VAUXHALL AND ITS PLEASURES

Duckie’s Vauxhall Bacchanal @ The Southbank Centre

By Patrick Cash

Duckie is the pioneering performance collective group who have been taking over the Royal Vauxhall Tavern every Saturday since 1995. During this eclectic journey they have become the heroes of London’s alternative gay scene, keeping the spirit of the South’s theatrical legacy alive against the more commercial clubbing atmosphere of the Embankment’s arches, and the largely drink-focused bars of Central Soho.

Founder Simon Casson with host Amy Lamé and their crew of faithful dreamers have branched out their distinctive brand of nightlife to many other venues and pathways over the years. A staple of their appeal has always been the provocation of thought and discussion, and therefore last Saturday saw them take over the Southbank Centre for a discussion of a subject that has always been at the beating heart of Duckie: ‘Vauxhall’.

A day-long itinerary of talks, forums and performances saw the area of Vauxhall in all its elements discussed, analysed and, in many ways, celebrated. A celebration though that did not mask any darkness that may be attendant on Vauxhall; that the hedonistic dragon you dance with there does not sometimes burn and bite. In fact, it soon became apparent that the focus of the day, as much as it was about Vauxhall, was also a dissection of hedonism and its appetites, for we learnt quickly in its history that this area just south of the river has long been a site for pleasure-seekers to scratch their itch.

David Coke, author of Vauxhall Gardens, joined Amy Lamé in the first talk of the afternoon to provide an overview of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, which since the 18th century have drawn the rich and fabulous of the city to mingle with the louche and debauched – not that there wasn’t a distinct overlapping between the two groups. An entrepreneur in property, Jonathan Tyers, opened the Gardens in 1729 to an astounding lack of success. One day the prominent diarist Samuel Pepys saw Tyers down by the embankment looking distraught. Upon enquiring as to the origin of this distress, Tyers cried that his Gardens were failing and he didn’t know whether to hang or drown himself.

Pepys took the young Tyers into his study. No one knows what was said in this private discussion, but suddenly the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens became a site for the most exotic, unusual visual entertainment in London and the crowds started to arrive. Hot air balloons, fireworks, Native American Indians, contemporary art, tightrope-walkers and many other attractions were all swirled into a heady mix. To ensure people didn’t lose interest, animals were brought into the hot air balloons, with horses being dragged up on boards and cats being thrown out in parachutes, and the tightrope-walkers found themselves having to balance through fields of fireworks going off. It was a huge hit.

But the pleasures of the Pleasure Gardens ran a lot deeper than mere spectacle; alcohol was consumed in excess here, prostitutes plied their trade to the rich young men in abundance, a subculture of homosexual dandies and transvestites existed. After the Gardens eventually closed in 1859, long after the death of Jonathan Tyers, this ambience of particular pleasures and socially shunned appetites continued to whirl gleefully in the Vauxhall area. In 1863 a new pub was built on a piece of ground originally belonging to the former pleasure gardens, named the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Swiftly becoming famous for its female impersonators and drag cabaret, by the post-war years this was one of London’s flourishing underground gay pubs.

In Duckie’s tribute to their spiritual home, ‘150 Years of the RVT’, three staple characters of the pub over the years came to talk of their experiences with host Rupert Smith: performer Maisie Trollette, author Neil Bartlett and fabulous doyen Stuart Feather. Perhaps it was Mr Feather, in his recount of the pub during the sixties when homosexuality was still struggling with legality, who made one of the most salient points: the pub at the time was divided into two, via a kidney-shaped bar, with one half being for the out-and-out queens and their drag shows, the other half being for the ‘manly’ men who steadfastly refused to acknowledge properly their sexualities. It just seemed like such a strange division, Mr Feather recounted.

Division, repression and the struggle with sexuality were all subjects that came up many times in a forum chaired by Attitude editor Matthew Todd, with former QX editor Stewart Who?, landlord of the RVT Jason Dickie and David Stuart from the gay drugs counselling agency Antidote. “Who here thinks there is a problem with drugs right now?” asked Matthew Todd. It was startling, and moving, to look round a room that was a forest of hands.

David Stuart gave a poignant theory as to gay men’s troubled relation with their own sex lives. Families, he said, are naturally about love and intimacy, which you hopefully learn early as a child. Yet even now if a teenager realises they are gay they are likely to keep it cooped up for some time, even many years, before telling their parents or siblings: the very opposite of intimacy. If we are disconnected from intimacy in such a way in our formative years, and this disconnection is so integral to our burgeoning sexualities, perhaps that partially answers the reason as to why we find it hard to inject intimacy into our private relationships. Hence the cycle of endless drugs, meaningless sex and deprivation of thought and senses that has built itself up. Perhaps it’s not completely correct, but it definitely sounds like it could be plausible, doesn’t it?

Before we all retired to Duckie’s quintessential performance-lead party, drag/cabaret artist/terrorist David Hoyle shared his inner thoughts on the subject of alcohol and creativity. As always, Hoyle put things into perspective, playing a video of the “infinite ever-expanding universe” upon a huge screen above him halfway through his set. “Yes, please,” he sarcastically pleads, “Give me rules and regulations, tell me who I am!” As a middle-aged woman who couldn’t deal with his more outrageous remarks scurried from the auditorium, Hoyle spat after her: “It’s about self-contextualisation!” Think about it.

 

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