LGBTQ+ History Month: My Mum’s Black Sequin Dress
Aged 19, I remember the conversation and offer from my Mum of her black cocktail dress for Pride London 1997.
Both Mark - a good friend - and both my grandmas were my make-up guides. Not that my Grandmas in reality showed me how to put on make-up on, but I did enjoy watching them and they did not know I was learning from them. They all believed you needed to cake on foundation until you could see no real facial lines, blemishes or cracks. Their type of femininity and the fashions they chose were always received as very glamorous. My two Grandmas found their beauty and femininity in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The Hollywood feminine era. Mark had convinced my Mum of the idea of me doing drag as a way of masking my identity. In truth it was my first of many experiences of what I now see as gender bending. I did not want to look like a boy in a dress. My Mum had leant me her off the shelf black BHS sequined cocktail dress. At the time I felt good and healthy, being extremely skinny. Now I would say I was more androgenous due to being heavily underweight. I loved the validation I would receive for my body on the scene, and I realise now that no one - including me - questioned my gender. In hindsight, I did not feel good in the gendered body everyone was naming and seeing as a young man. But I did find an ability to perform well in sex being seen as a man having sex with men.
I remember waking up that Pride 1997 morning in Islington, greeted by bucks’ fizz, the smell and taste of warm, very buttery, strawberry jam-filled croissants, made by Mark and Edward in their flat off Pentonville Road in the - as Mark would put it - “Upper Islington” end of Angel backstreets. My Mum had argued with me a few days earlier about how I would be on ITV news and that might lead to my father finding out about me being gay (in my language - queer). This was the first pride that she knew about me attending: this is where how public I could be about my queerness began as a negotiation in my family. If I did not need to worry about how my local Jewish community would react to my queerness then I needed to worry about the effects on my father’s and grandparent’s health. This is - and was - a lot to put on a young person still understanding their gender and sexual identity.
Today, I know for both my parents the reality is that they could not have coped or dealt well with all the questions that would have come from my grandparents knowing about my queerness.
Whilst my extended family would deny that they had any knowledge of me being queer until I or my parents told them much later, they all in different ways treated me as the weird and quirky kid. I have always thought it had something to do with me not being academic but today I know it was something more than that.
Two things can exist. You can treat someone with unconditional love and treat them badly at the same time.
I know my way of finding my identity was to lose myself in hedonism, the scene and sometimes not come home till the early hours. I was out having fun, finding my queer and sexual liberation. By this time my first boyfriend and 10 friends had died from HIV complications since my first Pride in 1995. This must have been very confusing and even scary for those witnessing me. Those you love and care about can turn away at parts that they don’t fully accept, and that can leave you with feelings of anger, frustration and shame. It can also make you want to flee from feeling responsible for everyone’s feelings. With a compassionate set of lenses on today, I realise I had a lot to flee from. Today I know all these experiences and feelings are valid. I know both I - and they - could have done better. Relationships are always more than a “just me” process.
The felt difference now I have the language for was that I was - and am - non-binary and queer.
In truth school friends that lived in my local Jewish community had worked out my difference years before I understood it and understood it was not something I could conceal or hide. The bullying and taunting about this extended into my synagogue Jewish community for all my youth, from ages 8 to 16. Family would say I had a happy childhood. I remember it being very isolated and lonely, and the friends I had were being performative but in no real way showing me that they truly wanted me in their lives. There were family friends, luckily, who did what they could - but did not know what was going on beneath the surface. I am sure if I had they may have done something. At that young stage I was small and more physically able, so now in what I know as my hypervigilance, I knew how to physically run away (flee) from a situation. But danger felt very close, particularly at school.
At an early age I understood how to people please and mask what was really going on.
In the 1980’s there was no permission to talk about gender or sexuality differences. We did not have the language for it. Section 28 - but also going to Jewish schools - did not allow for this difference to be spoken about or an acknowledged part of my identity. I wish today that my parents were 1960s kids that had rebelled and found the freedom and liberation that I more identify with when I read about the 60’s and 70’s. Sometimes I feel like I am old before my time; that I was there, or that I wish I had played my part in that era of freedom and liberation.
There were no other kids at synagogue that wanted to dress up as Boy George for the festival of Purim and won the Purim fancy dress competition.
Today I reflect on this and think if that did not scream my queer difference and say a “fuck you” to the bullies, nothing would. I am proud of eleven-year-old me that learnt to use the mask of dressing up as a suit of armour from the nastiness surrounding them. I just wish that they did not learn to do this with their emotions and feelings. That they had a trusted adult they could be completely themselves with, and speak freely to and frankly without fear. That they did not bury all these emotions deep down to deal or not deal with until they were a fully-fledged adult.
In summer 1997 London Pride I stood with Jewish LGBTQ+ friends, with both Mark and I in full drag.
Wearing what I called my Eliza Doolittle black hat, my Mum’s sequin black cocktail dress, and full make-up, I felt shy and nervous behind the make-up, and tourists kept stopping me to have photos taken. I felt pride.
It was the decade before London Pride became a commercialised event and before it became a good thing for large corporate organisations to sponsor.
There was still a flavour of it being very creative: doing Pride on a shoestring budget. Pride was also a protest, as we did not have equal rights. Standing and walking with pride down from Lancaster Station, joining the procession at Hyde Park down Park Lane, Regent Street and then down The Mall. I felt glamorous and complete in my identity; the beginning of a long journey of bringing the intersections of my identity together. ‘Thank G-d for the fear of being on the ITV news’, I think to myself and the good friends around me.
Later in the day I am walking home up Pentonville Road, barefoot, with ripped fishnet black tights, holding my heels in one hand behind my back, and the make-up has run down my face from the heat and sweat of the day.
The black sequin dress like a hot, wet kitchen cloth hangs on my body. A lovely exhaustion stretches over me and the pain of my feet on the hard concrete floor, left from a long day of Pride celebration and elation. A great Pride Day.