In east London, volunteers leave groceries on doorsteps for the elderly or walk dogs for those now told to stay indoors. Charity workers take calls to the helpline from their own front rooms. In Manchester, condoms that used to be given out in bars are now stuffed into envelopes to post. A new befriending scheme for the over-70s is nearly ready. Elsewhere, an entire online scene is forming: Zoom room clubbing, virtual gyms, a community centre with space to talk and to grieve.

This is queer Britain in 2020; a community mobilised once again, this time in the face of the coronavirus. Isolation is not new here. It is the cold air from everyone’s past: the closet. Many are not novices to community efforts either, having gathered on tiny marches in the 1970s just to be seen, or galvanised in the 1980s for a pandemic that was allowed to happen — or more recently, marching for Pride, or signing a petition against threats to hard-won rights.

Today’s threat is to everyone. But pandemics exploit inequality, and for LGBTQ people the instinct to shield and fight back is felt as much as ever. It has led to the launch of a London “mutual aid” group to provide targeted support during the coronavirus outbreak, as organisers fear the most vulnerable within this community are at particular risk from poverty, isolation and serious illness.

It forms part of a nationwide effort from a vast range of LGBTQ businesses, charities, individuals, and voluntary organisations to protect lives, mental health, and human connection during the worst pandemic since the AIDS crisis.

Mainstream mutual aid groups have sprung up across the country to help others in the local area, but as these are based on locality rather than any particular community, Carla Ecola, a homelessness worker, spotted a gap through which some could fall and cofounded the London LGBTIQ+ COVID-19 Mutual Aid group. Read more via Buzzfeed