For those of you paying attention, I’m sorry I’ve been so slack at posting on here recently.  It’s just that my life’s been uneventful and, whenever I’ve sat down to write, I’ve been distracted by something more pressing.  I might find myself busy wondering why the fluff I’ve picked out of my belly button is always blue, for example, or perhaps flicking through a catalogue for vinyl flooring, only to realise 30 wasted minutes later that I am still sitting on the toilet and my bare knees are getting cold.

Okay, so I’m lying.  The truth is quite the opposite.  My life has in fact been hair-raisingly eventful (emotionally at least), with more hectic stage business squeezed into the last few months than I have had in years.  The problem is, I just can’t bring myself to talk about it publicly – not at the moment, anyhow.  After years having the bizarre experience of watching Londoners read about my (no longer) private life in a free paper on the tube, I’ve grown wary of making myself un-dateable by broadcasting my lovers’ failings to anyone who would listen.  And while initially I thought discussing my life in a newspaper would boost my confidence, it wasn’t always that simple.  Back in the day I had some lovely encouraging emails, but I would also walk into bars or clubs inhibited by the megalomaniac misconception that I was being recognised and discussed by men around me (and occasionally I was right).  Likewise, publicising my occasional successes with men scared off a few shy potential boyfriends, which is a pity because shyness is something of a fetish of mine.  Now the London Paper has gone, the pressure is definitely off – but right now, I am afraid to break the spell by explaining exactly why I am so happy.

High time this blog had a picture of a kitten on it

My situation may be extreme, but it’s not as uncommon as it might look.  To an extent, many of us are Katie Prices and Peter Andres nowadays, publicising our relationships to the world in a semi self-conscious, exhibitionist way.  It seems like the biggest step in many people’s loves now, for example, is changing their Facebook status – not just because we’re all shameless self-publicists (though we are), but because adding or removing “in a relationship” invites a cascade of comments, many from people whose connection to us is pretty tenuous.

It can be handy sharing your life effortlessly, but the downside of it is that it becomes hard to remember exactly where your representation of yourself ends and your “real” relationships begin.  Are the many photos of ourselves with lovers that we post online, for example, always a proof of our happiness, or are they sometimes a way of calming our doubts by presenting the appearance of happiness to the world?  And how many couples have felt romantic moments in public enhanced by a tingling awareness that they look to the world at large like a handsome, happy couple in love?  Neither of these things means a relationship is false, but this self-consciousness can suggest it rests more on other people’s reactions to it than might be healthy.  Having been professionally obliged to live out my love life partly through other people’s responses to it, I’m wary of doing it again without thinking about it first.  So, dear readers, please give me a bit more time…

Is London really a big city?  Is the world indeed a large place?  I’m starting to doubt it.  As I come into weekly online contact with friends (or often just “friends” with inverted commas) from Lebanon to Liverpool, the world is starting to look less like an infinite, unknowable expanse and more like a small, tangled cat’s cradle, with digital links binding us all into uneasy false

Bearing this in mind, I completely understood my friend G’s enthusiasm for the man he’d just started dating.  Discussing him with me in a deserted café in Bethnal Green last Sunday (everyone else was at Lovebox), G mentioned his most impressive quality:

“You know what’s best about him?” he asked “He’s practically a Facebook virgin”

“What, you mean he doesn’t even have a profile?”

“Sure he’s got one, but we’ve only got three mutual friends in common.  Two of them are old work colleagues of mine I hardly see and one of them lives in Madrid.  We’ve got almost no connections at all – and that’s after his living in London for 7 years” he smiled.

So it’s true.  There has long been a rumour that there is actually a gay man in East London that Nobody We Know has had, but due to lack of verifiable sightings, he’s now been filed with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster as just a beautiful legend.  Meet someone you think is new and invariably someone says something like: “watch out for that one, a friend of mine did him and he stole a box of breakfast cereal the morning after”.  You might also get something like “he’s still in love with my ex and goes round to shag him every second Tuesday” or the enigmatic and not entirely unpromising “he’s dirty”.

This run of familiarity and rumour is nothing true love or lust can’t overcome, but it’s slightly annoying.  Don’t we all want to find someone different and shut the world outside for a while?  To forget our futures shrinking away second by second and to find someone with whom to live briefly in the here and now?  If the hazily understood object of your affections turns out to be friends with people you hate, or just out of a relationship with someone you once shagged absentmindedly, then the world outside sneaks its way under the bedroom door and escape is harder.  And believe me, when you’ve been writing about your love life publicly for years, it’s nigh on impossible.

I’m pleased G has proved its possible to break out, to find someone likeminded, attractive, kind and based in London for years who is still as yet not yet entangled in your social network.  At least that way, he gets to find out his new man’s strengths and flaws all by himself.

Shallow and stupid. You, not him

I’ve noticed two things about gay life in London recently.

1. Loads of people are sick of the gay scene’s brainless commercialism and petty cliques.
2. There is a real fire under a lot of people, from many different gay subcultures, who want something better.

Exactly how to go about making gay public life better for us all, however, is a tricky question.  On a small, intimate level, I think a good start would be to try treating each other with more respect, kindness and tolerance.  While there is a lot of generosity and mutual support out there among gay people – I experience it daily, in part from people who read this site – I can’t help feeling we could all approach each other with a little more love and a little less judgement.  I need to do this as much as anyone.  In the past I’ve been quick to reject and slow to forgive, happy to dis people I didn’t know because they made me feel insecure, ugly or out of touch (even in print).

But if you want to change, where do you start?  From my own viewpoint, here are some phrases and standpoints not all that uncommon among gays that I think we could all do with ditching.

1. “No Asians please: no offence, just not my type” on Internet profiles.

Totally unsexy. You, not him.

What so out of over a million Asian men in the world, you can confidently say that you don’t find a single one attractive?  And are you really so constantly inundated with offers of Asian loving that you need to make an excluding banner statement making sure that Asian men don’t dare to join your club?

2.“Muscleboys are all vacuous idiots”

Really?  So you’ve given every single one a personality and IQ test?  Demonising a whole group of people because you suspect they don’t want to sleep with you is hardly a sign of intelligence.

3.“I have no respect for people who don’t look after themselves”

There are a thousand ways to “look after yourself” – say, spending time with your friends, enjoying food or studying – that have no visible effect on your body.  To assume that exercise is the only way people can boost their health and happiness suggests that you are doing a poor job of it yourself.

4.“Why do so many Lesbians want to be men?”

Because they don’t.  That some lesbians want to ditch a conventional feminine image that they find both oppressive and a bit silly on them is one thing, changing sex is another entirely.  Just because some find female gender stereotypes a cage doesn’t mean they want to swap theirs for ours.

Wants to be a man. You, not her.

5.“I can’t stand politics, I just want to have fun”

Don’t we all want to have fun?  Politics can sickening and dull, but ignore them and you may find yourself chewed up and spat out by the people who have chosen to act on your behalf.

6.“I can’t stand queeny gays.  I only like real men”

Everyone has their fetishes, but stigmatising people you consider to be less than butch smacks of projected self-loathing– especially as so many “fem-haters” have a hint of campness to their behaviour that they’re unwilling to accept.

7. “Ewwww, this place is full of Breeders!”

Granted, it was straight people who started it on the prejudice front, but stigmatising people for fancying the opposite sex and having kids makes no one look big or clever.

8. “You don’t know the tracklist for Kylie’s new album and you dare to call yourself a gay man?!?”

For the record I AM familiar with the track list for Kylie’s new album (and quite like it), but the assumption that being gay automatically means a love of mainstream gay icons is a pain in the arse for the thousands who couldn’t give a toss about Liza or Gaga.  Likewise the belief that all gays have an innate aesthetic sense makes shabby gays like me, with razor cuts, magnolia walls and beaten up furniture, feel inadequate.

9. “He/she’s such a fag hag / chicken hawk / muscle mary / rice queen etc”

There’s a venerable camp tradition behind a lot of these terms and no one wants gay chat to turn bloodless – but it’s depressing that, whoever you are and whatever you do, gay slang will find a way to make you sound ugly.

10. “Gays are just so shallow and dysfunctional – except my friends and me, we’re all lovely”

Bullshit – there is plenty of love and kindness out there.  Seek and you shall find.

Not exactly random eye candy - this guy is Spain's former Mr. Bear, and a Moroccan Muslim

I’ve lost a fair few illusions since I came out aged 18. Among many groundless fancies dashed over the years, I’ve realised that:

- I do not have a lovely singing voice.

- I do not look cool with an “interesting” haircut.

- I cannot breakdance / vogue/ krump, even when extremely drunk.

- Despite my mother’s protests to the contrary, I do in fact bear a passing resemblance to Henry VIII.

True to my self-satisfied self I’ve come to terms easily with these limitations – but the illusions I’ve lost about my fellow gays since getting to know them better have proved harder to do without.  When I first arrived on the scene, I assumed that because gays were the butt of so much prejudice, they’d be less prejudiced themselves.  Exposed to rejection and discrimination, gay people would be kinder, more inclusive, slower to judge and quicker to understand, an example to other people of what tolerance means.  Was I right?  Was I f***

Certainly I’ve come across many people whose sexuality has blown the doors off the prejudice they lived with in their own families.  I’ve often heard people say “If I wasn’t gay, I’d be a blinkered idiot like my brother/sister/parents”.  But the rainbow alliance between the victims of prejudice I imagined as a teenager has turned out, like a rainbow itself, to be a mirage.  I’ve met racist gays who would fuck but not date a non-white person and misogynist gays who think the pressure fashion exerts on women to loathe their bodies is a good thing.  I’ve come across rich gays who look down on people who aren’t “solvent”, privileged gays who think the developing world gets all it deserves and macho gays who sleep around but think their sisters shouldn’t cohabit before marriage.

While some of those views make me sick (actually, all of them do), I’ve accepted that a mere mutual fondness for cock isn’t going to create a universally shared ideology.  Now I think about it, my earlier assumption that being gay would mean sharing my liberal views had a faint whiff of fascism to it, as if people who disagreed with me couldn’t possibly join the club.

At the same time, when I come across outbursts like that by my (now former) Facebook friend Mark Ames – promoter of Europe’s biggest bear club XXL – I still feel hugely disappointed.  For those who haven’t come across yet, Ames suggested a boycott of all Muslim businesses and countries after youths fought with police outside East London Mosque. As a recent Dispatches programme on Channel Four showed, there is indeed a problem with Muslim extremism in East London, caused by the Islamic Federation of Europe infiltrating local institutions and then coercing and bullying people.  Moderate muslims, however, are the first target for extremists – recently a female Muslim councillor has been scared into wearing traditional dress after receiving anonymous death threats, while non-religious groups for Bengalis have had council funding removed.  Do we really want to isolate these people further by blaming them for the actions of the people who are bullying them?  It seems cruel and simplistic, a bit like hating gays because of the discovery of one gay paedophile.

Watered down, fleeting and illusory

This spat has been much discussed – and Ames has now apologised publicly.  I still think there is an important point worth making.  While we still get a load of shit, the position of gays in this country has improved hugely in the past few decades.  Now that many of our rights have been recognised, are we going to pull up the drawbridge and look at other minorities with automatic fear and suspicion?  Our own treatment has given us an inside knowledge of how prejudice breeds injustice – we should never lose sight of that in the way we treat other people.

I know plenty of men who fancy Seth Rogen, proof that bigger guys are still often lusted after

“You’re just getting a little too, well, chubby”

Does anyone want to hear this from their partner?  My friend Gareth was none too pleased when his boyfriend of 8 months made this comment last week.  Wondering why things were cooling off sexually between them, Gareth had gently brought up the subject of what was going wrong.  He hadn’t got what he’d expected.

“I can get all the pressure I need to dislike my body just by flicking through QX or the Daily Mail.  I don’t need extra help from someone I love.”

That said, Gareth accepts that his boyfriend isn’t making it up.  Over the past few months, old pairs of trousers have started digging ever-deeper caterpillar tracks into his waist, while his face is subtly but noticeably rounder.  He’s still a handsome, utterly charming person – and many men out there would prefer his new body shape – but there’s no denying that he’s more pillowy and less angular than he was when he met his current lover.  Whether this really matters, however, is a moot point.  When you fall in love with someone, after all, you normally do so with their whole personality, not because your heart has been smitten by a particular silhouette (at least, romantic that I am, that’s what I like to pretend).  As people get older, bodies usually get less taut and trim – if you can’t accept at least some evidence of the effects of time, you’re better off sticking to one night stands.

At the same time, relationships come with an unwritten contract.  Deciding you can fulfil another person’s emotional and sexual needs indefinitely is a brave thing to do, and no one should be surprised if it takes work.  A few inches more or less on the waistline should be okay with anyone but the most rigid body fascist, but letting your shape change radically (either way) is a good way of letting your partner feel taken for granted.  Has Gareth been doing just that with his partner, then?

“Not at all! I just splurged a bit last holiday and haven’t made it back to the gym yet.  I refuse to see that the odd extra pint and the occasional treadmill session less means I’m slapping my boyfriend’s libido in the face.”

Despite being put out by his boyfriend’s comment, Gareth says things have started improving.

“I didn’t like it, but just a bit of honesty between us has thawed things out, and we’ve started having more sex already.  It might be easier in the short term to lie and pretend everything’s okay –but sex aside, this is a relationship we both badly want to continue, so it’s better getting it out in the open.”

Ugly, isn't it?

“Don’t leave me here!” I thought to myself.  As the ferry rumbled away leaving my friend P and me – and no one else – on an unfeasibly remote Greek island, I felt little panic moths nibbling away at my stomach lining.  How would I cope with a week on an island whose inhabitants would fit comfortably on a single bendy bus?   Brought up in London, even sprawling Berlin is small enough to make me feel a little claustrophobic at times.  Here there was one bus, one bar, one restaurant, one priest, one resident foreigner (a Pole, referred to as “the Pole”) and just two gays – us.

Chances of gay action were therefore precisely zero.  P is a friend strictly without benefits, while the only other tourists were five buff, dead-eyed, apparently straight young Greek men who spent all day drinking beer and discussing basketball (so Greek-speaking P told me) ignoring their lithe, dead eyed young girlfriends looking on in mute protest.  True, there were a few bearish fisherman types lolling round the port playing backgammon, but while the odd lewd bit of ancient pottery gives many false hopes that many Greeks still swing, no one gets away with anything surreptitious in a community of only 200.  Still, what the island lacked in amenities, it made up for in rocks – they were everywhere, making the wild, rugged terrain look like a slightly dessicated version of Mordor.

Rather jaded as I have been lately about the gay merry-go-round, this wasn’t a problem – but one thought did strike me.  Lying under a shady bush on a deserted beach with P (I burn like buggery), I realised that my holidays are increasingly resembling honeymoons, just without the sex.  Last time I went away, to Morocco, I was with another old friend with whom I was routinely mistaken for a couple.  Here once again, the sight of two men alone on a far-flung island had something matrimonial about it, equally false.   Wasn’t this a bit odd?

Don't let ancient statuary mislead you about contemporary Greek mores

Possibly, but it’s an experience many of my friends, gay and straight, are going through.  Realising as their thirties draw on that we aren’t going to fall effortlessly into relationships we’d really choose to stay in, lots of us are making alternative plans to make sure we get the lives we want.  My single female friends are starting to consider having children without a committed live-in partner rather than waiting for some imaginary, infinitely fertile Mr. Right.  Meanwhile, men like me have noticed that, possibly because we don’t have partners, our friendships are often more close and supportive than other people’s, and that we already have the love and support around us to see us through.  On our trip, my friend P was infinitely generous, kind, funny and interesting – and without his enthusiasm I would never have seen that obscure, rocky island, which I must grudgingly admit was wildly beautiful.  Coming back on the ferry, I was sad to see it turn to a distant speck, but felt peaceful, cared-for and happy.  My life isn’t going to go according to the hazily conceived plan I had in childhood – but seeing that involved a wife and kids and a semi in the ‘burbs, I can’t bring myself to regret it.  In fact, I hope the honeymoon continues.

Nothing, actually.  Despite having been guilty of professionally peddling the notion that men only think about One Thing, I can’t see anything wrong with a restorative sexual lull now and again.  The trouble is, that men are pressed to see this sort of thing as a problem.  Women in this country have done a good job of challenging the notion that any woman who enjoys and looks for sex is a slut, but men are still having a simplistic cartoon version of their sexuality sold back to them.  It’s as if we’re all supposed to be desperate priapic fuckmonsters ready to shoot spunk at the merest sight of a well-turned ankle.  Men are animals, we hear, they’re programmed to spread their seed to the four winds, they effortlessly separate sex and emotion, they’re automatically turned rock hard by the slightest hint of tits and arse – in the words of Lenny Bruce, they’ll “fuck mud”.

Is this really true?   Right now, all this male is programmed for is reading books and farting into a chair.  Certainly, there are times of the month when, personally, I seem to be dragged around by my dick like a lost soul strapped to a hellhound (or maybe just a hellpuppy).  These phases, however, aren’t the sum total of my or any man’s sexuality.

My Ex's photos have been getting me excited. As has Mr. Cohen

So why are they often portrayed as such?  It might be because they’re so damned convenient.  “I/he just can’t help it – I’m/he’s a man” can be a handy excuse to have around for all concerned at times.  It means that men needn’t be held totally accountable for their horniness, while women who sleep with them can, if they so wish, claim they’ve been swept away by the power of their partners’ lust.  The gay identity is largely, if not exclusively, built around sex – our attraction is after all the one thing we all share.  But even in hyper-sexualised gay subcultures, the power of desire can be overstated.  For every gay man that sets up a blind sex date online, there are 3 who chat up someone online because they’re horny, then decide to stay at home because it’s raining and there’s something good on telly.

So for the time being I’m happy to hold it all in and see what comes.  That said, when my ex got in touch over Facebook recently (friendly again, at last), I did find myself flicking through his photos with surprising excitement.  Remembering how hot he was, what his skin tasted like and how much I liked the quiet little noises he made, I felt genuinely hot under the collar for the first time in weeks.   Despite his good looks, I suspect that it was our emotional connection that made the whole thing so exciting.  Does that mean I’m – horrid word, this – complicated?  Probably – so many men are more complicated than they feel they’re allowed to admit.

For 3 weeks he hasn’t replied to any of my messages or emails and doesn’t pick up the phone. The last time I heard from him was 3 weeks ago when I went to Paris on my own to use my unrefundable Eurostar ticket. This was after he suggested I didn’t come to visit him in Normandy as planned because he wasn’t well with depression. I’ve pleaded with him to get in touch but not a thing. We met at the beginning of the year and he has come over to visit England 3 times and I’ve been to visit him once, so we’ve seen each other once a month until the depression. Before the depression he admitted that he couldn’t give me the level of attention that I can give him because of his commitments with having children and a killer work schedule being a hospital doctor.

I am arranging to meet a guy I saw a few times at the time I met M and I’m in the process of planning another date with another guy. Am I wrong for doing this? Should I be holding out for M?

best X

No, you shouldn’t be.  What does this relationship have to feed on but misplaced optimism? Long distance relationships are intricate and fragile at the best of times – personally, I’m crap at them – and they require complete commitment from both parties to function.  Your man can’t offer you that, and in his current situation, he needs less on his plate, not more.  Though I’m sure you have a lot to offer, his asking you not to visit suggests that, depressed as he is, he doesn’t think you can lighten his load.

Almost invisible, isn't it?

Don’t take this too personally – depression is hell and it partly breaks its sufferers’ ability to engage with other people.  Do you remember Sylvia Plath’s description of it as a bell jar?  It’s as if there are glass walls separating you from everyone else, walls which no one else can quite see but which isolate you from human contact nonetheless.  If he feels like this, M may already be struggling to keep meaningful contact with the people he sees every day, so it’s not surprising he can’t manage time and space for you as well.  To his great credit, he has been clear with you from the beginning about his limits – and by doing so, has tacitly given you leave to seek out a situation where you get back as much as you put in.  Keep in occasional contact with M by all means, but do not expect any more of him.  You should feel completely free to meet up with other guys without any feelings of guilt – good luck.

xJ

Look at my face

Summer’s clearly on the way this week – despite dingy skies, Soho yesterday was full of gay men proudly parading their gooseflesh in tight little T-shirts. Sitting drinking bad coffee outside Costa on Compton Street in the early evening, half the men walking past looked as if nature had suddenly provided them with a slightly wrinkled second skin of gaudy cotton.  My friend Jon and me started counting nipples (we got to 12 pairs), as the slightly crisp evening air meant that a fair few were all standy-uppy and pert, looking like possessed jelly tots trying to bite their way through prison walls made of fabric.  It passed the time pleasantly (so thanks guys) but it did leave us wondering what had happened to understatement.

What, I hear you ask, is the problem with showing a bit of handsome flesh in warm weather? Nothing in particular, I suppose – I like looking at nice bodies as much as anyone else.  It’s just that if you don’t underplay what you put on show, you end up looking a little obvious and oversold.  I personally get more excited when I have to guess a little of what lies under someone’s clothes – in the street at least, if less so in a club or online.  Seeing an arse in jeans that make it look like two hard-boiled eggs squeezed in a hankie means you needn’t fantasise about what it looks like unveiled.

How does this guy walk?

For a lecherous old goat like me, skin-tight clothing on buff bodies is also maddeningly distracting in social situations.  If someone with a body I like wears skin-tight clothing, I too often find myself having long conversations with their pecs rather than their face.  This isn’t necessarily about sexual attraction – I can be similarly transfixed by low-cut cleavage on a woman.  She might be talking to me about the budget or the death of a much-loved pet, but I can’t stop my eyes straying downwards and thinking about is what it would be like to bury my face in them and go blubble, blubble, blubble.

That said, criticising the way other people display their bodies and you risk overstepping a line into sour judgement.  I’ve met plenty of men who affect to sneer at guys who put their bodies on display, when secretly they really fancy them and are just put out because they suspect they  couldn’t pull the owner of the goods on display.  I don’t want to be one of these ­– people have the right to enjoy being in their own skin.  I might also grudgingly admit that I’d be more indulgent to overt muscle display if I had a bit more to show myself.

I still think, however, that wearing clothes that act as a form of sexual marketing all the time can make you look a little two dimensional.  It must be nice to come across as a hot piece on a summer evening, but if Jon and my reactions yesterday are anything to go by, it means people are too busy checking out your chest to focus on your face.  Could it be that a world where you had to work a little harder to see how other guys were built might be a little more sexy, not less?

“Where do you normally hang out, Josh?” Facebook friends of mine quite often ask me this, and it makes me feel sheepish. I’ve exposed so much of my own and my friends’ lives that I feel self-conscious about people possibly stumbling across me actually doing the things I write about.  Making jokes in print about being a luckless nob-end is one thing, actually being on show while being a luckless nob-end is another entirely.  Now my post-London paper readership has inevitably shrunk, however, being coy about my normal whereabouts seems precious and self-important – I’m a former columnist from a defunct afternoon free paper, not Osama Bin Laden.

So for the record, I normally hang out in what likes to think of itself as London’s “alternative” gay scene.  I’m talking about places like the (mixed/gay) Nelson’s Head and Vogue Fabrics in East London, the Griffin in Vauxhall, plus places where there’s more of a mixed crowd like the Eagle and the Vauxhall Tavern.  I put inverted commas around the word alternative for good reason – despite its various pretensions, this small niche is in denial about how similar it is to the mainstream gay scene.  At its worst (yes Dalston Superstore, I’m talking to you) it can be cliquey, mono-cultural (in this case, mainly white and middle class) and unwelcoming to faces that don’t “fit”.  It is admittedly less body conscious and flashy than the muscle scene, but still has its fair share of fashion fascism and status-consciousness.  I’ve met many wonderful people out and about, but I’ve also come across a few vacuous scenesters who won’t deign to acknowledge anyone until they’ve had piss fun with Wolfgang Tillmans.

Given my mixed feelings about this scene, you might ask, why do I hang out on it?  Because despite its faults, it’s where I meet most people I have things in common with.  They play music I like, the lighting tends to be flatteringly low and the drugs of choice are mainly legal (early druggy excess followed by depression has left me easily freaked out by heavy drug use).  After years hanging around like “the smell of spilt milk on vinyl flooring” as my friend Jon puts it, I know lots of people, like many of them and even love a few.

This column, however, has shown how much I might have missed by staying in my own little rut.  When I started writing it, I was amazed and moved to find that people I’d never met recognised their experiences in what I wrote.  While I’d been keeping my head down all these years, my life actually had a whole lot more in common with other people than I thought.  As a slightly reclusive and sometimes shy person, this was a bit of a bombshell – a good one.  Instead of judging people I thought were excluding me, I realised that I myself had been zoning out all sorts of people who, underneath the surface, were actually a lot like me. For that readers, I’d really like to thank you all.

Anyway, I seem to have lost track of the real reason I started writing this piece in the first place: friends of mine have been hassling me to plug their club nights.  I’ve finally caved in, and will be occasionally drawing your attention to a few in future.  I’m starting with one of my favourite nights, the monthly Kimono Krush at the Vauxhall Tavern, which just happens to be coming up this very Friday, the 14^th of May,  with a Tribute to the 90s – find more information here. A toxic mix of random but excellent music, low-rent go-gos and exquisitely tragic tranny lipsynching, I find it has the leftfield energy I like on the alternative gay scene minus its occasional self-important attitude.  I’ve had some fantastic nights there – all the photos surrounding this piece are from KK – and if any readers feel like coming along (I can’t make it myself, alas) the very friendly organisers will be delighted to take your fiver.

Kimono Krush is at The RVT, Vauxhall 9 – 2.30 am Friday the 14^th of May. £3 before 10, £5 after.