John-John, "Auntie Paul" and I gathered, with regulars Emma and Toby, Paulo and (not-so-regular any more) "Little Tony" at the historic and revered Heaven gay nightclub for another edifying evening at "London's peerless gay literary salon" Polari on Thursday, the first such event of 2024. Once again, we were in for a treat.
Our host, the faboo Paul Burston was sparkling from top-to-toe, as befits such an occasion, as he proudly opened the show...
One of my favourite authors/readers at Polari, Neil Bartlett opened proceedings with a salacious extract from his 2014 novel The Disappearance Boy [set in the early 1950s], in which [disabled by polio] magician's assistant "Reggie Rainbow" [whose job it is to help make the assistants "disappear", hence the title] discovers a secretive, hidden gay world of wonder, and sex, under the pier at Brighton.
Been there, done that - and absolutely loved the book! Remarkably, it has only recently been published in paperback.
Polari Prize winner in 2020, Kate Davies was up next, with a brand new delight for us - reading from her new novel Nuclear Family, which is out in February. A salutary tale of what happens when a loving daughter Lena decides to buy a DNA test for her dad, only to be completely devastated by the news that she and her twin sister were conceived from donor sperm. Lena goes off the deep end in her obsession with who her "real" father is, while her sibling Alison more-or-less takes it in her stride, trying as she is to conceive a child with her wife using the exact same method.
In the (very funny) extract Kate read for us, the couple's attempt to broach the subject of donation with their friends, a gay couple, while at a dinner date, doesn't actually go quite as planned...
With the laughter still ringing in our ears, it was time for a complete contrast...
...as it was the turn of our friend and Polari stalwart Alexis Gregory to explode onto the stage, the force of nature that he is - he has a new show on at the King's Head theatre in Islington, FutureQueer, described thus: "...part theatre, stand-up comedy, DIY queer lecture, pop-culture commentary, and meditation on disco music as a metaphor for queer survival." It certainly was a bit of a mind-fuck! Set in the year 2071, he conjured up for us a fantastical future where everything is "gay-gay-gay"; a world where voguing and lip-syncing are categories in the Olympics, the national anthem is by Dannii Minogue, there's a statue to George Michael on Hampstead Heath, and the goddess of Disco herself Donna Summer [NB 2071 happens to be exactly as far into the future from today as Miss Summer's I Feel Love is in the past] dominates society.
Who better to enter such a fantabulosa world with than "Sexy Lexi" ?!
We needed a fag and a top-up after all that...
After the break, our final reader was 2023's Polari Prize winner Julia Armfield, with a reading from her mysterious new work Our Wives Under The Sea.
As the review in The Guardian put it:
It is told in two alternating voices: Leah’s, in the form of a journal she kept on a deep-sea dive that stranded her and two others in undersea darkness; and that of her wife, Miri, who presumed her lost, after Leah’s return. The tale travels, with Leah and the submarine, down through the missing six months and the ocean’s vertical zones (sunlight, twilight, midnight, abyssal, hadal), while on land Miri tracks how their relationship is changing in the present.
From the extract she read, it would appear that those changes are even more mysterious than anyone could predict... Chilling stuff!
Our evening was not over yet, however - as a real feast of frolics was in store, with the arrival on stage of the ever-joyful David McAlmont with HiFi Sean!
They played a blinder of a set, and got everybody (including the lovely BSL interpreter Paul Michaels) in a dancing mood! Here's a jolly one:
STOP PRESS: And then, there's this!
Now, that's the way to finish an evening!
We love Polari! Roll on the next one...
