Interlude - Drag Race Meet And Greet

December 14th, 2024.

The morning after Kyran’s show. I open the curtain a couple of feet and leaning forwards I feel the cool glass of bay window against my face. If I pressed a little harder my forehead could smash the panes and I would fall naked onto the flat roof of the hotel portico.

My room overlooks the King’s Road, and in the midground there, the ruins of the old pier. Intriguing little frenzy of beams, a younger me might describe it as the skeleton of an insect, it looks as if someone is trying out an old biro against a postcard. Sometimes at boarding school postcards would arrive in my pigeon hole from Mum’s romantic weekends after the divorce and she would draw big arrows in the skies of King’s Lynn or Cromer to show me where she had stayed, while I lay in my little dormitory bed with chattering teeth, worrying about the morning’s Latin test.

Seagulls with wings the size of skateboards flap and fight over kebab scraps on the corner of Little East Street and an old man soldiers forwards, struggling with his umbrella. Hot men in tracksuits stand on the Leonardo’s steps, clutching their cocks through nylon and fumbling over their Polish cigarettes.

Kyran and Richie have already left for the Manchester gig, it is nearly nine. Late night plans for a morning swim (in the hotel, not the sea!) are destined to remain imaginary, but I will go there alone after breakfast. I needed a good night’s sleep after all that unplanned dancing in Legend’s to Modjo, Daft Punk and Sophie Ellis Bextor, we’d all been charmed by the sticky floors and friendly locals with spray tans, blue drinks and silver halter necks.

I’d felt a little lonely dancing in my Puffa, politely rebuffing interest from drunk men, waiting for people to get their Drag Race selfies in with Kyran. One boy was very attractive and kept following me around but I didn’t like the idea of him in my hotel room touching things. I had a sense of being “From London”, an insolence wanting to creep into my cheeks, I felt too tall and formal as I tapped my Debit card at the bar, there’s something stale there, hard to explain, as if I was trying not to think I was too good for the place - which I know sounds ridiculous. Regional crowds are so friendly, they both inflame the ego and threaten to undress it. But I love being in those little provincial gay club dressing rooms, following in the foot steps of so many minor pop stars and loosely celebrated DJs, a framed picture of Jodie Harsh on the wall - ooh la la! I wondered if she put it up herself.

The show last night in Revenge had left a murky imprint on me, about 100 people - not great for a brand new Drag Race winner - but it’s hard to measure things in seaside towns which are a law unto themselves, coastal audiences seem to appear and then vanish in waves, a mysterious school of fish, some weeks you catch them, some weeks they’re somewhere else - a barn dance, a crucial 40th.

The marketing is always a little shaky out here, provincial gay bar sluggishness, whack a poster on the toilet door and hope for the best, eclipsed on socials by the big tours. Sophia Stardust finds the small shows hilarious, she loves storming around on stage shouting “Support Local Drag”

But I can’t shake this feeling of a drag fatigue, a kaleidoscopic shift. Its true effect remaining to be seen.

Kyran will be fine, her star power transcends the franchise, so ruthlessly ambitious and achingly likeable, if she has to jump ship - make a move into serious acting or whatever it may be - nothing will stop them, the industry is theirs. Apparently Lawence is doing well in Vegas. The problem isn’t us, see, it’s the fucking UK. Cold kebab meat.

I start running a bath, and sit naked for a while in a hard back chair, melting leftover malteasers against the roof of my mouth, stabbing at leftover chicken in a polystyrene tray, butter rice - which Russell T Davies said was his favourite snack once on one of these interminable podcasts. Funny how we remember these odd little things.

My eyes are too tired to read, and porn feels a little wasteful - there’s no telling who I might meet later. I put the tiny kettle on, open the curtains wide, and do some morning stretches, letting the wind turbines have a good look at me, my bed hair, my socked feet, I’ll be 37 next week. There is something comforting about this saltwater mass before me. The old pier, where they filmed Brighton Rock, Richard Attenborough darting around with a pistol, just nineteen, and Hermione Baggerley in her clown suit. There’s a permanence about the sea that continually reassures me, bigger than Drag Race, wider than me, no matter how many cheesy chips I eat.

How long can these words exist? Before someone presses Deactivate or Delete. But still there, after our unseen deaths, the sea.

I imagine strange sentient organisms in the faraway future, scanning across the earth, surveying the wreckage of our mess, collecting the data from this ancient town. Brighton in a glass case. Pay to Zoom In.

A chip fork.

A false lash.

A 2p Machine.

A VIP Wristband. Whatever that means.

An A4 poster that says “This Way for Drag Race Meet And Greet”