Brighton is a fun and happening, very elite, sometimes dangerous, seaside city, home to the rich and the poor. In contrast to the quaint expressions and symbols of national pride so typical for an English coastal resort, Brighton somehow manages to retain the Zeitgeist and is the location of choice for musicians, digital bohemians, and intellectual elites. Brighton also hosts many alternative events with such spectacles as a naked bike ride through the town center. Most notably, Brighton serves as a beacon for the LGBT community to live and party. And the cultural milieu pitches it as an ultimate vanguard and the precursor to a golden, utopic age.
Things are not so golden, from Covid to war in Europe. Still, years before these crises, while this epicenter of culture danced en masse at Europe's most prominent gay pride event, as the spectator hysterically laughed at the naked biker as the clubs buzzed with excitement, I saw the Black Sun on our horizon, rising over this Progressive seaside city of love and Rainbows Hiding in plain sight, it was visible in the tent-filled streets and reflected in the lost faces of an ever-increasing homeless community.
Brighton is a wild, often hilarious, but with 1 in 78 of its citizens living on the street, ultimately a tragic place. An absurd black comedy of an intersection where picturesque seaside banality and radical cultural change meet economic collapse. (PaulHynes-Allen)
The arrest of a drug dealer. Through my basement window.
My friends hand.
