Manchester's Dark Underbelly.

 

The Undercroft on Rochdale Canal

There have been reports in the Manchester Evening News of holiday-makers on canal boats complaining of seeing people engaged in sex acts on the canal towpaths in Manchester as they sail past.

People have been lured to parts of the Rochdale canal for sex and then beaten up and robbed. Teenage rent-boys are also known to work in the area. According to the M.E.N., the Undercroft is well publicised as a gay cruising and public sex area on websites. This is the dark underbelly of life in the city of Manchester which under a Labour controlled council, has become identified as a "queer city". Many of its politicians can't see much further than Canal Street and its "gay village."

Although parts of Manchester are known for being areas of social deprivation and child poverty, when he was appointed the Lord Mayor of Manchester in 2016, Carl Austin-Behan, said he would be spending the next twelve months in office to highlight "prejudice towards the trans community" and to make HIV testing more readily available. He was deselected in his Burnage ward in 2017. Some said his deselection was due to his lack of visibility in the ward. He now works as the LGBT adviser to the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham.