What I like doing best

“What I like doing best is Nothing."

"How do you do Nothing?" asked Pooh after he had wondered for a long time.

"Well, it's when people call out at you just as you're going off to do it, 'What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?' and you say, 'Oh, Nothing,' and then you go and do it.
It means just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."

"Oh!" said Pooh.”

It's apparently "Winnie the Pooh Day"! [Well, it's the birthday of AA Milne, who wrote the stories, but give the mayor of Los Angeles an inch and he'll take a mile...]

Let's indulge...

Winnie the Pooh - A Rather Blustery Day

Winnie the Pooh - Stuck at Rabbit's House

Tigger's Song (Winnie-the-Pooh)

Sigh.

Childhood revisited.

Arise...

...Companion of Honour Dame Shirley Bassey, Dame Jilly Cooper (for services to the "bonk-buster" novel?), [founder of Glastonbury Festival] Sir Michael Eavis, [founder of that other great British institution Wetherspoons] Sir Tim Martin.

Also honoured: Dame Judith Weir [Master of the King's Music], author Sir Alexander McCall Smith, former Home Secretary Sir Sajid Javid, Knight Grand Cross Sir Ridley Scott and Dame Grand Cross Dame Margaret Beckett.

Among those awarded Commander of the British Empire (CBE): lyricist Don Black, TV chef Paul Hollywood, former rugby players turned fundraisers Rob Burrow and Kevin Sinfield, former England footballer Peter Shilton, TV historian Professor Ronald Hutton and author Kate Mosse; Officers of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) include legendary DJ Tony Blackburn, singer Leona Lewis, business guru Mary Portas, soprano Carolyn Sampson and England football team captain Millie Bright; Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) include DJ Steve Wright, actress Emilia Clarke, broadcaster James Whale and England footballers Lauren Hemp and Mary Earps.

Congratulations, one and all!

New Year Honours list 2024 in full

Dystopian matriarchy, lust, society balls, Mother Courage and an Oscar-winning hunk

It was with great - nay, salivating - anticipation that John-John, Paul and I braved the foul storms and rain on Monday night and headed to the Southbank Centre for a very special outing for "London's peerless gay literary salon" Polari. For we knew our headliner was none other the Oscar-winning [for Milk] Dustin Lance Black - screenwriter, director, film and television producer, LGBT rights activist, and husband to Tom Daley!

There was no sign of the gorgeous Tom on the evening, more's the pity, but it was an utterly faboo evening, nonetheless!



Opening proceedings as ever - to a packed house of familiar faces (including the lovely John McCullough, Bryanne - with broken leg and a hilarious scooter - and Simon, VG Lee and more), our host Paul Burston proudly listed the many and varied venues that Polari had visited, and will visit, up and down the country as part of the continuing Polari Tour - not least the superb birthday celebration for Heaven nightclub we went to last month. This month's event was also the occasion to announce the Polari Book Prize; but first, our opening reader, Angela Chadwick.



She read for us an extract from her debut novel XX, described by one reviewer perfectly thus:

Rosie wants a child. Her partner Jules isn’t sure. But a new trial offers the lesbian couple a chance to have a baby which uses DNA from both their eggs, rather than forcing them to rely on a sperm donor to become parents.

Jules is excited about becoming part of the ground-breaking experiment and feels more comfortable about bringing up a child who is biologically her daughter.

But they are not prepared for the furious backlash from the trial’s critics, or the intense Press interest which follows their every move. Former journalist Angela Chadwick’s interesting and thought-provoking first novel explores the ethics of creating babies with two biological mothers whose X chromosomes can only create daughters.

[The] measured writing means the reader can consider the arguments from both sides, rather than being told what to think and there are plenty of unexpected twists to keep the plot moving.

It was very impressive indeed.



Next up, Georgia native Mr Collin Kelley is a familiar - if somewhat in frequent - reader at Polari. He read a series of his poems about lust, longing and his affinity with England, to the delight of the audience.

More Mr Kelley here and here.



Completing our triptych was another Transatlantic Anglophile, Ms Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott, whose reading took us away from the concerns of the modern world into a more glittering domain - that of the waspish author Truman Capote and his circle of society acolytes, to whose vanity he appealed with his words and his society events such as the legendary Black and White Ball. More specifically, her novel Swan Song [read an excellent review courtesy of ArtsDesk] deals with the apocalyptic fallout in the upper echelons of New York society when Truman decided to "bite the hand that fed him" by publishing a thinly-veiled fictional expose of the foibles and scandals behind the gilded lives of the ladies he called "his Swans".

I only wish there were a YouTube video out there of Ms Greenberg-Jephcott reading from her book - as she perfectly imitated the already drug-addled Capote's nasal whiny drawl and prissiness, trying desperately to hide and protect the valuable manuscript of the story that would lead to his downfall... I thoroughly enjoyed it! [Must try and get the audiobook.]



Next, Polari stalwart and national treasure (and unfortunately not-made-a-Dame-again) VG (Val) Lee and bestselling award winning author Kiki Archer presented the longlists for not one, but two book prizes - for writers whose work explores the LGBTQ+ experience, whether in poetry, prose, fiction or non-fiction - on offer at the salon this year!

First, the contenders for The Polari First Book Prize 2019:

The House on Half Moon Street – Alex Reeve (Raven)
XX – Angela Chadwick (Dialogue Books)
The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor – Rana Haddad (Hoopoe)
Soho – Richard Scott (Faber & Faber)
Attend – West Camel (Orenda Books)
Disbanded Kingdom – Polis Loizou (Cloud Lodge)
Not Just A Tomboy – Caspar J Baldwin (Jessica Kingsley Publishers)
Next Lesson – Chris Woodley
Queer Sex – Juno Roche (Jessica Kingsley Publishers)
Out of the Woods – Luke Turner (Orion)
Visceral – RJ Arkhipov (Zuleika)
Yes You Are Trans Enough – Mia Violet (Jessica Kingsley Publishers)

...and the full longlist for the brand new Polari Prize (for established authors) 2019:

Drapetomania – John R Gordon (Team Angelica)
The Other Woman – Sophia Blackwell (Burning Eye)
Take Nothing With You – Patrick Gale (Headline)
The Lion Tamer Who Lost – Louise Beech (Orenda Books)
A Simple Scale – David Llewellyn (Seren)
Making Oscar Wilde – Michéle Mendelsshon (Oxford University Press)
Louis & Louise – Julie Cohen (Orion)
Playtime – Andrew McMillan (Penguin)
Prodigal – Charles Lambert (Gallic)
The Bumblebee Flies Anyway – Kate Bradbury (Bloomsbury)
Ghost Wall – Sarah Moss (Granta)
The AQI – David Tait (Smith / Doorstop)



After a break for a fag, dodging the downpours outside the Royal Festival Hall, and a top-up, it was time for the showpiece of the evening - as Mr Dustin Lance Black took to the stage.

Such an instantly engaging and charismatic man (and swooningly handsome to boot), he soon had the audience in turn laughing and crying as he read the moving intro to his memoir Mama's Boy:

A hot, gauzy morning in the late summer of 1987. That was the first time I ever laid eyes on the streets of Los Angeles. I was thirteen years old but looked ten at best - an agonizingly shy Texas boy with eyes like water, hair like the sun, and a tanker truck’s worth of secrets. I was jammed in the backseat of my mom’s mas­sive yellow Malibu Classic between my little brother, Todd, and our stinking cat, Airborne. My mom said we were “on the move.” Others would have called it “on the run.”

Days earlier, my family had packed up what little we had of value and vanished without notice from our lives in the Lone Star State - leaving behind my middle school in San Antonio and our Mormon church in the Randolph Ward, heading west. My mom was behind the wheel, her hairspray-stiffened curls resting on worried shoulders as she worked the hand controls to speed up and slow down her beast of a car: a colossal artefact from a former life that now had to be wrested into submission by a woman who walked on crutches, her legs in braces, her spine fused and held together with metal bars hid­den just beneath the scars that ran the length of her body...

...we’d been taught our entire lives that places like Los Angeles were filled with folks who’d traded their souls and sal­vation for fame, booze, drugs, cash, cars, hetero sex, group sex, and dirty, filthy faggot sex. Los Angeles was the embodiment of an unfa­miliar, exotic America that we’d been warned to avoid: liberal, often coastal, a place for sinners and moral relativists. For our ragtag family on the run, passage through this city was a test of spiritual strength. So we plugged our noses in back, Marcus did his best to navigate up front, and my tiny runaway mom rotated the hand control that turned the gear that pressed down on the gas pedal that she hoped might propel us to safety...

...I described Los Angeles as the “second gayest city in the world.” It wasn’t a compliment. I was already fairly certain that San Francisco was in first position thanks to AIDS hitting the national news when Old Hollywood heartthrob Rock Hudson fell out of his closet and into his grave. Since then, even the news shows in Texas had started offering up images of emaciated gay men, most in San Francisco, but others in New York and Los Angeles, dying terrible deaths thanks to their “lifestyle choices.” So yes, it seemed that San Francisco was the closest to hellfire, but I was fairly certain Los Angeles wasn’t far behind. I suppose I felt it neces­sary to let someone in Texas know I’d survived our journey through this foreign land.

But as we reached the top of a mountain, something in my God-fearing heart stirred, and I looked back toward the city. It was calling to me. If I’m being honest, it had started calling well before we set out on this adventure. If Los Angeles was dangerous, I was curious. How true were the stories I’d heard? Did the people there really do so many strange things to their bodies, their minds, and one another? Did they really make all of those movies and TV shows I’d fallen in love with on the rare occasions we were allowed to watch them? And the most dangerous question of all: Did the nation’s current teen heartthrob, Ricky Schroder, with his golden hair and ocean-blue eyes, actually live somewhere down in all that chaos?

That question, and all of its invasive roots and sticky webs, lin­gered longest in my mind as I watched the city glimmer and shine in the morning sun until it slowly disappeared behind a veil of blue-white smog.

Thirty years have passed since that drive, and for more than two and a half decades of that time I’ve called this City of Angels my home, with all of its sunshine, celebrities, workers, artists, headaches, egos, booze, dreams, lies, cigarette butts, body parts, hot tubs, invitations, hangovers, trophies, and yes, reliably progressive values. And like most Angelenos, I’ve spent much of that time in my car getting from place to place, tucked inside my bubble. Isolated. And in a hurry.

So whenever I heard a siren, I did what most Angelenos do: look forward, left, right, check my rearview mirror, and keep on driving. As an Angeleno, the last thing you want to do is tap the brake. The clock is ticking. We have places to be, coffees to order, deals to make, and great things to accomplish by lunchtime.

But something happened a few years back to strip me of that habit. I was driving home down Hollywood Boulevard when my mom called. I hit the icon on my dash to answer. She sounded gloomy and called herself a “dinosaur” twice. I’d rarely heard her in such a state. I was worried. So I added a three-day layover via Dulles Airport in Virginia to my next love-fuelled flight to London to see the Brit I was fast falling head over heels for. It was a little surprise visit to lift my mom’s spirits, and a big birthday present to myself...

...She wasn’t feeling well, but that was nothing new. For a variety of reasons, big and small, she’d long been forced to use her not incon­siderable strength to fight off this illness or that. We’d done this ailment dance many times. We simply took advantage of her sleep­less nights to share stories, watch NCIS, check out the Home Shop­ping Network’s jewelry specials and buy a few pairs of earrings she couldn’t afford on a military retirement check, sneak far too many Oreo cookies, and witness a sunrise. Her spirits were lifted by the company. So were mine.

Just before I left, my stepdad arrived home from work to take her to the doctor for a checkup, and get her some antibiotics for what she felt sure was a bladder infection. Love hungry and London bound, I ordered a cab to the airport.

It was a markedly quiet ride. I don’t remember music ever even being turned on. But then my cell phone rang. The caller ID said “Mom.” Nothing unusual. This was her regular call to say she missed me already, and I would say the same, because it was true. Instead, when I said hello, my stepdad’s trembling voice rang in my ears: “Your mother collapsed. In the garage. Her heart stopped. The med­ics got here. They did CPR and revived her, but she isn’t conscious. It’s bad, Lance. It’s really bad.”

I couldn’t process it. This was the same brave mom who had suc­cessfully slayed the City of Angels years earlier with three little boys and no use of her legs. It was impossible to imagine her having to be revived by anyone. My mom was the one who kept everyone else safe and strong. Her tough, stubborn heart didn’t need a stranger’s help to keep going.

Choking out the words, I told the cabdriver what I’d just heard, and bless his heart, he ploughed right over the grassy centre median and turned back the way we’d come. Soon we heard the siren. Then we saw an ambulance take a left turn off of my mom’s road, rac­ing away from us toward the local Manassas hospital. That’s when I noticed that, like they did in Los Angeles, the drivers in this small, polite, Southern town mostly didn’t bother to pull over for ambulances either. Maybe a brief pause to let it pass, then a chase to make up their lost time in its wake. As we raced to catch up, I grew more and more distressed by this surprising similarity. My mom, my best friend, my rock was inside of that ambulance fighting for her life, and even here in her treasured South, no one seemed to give a damn. Our terror was their inconvenience...

...I started to shake. Until then, I hadn’t considered that she might die. Everything I’d ever built was thanks to that stubborn heart of hers, and there it was, racing away from me in the back of an ambu­lance. Suddenly, I didn’t know if I’d ever again feel the warmth of her hand, know the might of her will, or stand atop the foundation she’d built for our family with the strength of her steel-clad spine... Although my mom and I had often disagreed politically and per­sonally, she’d led our family by example, instilling in us a can-do atti­tude that often defied reason—an optimism many would call foolish, ignorant, and naïve, but an optimism that occasionally shocked our neighbours and our world with its brazen veracity. She was my reason...

...So I let the cabdriver know that I’d pay for any ticket he got, but that if he didn’t push his pedal to the floor, he was asking for a big old can of whoop-ass from yours truly. He didn’t need much convincing. My red eyes had already made the stakes abundantly clear. My mom had to live. Because deep in my gut, I feared a storm was coming. Beyond the headlines of the day, I could just make out the sparks of division catching fire in the disparate places we called home, and I knew that my mom and I had much more to discover and build if we were going to help our neighbours and family weather the terrible schisms this storm would bring.

So I held my zen-like cabdriver’s gaze until he looked back out toward the ambulance that was now racing away from us, and he hit the gas.

Wow.

It must have been somewhat difficult for all concerned (as I commented to Mr Black later) to progress from such an emotional wrench to a full "in-conversation" session with Paul Burston, but, after gathering themselves, it was a rewarding session - covering topics ranging from fame, families (both Lance's childhood and his current family with Tom and little Robbie) to campaigning for LGBT equality, the strains of being "role models", current politics and being vigilant about protecting our rights in the future, to pride, prejudice, and all that. It was a joy.

[Watch his interview on Lorraine Kelly Show for more]



It also happened to be, as Paul revealed, the adorable one's birthday - and in a genuine moment of camaraderie, the whole room took part in a heartfelt chorus of Happy Birthday To You:

Happy Birthday, Dear Lance

After the customary curtain-call, it was time to join the queue to get our copies of Mr Black's book signed. True to form, he seemed unfazed by the attention, and had the patience to speak to everyone on a personal and genuine level, and to have his photo taken with all of us in turn. I think after this, we're all a little bit in love with Dustin Lance Black.

Another triumphal evening! We love Polari.

Our next outing will be on 26th July - and our host-with-the-most Paul Burston will lead the pack, reading from his own new novel The Closer I Get. His "supporting cast" will include the lovely Alex Marwood, Bethan Roberts, Orlando Ortega-Medina and Kate Davies. Can't wait.

PS Get well soon, Paulo!

The definitive chronicler of a certain kind of English ordinariness

That master of letters [don't call him a "national treasure", whatever you do!] Alan Bennett celebrates his 85th birthday today...

As the BFI describes him:

It's hard to pigeonhole Alan Bennett, and correspondingly easy to undervalue his achievements. Although one of the most recognisable writers of his generation, his unassumingly owlish persona and fondness for self-deprecation has created the impression of a lovably eccentric minor talent, whose amusingly droll plays about elderly Northern women (typically played by Thora Hird) and fusspot secretaries (Patricia Routledge) are merely one step up from sitcom. The idea that he might be the most important and innovative British television playwright since Dennis Potter initially seems laughable.

But it's hard to think of a stronger contender. His prolific output includes individual television plays, television series and cinema films, together with numerous stage works, short stories, assorted journalism and his inimitable diaries. An Englishman Abroad and the two Talking Heads series are regularly cited amongst British television's greatest achievements, and he is widely recognised as the master of the television monologue.

Furthermore, his work is generally darker, harsher and more satirically barbed than his (deeply resented) 'national treasure' status and peerless ear for the eccentricities of Yorkshire dialect and workplace gossip would suggest. Often, what looks like endearing shyness is closer to full-blown paranoia (Kafka is a character in two plays, and his shadow looms over several more), with family life either fractious or awkwardly silent, his elderly characters often facing a lonely, neglected death. His ability to get under the skin of such withdrawn people and write about them with such empathy, compassion and wry (often gallows) humour makes him not just a great writer but the definitive chronicler of a certain kind of English ordinariness, whose outwardly placid surface conceals inner turmoil as intense as anything displayed by the more emotionally articulate.

So very true. That is why we adore him.

Mr Bennett is as much an embedded part of British culture as cricket, Churchill, drinking tea or Thomas Arne - and his observations on such intrusive modern inventions as television [tongue-in-cheek observations, needless to say] are a joy:

A Night in With Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett watches Love Island

Many happy returns, Alan Bennett (born 9th May 1934)

Nobody could be less elitist than I

"He was the [art critic] profession’s equivalent of Dame Maggie Smith in 'Downton Abbey', a hugely entertaining old monster. His ratings were on the Downton scale too. He was genuinely loved by legions of readers, a national celebrity." - The Guardian

In a weekend where what passes for "the media" - in its obsessions with the television returns of The X-Factor, Dr Who and Downton Abbey, Jeremy Corbin, immigration and sport - barely mentioned the death of the delightful Jackie Collins, it is little surprise that the sad loss of Brian Sewell (one of the country's last remaining "old school eccentrics"; a determined foe of all that modernist guff that masquerades as "art" these days) is underwhelmingly reported.

We adored the man. His eloquent summation of the feelings of many (including our own here at Dolores Delargo Towers) about the state of 20th century art and its institutions, and the incomprehensible rise to fame and fortune of the likes of Hirst, Emin and other Turner Prize-winning types is legendary...

On The Royal Academy: ..."the grand old whore of Piccadilly, masquerading as a charity."

On David Hockney: "...he takes a subject and wrings it to exhaustion, constantly repeating tricks of handling to lend shallow interest to his fields of canvas. As for his discordant range of colour, I fell to wondering if he is the Monet of our day, his vision so dimmed by cataracts that he must paint in vile greens and viler purples if he is to see anything take shape on his innumerable canvases."

On Banksy: "The two words 'graffiti' and 'art' should never be put together... [He] should have been put down at birth. It's no good as art, drawing or painting. His work has no virtue. It's merely the sheer scale of his impudence that has given him so much publicity."

On an exhibition of Damien Hirst's skulls: "these paintings are shoddy, slip-slop and derivative... He is vain enough to proclaim that his work as Bacon's shallow pasticheur belongs in the Wallace Collection with paintings by Rembrandt and Velázquez, Titian and Van Dyck, but one minute spent in the Great Gallery with these is enough to prove the arrogance of this delusion... I declare this detestable exhibition fucking dreadful."

On Gilbert and George: “They are nothing but a pair of pretentious prats. They see all their excretions as precious. They are infantile and narcissistic.”

On Tracey Emin: "Skill, if she ever had any, has been usurped by celebrity, a celebrity nourished by deliberate outrage... The sane man must ask whether he should give any of this pretentious stuff the time of day in aesthetic terms when it seems that this self-regarding exhibitionist is ignorant, inarticulate, talentless, loutish and now very rich.”

And the final word from the great man - on himself: "Nobody could be less elitist than I."

RIP Brian Sewell (15th June 1931 – 19th September 2015)

For fun - Learn to speak like Brian Sewell

Brian Sewell on sex

It's not the bum sex that was the big problem

From my own published interview with Rupert Smith in Beige magazine (he says, modestly):

In a nutshell it is about a young woman now - Helen - who has a famous grandfather [Edward] who was a novelist loathed by the critics; very, very successful and loved by the public. She begins to dig around into his past, his "real" story to find out why he stopped writing when he did and his career went stone dead. The more she finds out, the more she begins to understand why that is, but in the process she discovers some truths about her own family that might have been better left undiscovered. She possibly wishes she hadn't.

The great relationship between her grandfather Edward and the love of his life Billy is the cause and effect that drives the whole thing... The secrets Helen discovers about her family stem from the shame and secretiveness of Edward and Billy, but as we discover, it's not the bum sex that was eventually the big problem.

It was with these themes in mind (knowing that I was likely to be one of the few people in the audience who had read it, and therefore understood exactly what the mysterious "secret" was) that I went along with John-John and Paul to the launch of Rupert's latest opus Interlude at the chi-chi New Bloomsbury Set bar yesterday afternoon.



As ever, Rupert's mellifluous tones, as he read passages from the book, held the crowd in hushed attentiveness. The audience was a mixed bag of literary types and "friends of the family", newbies and die-hard fans.

The divine David McAlmont was there. The event was hosted by the sexy Uli from Gay's the Word bookshop (around the corner). I was overjoyed to see former Polari DJ (from its early days in the Trash Palace and Freedom Bar in Soho) Dom Agius - whose stunning photographic portrait of a male model graces the book's cover - as I hadn't seen him in years.

The room was packed out, in fact, and everyone gave The Author a massive round of applause.

This was an enjoyable event, as book launches go - engaging and never dry (Mr Smith is a past master of the witty aside), and the readings and the question and answer session afterwards were excellent.

I really hope it does well. Interlude is certainly one of the best books I have read for a long time!

[PS I never did get a complimentary copy (other than the proof copy by email) for my journalistic efforts - so had to buy it at the event, and Rupert kindly signed it.]

Buy a copy today via Waterstones or Amazon.

A rather fab Interlude

A while ago, our friend Alex asked me to do a feature for Beige, a quarterly glossy gay magazine of note, in which I have previously had pieces promoting LGBT History Month - but only ever in their online version.

This time, I am chuffed to announce that my interview with the fantabulosa award-winning author Mr Rupert Smith has made the print edition!



I am very proud...

Rupert Smith's new novel Interlude is published in September 2014 - and I cannot recommend it enough!

Visit Rupert's website for more information.

Wilt wilted

More sad news. Author Tom Sharpe is dead.

Way back in the 1970s, as a pre-teen I was an avid reader. My reading matter ranged from the works of Richmal Crompton and Enid Blyton to Roger Lancelyn Green and CS Lewis. But my Grandad was also a great reader, and his shelves contained books of a more intriguing nature. Grown-up books, full of murders, sex, spies and adventures - and a selection by a new (at the time) author by the name of Tom Sharpe. My very first "adult" book was probably his Indecent Exposure [a satirical, and very funny, farce taking the piss out of Apartheid South Africa], and I took on the - enjoyable - task from that moment on to read all of Mr Sharpe's books I could get my hands on.

With their riotous - and often quite deliberately offensive, in a Viz-type comic-strip way - covers by Paul Sample, these paperbacks were utterly fascinating to me as a teenager; each one a cartoon featuring bawdy large-breasted Rubinesque harridans, detailed depictions of unfortunate (usually sexual) mishaps and scenes of utter chaos, they were a pretty accurate indication of each book's contents. For Mr Sharpe certainly wrote into his novels numerous interweaving farcical predicaments and hilarious calamities, all inevitably brought together in some kind of explosive denouement. I loved them all!

It is no wonder his stories were such an attractive draw to TV producers - and indeed Wilt, Porterhouse Blue and (best of all) Blott on the Landscape were all hit series in the 1980s.

Apparently Tom Sharpe was in the process of writing his autobiography when he died. Such a shame his life story - in his own words - may now never be told.

RIP Thomas Ridley Sharpe (30th March 1928 – 6th June 2013)

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

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.

I don't want to be respectable

"I don't want anything. I don't want a job. I don't want to be respectable. I don't want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I was elected to it in 1976 on the grounds that I already belonged to the Diners Club."
Gore Vidal

A selection of photographs by Hedi Slimane of the great writer, orator, political pundit and wit Gore Vidal has been published.

















I have the deepest admiration for this man, and have written about him before - here and here.

These photos are stunning, and thanks to the lovely people over at The Pandorian for alerting me to them...