(Click here to view the rules of the game.)
I expect to be seeing many entries making reference to such things as Yohji Yamamoto and Martin Margiela, boutique hotels and crab tortellini. Come on: surely you don’t think that I’m that predictable? Strewth, you’ll be telling me next that you know my taste in music.
No, we’ll be putting such things as impeccable taste aside for now. My gayest moment cannot be reduced to such superficialities. Oh no, dear reader, it’s so much more meta than that.
(My, but I do wish I hadn’t demanded that html tags be omitted. I so want to italicise every second word. I’m learning about myself already.)
So, yeah: my gayest moment. Let me take you back to the summer of 1985. Regular readers will already know that K and I met that year. What you cannot possibly know, because I haven’t yet told you, is this: we entered a competition, K and I. A gay competition. A gay Judy Garland (damn that lack of italics) competition.
Hosted by Part Two, Nottingham’s gayest club, the object of the exercise was not just to mimic Judy Garland, oh no. For here is where it becomes such a marvellously meta concept.
We were being asked, and I swear this is not a word of a lie, we were requested, nay, exhorted (by friends who shall remain nameless, but are to this day waiting (in vain, I might add) for forgiveness), to mimic Judy Garland mimicking a gay man. What twisted gay fluffy-pink mind came up with such a concept, I can only dream at. And thankfully I never had to suffer their company. (For the progenitor of such an appallingly misconceived fiasco must surely have been an insufferable little twerp.)
However, despite the absolute and incontrovertibly pointless (and naturally, were I able, I would have italicised the word pointless) nature of the event…
….we rather enjoyed ourselves. We pranced. We preened. We screamed at each other from either side of the small student bedroom in which we rehearsed this madness. We wore pink. Yes, pink. And finally, we sallied forth into the centre of Nottingham in all our finery. We were ready, we two, to take Part Two by storm. We minced, dear reader, oh how we minced. Such mincery has never been seen.
Did I mention that we wore pink?
We didn’t win. There remains in my heart, I freely admit, a small kernel of bitterness which pains me whenever I think of that night. For we, not to put too fine a point on it, were robbed. To my mind, a gay man with a beard is simply not capable of presenting a convincing facsimile of a female gay icon, whomever she may be mimicking. But there, what do I know?
After all, I’ve never been terribly gay.
troubled diva 