What a sensational 1987 raid on the RVT reveals about the limits of 1967 reform and the ongoing fight for queer equality. Part three of three.
Simon Casson on Duckie’s 21st birthday
A Q&A for Run Riot about middle-aged punters, neurodivergent cool kids and Amy Lamé becoming London’s Night Czar.
Amy Lamé is London’s first Night Czar
The Duckie co-founder and Royal Vauxhall Tavern campaigner will work with City Hall to shape London as a 24-hour city.
A quick update
For me, the past couple of months have been very busy and rewarding in terms of my own work and, as for many people, very challenging and upsetting on a political level. This post is just a quick update regarding the former since, among other things, I use this blog as a tally of what I’ve […]
Holly Revell on her Transformations portrait series
The London queer-performance photographer talks about her long-exposure portraits, which show artists in and out of drag in the same shot.
Articles about Duckie in Sitges and Forest Fringe in the Guardian
Just a quick heads up on a couple of recent articles… I’ve written my first blog post for the Duckie website as Dr Duckie – I’ll be posting occasional pieces there reporting back on my PhD research in a more casual, less footnoted way than academic protocols allow. This first dispatch is a report on […]
‘Five years to save the RVT’
The next five years will be crucial to the long-term fate of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, the iconic south London pub and LGBTQ cabaret venue that is being sold to unidentified new owners. “I’ve got five years to get RVT turned around and made into a viable business, but for that to happen we […]
Pride in London round-up for Evening Standard
Today is Pride in London and I did a round-up of events in the capital for yesterday’s Evening Standard. I like how open the Standard is these days to LGBT and even occasionally queer content. For this round-up (which also includes a few entries written by the features desk and included under my byline), I […]
Doctor Duckie
The five years or so that I’ve spent covering cabaret and other kinds of alternative performance in a sustained way has been a wonderfully stimulating and rewarding experience. A vital part of that has been thinking about why I love these shows. A lot of it has to do (as I’ve recently written elsewhere) with […]
This machine kills anxiety: cabaret vs late capitalism
As you’ll have noticed, there’s a good bit of anxiety around these days. I’ve got loads. You probably have too. I’m anxious about global things, like geopolitical instability and climate change; societal things, like employment prospects and dodgy urban planning; and personal things, like having a substandard body and shortchanging important relationships. Most people, […]
