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]

Daddy-chasers, dead Divas, swifts, stalkers, and a multi-cultural middle-class soap opera

Eeek!! A close-up...

Maybe it was the weather. After a little bit of a break from attending, I made a valiant attempt to "round up the troops" for Tuesday's Polari. To be fair, John-John was going to accompany me, but in the event was sick; everyone else was otherwise engaged...

Not that any of that matters, of course - Polari is a "family" all of its own and I always enjoy it. Regulars VG Lee, Wayne Herbert and Alexis Gregory were present and correct, and I was overjoyed to see that the effervescent and every-lovely Rebecca Chance/Lauren Henderson was there, so I joined her at her "ringside table".

Our genial host Paul Burston opened proceedings at "London's peerless gay literary salon" by thanking all of us for turning up on what was the hottest day of the year so far [the Royal Festival Hall terrace was packed with sun-seekers!], before, without further ado he introduced our first reader Polis Loizou.



Reading from his novel Disbanded Kingdom, his account of the obsessive cruising/stalking of a hot "Daddy" from pub to pub and into the outer environs of London by the "hero" of the book, twenty-two-year-old Oscar, certainly did leave us a little hot under the collar, I must admit...



However, it was the next "turn" that provided the classic kind of entertainment for which Polari is rightly so popular, as our second reader Derek Farrell came to the stage, accompanied by our own dear Rebecca Chance! The reason for the double-header soon became clear.

Outrageously camp, Mr Farrell's Death of a Diva [which has been described as “Like The Thin Man meets Will & Grace via Ab Fab. In Southwark.”] was the first in his series of books featuring the hapless Danny Farrell, and his unlikely best friend Caz (Lady Caroline Victoria Genevieve Jane De Montfort, only daughter of the thirteenth Earl of Holloway) - and guess who got to play the part of the hard-drinking, incisive aristocrat..? Here's a synopsis of the book - and it sounds every bit as hilarious as our readers made it:

Lyra Day, one time TV star, singer and gay icon is booked to stage her big comeback at the Marquess of Queensbury, a big coup for Danny at his grand re-opening night. Sitting in her make-up chair, eyes staring lifelessly ahead, the diva is dead. Her sequinned dress glittering in the light cast from above; the little pools of reflected light sparkling across the paper held tightly in her hand. The policeman carefully prises it out of her grip and unfurls it. It reads “The Last Will and Blurb of Lyra Day”.

Danny Bird is having a very bad day. In the space of just a few hours he lost his job, his partner and his home.

Ever the optimist, Danny throws himself headlong into his dream to turn the grimmest pub in London into the coolest nightspot south of the river. Sadly, everything doesn’t go quite as planned when his star turn is found strangled hours before opening night.

Danny becomes the prime suspect in the crime, and then the gangster who really owns the pub starts asking where his share of the takings has gone… it seems things are going to get worse for Danny before they get better.

It was a hilarious romp!



Completing the trio of readings for the first half, Kate Bradbury is a renowned writer on nature - and particularly wildlife gardening - for many leading publications such as the Guardian and the Telegraph. She embarked upon transforming a gloomy, rotting and overgrown back yard in Hove into a living garden space, and to write a book about her travails - The Bumblebee Flies Anyway: A year of gardening and (wild)life. It developed into something darker, however, when in the middle of her transformation project her mother was taken critically ill - and the domestic drama began to interweave into the narrative of the book.

She read for us a piece about studying the minutiae of nature as a release from the tension of dealing with hospital visits, then followed it with a beautifully-described piece about the swirling, swooping beauty of swifts in full flight. It was entrancing.



After a break for a drink, a fag and a gossip, it was time for the headliners...



But first - our darling "Sexy Lexi" Alexis Gregory made an announcement of the long list for this year's Polari First Book Prize, as follows:

• Trans Mission: My Quest to a Beard – Alex Bertie (Wren & Rook)
• Through Your Blood – Toby Campion (Burning Eye)
• Mussolini’s Island – Sarah Day (Tinder Press)
• A Marvellous Party – Ian Elmslie (Ignite)
• Good As You: From Prejudice to Pride - 30 years of Gay Britain – Paul Flynn (Fourth Estate)
• Pansy Boy - Paul Harfleet (Barbican)
• Carnivore - Jonathan Lyon (HQ)
• Elmet – Fiona Mozley (John Murray)
• Little Gold – Allie Rogers (Legend Press)
• Conversations with Friends – Sally Rooney (Faber)
• Bravado – Scottee (Oberon)
• Is Monogamy Dead? Rethinking Relationships in the 21st Century – Rosie Wilby (Accent Press)

Amanda Jennings is a best-selling author, and she read for us from her latest Cornwall-based novel The Cliff House. With a slightly Gothic feel to it, the story is told from the perspective of fifteen-year-old Tamsyn, obsessed with the goings-on at the huge Art Deco house overlooking the cove where she lives (to the extent of spying on its occupants with binoculars), and the budding relationship that develops between her and the rich family's daughter as their paths cross when she is caught swimming in the house's pool without permission.

Whether or not - as is implied - there develops some kind of lesbian frisson between the girls remains a mystery - until or unless one reads the book, of course. Or gets someone with a lovely voice to read bits from it for you...





Finally, our headliner - Mr Philip Hensher. His latest magnum opus The Friendly Ones is a complicated and comprehensive examination of cultural histories, focussing on the interwoven relationship between a middle-class Bengali family and their immediate neighbour, a retired gent with a distant and somewhat dysfunctional family who he rarely sees. Needless to say - in the passage Mr Hensher read - it is the neighbouring "foreigners" who come to his solace when the elderly man receives news that his son has been killed in a tragic incident.

The "whos", "whats" and wherefores of their relationships - and indeed, who the hell is who in the cast of apparent thousands, even in this short extract - was confusing, but would likely be resolved by delving deeper into the novel. At some stage, I might.

And, with the applause for the great man subsiding, it was time for the curtain call - and the end of another session of literary brain-food.



Our next outing will be will be on 25th July, and features Lesley Thomson, Patrick Horrigan, Babirye Bukilwa, David Kerby-Kendall and Stephanie Dickinson.

We love Polari!

What does it mean to be gay?

A most fascinating debate has opened on The Guardian website today.

Esteemed gay author Philip Hensher (who was entrancing when he read from his own work King of the Badgers at Polari last October) has posted his review of a new book called How to Be Gay by David M Halperin. Here is an extract:

What does it mean to be gay? Is it enough, as many people think, just to fall into the sex-clinic's category of "men who have sex with men"? That is intended to include the closet case and the cottager who goes home to wife and children. There are plenty of people – increasing numbers, in fact – who are gay without having much to do with traditional gay culture. There are gay people who follow rugby and even play it – not necessarily in a pervy way – and those who genuinely quite like the New Statesman. Some gay men live their entire lives kitted out in beige anoraks. Some of them collect stamps and others work for engineering companies. Some of those men – gay but not Gay, as it were – regard the whole musicals-interior decoration-fashion-thing as a curious foreign language, not really worth learning. They have never said "Bona" or "fabulous" in their lives; the only musical they have ever seen is Phantom of the Opera, because their aunt took them. What their culture is, and whether it forms a unity, the cultural critic cannot, apparently, say. What he can be concerned about, it seems, is the culture of Gay, passed down through generations of slappers, propping up the bars of Soho in London, Chelsea in New York, and the Marais in Paris, all quarters which are now as dead as the proverbial dodo.

David Halperin has written an over-long book, more localised in its application than he seems fully to appreciate, about the aspects of being gay other than sexual choice. His thinking arrives courtesy of a course he teaches at an American university. Naturally, when a course in "How to Be Gay" was announced in the American mid-west, an army of enraged family-first campaigners rose up in taupe leisurewear to denounce Professor Halperin for wanting to recruit the innocent. The passages recounting this provide the most amusing sections of the book, as taupe leisurewear and its mental equivalents so often do. He admits that "American" is an unspoken adjective in much of what he has to say, including the title of the book – I guess "How to be an American Gay" would be an even more uninviting subject than the one he has chosen. Outside America, he reliably gets things wrong, suggesting that Bollywood musicals may represent the same sort of gay cult to Indian gay men that Sex and the City does to Americans – he's clearly never seen a film in a Calcutta cinema, or he would have noticed that the appeal is not a gay thing at all at its source. He's not even very good on opera, bringing up Aida as his prime example – if he knew any opera queens, he'd know that we are much more likely to be going to Tristan, Salome and Janacek. When I last saw The Makropoulos Case, the stalls were like Lo-Profile on a Friday night, packed with queens waving at each other, opera glasses in hand.

In fact, the limits of the book are set not just by the limits of his culture, but by his understanding of what culture might be, even just in America. His interests are not really in gay culture at all, but in gay taste, particularly in film and TV shows. He doesn't show much interest in gay meeting places – when he does record finding himself in a backroom, it is to talk about the porn playing to an accompaniment of 19th-century opera. He doesn't, amazingly, show any interest in clubbing, which I would say was a much more powerful expression of gay culture to recent generations of gay people than terrible old movies. He doesn't write about clothes, or gestures, or gait, or any of what identifies a gay man to another at 80 paces, or the syntax and vocabulary and slang which makes them mutually clear at closer quarters – I mean, you can't always be saying "Have you seen Mommie Dearest?" to strangers. Halperin pretends to be an outsider looking in, but you only need to look at the Earls Court, circa 1985 moustache ornamenting his face to realise that he's writing from well within his own culture, looking out, but not looking very far. Perhaps if you stand still long enough, you become an outsider, as the culture moves swiftly on, from Judy to Gaga.

True to form, this has encouraged a healthy discourse among Guardian readers, which I have really enjoyed reading! Comments such as:

• "I have never believed anyway that what passes for most of gay culture is in any way radical. The pressure to conform to notions of what it means to be gay can be as suffocating (hell we in the past have managed to fetishize conformity to an extent that a whole generation of gay men self-identified as "clones") as the pressure to conform to the conservative white picket fence life."
• "At the most we can have a bit of fun with these stereotypes, by either embracing them or subverting them, but at the very least I think we have to accept that it does no good to outright deny them."
• "[I grew up trying]...to be a normal guy who shows no more stereotypically gay traits than my straight friends - but eventually [found] that this was leading to the exact opposite. I was consciously suppressing parts of the 'real me' to try to prove that the stereotypes were false."
• "I suspect some of the more mannered gay behaviour in the past may have been because gays were isolated and threatened. Things like Polari - which sound really weird today, like something out of a 19th century fable - had their purpose. Today there is no particular reason for gay people to look or sound especially different to the rest of the population - unless they want to. But if they want to, then that's cool too."

I strongly recommend reading the whole thing.

I doubt I will ever read, let alone recommend in the same way, the book itself.

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!