in response to Thatcherite ideology, the conservatism of the mainstream media, the onset of the AIDS epidemic and homophobic legislation such as Section 28. This was a period Stuart Hall described as a “conjuncture”, a “problem space”, which posed a set of distinctive political, social and cultural questions that together formed an “horizon of possible futures”, to which artistic practices constituted a reply. (Stuart Hall, “Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three ‘Moments’ in Post-war History”, History Workshop Journal 61 (Spring 2006): 3–4.)

In recent years, landmark exhibitions such as Queer British Art 1861–1967 (Tate Britain, 2017) have marked a new period of visibility for queer artistic production in the UK, even as artists and scholars have critiqued the imperative to be visible, and advocated for practices and histories that resist “queer” as an institutional category. As the moment when “queer” was first reclaimed as a radical term, the 1980s offers particularly rich historical resources for such work, as witnessed in the recent groundswell of conferences and research projects on the period and its afterlives, through which this editorial team has come together. With this special issue we look to index and interrogate the growing interest in queer art and activism in Britain during the 1980s, and to explore legacies of the long 1980s in work by contemporary artists, scholars, critics and curators.