We Can Be Heroes, page 23
My old friend Caroline was there – the one who’d illustrated my adventure stories about Jim when we were both at junior school. Marc Almond popped in briefly, adding some iconic ’80s pop-star glamour. My parents also came. If my mum was disappointed by the lack of go-go boys in jockstraps, she didn’t say anything.
The book was well received and even earned me a nomination at the Stonewall Awards for Writer of the Year. The ceremony was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and never has my sense of imposter syndrome felt so strong. Even in my dinner jacket, I felt like a fraud. Among my fellow nominees were Val McDermid and Victoria Wood, who was shortlisted for her TV drama Housewife, 49. McDermid was the queen of crime fiction. Wood was nothing short of a national treasure. Like many of her gay fans, I could quote most of her sketches word for word, and frequently did. Hovering awkwardly at the drinks reception beforehand, I knocked back a few glasses of champagne and practised my gracious loser face. What was I doing here? I wasn’t in the same league as these people!
Needless to say, I didn’t win. The award went to Val McDermid, who gave a stirring acceptance speech about lesbian visibility and growing up at a time when the only lesbian novel she’d heard of was The Well Of Loneliness. Like me, she’d spent her early years hunting high and low for positive representations of people like her.
Later, I found myself standing next to Wood at the post-award drinks. I offered her my commiserations and told her how much I’d enjoyed Housewife, 49. She was polite but seemed ill at ease, or perhaps a little put out at not having won.
Years later, I took part in a charity pub quiz at the Groucho Club with her, Helen Lederer and Harriet Thorpe. ‘Vic’ was far friendlier on this occasion, but very serious about winning. We came second. Runners up, once again.
The launch party for Lovers & Losers led to a club night of the same name, which opened on May Bank Holiday. ‘Paul Burston’s sizzling novel comes to life in a debauched ’80s night,’ read the poster. Much to my amazement, there were queues around the block. I shared the DJ duties with Tommy himself and clubland legend Princess Julia, playing everything from ’80s synth-pop to Bowie, Blondie, Hi-NRG, electro, rap and disco. It was exhausting and exhilarating.
By the time the second club night came around in August, I’d taught myself how to use GarageBand on my iMac and started making my own mash-ups – a hugely popular genre at the time. Basically, a DJ or producer took one song and mixed it with another, creating a whole new hybrid track containing elements of both, often isolating the vocal from one song and adding it to the instrumental from the second. Famous mash-ups included ‘Can’t Get Blue Monday Out Of My Head’, which mixed Kylie Minogue with New Order, and ‘Rapture Riders’, which mixed Blondie with The Doors.
Joining me on the decks for the second club night was DJ Dom Agius, who was in an electro-pop band and far more technically proficient than I could ever hope to be. He created my favourite track of the time and a guaranteed floor-filler – a mash-up of ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ by Depeche Mode and ‘Music’ by Madonna. He and his band Furiku also recorded a track called ‘Lovers & Losers’, incorporating lyrics from the fictional song in the novel, with yours truly on backing vocals. It was all very meta, as the kids say.
Following the success of A Club for Lovers & Losers, there were invitations to DJ at DTPM, Popstarz, the RVT and the Shadow Lounge, where I warmed up for the late, great Tallulah. Dom and I ran a short-lived night called Electrosexual at Freedom Bar in Soho and became residents at a far busier night called Kill Your Pets at The Ghetto in Shoreditch. I took this as an opportunity to relive my Buffalo Boy days, wearing a bowler hat with the word ‘Killer’ emblazoned across the front.
Then, in September 2007, I did something unthinkable – I got married. Two decades earlier, in Queens’ Country, I wrote, ‘I wouldn’t get married if you dragged me to the altar in a wedding dress with the offer of a world cruise as a wedding present.’ Reader, I changed my mind. Strictly speaking, it was a civil partnership – but everyone referred to it as our ‘wedding’. We had a wedding reception and a wedding photographer and my mother bought herself a new hat. Our wedding song was ‘Amazing’ by George Michael.
So far, so traditional. The ceremony took place on Tower Bridge. The photographer knew about my activist past, and afterwards we literally stopped traffic. The entire wedding party blocked the road, just as I’d done over twenty-five years earlier with ACT UP. Had you told me then that gay weddings would happen in my lifetime, or that I’d be sitting here writing that sentence, I wouldn’t have believed you.
Shortly after getting hitched, I was offered a DJ gig at the Green Carnation on Greek Street. The music producer Tris Penna had his own Friday-nighter there called Wilde Ones and asked me to fill in for him, playing everything from lounge music to chart pop. It was a long set – starting at 8 p.m. and ending as late as 2 a.m. – so I offered to split it with Dom and we worked alternate shifts, warming up one week and doing the late slot the following week.
It was at the Green Carnation that I was asked to DJ for Sandie Shaw’s sixtieth birthday. She came with her daughter, who was an absolute delight, and they were treated to a bottle of champagne on the house. It was all going swimmingly until I put on ‘Express Yourself’ by Madonna. Sandie didn’t want to hear Madonna expressing herself. She didn’t want to hear Madonna at all. Storming up to the DJ booth, she demanded that I change the record.
Tempting as it was to play ‘Puppet On A String’, I put on ‘Survivor’ by Destiny’s Child and hoped that this would do.
Wilde Ones was such a success that eventually the Green Carnation offered me my own regular night. I came home full of excitement and broke the news to Paulo.
‘Are you mad?’ he replied. ‘You’re at Time Out three days a week. You spend days planning your DJ sets and another day recovering. When will you find time to write? People will start to think you’re a DJ and not an author!’
I felt deflated but deep down I knew he had a point. I slept on it and by the morning I had a plan. Polari was about to be born.
Chapter 29:
Speak My Language
Bowie once said that ageing is the process by which you become the person you were always meant to be. He also said the key to ageing happily was learning to accommodate your past selves within your current persona. This was the man famous for adopting and discarding various guises. Now here he was, learning to live with them.
In 2007 I turned forty-two and launched my own literary salon. Polari was the culmination of everything I’d ever done. It was me accommodating my pasts within my persona – drama student, theatre practitioner, activist, journalist, author and shameless exhibitionist.
I was a man on a mission. For me, Polari was never only about providing a platform for LGBTQ+ authors, poets and performers. It was also about reshaping the narrative and making it about our lives, our experiences, our stories. In the books people read from at Polari, we weren’t just the gay best friend or the lesbian next door or the trans woman up the road. We weren’t secondary characters or plot devices. Here we could be the stars of our own stories. We could be heroes.
Despite publishing three novels and several non-fiction titles, I’d never once been invited to speak at a book festival. Twelve years after it was first published, A Queer Romance was widely recognised as a classic of queer studies in the UK and was a set text on many university courses. Still, those invitations failed to materialise. Despite being shortlisted for a Stonewall Award, I had very few opportunities to promote Lovers & Losers. So I figured I could either bitch and complain or I could get off my backside and do something about it. Maybe it’s the activist in me, or maybe it’s just bloody-mindedness. But if an opportunity doesn’t exist, I’ll create one.
Polari began life in November 2007 in the upstairs bar at the Green Carnation in Soho. It was billed as ‘an evening of words and music’, with guest writers and me as DJ and host. The owner of the venue had a few reservations. He was convinced that as soon as the music stopped, people would run out into the street rather than be exposed to the spoken word.
In fact, the opposite was true. The first event was a small affair – just me and a dozen friends. But word spread and soon we were packed. Neil Bartlett read and the audience grew. Stella Duffy performed and it grew even further. The night Will Self came to read from his reworking of Wilde’s Dorian Gray, it was standing-room only, with a queue halfway down the street.
Why the name Polari? Sometimes described as ‘the lost language of gay men’, Polari – sometimes spelt Palare – was a form of slang also used by travellers and other communities, and employed by gay men at a time when male homosexuality was against the law and speaking freely could easily land a man in prison. In the 1960s, it was popularised by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams’s camp characters Julian and Sandy on Round The Horne. As the laws around gay sexuality became more relaxed, so the need for speaking in code became less of an issue.
When I first came out in the mid-1980s, I would sometimes hear older gay men speaking in Polari. This is rarely the case nowadays – though some words have found their way into common usage. The word ‘naff’ comes from Polari and originally meant straight or ‘not available for fucking’ (ironically, by the Noughties, the word ‘gay’ had become another word for naff – as in, ‘That’s so gay!’).
To me, Polari literally means ‘gay words’ – and what could be a more appropriate name for a spoken-word night dedicated to LGBTQ+ writing?
After six months, Polari outgrew the Green Carnation and moved to Trash Palace. We relaunched with a night dedicated to Gay Dandies. Sebastian Horsley headed the bill with a reading from his memoir, Dandy In The Underworld. I liked Sebastian. He was arch and often acidic. His emails to me usually opened with ‘Paul, you big poof . . .’ But he was also incredibly witty and hugely entertaining. With his towering stovepipe top hat, bright velvet suits and painted, powdered face, he was about as queer as a vigorously heterosexual man could be. In fact, you could say he was his own special creation – much like Quentin Crisp or indeed Pete Burns.
Sadly, like them, he’s no longer with us. He died of an overdose of cocaine and heroin on 17 June 2010 – hours after Tim Fountain’s one-man play about his life opened at the Soho Theatre. Horsley’s friend Toby Young firmly believed that his death was an accident – ‘If it had been suicide, Sebastian would not have passed up the opportunity to leave a note.’
Back in September 2008, he was still very much alive and very much Sebastian – arriving at Trash Palace in a bright red sequinned suit with a heavily made-up face and telltale rings of white powder around his nostrils. A photograph of us both taken that night shows the vulnerability behind the mask – what his friend Stephen Fry later described as his ‘essential sweetness’, and his brown eyes that stopped ‘just short of pleading’.
Among the audience at Polari that night were Marc Almond and Bette Bourne and Stuart Feather of Bloolips. I’d first met Bette twenty years previously, when I interviewed him for Capital Gay. Bloolips were performing a spoof of Ben Hur called Get Hur. Partly inspired by the American theatre troupe Hot Peaches, and drawing heavily on the politics of the Gay Liberation Front, Bloolips helped put the radical into drag. They weren’t drag queens in the traditional sense, but rather gay performers who used cross-dressing to deconstruct and explore the meaning of gender in shows that combined elements of agitprop, cabaret, music hall and pantomime.
Long before queer theorists like Judith Butler began writing about ‘queer performativity’, Bloolips were doing it live on stage in shows that were accessible, entertaining and thought-provoking. Together with the lesbian theatre company Split Britches, they once produced a gender-swapping remake of A Streetcar Named Desire, with Bette as Blanche DuBois and Peggy Shaw as Stanley Kowalski. The night I saw the play at London’s Drill Hall theatre, I swear there wasn’t a gay man in the audience who wasn’t at least a little bit turned on by Peggy Shaw’s swaggering channelling of Marlon Brando. Bette also performed with Neil Bartlett in Sarrasine and a number of plays by Tim Fountain – including Resident Alien, where he played his old friend Quentin Crisp.
Bloolips once performed a show called Living Leg-Ends. To me, Bette is nothing short of a living legend. He’s been to Polari many times since, and it’s always an honour to have him among us.
Polari at Trash Palace lasted for six months, after which the venue closed down. We moved to Freedom Bar in 2009, where I launched my fourth novel for Little, Brown. The Gay Divorcee was another comedy of manners, this time on the subject of gay marriage, which was a hot topic at the time and something I knew about first-hand. I went on my first real author tour, organised largely by myself. The tour began with a stag night at The Ghetto in Shoreditch and included talks and book signings in Birmingham, Bradford, Brighton, Cardiff, Hereford, Manchester and Margate. The marketing strategy for the book seemed to be: ‘Paul has lots of media contacts and runs his own literary salon, so let’s just leave him to get on with it.’
The Gay Divorcee got great reviews and was subsequently optioned for television with Jonathan Harvey attached as screenwriter, though nothing ever came of it. I was disappointed, but after my earlier experience with Shameless, hardly surprised. I resigned myself to the fact that books with gay protagonists and explicitly gay content still faced an uphill struggle. After all, that’s why I created Polari in the first place.
Polari at Freedom continued to grow steadily. The basement space had more of a nightclub feel than previous venues, complete with mirrorballs. It was glitzy in a slightly shabby way and gave us room to grow. Susie Boyt read from her moving memoir My Judy Garland Life and even brought some of her prized Garland memorabilia for people to inspect for themselves. VG Lee made her first of many crowd-pleasing Polari appearances, as did Karen McLeod. Christopher Fowler read for us, along with Adam Mars-Jones. Things were often quite riotous. Many were the times I ended up dancing on a podium, dressed in a fake fur coat and denim shorts or channelling Grace Jones in black swimming trunks with the word ‘Grace’ printed across the crotch. I think she would have approved.
One night Polari was attended by Rachel Holmes, who I knew from way back in my activist days and who was now Head of Literature and Spoken Word at the Southbank Centre. At the end of the evening, she told me, ‘You should really bring this to us.’
So I did. Polari opened at the Southbank in September 2009. It was quite a step up from the Soho gay bar scene to the UK’s largest arts centre. But the celebrations were short-lived. Shortly after we moved to the Southbank, I was dropped by my publisher. The mass market edition of The Gay Divorcee hadn’t even been published yet and already it was decided that the book hadn’t been the success everyone hoped for. I was gutted.
A lot of authors I know were dropped in 2009, as the fallout from the banking crisis impacted on the publishing world and the industry as a whole became more risk-averse. I’d had a good run with Little, Brown, who’d published five of my books in total. Still it’s hard not to take these things personally. I have an author friend who says, ‘It’s my job to write the bloody book and their job to sell it.’ If only it were that simple. Increasingly, authors are expected to write, market and publicise their books in any way possible. Create a website. Build a mailing list. Engage with readers on social media. Give talks at bookshops and local libraries. Really put yourself out there.
I don’t mind doing any of those things. I accept that they’re part of the job, despite the fact that most of this work is unpaid labour. But it’s hard to compete in an increasingly overcrowded marketplace, and easy to feel as if any failure is yours and yours alone. If a book fails to sell in sufficient numbers, an author becomes tarnished with what’s known as ‘bad track’ – making it harder to find a publisher for their next book. Few people stop to consider the many other factors that help determine whether a book becomes a hit or not – marketing, advertising, sales and distribution networks.
Being dropped threw me into a tailspin. My agent at the time suggested I change my name and refrain from writing gay characters. I refused. I know lots of authors who write under various pen names. I understand their reasons for doing so, but it wasn’t what I wanted. And as for writing gay characters, that was non-negotiable. I’ve written books where the main protagonist isn’t gay. I may well write more. But to create an entire world in which no gay character exists would feel somehow dishonest to me. It would feel like going back in the closet. And those doors were kicked off their hinges a long time ago.
Polari didn’t take long to establish itself at the Southbank Centre. Audiences grew and the event evolved into something far more ambitious than I’d originally envisaged. Of course it helped that I was no longer working alone. I had an event manager, technical support and the publicity department of the UK’s biggest arts centre behind me. Soon I didn’t need to go in search of authors to read at Polari. They came to me. Book publicists would contact me about potential headliners. Where once there’d have been one or two writers on the bill, now there’d be four or five. I’d confirm the bigger names first, then fill the bill with writers and spoken-word performers at various stages of their careers, some of whom had never read their work in public before. Having created a successful platform for LGBTQ+ writers to showcase their work, here was an opportunity to encourage new talent, just as I’d been encouraged by those who came before me.
When it comes to finalising each line-up, my motto has always been ‘the more diverse, the better’. I don’t say this out of some desire to be seen as ‘politically correct’, ‘woke’ or whatever term people are currently using to describe the efforts of those trying to be more inclusive. I say it because it makes sense. There’s little point in creating an event in the name of diversity if you don’t use it to celebrate the diversity within the community it’s supposed to represent. I’ve been to far too many literary events where the line-up consists of authors all drawn from the same narrow demographic – usually white, male, heterosexual and predominantly middle-class. Quite frankly, they’re often boring. Diversity isn’t about ticking boxes. It’s about different perspectives and a variety of stories and voices. Surely that can only be a good thing?
