Dr Duckie’s debut

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Posted by Ben Walters, Monday 13 May 2019, 12:44pm.

On Saturday night, I made my debut as Dr Duckie on the stage of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.

The event was planned as a way to try to share the ideas from my recently-completed PhD beyond the academy, in particular to people involved on the ground with the Duckie projects at the heart of my research – and, to my huge relief, it went really well!

Doing a pub talk based on a PhD was an unusual idea but it seemed to work. The Tavern was packed with a wide range of people making up an incredibly patient, attentive and generous audience.

I felt so proud and lucky to stand on that sacred stage and try to explain some ideas that I hope will be of practical use to lots of people who are trying to change things for the better, promoting the queer values of empathy, difference and love.

In January, I passed my viva, meaning that my doctoral research passed muster on academic terms and I was officially a doctor. But it was just as important and validating – in fact more so – to confirm that the people actually driving Duckie’s amazing projects thought my ideas did justice to their work and even helped them see new aspects of their form and value.

My PhD was based at Queen Mary University of London and involved loads of fieldwork at four community-focused projects of Duckie’s:

• The vintage clubbing events, a series of large-scale immersive performance nights themed around little-known queer London party scenes of the twentieth century
• Duckie Homosexualist Summer School, or DHSS, a summer school for young queer performers hoping to break into the scene
• The Posh Club, an afternoon cabaret for older people at risk of isolation
• and The Slaughterhouse Club, a drop-in arts project for people living with homelessness, addiction and mental health issues

In the talk, I explained how each of these, in its different way, is an example of what I call “homemade mutant hope machines”.

A homemade mutant hope machine is any form or process that emerges from lived experience, operates relatively autonomously, adapts to changing conditions and – most importantly – works to routinely generate hope in the possibility of better worlds for marginalised people.

They’re a powerful technology of queer utopian aspiration, based in the understanding that hope isn’t just a fleeting ephemeral thing but something that can be consciously and reliably generated, even in very challenging circumstances. I call this understanding “reproductive queer futurity”.

And homemade mutant hope machines get even more powerful when they use participatory performance and queer kinds of fun and family.

I unpacked these concepts using examples from Duckie’s projects and with the benefit of on-stage help from Duckie bigwig Simon Casson – aka Simon Strange – who wrote the abstract terms up on a blackboard for me. Simon was the perfect glamorous assistant and is just a funny fucker so that helped things along no end.

Here’s how the blackboard looked by the end of the talk:

As part of the event, I asked everyone in the room to think of a homemade mutant hope machine they have, or would like to have, in their life – something that routinely gives them hope in the possibility of better, queerer worlds.

Here are just a few of the things people came up with. I love how they show that homemade mutant hope machines can operate at the most intimate personal level, and at the level of friendship, community and culture, and also on up to a grand global scale:

I was bowled over by the event as a whole and filled with gratitude for everyone who’s supported the research and the Duckie projects it’s rooted in (especially Simon and Dicky Eton at Duckie and Catherine Silverstone at Queen Mary). And then we stayed on for Duckie’s regular Saturday night to drink and dance and have fun together. (And guess who turned up? The Pet Shop Boys and Cathy Tyson!!!)

It was the perfect end to the PhD journey – but not the end of the ideas that came out of it – hopefully.