A mattress of one's own, literary Lesbians, popperbating - we're gonna do it anyway!

Braving the cold and drear that this time of year always brings, John-John and I trolled into town on Wednesday for the last shout of "London's premier gay literary salon", Polari, in 2021 - the culmination of its fourteenth year, indeed. Our hostess-with-the-mostest Paul Burston took to the stage at Heaven nightclub to the strains of I'm Still Here by Eartha Kitt. A tribute to Stephen Sondheim, but also by way of an introduction to his personal recollections - on this World AIDS Day - of the struggles he and fellow campaigners of the early '80s encountered, in those terrifying early days, to get recognition and viable medical assistance for gay men in the "firing line" of that pandemic; and with the huge emotional strain of all the losses we all suffered.

Read the full piece at Paul's blog.

Taking up the baton the marvellous Neil Bartlett, a genius of the literary world and a Polari stalwart, read an extract from his recently published collection of tales (all stories based upon his imagined histories of various places he has lived) Address Book - a hugely emotional and touching recollection of a grimly homophobic era, revolving around the sheer joy and freedom a "queer dancing-queen” in 1987 feels when he finally gets “a room of one’s fucking own” and, braving all the public hatred, abuse, stigma and discrimination he endures on a daily basis, goes to buy his own, his very first, mattress. It sounds mundane, but by gawd, the tears were rolling down my face. I love Neil Bartlett's writing!

Here he is, talking about the book and how he came to write it.

Neil Bartlett talks about Address Book

Purchase your copy from Inkandescent Books.

It is always a joy to hear our next reader Diana Souhami - even if this time round, she read from prompt cards throughout - with her encyclopaedic knowledge of the lives and loves of historial Lesbians. She read for us a synopsis of her magnum opus No Modernism Without Lesbians, as here:

Polari presents Diana Souhami

Weirdly, other than our readers, Paul B and the ever-lovely Justin David, there were no regulars with which to shmooze during the break, so with a top-up of booze and a fag - time for part 2...

A former journalist, writer Adam Zmith recently produced his first book Deep Sniff, an in-depth history of Amyl Nitrite - better known as poppers - and its interwoven connection with the LGBT community. It's a convoluted tale, indeed! None other than the brilliant fellow author Jonathan Kemp reviewed it for Queer Guru, so I'll let him take up the tale:

From their humble beginnings in mid-nineteenth century, introduced as a source of relief for angina sufferers, to their ubiquity within gay life, from dancefloor to bedroom, Zmith recounts it all with lusty relish. He introduces us to Antoine Jérome Balard of Montpellier, France, the man who started it all when, in 1844, he passed nitrogen fumes through amyl alcohol and discovered that inhaling the resulting pungent vapour caused his face to redden and dilated his blood vessels, lowering his blood pressure. At the time, he couldn’t think what earthly use it would be, but twenty-two years later, a young Scotsman, Thomas Lauder Brunton, used the vapour to relieve his angina patients’ pain. Pretty soon, it was being sold in small glass vials that you ‘popped’ to release the fumes.

Recounting poppers’ history is interesting enough in itself but understanding their place in history is where Zmith excels. Using episodes in the history of poppers, he explores, imagines and extrapolates on, among other things, gender norms, popperbators, science fiction, and the AIDS crisis. He adorns his book with gems of stories – like that of Roland Chemist on Praed Street near Paddington Station, London, who sold 185,700 ampoules of amyl nitrite in one year, compared to Boots Chemists in Piccadilly who sold around 288 ampoules. We learn about W. Jay Freezer the man who marketed poppers to gay men specifically – establishing the magazine Drummer to serve as a platform for advertising the product to its hedonistic readers. He dreamed of poppers being sold alongside shampoo and nail polish remover in supermarkets. Then, of course, AIDS hit, and anything associated with pleasure-seeking were shunned. For a while, amyl nitrite was considered the cause of what became known as HIV.

There’s a rich diversity of ideas, facts and musings here. Alongside an account of popperbating and a section on queer utopias as imagined by sci-fi writers, there’s a chapter on the police raids in 1986/87 on London’s iconic queer heritage public house, The Royal Vauxhall Tavern, to seize the poppers being sold there. The seven uniformed officers wore unnecessary surgical gloves. In protest at their provocative prophylactics, Lily Savage, who was on stage at the time, gave the Old Bill a Scouse mouthful and told the crowd to riot, earning herself a night in the cell.

Fascinating stuff - I need a sniff now!

Then, in a flurry of chiffon and attitude - it was time for our "headline act"...

Son of a Tutu, for it is he/she/they, is an award-winning drag queen and LGBTQ+ activist (who also landed a role in the film version of Everyone's Talking About Jamie). She chose her songs carefully for the occasion - recalling Neil Bartlett's piece about gay men being verbally abused by straight strangers, she said she needed to sing Sweet Caroline "to reclaim it from the football thugs".

And, reminding the audience of the fact that Labi Siffre's anthem of resistance was not, in fact, to do with racial discrimination (despite it being adopted by anti-apartheid campaigners), but about his own life experiences as a gay man, this:

Son of a Tutu - Something Inside So Strong

​Not a dry eye in the house.

And, with the customary curtain call, that was it for the year...

We look forward to the treats in store in 2022 - we love Polari!

Anarcho-syndicalists, Sapphic Paris and QUILTBAG

Threatened new restrictions or not, John-John and I were determined to "form a bubble" and get to Friday's outing of "London's peerless gay literary salon" Polari at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern - especially as the readers were favourites of ours; two of the most distinguished writers of their genre, Philip Hensher and Diana Souhami.

By happy circumstance we were seated at a shared table not with complete strangers, but with fellow longtime Polari-ites, our chums Emma and Toby. The "bubble" extended...

Our faboo host Paul Burston opened proceedings with typical aplomb, and it was on with the show!

Our opening reader, the engaging Philip Hensher entertained us with some extracts from his (somewhat delayed due to COVID) new novel A Small Revolution in Germany, the complex tale of a group of typically pompous and over-confident teenage self-styled "anarcho-syndicalist" radicals rebelling against their mediocre school, the Establishment, and indeed anything that they perceive as "getting in the way" of some kind of imagined worldwide revolution, including CND - whose meetings they (amusingly, from one of the pieces Philip read) disrupt with gleeful cacophony and bags of flour. Of course, as the story unfolds, it would appear that the passion for rebellion has faded from most of the group, with the exception of the "anti-hero", the book's narrator Spike and his Chilean-exile lover Joaquin.

From the review by Elizabeth Lowry in The Guardian:

 ...“From now on,” announces a smitten Spike, “I resolved to devote my life to the liberation of the urban proletariat.”

We may smile knowingly, but he means it, whereas the others don’t. The novel moves easily between Thatcherite Britain and the present, by which time everyone except Spike and Joaquin has shed his or her youthful convictions. Ogden has become a journalist with a facile line in wokeness, Kate is a mediocre but lauded poet, Milne a peer and QC, and James Frinton is not just home secretary, but has turned into a Tory (though as someone points out, ‘he had to do that before he could be turned into the Home Secretary’). His one-time friends are proof, as Spike remarks, that “there is so much difference between the espousal of principles and the living of lives”. The political purity of his beliefs, on the other hand, “has been untainted by any deals with what may be achieved now, today, this minute”, although he adds ambiguously: “I had kept my principles. I had remained what I was, a boy.” Have the others sold out for the sake of power, or simply grown up?

You'll need to purchase a copy of the book to find out...

With her typical articulate and wry humour, the lovely Diana Souhami introduced us to what she has promoted as the last of her "Di's Dykes" series of acclaimed biographies of famous lesbians [that includes Gluck, Radclyffe Hall, Violet Trefusis and Vita SackvilleWest] - No Modernism Without Lesbians, a study of the interwoven lives of arty lesbians in inter-war Paris, and their contribution to the "making of a new world" (that was sadly interrupted by the advent of war).

From her introduction to the book:

In the decades before the Second World War, many creative women who loved women fled the repressions and expectations of their home towns, such as Washington and London, and formed a like-minded community in Paris. They wrote and published what they wanted, lived as they chose and were at the vanguard of modernism, the shift into twentieth-century ways of seeing and saying. I focus on the lives and contribution of Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein – three were American, one was English. All rebelled against outworn art and attitudes. Sylvia Beach started the bookshop Shakespeare and Company and published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no commercial publisher could or would. Bryher, born Winifred Ellerman, daughter of the richest man in England, used her inheritance to fund new writing and film. Natalie Barney aspired to live her life as a work of art and make Paris the sapphic centre of the Western world. Gertrude Stein furthered the careers of modernist painters and writers and broke the mould of English prose. All had women lovers whom they kissed, and they changed the human mind to boot...

..."England was consciously refusing the twentieth century", Gertrude Stein said. America enforced prohibition of alcohol as well as censorship of literature and art. Lesbians with voices to be heard, who would not collude with silence and lying about their existence, got out if they could in order to speak out. Paris was waiting: the boulevards and bars, good food, low rents. It seemed on a different planet from London. Paris was where they formed their own community, fled the repressions and expectations of their fathers, took same-sex lovers, and painted, wrote and published what they wanted."Paris", Gertrude said, "was where the twentieth century was", "the place that suited those of us that were to create the twentieth-century art and literature". Indigenous Parisians held their traditional views but did not mind these foreigners with alternative lives. Gertrude Stein said they respected art and letters: it was not just what Paris gave, she said, "it was all it did not take away".

Modernism would not have taken the shape it did without the lesbians who gravitated to Paris at that time. There had been nothing like it since Sappho and the Island of Lesbos...

Stirring stuff!

No Modernism Without Lesbians is available from Gay's The Word bookshop.

After a break for a fag and a (socially-distanced, be-masked) mingle, it was time for part two, as Paul convened a panel discussion and Q&A session with our "stars".

Diana commented on her slight sense of progress at the fact her book was practically encouraged - by a mainstream publisher, yet - to include the word "Lesbian" in its title. An achievement in itself, the panel noted, in these days of multiple acronyms and self-identities, where the words "gay" and "lesbian" seem to be treated with something resembling disdain - a point I do so agree with!

Returning to the introduction to her book:

I duck the initialism of the present age: the LGBTQIA, the QUILTBAG (queer or questioning, undecided, intersex, lesbian, trans, bisexual, asexual or allied, gay or genderqueer) plus the +. Added recently are P and K: P for pansexual or polygamous and K for kink. And now there is prescriptive use of the pronoun ‘they’ for a person resistant to he or she...There are but twenty-six letters in the Roman alphabet and life is short...all the initials in the alphabet will not help in what I hope shines through: the uniqueness, the utter singularity of each individual life...For, of course, what matters from A to Z is not what you are, but how you are what you are, and the contribution made.

Amen, sister!

Questions and answers dealt with, and with resounding applause for another brilliant evening's entertainment, there was hardly time enough to say our farewells [and for me to do a little "vox-pop" of praise for Polari for some kind of podcast being organised by the lovely Sophia Blackwell, accomplished poet and fellow longtime Polari-ite] before the bar closed and it was time to wend our way home again.

Too soon.

Apparently, the next outing on 25th November will be another "Polari at Heaven" extravaganza - and that is definitely something to look forward to! Can't wait.

We love Polari.

---

Footnote:

"Di's Dykes":

[Clockwise from top left: Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Natalie Barney]

Diving into memories, prostitutes and profiteers, gangland jeopardy, a prize, a pansy, a wide Homburg hat and a long blue coat

I made a welcome (and long overdue) return visit to "London's peerless gay literary salon" Polari last night, and I'm so pleased I did - a truly top-class evening of thought-provoking literary gems [right at the start of the London Literature Festival, appropriately], and Sophie Ellis Bexter's mum presenting the prestigious prize pictured above, to boot!



Although the room (our usual 5th floor function suite, rather than the cavernous and character-free Purcell Room where previous Polari First Book Prize ceremonies have been held) was packed out, I was surprised that apart from or hostess-with-the-mostest Paul Burston, some of our readers, plus stalwarts Suzi Feay (at whose table I sat), VG Lee, Anny Knight and sexy Lexi Gregory, I hardly recognised anyone. It could be "the curse of Friday" I suppose; so many people have other plans that probably don't involve gay literature...

...but for those of us who love writing, it was a joy.



Opening the show - admittedly in a rather dark way - was the surprisingly cute Roelof Bakker [I always find Dutch men sexy], who is a regular contributor to the Unthology series of collated short stories, now on volume #9. The review on The Short Story website described it thus:

The last short story in the anthology, Yellow by Roelof Bakker is a touching work exploring loss... the story follows the narrator as he comes to terms with the death of his partner, Marek [who drowned]. Loss is a popular subject, but Bakker offers precise prose that avoids cliché, giving us original lines that bubble up beautifully through the paragraphs and are full of emotive veracity: ‘I’m only happy when I swim. Bits of Marek live on in the water, traces of his DNA remain wherever he’s done the butterfly, the breast-stroke. When I dive in, I delve into the past, back into his arms. Memories bob to the surface.’

Truly beautiful...



An equally tragic theme was to follow - as feminist writer and journalist Julie Bindel (thankfully injecting some of her wry humour into an otherwise alarming subject) gave us an insight into her research findings behind her new book The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth. From a synopsis she wrote for The Spectator:

We’ve become accustomed to thinking of prostitution as a legitimate way of earning a living, even ‘empowering’ for women. We call it ‘sex work’ and look away. We should not.

For the last three years I’ve been investigating prostitution worldwide to test the conventional wisdom of it being a career choice, as valid as any other. I conducted 250 interviews in 40 countries, interviewed 50 survivors of the sex trade, and almost all of them told me the same story: don’t believe the ‘happy hooker’ myth you see on TV. In almost every case it’s actually slavery. The women who work as prostitutes are in hock and in trouble. They’re in need of rescue just as much as any of the more fashionable victims of modern slavery.

One of the most disturbing discoveries I made was that the loudest voices calling for legalisation and normalisation of prostitution are the people who profit from it: pimps, punters and brothel owners. They have succeeded in speaking for the women under their control. The people who know the real story about the sex trade have been gagged by a powerful lobby of deluded ‘liberal’ ideologues and sex-trade profiteers.

She went on to emphasise how those very same "liberal" voices who defend prostitution as a "life choice" - an oppressed form of sexuality which deserves "freedom" from legal restrictions, akin to the struggle for LGBT equality - are actually further repressing and endangering the lives of the very people they appear to represent. Powerful stuff.



Completing our "triumvirate of terror", the erudite Veronica "V.A" Fearon took to the stage with her customary swagger and her disarming smile, to read from her newest novel featuring the "fearless" gangs negotiator Dani, The Thirsty Stranger. She opened with a suitably "in-character" extract in which our "anti-hero" attempts to seduce an equally sassy woman, a photographer who has no time for her smooth-talking chat-up lines. In the second we were given an insight into a side of Dani that might be less expected; as the maelstrom of dangerous situations she has got herself into bring her an unfamiliar sensation: fear.

As ever, Veronica's work is completely engrossing, and I was very glad to be able to take a breath when "half-time" arrived. After a nip to the bar and a fag, it was time for part two - ding ding!



Without further ado, it was time for our Suzi to take the stage to introduce the Sixth Annual Polari First Book Prize. She read a synopsis of each of the titles on this year’s shortlist "which brings together three male and three female writers hailing from Kuwait to Cardiff, whose eclectic body of work offers a range of perspectives on the LGBT experience":

• Expecting – Chitra Ramaswamy (Saraband)
• Guapa – Saleem Haddad (Europa Editions UK)
• We Go Around In The Night And Are Consumed By Fire - Jules Grant (Myriad)
• Straight Jacket - Matthew Todd (Bantam)
• The Vegetarian Tigers of Paradise – Crystal Jeans (Honno)
• Jerusalem Ablaze – Orlando Ortega-Medina (Cloud Lodge)

Then she handed over to the adorable Miss Janet Ellis to announce the prize winner. After some encouraging and apposite words of support and encouragement for everyone who took part she opened the envelope and welcomed the rather buff Saleem Haddad to accept the prize.



He looked thrilled!



Our next reader Paul Harfleet simply exudes charm. The pioneering campaigner [he was one of the keynote speakers at 2010's "Say No To Hate" rally that I attended] behind The Pansy Project - which encourages victims of homophobia to plant a pansy at the site of their abuse, photos of which he collates along with a description of the incident on the website - he has latterly turned his estimable talents to education, by way of a semi-autobiographical (and beautifully illustrated by the author) children's book Pansy Boy. And here is a video introduction to it (which, last night, he narrated for us):

Paul Harfleet - Pansy Boy

Lovely.



And finally, it was time for our "star turn", Diana Souhami - the masterful researcher and biographer of many a famous lesbian, and dryly witty reader - to entertain us with a faboo audio-visual overview of the life, loves and work of the artist Gluck ["Gluck: no prefix, suffix or quotes."], who was the subject of Ms Souhami's earliest published work, and who was celebrated most recently in a retrospective exhibition at The Fine Arts Society during LGBT History Month in February 2017 (with another exhibition to come this autumn in Brighton). Here is a little snippet:

Throughout her adult life she dressed in men’s clothes, pulled the wine corks and held the door for true ladies to pass first. An acquaintance seeing her dining alone remarked that she looked like "The Ninth Earl", a description that she liked. She had a last for her shoes at John Lobb’s the Royal bootmakers, got her shirts from Jermyn Street, had her hair cut at Truefitt gentlemen’s hairdressers in Old Bond Street and blew her nose on large linen handkerchiefs monogrammed with a G. In the early decades of the twentieth century, when men alone wore the trousers, her appearance made heads turn. Her father, a conservative and conventional man was utterly dismayed by her ‘outré clobber’, her mother referred to a ‘kink in the brain’ which she hoped would pass, and both were uneasy at going to the theatre in 1918 with Gluck wearing a wide Homburg hat and long blue coat, her hair cut short and a dagger hanging at her belt.

She did several self-portraits, all of them mannish. There was a jaunty and defiant one in beret and braces – stolen in 1981 – and another, now in the National Portrait Gallery, which shows her as arrogant and disdainful. She painted it when suffering acutely from the tribulations of love. A couple of others she destroyed when depressed about her life.

She dressed as she did not simply to make her sexual orientation public, though that of course she achieved. By her appearance she set herself apart from society, alone with what she called the ‘ghost’ of her artistic ambition. And at a stroke she distanced herself from her family’s expectations, which were that she should be educated and cultured but pledged to hearth and home. They would have liked her to marry well, which meant a man from a similar Jewish background to hers – preferably one of her cousins – and to live, as wife and mother, a normal happy life. By her ‘outré clobber’ Gluck said no to all that; for who in his right mind would court a woman in a man’s suit? Her rebelliousness cut her father to the quick and he thought it a pose. But however provocative her behaviour there was no way he would cease to provide for her, his concept of family loyalty and obligation was too strong.

Courtesy of her private income she lived in style with staff – a housekeeper, cook and maids – to look after her. She always kept a studio in Cornwall. In the 1920s and 30s she lived in Bolton House, a large Georgian house in Hampstead village. After the war she settled in the Chantry House Steyning with Edith Shackleton Heald, journalist, essayist and lover of the poet W.B.Yeats in his twilight years. Both residences had elegantly designed detached studios...

...Mercurial, maddening, conspicuous and rebellious, she inspired great love and profound dislike. Perhaps what she most feared was indifference – the coldest death. Her dedication to work was total, even through her fallow years. Her severance from gender, family and religion, her resistance to influence from any particular artist or school of painting, her refusal to exhibit her work except in ‘one-man’ shows were all ways of protecting her artistic integrity. She desired to earn her death through the quality of her work: "I do want to reach that haven having a prize in my hand… Something of the trust that was reposed in me when I was sent out…" In reaching her destination with her paintings as her prize she took a circuitous path – unmapped, thorny and entirely her own.

Gluck's romantic entanglements were many and varied, including Romaine Brooks, society florist Constance Spry, and "the love of her life" the American socialite Nesta Obermer, with whom she appeared in her most famous portrait in the Art Deco era, Medallion (which she referred to as the "YouWe" picture):



Utterly, absolutely brilliant.



Thus, with the resounding applause for our assembled readers ringing in our ears, it was sadly the end of another great evening.

Next month's outing (on Friday 24th November, and part of the "Being a Man" festival season) will be the official Tenth Birthday(!) celebration of Polari, and promises to be another corker - with Jonathan Harvey, Topher Campbell, J Fergus Evans, Alexis Gregory and Carey Wood all announced. I can't wait!

I love Polari.

Dusty at the boutique, our favourite trans prozzie, lesbians through history, a gay poem and a moment of mourning for the death of old Soho

[I'm not quite so old as to remember the pub like this]

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Whatever happened to The Theatre Bar? Friendly, reasonably-priced, old-fashioned, comfortable - the only gay venue in London where you could hear the likes of Ethel Merman, Peggy Lee, Shirley Bassey, John Barrowman, Liza Minnelli, Bernadette Peters, Dorothy Squires and innumerable "songs from the shows" being played night after night? The place where we first met all those characters from the theatre world such as our favourite roller-skating drag queen Eb-on-knee; the artiste soon to be known as Mrs Moore; stage-hands and wig-makers; and even Graham Norton? The place where I won (singlehandedly) the pub music quiz? Whatever happened to our hosts Wezley (aka Cassidy Connors), or Rupert or Graeme? Or regulars Tom, Roddy and Marc? Long gone, I'm afraid. The Theatre Bar closed when its "mother-ship" downstairs the West Central pub (formerly the White Bear or Polar Bear, now known as Ku Bar) disappeared for a while and "went straight". More's the pity.

Why the reminiscing? Well, the new incarnation of what was formerly the West End's campest bar is called Light Lounge, and this was the chosen venue for "London's peerless gay literary salon" Polari's much-vaunted "return to its Soho roots", that I managed (painfully) to stagger along to on Monday. As a location for such an event it is most definitely found wanting. Gone is any semblance of the illustrious revelry that marked out this most historic (and perhaps slightly seedy) of corners in Soho/Chinatown, in favour of shiny surfaces and (the nowadays ubiquitous) low banquette seating. Gone is any notion of an affordable night out, in favour of drinks at £9 a pop - cocktails are, no matter how "fancily" packaged, only tiny measures of booze, and don't last long; and the venue's cider (or beer) is served in miniscule bottles for the same price as a pint everywhere else in the real world, including the Ku Bar downstairs. Ambience? Clinical. Comfort? Negligible. Toilets? Incomprehensibly awkward [flush behind the seat? How very British Rail.] Value for money? Ludicrous.

Worst of all, many of the punters - some Polari regulars (including me, Paul, little Tony, Bryanne and Simon, as well as Anny, Jayne, Tanyth and chums), and some newbies - who were crammed into the confines of the seating area couldn't even see the evening's readers. Shame, because they were worth seeing (as well as listening to, of course). Still, the glittering environs made a great backdrop for the bods at cable channel London Live, who were there (along with free gay mag Boyz) to cover the evening...



Opening the show was a "safe pair of hands" for any Polari evening, in any venue - the utterly marvellous VG (Val) Lee. She read from her soon-to-be-published new novel Mr Oliver's Object of Desire, a funny and insightful exposé of the clashing values of a boutique owner with the rapidly-changing world of late 60s/early 70s London, as he finds himself disappointed that his chosen "celebrities" for his shop's grand opening the Beverley Sisters were substituted at the last moment by some "new whipper-snapper" of a singer (bewilderingly popular with "the girls", to his chagrin) Miss Dusty Springfield...

Concluding with a crowd-pleasing "Deirdre" story, Val had the audience suitably "warmed up". Here is the lady herself, in conversation with the London Live talking head, about Polari and the London Book & Screen Week, of which this evening was a part:

London Live - Polari - VG Lee

No sooner had VG finished, it was time for a break. This, we surmised, was to give sufficient time for people to empty their credit cards behind the bar, so we went for a fag out the back.



The lovely Alexis "Lexi" Gregory, Soho stalwart himself (we first met when he was "bar whore" at another deceased venue BarCode), read us his first performance piece Through the Wilderness, about a Madonna-obsessed, half-Italian, half-Greek gay kid growing up in the suburbs of 1980s North West London dreaming of becoming an actor. Unsurprisingly, he revealed, it is autobiographical.

He also treated us to an extract from his latest play, the utterly marvellous Slap (that John-John and I went to see in Stratford last year), which completely captivated the audience, needless to say!

Here's Lexi chatting about it on London Live:

London Live - Polari - Alexis Gregory

Another break. Another over-priced drink.



Our next reader Diana Souhami is a writer of prodigious talents - in addition to the lesbian biographies for which she is most famous, she curated an exhibition on women's rights for the British Council that travelled worldwide, she has also written about the real-life Robinson Crusoe, an obscure 1940s murder, the "Bounty" mutineers and Leon Bakst's panels on the fable of Sleeping Beauty that were commissioned by the Rothschilds. Whew.

However, for Monday's audience, it was lesbians all the way - as Ms Souhami took us on a tour through her various works about painter Hannah Gluckstein ("Gluck") and her aristocratic lovers (including famed floral artiste Constance Spry), Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Mrs Alice Keppel's daughter Violet Trefusis (lover of Vita Sackville-West) and the Sapphic world of inter-War Paris with Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barney. This was an engrossing and entertaining journey, indeed - her wealth of research is impressive. Loved it.

Another break. Another fag.



Headlining this unusually disjointed Polari evening was the cute Keith Jarrett, poet and performance artist. Not to be outdone by Lexi's "autobiographical work", he gave us a selection of pieces about his own life and experiences being brought up as a budding gay boy in a God-fearing Jamaican community, culminating this one - A Gay Poem:

Keith Jarrett - A Gay Poem

He wowed the crowd, that's for certain.

And, of course, the last word goes to Mr Burston...

London Live - Polari - Paul Burston

Loved the speakers, love Polari. Thankfully the next one is back somewhere sensible - the South Bank - on 25th April (twice in a month? We are spoiled...) featuring Juno Dawson, Will Davis, Rachel B Glaser, Mark Lock, and the long-overdue return of our fave Rebecca Chance!

I can't wait!

Polari

Like so many queens they have no shame in public

What a fantastic evening "The Lavender Library" turned out to be... Not that I would have expected anything less, with the lovely Paul Burston and Rupert Smith in charge.

Brilliantly MC-ed by The Independent's Suzi Feay, gay writers and such stars as Julian Clary, David McAlmont, Stella Duffy and Andy Bell were asked to champion the gay books and writers that had most influenced them.



Diana Souhami amusingly championed Gertrude Stein and her long, eccentric relationship with Alice B Toklas; and Stella spoke in glowing terms about another literary lesbian Patricia Highsmith and her erotic novel Carol.

Andy was impressed with the similarities between his cruisy sex life and that of Joe Orton as much as the great man's writing, comparing the infamous cottage scene which Joe recalled with such relish in his diary with his own experiences when he encountered a young J*mi Som*rv*lle on Hampstead Heath!

Julian, more characteristically, chose one of our favourites - the Mapp & Lucia stories by E.F. Benson, all stylish and witty banter and mannerisms portrayed by supposedly "straight" characters, that reveal their true gay roots to the more discerning reader.

But for me the crowning glory was Paul Burston, who chose the book that I would say influenced me the most in my life - Queens by Pickles.

A masterpiece - this is one of my favourite books! It has played such a pivotal role in my gay life, and I actually have a guilty secret to share. Visiting the hideous 1960s mausoleum that passed for a library in Newport in the early 80s, I was searching for The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp - and discovered it had been catalogued by the neo-Fascist authorities that ruled the roost in South Wales at the time in the "Sexual Deviancy" section.

Outraged (and slightly intrigued) by this awful description, I made a thorough investigation of this particular area of the teak'n'gunmetal shelving and discovered the book (Queens) was part of the collection in that category. To my everlasting shame (not really!) I stole it (well, never returned it anyhow), and its tattered and well read and re-read pages adorn my bookshelf to this day (complete with added graffiti by a sexually frustrated reader, carefully Tipp-Exed out by the librarians - how very Joe Orton!)



Published in the year I came out - 1984 - the enigmatic author of Queens must have spent years observing people as he travelled through the London gay scene. His long list of characters - the Screaming Queen, the Straight-Acting Queen, the Old Queen, the Opera Queen, The YMCA Queen, the Insidious Queen, the Clone - and the scenarios and interplay between them that he portrays - are all instantly recognisable today.

Although Paul read out his particular favourite passage from the book, I have one of my own I need to share:

"The girly queens flock to Heaven like toddlers to a sweet shop. They flounce about the place, giggling and shrieking, hands and arms flung about in a wild sign language embellishing phrases like "She Never!" and "Ooh Gloria - don't!". They like to call each other bitch and never ever stand alone.

"Once out of the pubs and set free in Heaven's wide-open spaces, they know no restraint. Lacking androgynous beauty, they daub themselves with Boots blusher and eye-liner, and bat their eyelashes like Sixties sluts... Like so many queens they have no shame in public, but can be quite suburban and prudish in private. This is always an annoying reversal and lets them in for a lot of abuse which, because they are so desperately inadequate, they enjoy...

"Although impressed by money, they are unlike rent boys, and want sex more than cash, more than stardom even. Heaven is where they hope to find love one day. Love, of course, is the same regular big cock."

I think we can identify with that - we have all met these caricatures at some stage in our lives, along with all the others in the book. I certainly can spot Pickles' "types" whenever and wherever I enter a gay bar, and have spent many an absorbing evening doing just that!

Pickles also illustrated his work with some quite grotesque sketches of grotesque people...









Queens by Pickles is a must-read book for every gay person - I cannot recommend it enough!

It is out of print but is available through Amazon Stores