Get Sexy Right NOW: Remembering G-A-Y Late (Part 3)

Jack looks at the sex, the noughties fashion, and his favourite people from this era including Mary the G-A-Y Late toilet attendant.

GET SEXY RIGHT NOW: Remembering G-A-Y Late (Part 3)

I think I was once rimmed by a man in G-A-Y Late with my face shoved up against the TV screens, while a different man snogged me, and a queen - possibly Baga - was to my left, straddling an Essex man, and behind me a couple were arguing or fighting. I remember the warm wet stubbled mouth, and Nicki Minaj singing Starships, her face was so close to my eyeballs, her wig this vivid green like a protected plankton off the coast of Jersey. Don’t tell Westminster Council. Or was it Camden Council? Fuck knows. We were transcouncil, we defied all notice boards, brash and unstoppable. Our very essence defied rules. We were feral twinks with too many dreams. Our only responsibility was to choose the correct Chicken Selects dip. A euphemism quite possibly.

BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

G-A-Y Late didn’t book any drag talent, but it was where all of the younger Soho queens would go after their other gigs, which were few and far between, usually in grotty pubs with walnut interiors. Most bars didn’t book drag queens before RuPaul’s Drag Race changed things. Baga, Lloyd and Vanity were thick-skinned. To be on the drag scene in your early twenties meant proving yourself against men twice your age. These weren’t the days of just dropping out of Westminster uni, buying a Paks Wig in Camden, and asking Brewdog for a brunch slot. Drag was insular, twisted and precarious, it took a certain type, there was no gay festival headline slot or EasyJet commercial to look up to.

They came in pairs, the baby queens. Like trainer duos on Pokemon, or drivers on Wacky Races. Lloyd had her friend Porsca. Baga had Silver Summers. Vanity Von Glow had Nancy Clench. They looked out for each other, went on the pull with each other, spread gossip and twisted knives. Drag brought them drinks, attention, and sometimes men, but it wasn’t a ‘career path’, not really.

There was an even younger and more dangerous raft too, still in their teens, nightclub door whores and club kids who received small financial kickbacks for running up ‘guest lists’ for Jodie Harsh. Artists like Smiley Vyrus and Jason Summerfield would rise from this rabble and create East London parties. Teen drag queens, in it for the vodka and the photographs. You had to keep an eye on the youngest queens, one would chat you up while the other lifted your cigarettes.

Lady Lloyd was the coolest queen that you would see at G-A-Y Late, a tall glossy blond who wore real designer clothes and had poise, at least until the drinks kicked in. She had been in fashion shows, she knew some celebs. If you got on the wrong side of Lady Lloyd she would send Siobhan from Sugababes round to your flat with a baseball bat. Lloyd had this knack for landing a tabloid splash. She snogged Rylan Clark when he was an X Factor sensation, she ran around town with Ke$ha when she came here on tour, she hung out with Philip Sallon and Boy George. Lady Lloyd was “non binary” before people began throwing this academic term around socially, but really she was something beyond even this. She wasn’t rejecting gender, or making a point about being neither, she was highlighting and slipping in and out of both, seamlessly. She was a Lady. She was also Lloyd. She was Lady Lloyd. Inspired by the breathless androgyny and fantasy of the New Romantics, McQueen, electroclash, Pamela Anderson, and all that naughty noughties playfulness - Lady Sovereign, Lady Gaga, it was a thing. Lady Lloyd carried this glittery energy, she sparkled, she had star power by the sack load. But like so many of us, she drank too much. She would always arrive a bit late looking like an A-Lister, but she would leave in pieces, staggering on the verge of being paraplegic, the palms of her hands sliding down shop windows on Old Compton Street as she stumbled back to her flat near The Box, her heels would snap as she toppled on wet cobbles, tail lights and police sirens flashing in the oil on her legs. A rare exotic bird. A sight to behold. Today Lloyd is a pretty serious DJ, Lloyd Paul Dixon, with residencies all over town, and he’s sober these days. Well done Lloyd. We both went to hell and back. I love you.

If you asked me in 2010 to point at someone in G-A-Y Late and say “They will be a millionaire one day”, Baga Chipz would possibly have been my last choice. But I’m really happy that showbiz happened to Leo. She was outrageous even then, when hardly anyone was watching, Baga would banter with everyone and encourage punters to share their fags and spill their secrets. Sometimes after the clubs shut we’d go to Old Blue 97, a late night Chinese restaurant, and Baga would be cackling away with the waiters, Eric and Ming, while Vanity - a thrifty Glaswegian - found ways to play the menu, certain dishes included rice if you read the small print. Alcohol wasn’t allowed since it would be 4am, so they would serve us white wine in a teapot, in case the police walked past, and Baga would be sliding around on the floor saying “A mouse! I saw a bleedin’ mouse!”, whipping her napkin, while Lloyd sat with chopsticks in her wig sipping a Diet coke, next to some hunk she’d picked up, while Vanity snogged someone in the corner, her chicken curry going cold, Born To Die playing off her phone.

Baga was unruly and gobby, but she was compassionate - she was always interested in helping the homeless, visiting elderly regulars from her pub gigs, and she would always know if it was Remembrance Day. I remember this about her: behind the whirlwind of Carry On comedy and chaos there was a glimmer of a sane person who was paying attention and noticeably thoughtful. It was Baga’s less holy moments that made their way into our scene gossip of course, she could get up to a few tricks could Baga, and when TV came knocking, she shut the door firmly on what you might call “a past”

Vanity Von Glow was the most talented of the queens that you’d see in G-A-Y Late, an astonishingly good singer who looked ridiculously glamorous, nearly seven foot tall in her black wig which she routinely adorned with flower garlands and medieval trinklets. Celine Dion obsessed, when G-A-Y Late closed and we headed somewhere for an afters, Vanity had no qualms in making the twinks sit on the floor and watch Celine Dion en Concert. She always had the DVD ready in her clutch bag. This present-day Celine furore around the musical Titanique has helped a wider gay audience understand the camp joy and parody potential within Celine… but Vanity was doing this years ago. If you ever get a chance to see Vanity sing, take it. Adele is a fan. And so is my Mum. Vanity is often at The Phoenix, or on Grindr where I’m sure she’ll send you a voice note of some Lana Del Rey in exchange for your private album.

MARY, QUEEN OF LATE.

My favourite person at G-A-Y Late was probably the toilet attendant Mary. She had this catchphrase which she would invariably shout over the din of music and blow jobs: “SHOW SOME LOVE - GIMME A POUND!!”

Standing with a money plate on a tall chair, mop in hand, her expression was defiant. It was useful to be in Mary’s good books and I would always ask after her daughter, Princess. Mary would say “Princess is ok. Gimme a pound!”

“What does Princess like at the moment? Is she listening to music yet?” I might ask, turning to her with a smile from the hand dryer. Mary would say “Princess likes Barbie. Now gimme a pound”.

Sometimes Mary would abandon this unwanted small talk to smash a cubicle doors with her gloved fist and drag two twinks out, kicking and screaming with their jeans around their knees. Then she would return to her spot, find her mop, hold it like a sceptre, and frown at the new toilet arrivals. “Show some love. Gimme a pound”. Occasionally she would send people to the back of the queue, there were only so many bad bleach jobs that she could look at in a row.

My friend Nick, a well-spoken gay with a well-paid job at LK Bennett, would routinely give Mary £20 notes. Money could buy Mary’s blind eye. But not for long. Mary ran a tight ship and she would tell people to piss faster and “finish your sucky sucky and get out”. Even if you’d paid her before doubling up in the toilet, she’d still out stretch her palm for a second pay check - worth a punt. Princess and her Barbies didn’t pay for themselves.

Mary still works for Jeremy Joseph to this day, in his other Old Compton Street bar. Her daughter Princess must be in her twenties. I would love nothing more than for ‘Princess Late’ to break out onto the pop scene.

Here is a photo below of Mary with Nick from back in the day. As you can see, Nick was pioneering the hipster trend, spending his LK Bennett pay cheque down the barbers. Is that the embryo of a George Michael earring?

Of all the bouncers at G-A-Y Late, one bouncer was kind. Lucy. She would smile at our jokes and chat to us a little bit once we reached the front of the queue. I remember being chucked out of G-A-Y Late for being (allegedly) too drunk, and Lucy said “YOU’RE NOT COMING BACK IN” so that the office could hear her on the headset, but with her thumb she indicated that I could, in fact, slip back in. Five years later, Lucy would go by the name LJ Parkinson and act in some Olivier award-winning shows, as well as developing a drag king character LoUis CYfer (a play on the word Lucifer with the capital letters spelling out ‘L U C Y’ within it)

It gives me pleasure to know that that while all of these gay boy divas, X Factor hopefuls, and dancer twinks were storming into G-A-Y Late, flicking their hair, the biggest future cabaret star of all was standing right there on the door in a black beanie hat, winter coat and fluorescent armband. LJ Parkinson is a major cabaret star now, their talent widely recognised in London’s West End and across the UK. Well done babe, and thank you for your level head and leniency as a bouncer, it was appreciated.

Here is a photo below of LJ in recent years starring alongside Willam at the Garrick Theatre in ‘Death Drop’

THE BAD BOYS

There were sexual predators at G-A-Y Late. I can think of four different men, all middle-aged, divorced or married, burning through redundancy handouts, drinking their sorrows, and trying to buy us as a welcome distraction from their depressing, lost cause, lives. They must be in their 70s now. How these men put up with our noisy lurid egos and fawned over us, all for the chance of a feeble twinky fondle, is beyond me. I’m still in my thirties and I can’t stand 20 year olds for more than ten minutes. I’m not sure you see men in their fifties these days chasing after kids like that. It’s connected to some sort of pain. Perhaps their own lost youths which were buried beneath the fear of AIDS.

But it would be over-simplified to split the club into camps of good and bad, hunters and the hunted. Life is layered, and complicated. We knew the drill, and there were things that we wanted too. Money, drinks, useful career connections. Some predators were quiet and stood by the club’s central pillars, smiling and raising an eyebrow as you passed, it wasn’t uncommon for them to brush your crotch or touch your bum. What were you going to do about it - phone the police? Tell your Mum? We hadn’t yet been vested in the mighty powers of social media outrage, we didn’t know how to see ourselves as victims worthy of a voice. Thank God. We had enough addictions to manage without chucking Instagram LIVE into the mix.

WHEN YOU LOOKED MY WAY… POSSIBLE CANDIDATE

My bestie Dylan would infrequently go home with the predators, if the lights came up and he hadn’t pulled yet, because it was cheaper than a taxi back and he could raid their fridge in the morning. Dylan’s always had a soft spot for other people’s hummus.

Recently I was sitting in a park, feeling alone, struggling a little with the slog of my sober journey, and I thought how nice it would be to just slip back in time, and be young, and go to G-A-Y Late again, hook up with a strange old grabby man, his hand clutching my skinny knee, as we trundled home to his dead mother’s house, trying not to be sick on the speed bumps while he went down on me, the sun coming up, the driver playing dumb for tips, Capital FM warbling away.

Going home alone was the worst fate after G-A-Y Late. Sometimes I’d wake up in Enfield by mistake, the end of the N25 route, the bus driver would be shaking my shoulders while nearby cows mooed and twisted their gaze at me over a hedge. Once I woke up to find that I’d been mugged, some poor desperate fuck had stolen everything off me, including my flip phone! I walked to Liverpool Street police station and said “If I can just log into my Facebook and do a status, my friend (read: sugar daddy) will come and collect me”

“Sorry love” said the officer “but Facebook is blocked on our system”

I had no choice but to walk to Belsize Park with my own thoughts. I hovered for a bit outside Shoreditch Chariots, hoping someone might take pity on me, until a receptionist came outside and told me to move along.

But thankfully there was almost always someone who you could shag at G-A-Y Late, and shag we did. We were generous with our bodies. By going with older men we not only saved money, but we learned things.

Gen Z are educated by social media. I think we, millennials, were the last gay men to be informed and shaped by a reality. It was imperfect, and unfair, but it was real, and each time something went wrong you became better at handling it.

We were quite hardcore. It just so happened that our version of hardcore was underscored by an S Club 7 soundtrack.

Often I wouldn’t know if someone was a top or a bottom until we got back to theirs, things weren’t so spelled out or overstated. Obviously if a guy knew all the choreo to Love Don’t Cost A Thing, including throwing his necklace across the dancefloor, then you could hazard a guess that maybe he wasn’t going to dom top you - but not necessarily.

Not laying it all out on Grindr meant that we broadened our horizons. I learnt how to be a good top from other men baptising me in poppers and topping me in my youth. “Total tops” aren’t as good at topping. Ultimately they don’t understand what they’re doing, even if sycophantic subs tell them otherwise and they stupidly believe them. I didn’t always enjoy my one night stands, but nor did I look for someone to blame for my choices. We just pressed on. For every night that I’ve been the chaser, trying to mastermind someone into bed, there have been five times where I just politely went along with some random guy’s scheme, and let him sleep with me out of a mixture of politeness and nihilism.

If we found someone to get off with at G-A-Y Late and go home with, we would just leave without saying bye to anyone. We were horrifyingly unloyal to each other. Even if our friend was patiently waiting to buy us a drink. I remember coming back to the dancefloor with drinks only to realise that my friends had found shags and had left for some kind of hastily mapped-out foursome, so I just passed the drinks to random straight girls - “Here Rachael, here Becky. Have these pints of tequila on me. I need to make a shag plan quickly, I need to think”. We didn’t have Uber. If a man flagged a taxi down, that was it, you stamped on your fag butt and dived in. Unless Britney was playing in which case he’d have to wait until the end of the song, obvs.

French exits were the modus operandi at G-A-Y Late. But no matter what happened, we’d all be reassembled there again the next night, forced to forgive each other, because we couldn't afford to go anywhere else and there wasn’t enough room for grudges.

LOOKING GOOD AND FEELING FINE

I’m going to leave you on a quick round-up of G-A-Y Late fashions. I don’t know much about fashion. Nor did anyone in G-A-Y Late.

What did we wear in 2010, you might be wondering, for a long night of shimmying around to Booty Luv while swallowing small chunks of our own sick. Well… As Soho twinks in the 2010s we looked unanimously terrible.

My generation’s twink fashion was a messy mix of what retail giants dubbed ‘Nu-Rave’ - neon running shorts or tutus, glow sticks and slatted plastic Calvin Harris sunglasses. Then there was what I called in my first post “TOWIE glam”, shiny black garms, a refusal to wear socks, and a hint of Vivienne Westwood if your student loan would allow, and a bucket of fake tan. I’ve never fancied men with naked sweaty little tanned feat shoved, without socks, into boat shoes. Who’s fantasy of a man involves that? But sweaty naked tanned feet shoved into Edwardian plimsoles were everywhere. There were older twinks holding onto their indie youth, tight breton vests clinging to broadening beer bellies, pointy scuffed leather shoes and colourful thin cardigans. The Russell Brand, steampunk kinda look. We mostly wore very skinny jeans that would send you hopping around a boy’s bedroom knocking lamps over while trying to undress yourself.

Queerness wasn’t mainstream, we didn’t clack drag queen fans that said “YAAASSS”. Queer identity wasn’t this grand narrative that you could order on Amazon. We mostly expressed our sexuality through lip gloss, milkshake necklaces, and horrible Topman boxer shorts that had unicorns or cartoon doughnuts printed all over them. If I was being swanky, wash cycle permitting, I might wear some lycra-mix deep purple Bjorn Borg Y-fronts with thick white hemming. We were quite a moist bunch, forever coating ourselves in tinted moisturisers like Johnson’s Holiday Skin.

The cool boys were starting to feel their way into what would eventually become the hipster wave.. Baseball caps, team socks, and chains. But it wasn’t a subdued Carhartt affair. The caps were loud, the chains were more like bling. My best friend Dylan wore bandanas a lot and he was proud of his long bolt eyebrow and ear piercings. Rings were NOT a thing. We enjoyed plunging V-necks and low-slung slogan vests with obnoxious Paris Hilton esque statements on them like “I LOVE SHOES, BAGS AND BOYS”.

The London newspapers followed a clique of designers like Gareth Pugh, Jeremy Scott and Henry Holland who used their fashion power to mass produce t-shirts carrying London-centric in-jokes, stuff like “I’LL SHOW YOU WHO’S BOSS KATE MOSS” or “FLICK YOUR BEAN FOR AGYNESS DEAN”, jokes which only made sense to 12 people. The fashion elite were unchallenged by social media or the internet and The Evening Standard was nearly 100 pages thick. We took ideas from its ‘Flashbulb’ party pages. We copied boy bands like The Wanted, JLS and Blue. We tried to dress like Robert Pattinson. Lady Lloyd was inspired by Andreja Pejic. People used to fuss over YouTubers like Jeffree Starr. Intagram hadn’t yet shepherded us into one flock who all bought the same thing, influences were flying everywhere.

We liked garish American Apparel colour blocking and girls loved a cobalt blue legging with a tall black boot. If you were among the very coolest boys in G-A-Y Late you might have rocked a Burberry check shirt or some KTZ gay sportswear.

G-A-Y Late had a post-work crowd too. So you would see a bit of a “top buttons undone now” office bunch on the dancefloor. You would see women wearing their best Karen Millen work blazer, strawberry margarita streaming down their tits, with a laptop bag over their shoulder, screaming “I TAKE YOU TO THE CANDY SHOP!” That was normal. We were just before twerking, but people liked to throw their hands up in the air and scream, or sexily point at imaginary things.

COOLER THAN THE RED DRESS

But while I might find it embarrassing to look at some old photos of what we used to wear on nights out, the current Gen Z kids are going to have it one hell of a lot worse…. OMG.

I see them in Dalston Superstore, with their towering mullets and Third Reich moustaches, their giant sprawling jeans, spaghetti-strap crop tops, and dangly earrings, like barmaids from 1980s Coronation Street entering a Soviet ice skating tournament. And all of this paired with 90s athletics sunglasses, fly fishing gaiters, and 17 pewter rings of skulls and planets. My Gen Z darlings. You are going to just love TimeHop in ten years. If the world is still here.

AFTER THE AFTER PARTY

A few years before G-A-Y Late closed, its golden era had already passed. I saw Vanity this week at a Delta Goodrem gig and she said “It was like the fall of Rome, it happened from within, people didn’t realise it at first, and then one day they were like - Oh the Roman Empire has collapsed, G-A-Y isn’t a thing”

All the time while we were dancing to Gangnam Style, the space beneath out feet was being caved and hollowed out, CrossRail and the Elizabeth Line were being built all around us. Wrecking Ball, as it turned out, was a prophecy. By 2021, the landscape that we knew had been obliterated. Our livelihoods had been sold, and bought by “Outernet”. This was the future, 1000 confused Albanian tourists all staring up at an AI Van Gogh, filming it for no apparent reason.

What became of us? The evil twinks?

Baga found fame, Lloyd held onto her decks for dear life, and Vanity still sings - she recently performed at Blenheim Palace. Dylan found a steady boyfriend, perhaps the biggest shock of all.

I applied my commercial pop knowledge to East London, an area not famed for its cohesive marketing strategies. Shows I helped create like LIPSYNC 1000 and SLAV 4 U have a bit of G-A-Y LATE in their veins. Lloyd DJs at the Clapham Grand, a venue I helped rebrand in 2018, and we definitely waved the G-A-Y “camp attack” wand at that.

Music got cooler with the Gen Z gays … Cobrah, FKA, Tove Lo, Kim Petras, Chase Status, Slayter, and of course Charli … girly pop started taking itself very seriously, and rightly so.

The boozy gays, you can still find them at Mighty Hoopla, but most of them bought two-bed flats and became plant dads. Going to the gym became a thing, and is directly at odds with having four hangovers a week. Are the gym gays happy? I don’t think so. Where’s the dare, where’s the drama, where’s the risk, with this new lifestyle of doing indoors repetitive tasks while listening to podcasts. Live fast, die Late. That was our mantra.

I was organising a comedy club in Wood Green with Jayde Adams and she hadn’t seen me in a while, she said to me “Jack - look at you babe - you’ve been East Londonified”

I was wearing calf-high socks with sliders, a baggy dress-vest and some Nu Balance shorts. You don’t notice these things happening, but bit by bit, I outgrew Soho. I threw myself across the matcha mungbean altar of East London, I hid in the darkness of Vauxhall, I obliterated myself in Berlin. I own two harnesses and a sports bag of wrestling singlets and jock straps. I’m still completely lost. I don’t own a house. I don’t have a partner. I built a sprawling intangible empire of scene status and social currency. I launched Rent-a-Queen, my drag agency, and we do about ten private parties a week. All of this, in some ways, came from that G-A-Y seed, the vodka lemonade lifestyle that Jeremy marinated us in.

Books that document the gay scene rarely look at commercial establishments, just as plays about AIDS only show you young, hot, skinny people. But there was something culturally impactful about that Soho dive of his, a late night pop bar that threw together a wide spectrum of people from all nationalities, age groups and pay grades. It should have been saved by the Arts Council. Give me Swagger Jagger over any Turner Prize bloody nominee.

There was something so simple and effective about the product, the wall to wall videos, the blaring music, the cheap drinks, everyone all dancing and laughing and fucking and fighting inside a Campbell’s soup tin.

Now that 20 year olds are fun again, and are waking up to the con of social media, I feel like there’s a gap in the market, to recreate somewhere that offers what G-A-Y Late once did. Something kinda ooh. A sweet sweet fantasy. Somewhere to scream and shout, or get lucky. Somewhere that doesn’t overthink things.

R I P

* * * * *

Thank you to Dylan, Thom, Leo, Lloyd, Marsha, Nini, Nick, Rob, Paul, Marie, and all the other lost boys mentioned in these posts. I’m so lucky to have shared my adult youth with you. My recollection of the past is just one of many perspectives, and I have seasoned the truth here and there with touches of exaggeration and comedy. If there’s one thing that the G-A-Y Late smoking area taught me, it’s - don’t believe everything you hear - please enjoy me with a pinch of salt and ten tequilas.

Thank you for reading this deep dive. Sharing it with someone else is the best thing that you can do to support me as a writer. There’s no money in writing, but there are readers. Help me find them! You can tag me at @ jackcullenuk.

You can become a paid subscriber if you’re feeling a little bit flashy, or if you need a drag queen for your party in France, drop me an email at Rent-a-Queen.