Post-lockdown euphoria, an edible poet, Cunto, The Boy, a Diva retires, and oral history is a Riot!

It was with the greatest of excitement that I, John-John and (eventually) our friend Paul met up for the first time since last October - in a pub (Halfway to Heaven, of course). For not only were we getting our first taste of "freedom" as lockdown restrictions are lifted, but the occasion was for the triumphal return of "London's peerless literary salon" Polari to the legendary Heaven nightclub! And what an evening's entertainment was in store...

Our hostess-with-the-mostest Paul Burston looked ecstatic to welcome us back, opening proceedings with an apposite reminder that, although the sense of relief was palpable at the prospect of the coronavirus pandemic coming under control in the UK, for many people in the room this was actually the second pandemic we have lived through and survived to tell the tale - about which there would be more in parts of the evening's programme.

Opening the evening, however - emerging through the "rock concert-style" dazzling light-show and dry ice that enveloped the stage [the effect of which meant that 160 out of the 183 photos I took went straight to the delete bin as the glare made it impossible to see anything in them] - was a gleam of exuberant joy, in the form of the delightful PJ Samuels. I love the way she described herself in one of her blog posts way back in 2014:

I am a black woman. Rastafarian. Christian. Immigrant. Exile. Lesbian... I am by no means confused. This relationship in my skin sits like ice lolly on a hot day, a magnum original on the stick. So many reasons why it shouldn’t work together but heaven when you taste it. So for every group that I don’t fit in because of the other aspect of me that I embrace, it’s your loss. I’m delicious. All kinds of delicious. A smorgasbord of incongruous flavours that are heaven on a platter. Damn I want to eat me…

Mesmerised by her recitative delivery of a selection of her poems and songs: some tender, some angry, some empowering, our audience wanted to "eat" her up, too!

PJ Samuels - Dear Black Woman

Speaking of "poetry powerhouses", next was the turn of Joelle Taylor, as excited to have just received her first print copy of her new anthology Cunto and Othered Poems [this Polari being its "unofficial" launch] as she was to be performing extracts from it on stage again!

According to the eminent Patience Agbabi she is

"...a shape-shifter, myth-maker, linguistic risk-taker; poetical activist, surrealist with a raised fist. She knows how to handle a pen. Razor sharp, tattooed or AWOL, her women are the best dressed men. Her material – fractured glass and human skin; the effect – a maze, a mosaic, a hall of mirrors. She redefines the dispossessed, the caged in and gives them a way out."

Focusing largely on her own experiences as a masculine presenting woman, a "Butch" or "Boi" on the in London lesbian scene in the 1990s, the poems she read for us were a combination of pent-up frustration, intriguing and sometimes menacing characters, politics, anger, love, lust and loss - like this one:

Joelle Taylor - Trauma: The Opera

...and here's one she made earlier...

Joelle Taylor - No Man's Land (We Belong Here)

Just when we thought "how does one possibly top that?!" - our lovely "Sexy Lexi", the sublimely talented Alexis Gregory trolled up to the mike...

Riot Act is surely his magnum opus - he wrote this one-man-drama based upon three real-life interviews: with Michael-Anthony Nozzi, one of the only remaining Stonewall survivors; Lavinia Co-op, a 1970s London radical-drag artist; and someone a little closer to home.

The piece he performed from it for us was the tale of an activist in the era of fear and loss and anger that encompassed the gay world when AIDS reared its ugly head in the 1980s, of his conflicting experiences of camaraderie and dull political correctness, of placards and protests and forming a chained blockade across Waterloo Bridge, of attending funeral after funeral after funeral of people who were too young to die, of experiencing rejection and denial on the gay scene, burn-out and "survivor guilt", partying too hard to try and blot out the grief, and the feeling of hopelessness that a whole generation of collective memory has been lost, so the next wave of gays has no connection with that era and would rather forget it ever happened - all too, too real. And familiar. I cried.

The subject of the monologue was, of course... Paul Burston himself.

Here's the trailer for the show:

Alexis Gregory - Riot Act

I really needed a cigarette after that!

After the break and some more drinkies, served to our table of course, it was time for a familiar friend and Polari stalwart to appear. However - shock! horror! - to our dismay, Paul announced that would be the very last time the lovely VG Lee [for it is she] would ever perform live again...

From her entrance with a sort-of "1960s catwalk model" routine, to the end of her performance with a series of her hilarious "Dear Auntie Val" agony aunt letters, she had us enthralled!

Accompanied as she was [in fact, all our speakers including Paul B had their own similar large-screen back-drop] by a selection of photos from various points of her younger - and dead glam - life, she revealed that ("before I was a lesbian") she had actually been married (to "Hemel Hempstead's answer to Barry Gibb") for quite a few years - and even wrote a semi-fictional, and hilarious, short story about it in her recent anthology Oh You Pretty Thing, which she read for us. Here she is with a [unfortunately abridged - the longer extract she read for us continued with a more pithy take on the relationship and its inevitable fate...] version from a Zoom-based event she did last year:

VG Lee - Oh You Pretty Thing

If this really was the "farewell performance" of such a legend, there's going to be one helluva gap in the Polari repertoire... We'll certainly miss her!

Finally, from one legendary long-serving performer to another.

Ian Elmslie was (the cuter) half of the cabaret duo Katrina and the Boy [who I saw on stage - after attending Gay Pride in Kennington Park - at the long-demised gay pub the Market Tavern in Nine Elms/Vauxhall way back in 1991. There's some fab footage of one of their performances in this video on YouTube - however, you'll need to skip to the 2:20:00 mark to see a very youthful Mr Elmslie in action!]

click any photo to embiggen

Latterly, Mr Elmslie published his entertainment memoirs - A Marvellous Party, from which he read an extract at Polari back in December 2017 - and still "keeps his hand in" as a cabaret singer-songwriter; indeed, he had not one, but two CDs on sale last night. He also, it emerged, is a bit of a Bowie fan [hence the photo at the head of this post with the neon sign "Boys Keep Swinging"] - and the major part of his performance was indeed dedicated to the great man, with audience participation, to boot! I'm not sure any previous audience in the history of Heaven nightclub has been encouraged to shout "Hot Tramp!" en masse in quite the same way before...

He also treated us to one of his own songs The Other Man from the new Old Boyfriends CD, which I think is brilliant:

Ian Elmslie - The Other Man

After resounding applause came the customary curtain call...

 

...and without further ado, it was time to clear the decks and bugger off for last orders at the pub.

It was such a brilliant evening that, despite having suffered the "getting up for work" bit afterwards, I'm still coming down to earth.

Unfortunately we might miss the next outing at the RVT on 4th June (with headliner the lovely Adele Anderson), as it's not just selling out fast, but apparently clashes with other arrangements... but we do indeed love Polari!

Fairy foul-mouth, the obsessions of youth, gold star lesbians, Olympian lust and Diamonds Are Forever - in Heaven

John-John, little Tony and I trolled along to the legendary gay nightclub Heaven on Tuesday evening - not for a night of dancing and debauchery, needless to say at our venerable age, but for a special edition of "London's peerless gay literary salon" Polari!

As it was when last we were there, the main dancefloor was packed with punters (seated for a change) - including Our Paul, Emma and Toby, Bryanne and Simon, Adele Anderson, Karen McLeod, Paulo, our former Scope colleague David and his hubbie Max, Ian Elmslie, and many more regulars and assorted literati - eagerly awaiting a cultural, rather than hedonistic, experience. Our host Mr Paul Burston, paying tribute to Madonna's "Madam X" at stages throughout the show, opened the proceedings with aplomb...



...and first up we had a pantomime (after a fashion) - "oh, yes we did!" - a Trans Fairy Tale, performed by Cerys Evans. As the review in Broadway Baby described:

Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother. Except, this fairy godmother is more likely to say ‘bibbity-bobbity-fuck-you’ than turn a pumpkin into a silver carriage. She’s not magical, she doesn’t really care about her spoilt princess clients and she wakes up with her wild hair, her nightgown inside out and blowing raspberries...

Subversive, or what? The snippet of the show we got probably didn't do the show justice, but this was a good ice-breaking opener nonetheless.



As this special event formed part of this year's LGBT History Month, Paul Burston stepped outside his usual "safe zone" of MC, interviewer or reader of his own works of fiction into a more autobiographical mood [he hinted that there may indeed be a memoir-in-the-making]. Accompanied by a mini-slideshow of photos from his youth, to varying degrees somewhat embarrassing, he gave us a little vignette from his younger (more naive) days on the gay scene - enamoured of a Greek Adonis to such a degree he abandoned a family holiday to seek him out on a neighbouring Aegean isle, only, as is the way with whirlwind romances, to be sorely disappointed by the reunion. Lessons learned all round, but all part of life's rich tapestry, I suppose.

I look forward to seeing this salacious tell-all story being serialised in the Sunday People in the near future!

Completing the triumvirate of acts in the first half was the award-winning performance poet and activist Joelle Taylor, with her dramatic poem Cunto, latterly re-titled Butterfly Fist - which she herself described as:

"highlighting the journey we masculine women, we butches, we gold star lesbians have taken. It speaks of the female body as a political act and focuses on one simple intent: the taking back of a body. It looks at homophobia and misogyny and talks about the community we forged to overcome the grief of our own lives."

And here's just the merest clip of it, for your delectation:

Joelle Taylor - Cunto

Stunning stuff, indeed!

We really needed a fag after that, and, after the much-needed "comfort break", a trip to the bar and a little chance to mingle, it was up with the strobe and on with the rest of the show...



Opening proceedings was the glamorous Nikita Gill - a self-made success story thanks to her posts on social media - who read a few marvellous pieces from her new poetry anthology Great Goddesses, exploring some of the hidden-in-plain-sight same-sex desires of the Olympians. With stanzas such as these, who could resist?

“You, who wove stars into your hair as a girl,
and equally let them freckle your skin,
held the moon up as a looking-glass
and bewitched existence for eternity.”

"I watch Girl become Goddess
and the metamorphosis is more
magnificent than anything
I have ever known."

Nikita Gill - Great Goddesses

Of course, it could not end there.



There was a real treat in store, as the very lovely David McAlmont and his esteemed collaborator Janette Mason took to the stage, to perform a series of numbers from LGBT+ artists - including David Bowie and George Michael - and those we adore, such as Dame Shirley Bassey (Mr McAlmont's impeccable version of Diamonds Are Forever, of course!).

Despite the occasional crack in his voice (due to a cold), the shivers were riding up and down my spine throughout this brilliant performance! Why-oh-why is Mr McAlmont not up there with the great soul legends?!

Janette Mason and David McAlmont - Sweet Thing [Bowie]

We were left speechless.



Another triumphal night co-ordinated by Mr Burston - and, despite the absence of the DJ as advertised on our Eventbrite tickets, a thoroughly enjoyable one.

Next month, "the salon" returns to the Southbank, with headliner Philip Hensher, plus readings from Susie Lynes, Jennie Stone and Jamie Christian. I can't wait!

We love Polari!

Central Line reverie, ex-pat fetishism, Big Sister, angry poet standing and a movie stars' petting zoo

With a little nod to its past, Polari was relocated to a previous home (the Weston Pavilion) at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, last night, and we (Paul, little Tony, Jane, Emma, Toby, Wayne, Alex and I) were somewhat hemmed in by the crowd - we had forgotten how spoiled we have been in the capacious surroundings of our regular room on Level Five - but (inevitably) the heat of the smaller room gave our host Paul Burston the perfect excuse (as if ever he needs one!) to strip down to his beach-wear to show off his tan from his recent trip to Brazil (with hubby Paulo). And so it was with envy we looked on, pasty white and umbrella-bearing, as he opened proceedings for the first Polari of 2014...



Without further ado Paul introduced our first reader to the stage - Anya Nyx, novelist, writer, poet and artist, and proud wearer of wildly psychedelic tops.



Her new work in progress, which she is writing under the name Tanith Nyx, is described as "a lesbian-fantasy-adventure novel dealing with love, death, time travel and unicorns" (with a working title Palace of the Butterfly Bird). The extract she read for us delved into a mysterious time-travelling fantasy-world, in which women appear to be in charge of a "Big Sister"-dominated type of society, controlled from the top by regular uploads to a government computer of the dreams of its population. Entangled within this eerie dominatrix matriarchy, our lesbian heroine flirts with the powerful High Priestess... Anya's mainstream work is in teenage fiction, and it will be interesting to see if this novel with its gay theme, when finished, will capture that same audience.



Next to the podium was the very cute performance poet, fiction writer and educator Keith Jarrett - not to be confused with the American jazz pianist and composer, as he explained in his first poem about identity; other poems he read covered such diverse subjects as the country of his roots the Dominican Republic, race, language, and the Central Line(!)...and then there was this brilliantly funny one - A Gay Poem:

Keith Jarrett - Gay Poem

We loved it!

However, a treat of the highest campery was in store next when the marvellous former rock singer, collaborator with The Smiths and winner of the Polari First Book Prize in 2011 (none other than Julie Burchill described his memoir Autofellatio as "think Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard finally finding Mr DeMille on her doorstep and you've got it. But with better shoes.") Mr James Maker - hot-foot from his home in Valencia in Spain - took the mike, to première a passage from his new work Axed Pat, due to be published this autumn.



A marvellous insight into the secrets of ex-pat suburbia, his tale (read in his customary deadpan Mancunian manner) involved the hypocritical scorn of a woman about the nudism of her gay neighbours in their Spanish settlement - yet the woman and her husband's excessive propriety conceals a lie that tells the truth; for in fact, their entire relationship has involved pandering to hubby's kinky fetish for her wearing a succession of plastic macs as a sexual kick! Hilariously funny and insightful, I can't wait to read it... [I did say to Mr Maker I thought his reading was akin to the "reincarnation of Elsie Tanner", and he seemed overjoyed at the compliment.]

Meanwhile, as an adjunct while we wait, here's Mr Maker's latest musical effort - a cover of an old Spanish torch song, Un Año De Amor:

James Maker - Un Año De Amor

After suitably sufficient break for a fag, a trip to the bar and a bit of a catch-up with some of the regulars (DJ, VG, Paul, Bryanne, Simon, Anni, Suzi and the rest) and the evening's readers, it was time to return to our seats for part two.



Opening the show was another "newbie", and a complete wake-up call, the angry "slam" poetry of Joelle Taylor, who, in addition to performing also co-ordinates numerous educational programmes and young poetry networks, working with some of the UK's most disadvantaged communities. The video for her Last Poet Standing (which was among the poems she read for us) has even been circulated to schools as a teaching aid. And here is is:

Joelle Taylor - Last Poet Standing

All very in-yer-face. I did feel - uncomfortably at times - however, that some of her polemic may have actually been directed at us, the decidedly non-"street" audience at the Southbank..

Finishing up with customary aplomb, I was delighted at the return of Mr Christopher Fowler to our stage - a writer whose work I have always admired (his blog alone is a joy to read). He is the multi award-winning author of over 30 novels and 12 short story collections, and his latest work includes the War of the Worlds video game with Sir Patrick Stewart, a graphic novel, a Hammer Horror radio play, the memoir Film Freak and the comedy-thriller Plastic, which took six years to get published.



It was from the latter two that he read extracts for us - the first, some wonderfully gossipy moments from his earlier career in the back-of-house end of the British movie industry, including the embarrassment of badly thought-out premières:

Film premières in the UK are much slicker affairs than they used to be.

Never ones to go in for subtlety, distribution companies once staged embarrassingly literal publicity stunts for their films until Hollywood executives stopped them. During the première for ‘Hair’ at the Dominion Tottenham Court Road the unimpressed audience was pelted with flowers, while the ushers were made to wear beads and long wigs that made them look like crazy old tramp-women. For the megaflop ‘Can’t Stop The Music’ we were encouraged to attend on roller skates, but the theatre had a steeply raked floor and everyone fell over. The distributors thought carefully about the latter, putting ‘music’ and ‘England’ together and coming up with a Morris dancing display outside the cinema.

The première of the killer-rodent movie ‘Willard’ was preceded by a giant red-eyed rat being driven about London on the roof of a window-cleaner’s van, while the vomit-inducing ‘Mark Of The Devil’ had its logo printed on sick-bags. More recently, the ‘Sex And The City’ première party housed its four leads in mocked-up movie sets separated by white picket fencing, like a kind of movie stars’ petting zoo. ‘Come on, we’ve stroked Sarah Jessica Parker, let’s go and feed Carrie-Ann Moss now!’

Hilarious stuff - but his second reading was a somewhat darker affair. When one gets a line in a novel like "My name is June Cryer, and I am a dead housewife", one just has to sit up and take notice! A tale of domestic infidelity, shopping obsession and art theft, Plastic sounds fantastic! [You can read the full intro to the novel that Mr Fowler read for us on his blog.]



With the customary photo line-up (everyone was encouraged to take photos - most done (brilliantly) by the lovely DJ (Diane) Connell - as our regular photographer Krys was unwell), that was, unfortunately it for another month. But what a bloody good start to another Year of Polari!

Next month's outing (on 28th February) is an LGBT History Month special, and features VG Lee, Rose Collis, Musa Okwonga, Jonathan Broughton and Colin Bell. It will be fantabulosa, and I can't wait!

Polari