Unwritten history

I meant not to capitalise that second word, by the way. It just felt right.

I have just been looking at the website of a locally famous drag queen. This guy has been a major fixture of the local gay scene for a long time, with his own bar, and I have known him in that capacity for some years. A couple of summers ago, I ended up meeting him when he wasn’t working, and we went to an illicit after-hours bar, where he (very kindly) plied me with gin, and then took me to one of his two houses.

Now, he is a lot older than me, but he looks great. However, I don’t and didn’t fancy him, but was totally in awe of his position and status (especially as he starred as himself in one of my all-time favourite tv dramas). We chatted a bit. The funny thing is, he was as nervous as I was – as if he didn’t know what to do with me! We ended up sleeping in the same large bed, with no contact whatever. In the morning, he gave me a bottle of mineral water and I was on my way. He texted me, and offered to take me out to a drag cabaret club here, but I got totally wasted the next weekend, and lost my phone – and with it, his number. I told him, but he didn’t believe me, and we’ve never been as close since, although he always tries to play a song for me when I go to his bar.

Anyway, reading his life story on the website really struck me, in rather the same way as watching vintage porn. This sounds dodgy, but bear with me. It is, after all, an area of culture that hardly figures in mainstream accounts – drag and the portrayal of graphic sex equally. These, and other things, seem bizarre in a historical context, because they feel so contemporary. Why? Mostly because they are omitted from our understanding of the past. But drag acts have been out there, openly, for as long as homosexuality has been decriminalised in this country (a couple of generations by now), and sex – well, that’s been around forever, but porn in the modern sense is at least as old as photography, and probably as old as art.

They are largely unrecorded, and thus seeing photos, and reading testimony, from before I was born, is strange, uplifting at the same time quite sad. Many of those performers are dead, as you might expect, but their contribution lives on in such a liminal position. I’m not saying there should be a national monument to drag queens of the past. I’m just musing on all those things that are either taboo, or seem so mundane that they are not recorded, and thus each generation pretends to create anew. When I see men dressing up as women, or men having sex with men, from today, it seems utterly unremarkable, but when I see it from forty years ago, it is a revelation. But it really shouldn’t…