Prizes, surprises, gay horses, cami-knickers, schoolmarms and cocks in frocks

John-John, Ange, Emma, Paul and I had our glad-rags on (well, in Miss Bourgeois's case her best cami-knickers - very "Kit Kat Club"!) for the much-anticipated fifth birthday of "London's peerless gay literary salon" Polari, hosted by "proud Dad" Mr Paul Burston (of course).







Once more resplendent in a flamboyant array of costumes, he introduced to our star-studded audience (including the very lovely Max Wallis, Steven Appleby, Lauren Henderson/Rebecca Chance, Carl Oprey/Charlie Bauer, [a Louise Brooks-bewigged] VG Lee, Toby Tobes, Peter Daniels, DJ Connell, Terry Ronald, North Morgan, Vicky Ryder et al) yet another fine ensemble of talent, for our delectation...



Opening the show, we had the welcome return of Mr Neil Alexander, whose pithy (and sometimes filthy) poetry is always a joy. Such as this:

Fitlad
I’m gonna ruin U fella,
he says
Give yer a good
sandpapering.
Gonna stubble rub U
black n blue.
He’s all talk.
White paint
on grey flannel,
a tongue
licking, thumb
clicking Adidas Adonis.
Dog tag,
ankle tagged,
a number two boss
back and sides:
his hot cockney ring
finger
wheedling me in,
my Veet fleeced cheeks,
his Lynx kissed skin.
Open up wide, he says.
Suck my big cock.
He never mentions
Kylie - or his PhD
on Iris Murdoch.

Fab!



Without further ado, it was the turn of a Polari virgin (although I'm not sure "virgin" is really in her repertoire!) - Mr/Miss Jeff Kristian, host of many a salacious evening at Soho's Molly Moggs cabaret bar, and TV celebrity drag queen-turned-author. His debut novel Where D'Ya Put Yer Willy? sounds an absolute hoot, from the piece he read. Just the novel's description alone is enough to make you giggle:

"Upon the sudden murder of Jewish drag queen Letitia Von Schabernacket, closeted Essex geezer Michael is left a small fortune and fifty per-cent shares in a notorious Soho drag club, Sugar Sugar. But to inherit, he must become a drag queen at the club for six weeks under the guiding hands of his new drag sisters Connie and Chastity, as they try to hide him from the violent Essex mafia and unravel the devious plan that’s hideously thrown them all together."

Camp as tits, dear! Apparently, the book began life a couple of years ago as a planned musical/radio show and evolved into print, and the songs from book will soon be available as an album on i-Tunes. Talk about multi-media!



Following the shower of sequins and lip-gloss of Mr Kristian, the equally flamboyant - in her "Swinging Sixties"-style "London Underground" frock - Miss Cherry Smyth grabbed our attention with her unique, thought-provoking and entertaining brand of poetry. Here she is in person, reading at a poetry event earlier this year:

Cherry Smyth at Open Ealing Poetry

The poems she read for us were a feast for the senses, and Ms Smyth is a lovely woman. Her latest poetry collection is Test, Orange available from Pindrop Press.



Paul was about to announce the fag-break, when it was his turn for a surprise! Our Ange, together with various cohorts among the "Children Of Polari" who use F***book (I don't, and I was not directly involved) had cooked up a big presentation for the fifth anniversary of Polari, and in recognition of Paul's sterling and tireless work in getting such a multifarious miscellany of authors and performers together to entertain us every month. Champagne, a card with specially-commissioned artwork by Jane Eccles (below), a book of photographs from Polari through the years, a t-shirt and much more in a "goody-bag" of treats. Applause all round, I think!



After the break (all-too-brief it turned out, as the queue at the bar downstairs - it has draught rather than bottled beer - meant I stumbled back in after the lights had gone down) it was time for another superb treat!



In an astounding pas de deux, BAFTA-winner Daniel Rigby (who was so brilliant as Eric Morecambe in the BBC dramatised biography Eric and Ernie) and writer Robbie Hudson gave a hilarious (and unexpected, as it was not on the Southbank's bill for the evening) performance of their Radio 4 comedy-drama Warhorses of Letters - a series of love letters between two gay horses(!) on opposing sides during the Napoleonic Wars. Of course. Letters that include this opening gambit by the love-struck Copenhagen:

"Dear Marengo brackets Napoleon's horse close brackets,

I've never written a letter like this before. You probably get hundreds of them and this one might never arrive anyway, because of the wars smiley face, but I would never forgive myself if I didn't send it and so here it is. I have seen pictures of you. You are literally an oil painting. I don't know how you could look so amazing with that dumpy Napoleon on your back.

...You are an Arabian too, aren't you? Maybe we are distant cousins even! That doesn't matter for horses of course. I am only two and you are at least twelve, but that also doesn't matter for horses, as you know. Anyway, people tell me I look older than two.

I am a racehorse. It is so lucky that I didn't become a warhorse, or we'd have been mortal enemies, and that would be a nightmare. The word nightmare always makes me think of lady horses that want to seduce me. Lady horses, or mares, are always trying to seduce me. They don't get very far.

Maybe you are only interested in lady horses brackets mares close brackets, but when I saw the pictures, my equine gaydar pointed due south wink.

I hope you reply.

Love,

Copenhagen, kiss kiss hoofprint

And so it goes on - excellent and hilarious stuff, indeed. We were in stitches!

The BBC apparently thinks so highly of it that the series - featuring Stephen Fry as the snobbish Marengo and Mr Rigby as Copenhagen - returns to the airwaves on Wednesday 28th November. Listen to some clips.



How does one follow that? With another "double-act" of course, as our headline reader Susie Boyt [she of the Judy Garland obsession that led me to be able to wear the diminutive diva's hat at Polari in February 2009] was joined by the effervescent Suzi Feay ["two Susies for the price of one!"] to play out the slightly twitchy conversation between a schoolmarm and one of her over-enthusiastic pupils. Here is just a snippet of the passage that she/they read from her forthcoming novel The Small Hours:

To know someone well without a scrap of evidence. Was there a hero bold who held Miss McGee’s heart? What, for that matter, was her daily lunch routine? Of course, it was probably vegetable soup, of a refined calibre, naturally, half a sandwich to follow, on some exquisite bread, but it wasn’t quite the same as actually knowing.

Of course, Miss McGee didn't for a second give anything away. Her garments, well fashioned from high class materials in plain shades, were almost extravagantly nondescript: skirts, jerseys, neat shift-style day dresses, shoes, nothing creased or mended or outlandish, yet what they said, these assorted, irreproachable clothes, depended on the way they were worn, and the way they were worn was exactly what it was impossible to read. There was nothing in her you could pin down: her hair of uncertain colour, her skin of indeterminate years. She was a sort of mouse de luxe; in fact she was Supermouse. She could be anything you wanted.

‘It’s nearly time, isn’t it?’ Harriet said. The clock’s black hands on the table between them could not tell a lie. ‘Nearly time,’ echoed Miss McGee, with an indulgent quarter smile.

And then Harriet could not wait a moment longer, her walls came down, her banks broke. ‘You, you’ve just helped me so much,’ she cried out to the woman opposite her who had loved her more than anyone she knew. ‘I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. Wouldn’t want to be. Thank you! Thank you so so much! I thought endlessly about a present, the perfect thing, but nothing seemed good enough – good enough! - and then, I suppose, what I’m certain I knew you’d most like from me was nothing at all, and so I reined myself in. Which doesn’t exactly come naturally, as you know. I do wish I’d brought something now. For my own sake in a way. When I act against my feelings I always get into hot water.’ She spoke the simple words as though a motto she had memorised.

Harriet closed her eyes briefly. Miss McGee had torn away great swathes of unfactual landscape, they had done it together. The colour of everything was compromised when the world failed you at every turn. Miss McGee saw this completely and she saw just as strongly that it wasn’t at all true. They resituated things, they resuscitated and reframed. They had a rampage. Both admitted after time that their subject had a lot of potential; this child they were raising together could be powerful and headstrong - some of its judgements were entirely tyrannical - but these could be good things.

‘And I saw such a beautiful bowl from the nineteen fifties, quite severe, architectural somehow, very dark brown with a thin white line beneath the lip. It was so discreet. And I very nearly got it for you. I would have done, but there was a tiny chip at the base I wasn’t happy about, thought it might tempt fate somehow. Not even sure what I mean by that. Send me scurrying back before the year was out perhaps. Wish I had got it now, perhaps it’s not too late, but anyway, for now, a million thank-yous!’

Miss McGee moved her head a fraction. Was there a twelve degree upsurge in her thinnish, shallow smile? Was she about to utter, ‘De rien!’ or ‘The pleasure, my good fellow, was all mine?’ Or ‘Oh! Come Come, My Dear’. Miss McGee, intelligent, Kleinian, remote had never once called her My Dear. It would have been to them both utterly scandalous.

Harriet had not quite stopped talking. One minute twenty two, she saw.

‘It’s odd in a way but for years and years, when you think about it, I put my happiness completely in your hands, didn’t I? And for some of those years, probably for most of them you were the most important person in my life and I suppose, you know, what I’m trying to say, I think, is that’s a very big thing to lie between two people.’

Miss McGee nodded. ‘Yes it is,’ she said.

‘And I suppose, I can’t help thinking was it very, I don’t know, very mad of me almost to throw myself into things so, so fully, to give myself over to it so completely, the process? I mean I’m sure not everyone does that … Of course, obviously it may have helped things to work, helped the things we were talking about to … to take, but I don’t know…’

Miss McGee looked at her with a sort of shimmering frankness. ‘It was brave of you,’ she said. ‘It was very brave.’

Tears started in the suburbs of Harriet’s eyes. She spoke slowly and with emphasis. ‘Well, you say brave, but really it was you... what I mean is, it was you who made throwing myself into things seem like the wisest and the safest, seem like the only thing to do.’

There. There was their perfect ending gleaming lustrous before them.

Both women exhaled. Harriet blinked. All it would take now was for her to rise from her chair and murmur another thank you and issue a firm goodbye, then walk clearly and with strong direction out of this room once and for all. But, it transpired, there was a postscript. She was still sitting firmly in her seat. She had always been hopeless at secrets. Well that was not strictly true but - Besides, could you really, sensibly, squander your last thirty seven-seconds with the best person you knew?’

Intriguing - and brilliant!

It was not over yet, folks. It was time for the announcement of the winner of the Polari First Book Prize 2012! Suzi Feay joined Paul B and Linda Riley of Square Peg Media (who donated the £1000 prize) to make the presentation. And the proud winner - and he looked genuinely stunned by the announcement - is the lovely John McCullough, poet and author of the excellent collection The Frost Fairs. A well-deserved honour!



As Paul B said: "The judges were impressed with the polish and precision of the language, the confidence of the writing and the scope of the work. The Frost Fairs isn’t a one-note collection, but one that covers many themes and strikes many chords, from modern transatlantic relationships to hidden gay lives from the past. It’s also surprisingly mature for a first book - a debut which doesn’t feel like a debut.”

Here is just one poem from this fine work - and possibly one of the best evocations of Brighton I have read:

Reading Frank O’Hara on the Brighton Express
I might believe we are stationary.
It’s only everything out there kindly
hurtling past, the grey verticals of Clapham
revealed as bars of a song. I might lend my ear
to catch cirrus chit-chat then touch down
at Gatwick and watch parked cars nuzzle
in tidy rows. Which reminds me to sort
my manners out, to raise a hand to waving trees
whizzing backwards, plastic bags in their branches
brilliant flags announcing carnivals
in Balcombe, Wivelsfield, Hassocks.

I could trill like a starling myself, bless everything
outside and within this case of human fireworks:
the silver-chained lads probing Burger King bags
like lucky dips; the Tannoy woman who is Our Lady,
surely, with a mobile altar of Ribena and Coke;
the suits with Guardians hiding Heat magazine.

I might realize Brighton doesn’t exist,
is being invented for our arrival,
the shops plugged in, the prom laid down,
the smiles carved in random pebbles
there where buses have names
so we can get knocked down by Dusty Springfield.

I could conjure up crowds auditioning
for the North Laine, all dreadlocks and posturing,
benefits and big schemes, with different kinds
of queen walking different kinds of dog –
vital clutter that dashes or repairs
Brighton dreams, that brings death or a boon
for the West Pier, swaying over the surf.

It all glides on towards salt-caked houses
and the united panes of Betjeman’s station,
though it’s not him but you, Frank, who I picture
in the station café, coughing your lungs out
above a latte as you eye the black waiter.

In just a moment I shall pass the gates
of heaven and find you,
my memories of travel left in the ticket machine
as we stroll out down Queens Road,
the sun on our skin, the sea shining so whitely
that we stop and stare and keep on staring.

Breath-taking.





With resounding applause for Mr McCullough, and for the evening's readers, it was time, reluctantly for the evening to end with the usual mingling - it is true what they all say, Polari is one of the best evenings in town, and the crowd is definitely one of the friendliest anywhere!

Our next outing (because of Xmas) is early - on 10th December, and among the crackers (geddit?) on the bill is Bethan Roberts, author of My Policeman. Many more will be announced soon, no doubt...

As always. I am looking forward to it!

UPDATE! (20:45): Just found out that "A Very Polari Christmas" will also include the delightful Helen Smith, Diriye Osman, the fantabulosa Marcus Reeves and... the return of the magnificent Celine Hispiche!

I'm looking forward to it even more now!

Polari