London's new elite? Meet the Gaytriarchy

Gay men are running everything from AI firms to the art market. WILLIAM HOSIE on how to ascend the Holy Homo Empire

- WILLIAM HOSIE

Much has been written about Jasper Conran’s five-star Villa Mabrouka since it opened last year. The boutique hotel in Tangier, Morocco, has a “ravishing garden”; it is the “magical resurrection” of a property that was once home to Yves Saint Laurent. To get to the heart of the matter, though, is to avoid such lyrical whimsies. The magic behind Villa Mabrouka is more straightforward. “It’s like a summit of all the powerful gays in fashion and media in the world,” one colleague summarised. And this, dear reader, makes it a very important place indeed.

Villa Mabrouka may call itself a hotel, but it’s really more of a club. Impossibly chic, inscrutable, as if it were members-only. As with most properties that come into homosexual hands, it’s not enough to appear exclusive simply at the point of entry. These aren’t properties that are restricted to the super-rich; instead, they operate a more cultural sort of elitism. “No riff-raff” here means something quite different to “no riff-raff” at a Bulgari hotel. It means they won’t let in anyone who doesn’t know who Wolfgang Tillmans is.

To a degree, gay culture has always been elitist. Wit and erudition have always been held in disproportionately high esteem, as have near-impossible beauty standards. Moreover, snobbery will appear within any culture that has become dominant: where there is structure, there are echelons. Today, gay culture is no longer on the fringes, it’s slap bang in the middle of things. From technology and politics (Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Wes Streeting) to media and the arts (Andy Cohen, Troye Sivan, Alan Hollinghurst, Ncuti Gatwa, Jeremy O Harris), gay men are running the show. And those beneath them — whether gay or not — seek to ape their glamorous ways.