Inky Cloak’s Cover Her Face starring La JohnJoseph (centre) at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club (image by Leon Csernohlavek)
Sexual intercourse, as Philip Larkin famously noted, began in 1963, “Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban / And the Beatles’ first LP”. By those lights – the ones that take something’s beginning as being the point at which its reality broke undeniably and irreversibly into all levels of public consciousness – queerness began a few years later, perhaps in 1967 in the UK, with the Sexual Offences Act legalising gay sex, or 1969 in the US, with the Stonewall riot.
Those sort of beginnings, of course, have a whole lot of history behind them. Yet even among the gay community (whatever that means), queer history tends to start with those late-60s watershed moments, and perhaps the Warhol scene that preceded them. The lives of non-straight and trans people prior to that often remain closed to us.
I’ve therefore been very intrigued by a new theatrical project called Cover Her Face, which reimagines John Webster’s 1613 play The Duchess of Malfi through a period LGBT frame: in this version, the Duchess is a trans character whose precarious power is wielded in the context of a London club on the underground queer scene in 1959. She’s portrayed by La JohnJoseph and the play is being produced at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club by Inky Cloak, a company led by Daniel Fulvio and Martin Moriarty.
As a friend of all of the above, I’m hugely excited about the project and was chuffed to be asked to put together a one-off soirée at Vogue Fabrics, called Uncover Her Face, which explores the world in which the production is set. It’s been a learning experience for me and I can’t wait to see what the night brings.
La JohnJoseph will be present, naturally, to set the tone with a period-appropriate number or two; this, don’t forget, is before rock ‘n’ roll stakes a place in the British mainstream.
Patrick Higgins, historian and author of the incendiary book Heterosexual Dictatorship, will sketch how social attitudes towards gay people reached a new low in the post-war years.
Bette Bourne, the drag revolutionary perhaps best known for his work with Bloolips and recent collaborations with Mark Ravenhill recalls being a gay teen just round the corner from Vogue Fabrics. The boys used to wear tight white jeans…
Tom Marshman will perform excerpts from his remarkable live-art performance Move Over, Darling, rooted in interviews with LGBT east Londoners in their 60s and older.
Lazlo Pearlman, the acclaimed trans performer and researcher, unpacks the extraordinary story of Michael Dillon (1917-1962) – doctor, member of the peerage and Britain’s first trans man to have bottom surgery.
Sara Davidmann delves into her own family archive to make sense of her trans uncle Ken’s double life, and connect it to her own work as a photographer with trans subjects today.
So it’s a chance to look back and discover a world very different, yet perhaps not so different, from our own. Gay rights and acceptance, at least on the statute books, at least in this country, have come an extraordinary distance since 1959. Trans rights not so much.
Knowing the past is always good preparation to shape the future.
In his poem, Larkin was speaking of straight people’s experiences of sexual repression. But wouldn’t it be nice if one day we could all recognise the sense of liberation he describes, from
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.
Uncover Her Face is at Vogue Fabrics, 66 Stoke Newington Road N16 7XB, Wednesday February 5th, doors 7pm, start 8pm, £7/£5 concs. Tickets available here.
Cover Her Face is at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club from February 10-15. More information here.
