Of Oedipus in Kent, trans lives, the dyke of desire, a giraffe and a Tutu

It was a dark and stormy night on Wednesday - it was pissing-down - but despite the weather I, and a handful of stalwarts including Our Paul, Emma, Toby, Simon and chums, made our way to the cavernous surroundings of the legendary Heaven nightclub under Charing Cross... for the very welcome return of "London's peerless gay literary salon" Polari to its home city, after too long away!

With our "hostess-with-the-mostest" Mr Paul Burston presiding, we were in for another treat in store, with another selection of class acts:

Jake Arnott, Alice Denny, VG Lee, John McCullough

First up, Mr Jake Arnott, one of the UK's most successful crime writers - among his works are The Long Firm and He Kills Coppers, both adapted into much-lauded television serials. In his customary style, acting the roles of the characters, Mr Arnott read for us a dramatic segment of his new novel Blood Rival - heavily based around the multiple historic Greek stories of Oedipus - in which the anti-hero Eddie Pierce has "inherited the crown" (and wife) of the previous Kentish gangster kingpin Lee Royle, who was murdered in an apparent road-rage incident. During their efforts to uncover the secrets and lies left behind by his death, Eddie confesses that as a teen he had been raped by Royle - yet still loved him, nonetheless; and it was this desperate desire that drove his ambition to live up to, and eventually take over the "throne".

Mesmerising stuff!

Jake Arnott - Blood Rival

Next was Alice Denny – a Brighton-based performance poet and judge for the Polari Prize 2026 - who read for us some of her pieces, tackling gender, love, loss, sexuality, marginalisation and injustice. Quite downbeat, but heartfelt.

Although it seemed that Paul B was hesitant to offer us a break, I think we needed it. A pee, a fag, a top-up and some mingling - and it was time for part two...

...opening with the faboo John McCullough, another stalwart - he won The Polari First Book Prize 2012 - reading selection of quirky, often quite amusing poems from his new collection Crowd Voltage. Like this one:

You're working-class my lad,
don't you forget it, said Mum.
She was talking to a giraffe,
a lanky boy prone to ideas
above his station, soft ways
of slipping skyward.
I loved being a giraffe,
a vegetarian in fairyland,
the staircase of my neck
leading nowhere sharp.
I loved not being a lion
even though that meant
being hunted, carnivores slashing
at me till I galloped away.
I loved withdrawing to invisible
acacias - cathedrals of leaves
where my elastic tongue,
licked what it liked.
Because I loved discovering
other giraffes, entwining
bodies and probing necks
or simply standing together
as a crowd, a forest
of extravagant breathing.

We love him!

Our final reader was the lovely Polari stalwart VG Lee, everybody's favourite "Provincial Lesbian"! She read for us a segment from her forthcoming new novel Our Shadow Selves her short story The Last Gold Star Lesbian, focusing in on the experience of a lesbian of a certain age, whose life is drifting along in a shabby seaside town, and the frisson that she experiences when a long-distant butch "crush" of hers swans back into town - and she finally gets the attention she deserves!

There is no footage of the actual passage VG read for us, but here she is in full form, a few years ago:

VG Lee on the Polari tour, 2015

Then, by way of an encore, we had a faboo live set from the effervescent Son of a Tutu!

Son of a Tutu - And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going

Despite the somewhat smaller then usual audience (I blame the rain), all concerned got a well-deserved ovation:

We love Polari!

Paper birds and silly string, sensible footwear and gay history, and St Albans with Debbie

It was with more than a modicum of excitement that I headed off [at first solo, but at the venue bumped into our friend Paul; as well as regulars Sexy Lexi and VG Lee, and many more besides] to the Southbank Centre last night for the latest outing of "London's peerless gay literary salon" Polari - for our headline guest was none other than that icon of "intellectual post-punk" combo [sometimes clumsily pigeonholed under the ghastly umbrella term "sophisti-pop"] Everything But The Girl, Miss Tracey Thorn!

But first, down to business - as our host Paul Burston opened proceedings by apologising in advance for any "costume clash", as both he and Miss Thorn were wearing leopard print, before introducing our first reader (and Polari First Book Prize winner in 2012), the lovely John McCullough.



Mr McC read for us a series of poems on themes from homelessness to homophobia from his newest anthology Reckless Paper Birds, including this one, which I thought particularly impressive:

Tender Vessels
I keep trying to slip away through the crowd
but history won’t take its mouth off my body.
What was exacted on someone else’s softness,
his cuttable flesh, is always about to happen here.
The vague kinship which exists between tender men
glowing with thirst starts in awareness of this,

how we’re unstitched by tongue prints, resurrections.
Standing in a street party one Pride, I saw a figure
stomp through, fists raised, and strike three boys.
They dropped to the ground, clutching their heads.
I witnessed everything, squeezed a stranger’s shoulder,
then, fifteen minutes on, my body was distracted

utterly by the smell of oranges. The unspeakable
scrapes a fingernail across my neck but I can only
concentrate so long before I wind up decanting
myself into the nearest fizzing light: Instagram,
house music. It’s like those inventors who tried to devise
a spray-on cast for broken bones, created Silly String.

But there are remedies worse than squirting
metres of sticky mayhem across a jubilant face,
outcomes bleaker than attempting, despite the scissors,
to inhabit this twenty-first-century skin.
I live in a dream of plummeting from the earth’s
tallest building without ever having felt more beautiful

because I’m not the only one falling. I’m in a crowd,
a loose democracy of descent, velocity with its hands
all over our bodies, but not enough to stop us
gossiping and blowing kisses as we speed
through the air together, reckless paper birds.
They will find us with our beaks wide open.



Next up was the estimable cartoonist for the Pink Paper Kate Charlesworth, who took us on a visual journey - reading some extracts from her new graphic memoir Sensible Footwear – A Girl’s Guide, accompanied by a series of illustrations from the book [click to embiggen]:



It was superb! Here's Kate herself, talking about the book:

Kate Charlesworth on Sensible Footwear – A Girl’s Guide

This evening's event was a special one for two individuals in the audience at the Royal Festival Hall - as the winners of this year's two Polari Prizes were announced [read the full shortlists for both prizes at the Publishing Perspective site]...



...the winner of the Polari First Book Prize 2019, Angela Chadwick for her debut novel "XX"...



...and winner of the Polari Prize for established writers [presented by none other than Booker Prize-winner Bernadine Evaristo], Andrew McMillan for his poetry collection playtime.

Congratulations all round!

After a break, a fag and a top-up of booze, it was time, however, for our leading lady.



Opening with a pithy examination of her teenage diaries (that form the starting-point of her second memoir, Another Planet: A Teenager in Suburbia) Miss Tracey Thorn immediately came across as a charming and frank reader and writer, hitting right to the crux of what it was like growing up in the suburban nonentity that is Brookmans Park in Hertfordshire in the 70s:

When I try to summon up the past – when I want to remember what really happened, instead of what I think happened, and what I really felt, instead of what I’d like to think I felt – I look at my diaries. They never fail to shock me with all the things they say, and all the things they don’t.

Going right back to the start, I try to picture myself on the day I first decided to keep a diary: 29 December 1975, when I was 13 years old. I must have been given it as a Christmas present, and although it was for the year 1976, its first few pages invited entries for the end of the previous year. So I began as the old year ended, just before it turned to face the new.

29 December 1975 – “Went to St Albans with Debbie. Got a belt. Could not get a jumper or skirt.”

That’s it, that’s all she wrote. No starting with a bang, no announcing herself to the world, or to a future reader, no declaration of intent. Nothing along the lines of “Dear Diary, draw closer and listen to what I have to say. Here I am; this is me; let me tell you the story of my life.” Not even the guileless enthusiasm of a 13-year-old self-introduction – “Hello, I’m Tracey and this is my diary.” Instead, I draw a circle and leave it empty, my eye caught by an absence. And it wasn’t an aberration; I carried on in that style for years, making countless entries about not buying things, not going to the disco, not going to school, a piano lesson being cancelled, the school coach not arriving. It’s a life described by what’s missing, and what fails to happen.

My second ever entry is just as banal:

30 December – “Went to Welwyn with Liz. Didn’t get anything except a bag of Kentucky chips.”

Was it me or was it my surroundings? Was it just that I was the dullest child in existence, noticing nothing, experiencing nothing, thinking nothing, or was it at least in part an embodiment of something in the air, something vague and undefined? Even when I write about it now, I realise that the time and place in which I grew up, 1970s suburbia, is easier to define by saying what it wasn’t than what it was. Brookmans Park was a village but not a village. Rural but not rural. A stop on the line, a space in between two landscapes that are both more highly rated – the city, and the countryside. A contingent, liminal, border territory. In-betweenland.

1 January 1977 – “Went to Welwyn with Mum and Dad to get some boots but couldn’t get any.”

8 January – “Liz and I went to Potters Bar in the afternoon to try to get her ears pierced, but she couldn’t.”

Anywhere with a tube station, however “end of the line” that stop may be, still feels to me like part of London, physically linked by the tunnels and rails. Things would still happen there. But beyond the reach of the underground lies a different and less certain terrain. Where things might not happen at all. Where you might continually try but continually fail, in endless small endeavours.

19 January 1979 – “Deb and I went to St Albans. Tried to get some black trousers but couldn’t find any nice ones.”

17 March – “Tried to go to the library but it was shut.”

When I came to write a song about the place, Oxford Street, I fell back into this habit of describing by subtraction, stating what wasn’t there – “Where I grew up there were no factories” – and only then going on to admit that “there was a school and shops, and some fields and trees”. But although there were fields, there was no agricultural life. No one worked as a farmer. All the men got on the train every morning with a briefcase to go up to town. Nature writers would have found little there to describe; it was not a place of shepherds, or hawks. There was no real scenery – no hills, or lakes, nothing in the way of a view.

Here I am again, talking about what it is not. What is it about the place that it demands to be written about in such an equivocal way? I rebelled as a teen and so have often felt that I abandoned the old me and invented a new one, casting off the time and place I came from. But as I get older, I sense its presence inside me. I want to reconnect with the self I left behind. It’s partly that common impulse of curiosity – which informs a TV programme like Who Do You Think You Are? or a song like Where Do You Go to My Lovely. I want to look inside my head and remember where I came from. Because I can’t quite believe it was as lacking as my diary suggests.

Excellent stuff, indeed. Then, in an absolutely engrossing and in-depth conversation with Paul Burston, she delved deeper into the hows and the whys that led her creative mind out of that stifling environment - and her feeling that she had never, quite, escaped it. Her revelations about her parents, for example - they never could come to terms with her musical fame, and apparently it wasn't until she married (her co-member of Everything But The Girl Ben Watt) and had kids that they even began to treat her as any kind of "normal" being; even then, they simply "tutted" at her later solo musical efforts, and she never quite understood why...

But success, it certainly was, albeit slow. The band itself was a sort of "meeting of minds" [both she and Ben were in different groups, and only reluctantly decided to work together at first], emerged from the unlikely environs of Hull University in the post-punk wave in 1981, and became a "cult" hit with serious music journos everywhere - they even had a Top 3 hit with their cover of the classic I Don't Want to Talk About It in 1989 - but it wasn't until after they had been dropped by their record label sixteen years later, that one of their songs caught the attention of a certain "super-cool" American DJ/remixer, and the rest is history!

Everything But The Girl - Missing (Todd Terry remix)

It's years since you've been there
Now you've disappeared somewhere
Like outer space
You've found some better place

And I miss you
Like the deserts miss the rain

How appropriate.

What an evening! We absolutely loved it.



And thus, with a final "curtain-call" it was time to say farewell again. The next Polari - its 12th birthday, featuring the multi-talented Russell T Davies as headliner - is apparently completely sold out (shame!), so (if tickets are available), the next outing will be A Very Polari Xmas, featuring Lisa Jewell, Will Brooker, Ben Fergusson and Carolyn Robertson, on 9th December...

J'adore Polari!

Seventies gay earnestness, photo-booth-ready dolls, a new Spanish soap opera, a shortlist, an array of false breasts and a sexy poet

With the mad social whorl of the past few days - the amazing Bowie Prom on Friday rapidly followed by the excesses of my dear sister's fiftieth birthday party last night - it's taken a while to get my head together. However, on Thursday evening I did also troll along to the sunny South Bank for the latest instalment of "London's peerless gay literary salon" Polari...

Before opening proceedings, our host Mr Paul Burston had some sad news to impart - his mother-in-law, Paolo's dear mum Heidi (who I first met back in 2013) recently died. Such a lovely woman. RIP.

However, the show - dedicated to her - must go on, and thus Mr B introduced our first guest.



Stevan Alcock, making a very welcome return to Polari, read a rather fab passage from his acclaimed debut novel - and Polari First Book Prize nominee - Blood Relatives, which tells the tale of Ricky, growing up gay in Leeds in the 70s against the backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper murders. Although the passage he read (brilliantly) described his teenage protagonist's trepidation as he hovers in a pub prior to attending a typically earnest 70s gay group meeting upstairs, then to his horror encounters by chance a school friend at the bar just as the out-gay punters start arriving, I can't find that extract online. Instead, here is Mr Alcock reading the introductory passage from the novel - written as it is read, in the Yorkshire dialect...

Stevan Alcock - Blood Relatives

Next up was a Polari "newbie", crime-writer Sarah Hilary, who read (as she had promised) a somewhat chilling scene-setting passage from her new work Tastes Like Fear that described the sinister scenario of a disparate group of young girls, a "family of photo-booth-ready dolls, smooth hair down to their waists, new tits under neat shirts", all of them trapped in the mysterious web of a man called "Harm". What's going on? What is his hold over them? What is going to be their fate? I really should read the novel to find out...



However, all thoughts of crime, murder and mystery evaporated with the arrival on stage of the utterly marvellous Mr James Maker (Polari First Prize winner for his autobiography Autofellatio in 2011)! Heaven knows what his plans are for the story he read for us - my vote would be for a television soap-opera-cum-comedy. Set around a small gated community in Spain (the country where until recently Mr Maker was an ex-pat), he introduced a stream of increasingly uproarious camp characters - from the pretentious gay couple hosting the party at which everyone was gathering, one a hysterical mess, the other a dull lothario, to the demandingly snooty wannabe-matriarch of the estate, to whip-wielding estate agent, to the (inevitable) busy-body gossips and unhappily married couples that always inhabit such spaces. With his customarily droll delivery, this was a thoroughly enjoyable and quite hilarious scenario, and I look forward to finding out where it will lead...

Thus cheered, it was time for a fag and a top-up before making my way back to the Fifth Floor Function Room, for part two.



Before our final acts, it was time for VG (Val) Lee to take to the stage to announce the Polari First Book Prize 2016 shortlist. Now in its sixth year, the Prize is awarded annually to a writer whose first book explores the LGBT experience, whether in poetry, prose, fiction or non-fiction. The six shortlisted titles are:

• Blood Relatives by Stevan Alcock
• Sugar and Snails by Anne Goodwin
• Trans by Juliet Jacques
• Different for Girls by Jacquie Lawrence
• Physical by Andrew McMillan
• The Good Son by Paul McVeigh

As Mr B said, it's a good job two of the night's readers (who were long-listed) made it to the shortlist, otherwise it may well have been embarrassing. Not least Juliet Jacques, opening part two. She was in fine fettle as she read one of her short stories, which focused on the S&M fantasies of a budding trans woman in Brighton, well, "Hove, actually":

The door felt heavy. As he entered he saw hangers of lingerie, red, black, white and soft pink, PVC nurses and maids’ uniforms, a bin full of eyeliner and lipstick. At the counter there were books and magazines: The Tranny Guide and Utterly Fabulous, with impossibly beautiful people on their covers. A middle-aged man stood behind them, his clean-shaven face caked in foundation, brown eyes with a little mascara on the lashes.
“Can I help you?”
“Do you have any tickets for Divinity?”
“We’ve got a few.” Patrick noticed that the assistant’s hands were also shaved, with clear nail varnish. He moved his gaze to catch the assistant’s eyes. They smiled at each other.
“How many did you want?”
“Just one.”
“£15, please. What are you going to wear?”
“I don’t know . . . I’ve got some heels, tights, a few dresses but I’m not sure they’re right. I was thinking of buying a wig. ”
“We’ve got plenty of those.”

Patrick saw stilettos, a room full of wigs on mannequin heads, some white boxes, open, with an array of false breasts, different sizes but all quite large, a few brown, mostly beige. He wondered if the silicone might feel nicer than cotton wool.
“What style were you after?”
“I don’t know . . . ”
“Hmm . . . I reckon light brown, not too long. Try these.”
Patrick tried a brown wig in front of the mirror.
“I think the blonde highlights brings out your eyes.”
“I love it,” said Patrick.
“Now you’ll need a dress.” The assistant shot him a smile. “Are you a top or a bottom?”
“Huh?”
“Are you dominant, or submissive?”

Patrick said nothing.
“You look like a sub to me.”
“How can you tell?”
“You’re just a bit coquettish. Not rocket science, I know.”
“But I don’t want to tie myself to anything.”
“No, but you want someone else to tie you to something.”
They laughed awkwardly.

Quite remarkable what happens in Suburbia...



And finally, it was time for the very gorgeous John McCullough to round off the evening's entertainment. His first collection of poems The Frost Fairs won the Polari First Book Prize in 2012. His new collection of poems Spacecraft has, as he explained, nothing to do with space or sci-fi, but, according to the blurb "the white space of the page and the distance between people". Several use as their allegory Mr MucCullough's musings on the death of his first partner from an AIDS-related illness, not least this one:

In Minnesota, they reeled a sixty ton house
over ice: a caught fish. The tow truck eased

forward, a steel cable stretched and quivered.
Walls crept. Why it sets me thinking of you

I can’t fathom. Who’d rescue your building –
split gutters, bleedings from oxidized pipes?

Still, I picture it skating, its porch nosing
the air. The house where you swallowed

your diagnosis. Where you phoned from, drunk.
It plunges through ice to the lake’s silty floor.

Brown water discovers its rooms.
Algae furs chairs and bedposts,

traces circles on ceilings – the loft crowded
with minnows, a wandering bass.

And with those emotions ringing in our ears, it was curtain-call time, and the end of the show.



All excellent stuff - we adore Polari!

However, our next outing is not until (bizarrely) 7th October - lord alone knows why the lengthy hiatus - when the winner of the Polari First Book Prize will be announced, Paul himself will be reading from his own new crime novel The Black Path, and also on the bill will be Namita Chakrabarty, Alexis Gregory, North Morgan and Amy Acre.

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

Trannies with taste, Chief whipped, Tintin, girls' private parts and the Gay Cranford

Ange, Paul, Jim, John-John and I trolled along to another highly-anticipated Polari last night at the lovely Level 5 function room, with its views of the London Eye and Parliament.



Bloody marvellous, it was too!



After a suitably gothic introduction from our host Paul Burston (resplendent in shiny black feather cowl and Crow Man hat for Hallowe'en), we opened proceedings with the very elegant Robin Anderson, who gave us a rather funny anecdote about how the name of one of his novels came about. When Old Compton Street was full of roadworks a few years ago, Mr Anderson was due to do a book reading at Balans Café. He approached a workman to ask when the "bloody mess" would be gone - "I cannot expect my guests to arrive in the middle of a bomb-site" was how he put it. The man's response? "Oh, La Di Da Di Bloody Da!"



Reading from his novel of that title and its sequel Trannies and Tiaras, Mr Anderson hilariously captured the weird and wonderful world of his heroines the trannies Miranda Maracona and Kookie Kombuis and their adventures in running a "love date agency" ("We are transvestites with taste," Miranda had announced firmly. "Not transvestites of tackiness!"), and latterly as protagonists investigating diamond smuggling and cocaine dealing... Wonderfully camp stuff! Visit his website for more.



Next up was the extremely enthusiastic "performance poet" Jason Charles (also a playwright of note) aka Jake Royston (his on-stage persona). Performance poetry is a bit of a "Marmite" art-form, and we did admittedly struggle a little, especially with the "sung" poems. However, I must admit to being charmed by some of his twisted wordplay. Watch his recent performance at the RVT.

However, if it is performance you want, then there is nothing - and I mean nothing! - in the literary world quite like the effervescent Rebecca Chance!



We had met the lovely lady before of course, at Polari back in February. On this occasion she chose to wear a rather fetching blue wig from her collection, together with a pair of gorgeous fuck-me shoes ("from Peacocks 'stripper range', daaahling!") and roped in our hapless host Mr Burston to be her stooge for a particularly salacious extract from her newest novel, Bad Sisters, involving an MP's ambitious wife and the inappropriately-titled Chief Whip (who gets the good spanking he himself craves!).



It was truly hilarious - and Mr B got so carried away with the method acting that his trousers just fell off..!

Here's Miss Chance talking about her previous bonk-buster Bad Girls:

Rebecca Chance - Bad Girls

You can also read an extract from Bad Sisters on her website.



Recovering his composure (and his clothes), Paul closed the first half's jollities, and Miss Chance joined us at our table for a while.



After the break it was the turn of the more scholarly of literary types starting with the lovely John McCullough, Brighton-born lecturer (with an MA in Sexual Dissidence!), queer archivist and a very clever poet indeed. He read poems on such diverse subjects as reading Frank O'Hara, and Tintin's relationship with Cap'n Haddock - and was quite mesmerising...



...as was his friend and fellow academic Ms Sophie Mayer, who read from (among other things) her book The Private Parts of Girls (as she said, "Don't Google this title!"), an extract from which is on her website. Beautifully-written and moving stuff.



Finally, it was the turn of our headline "act" - the Man Booker Prize-nominated novelist, critic and journalist Philip Hensher. He read two wonderful extracts from his new novel King of the Badgers, a lengthy chronicle of the bizarre lives of the inhabitants of a small North Devon coastal town, including closet queens, orgying Bears and mixed-up straights, all living in splendid isolation until a horrifying child abduction occurs in their midsts. Mr Hensher himself said: "I kept saying to people as I was writing it, ‘It’s a gay Cranford’. My publisher actually wanted me to call it ‘The Gay Cranford’."

The piece featuring a slightly deranged and lonely teenage girl who re-enacts entire trial-by-jury stories with dolls and "My Little Ponies" was particularly imbued with black humour - Mr Hensher is a fantastic writer, indeed!

Here is Mr Hensher talking to Mariella Fostrup about his new novel.



And so, reluctantly, we staggered to the close of another brilliant peerless gay literary salon. It only remained to do a bit of schmoozing with the familiar faces such as Alex Hopkins, Joe Storey-Smith, Helen Sandler, DJ Connell, VG Lee, Helen Smith and of course the luscious Frasier from Foyles before heading off across the bridge into the (by now very rainy) West End.

Another fab night, and there are a few more events announced in the "Polari pantheon" already:

First up is the "pop-up Polari" event at Lo Profile in Soho tomorrow (Wednesday Oct 26), where "Polari First Book Prize" shortlisted author James Maker will read from Autofellatio. Also on the bill are Angela Clerkin, Alex Hopkins and Karen Mcleod, who’ll all be reading from Men & Women.

On Thursday Oct 27, over in East London the LXV bookshop is hosting "A Queer Quintet", with all five shortlisted authors - Clare Campbell, DJ Connell, Timothy Graves, Jonathan Kemp and James Maker.

On Wednesday Nov 16, Polari returns to Lo Profile with shortlisted authors DJ Connell, Timothy Graves and Jonathan Kemp, as well as debut novelist - and a possible contender for next year’s prize - North Morgan.

And finally, there’s the big "Polari First Book Prize" night itself, at the Southbank Centre on Nov 21. This event also marks Polari’s fourth birthday, and we’ll be joined by award-winning debut novelist SJ Watson, plus Karen Mcleod, Neil Alexander, Paula Varjack, Shaun Levin and singer Marcus Reeves.

I can't wait!