MARK O'CONNELL

Writer, Author, Bond Fan

Category: LGBT (Page 2 of 2)

“Come in Number One, we were expecting you” – Sam Smith & WRITING’S ON THE WALL make 007 chart history

October 2, 2015 /

JUKEBOX

CONGRATULATIONS to Barbara Broccoli, Team EON and the SPECTRE ensemble for making Bond chart history with the Bond series first UK Number One!

Sam Smith’s WRITING’S ON THE WALL has gone straight to the top of the British charts in its first week of release and is set to resound around the globe for Bond, SPECTRE and Smith. The singer has told BBC’s Radio One “out of all the songs I’ve brought out in my life, I was not expecting this to even chart in the top 10, let alone number one. It’s unbelievable.”

Despite some kneejerk panic and reaction, SPECTRE’s opening anthem is a worthy track, a solid one and possibly needs to be seen in the context of the film it flanks. It is certainly carrying on a grand tradition of the top singer of the era stepping up to 007’s mic and giving the series their take on a Bond tune. This will get Oscar, Golden Globe and Grammy nominations. Easily.

For a review of the track and what it means for Bond – read here.

And Mark O’Connell writes for OUT magazine about Smith and the Bond song legacy :

Why Sam Smith entering Bond’s Thunderball of fame is good news for 007

 

OFF THE WALL – Sam Smith is announced as SPECTRE’s title song performer

September 9, 2015 /

smith 2The official writing is finally on the wall with the announcement that British singer Sam Smith is performing  Writing’s On The Wall– the title song to the 24th Bond movie, Spectre.

Just like Adele before him, the multi-Grammy award winning British singer is a natural choice, a very current and high-selling choice and do not be surprised if Sam Smith is performing Writing’s On The Wall at next year’s Academy Awards ceremony. Just sayin’.

However, Smith of course strenuously denied such Bond associations, citing Ellie Goulding in a scent-diverting tactic. Other names were touted too – including the rather delicious prospect of Radiohead getting involved.

But the upshot was it was always Smith’s gig. Co-written very quickly with Smith’s co-writer Jimmy Napes (Stay With Me), the track allegedly took barely twenty minutes to structure with the end result being one of the proudest moments in Sam Smith’s career thus far.

He is the first British male solo artist in fifty years to perform a Bond tune, the first out performer and one of the youngest too.

For my fuller thoughts on Sam Smith’s casting as the Spectre title song artist :

OUT MAGAZINE : Off The Wall – Why Sam Smith entering Bond’s Thunderball of Fame is good news for Bond

BBC 5 LIVE :  Sam Smith ‘obvious choice’ for theme tune says Mark O’Connell

Writing’s On The Wall is available to buy and download from September 25th 2015.

CD and vinyl pre-orders are being taken here

EVERYTHING’S COMING UP PEACHES – Wonderground cinema’s Peaches Christ hits UK shores!

September 23, 2014 /

Move over Secret Cinema before someone sabotages you down the stairs of immersive moviegoing!!

“There’s always someone younger and hungrier coming down the stairs after you”, chirps Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon) in Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 – er – ‘classic’ flesh-fest, Showgirls. Well if it’s hunger you need, then San Francisco’s schlock-fest doyenne Peaches Christ is certainly younger and hungrier than most for this film and is bringing that schlock-fest passion to London in October. Teaming up with the Amy Grimehouse and a gathered ensemble of San Francisco queens, kings and no doubt a few British princesses for good measure, Peaches is bringing her volcanic-ally explosive night Showgirls to the Rio Cinema and Bearbarella to Manchester’s Cornerhouse.

This writer was fortunate enough to catch Peaches’ sixteenth Showgirls night at the Castro Theatre. This is what British audiences have in store when a peach bursts your cherry….

Christ’s A Night of a Thousand Showgirls is a now famed event in gay San Francisco – an annual on-stage tribute to the gobbling turkey that is Verhoeven’s critically mauled flick. Recently celebrating its seventeenth slide down the pole of affectionate ridicule, Peaches Christ’s pre-show extravaganza has built up quite a head of steam. Infinitely bolder and cleverer than the film itself – which is only glorious because it knows not of its pitfalls (“you got something wrong with your nipples?”), A Night of a Thousand Showgirls is a must in the Castro’s must-ladened calendar and this Showgirls virgin was luckier than Kyle MacLachlan’s [then] bottom wrangler.

(c) Mark O'Connell / 2013Located in ideal seats by our Showgirls-savvy friends in the beautiful old paddle steamer of a cinema that is San Francisco’s Castro Theatre, the night’s merriment was already apparent. Audience participation is to be as key as audience enjoyment. This is what the Rocky Horror Picture Show fan movement was before provincial tours starring Blue Peter presenters diluted the naughtiness for midweek audiences. Here is a party where day-glo drag drifts through the aisles, bearded Vegas showgirls mingle with fluorescent leotarded weaklings, a quarterback in oddly becoming stilettoes trots to the Gents, space vixens glitter alongside Gaga reinventionists, girls are boys, boys are girls, boys are boys and the statuesque RuPaul’s Drag Race candidate and drag loyalist Honey Mahogany shows them all how it’s done (“too real”, dismisses host Christ with a wink at Honey, “too real!”).

The thing to remember with San Francisco is that people put in the effort. For scant fiscal returns, this town is bustling with many a creative hustler like Verasphere’s Mrs Vera and Mr Tina, Club Something’s David Glamamore, Honey Mahogany and – in this instance – Peaches Christ (and her alter-ego Joshua Grannell) who push their friends and collaborators’ time and talents to bring out a one-off yearly night that celebrates cinema, cinema-going and the city’s crucial LGBT scene. From an elaborate and hilarious pre-show film written by Christ to on-stage dance numbers and the night’s signature moment (which we will come on to), this is an event that celebrates Verhoeven’s filmic monstrosity but more crucially tips a hat/wig/Michael Myers hockey mask (I’m sure I saw one) to the creative counter-pulse of San Francisco itself. Quite clearly revelling in the support of the current and proven generation on the drag and cabaret circuit – Mahogany, Lady Bear, Cousin Wonderlette and Penny L’eggs – as well as giving a step up to newer creations still finding their feet (and kitten heels), my night with a thousand showgirls soon became so more than a bit of camp filler for an otherwise bad film. And to label anything of this thinking as camp or drag is to miss the point. This is not about expression, not impression. These girls and boys are not aping Showgirls, they are using it as a spot-lit springboard for their own identities however temporary or fleeting. Marshalled by Peaches as – naturally – Gershon’s bi-hi Cristal Connors, this pre-film rollercoaster is a slick affair whose edges are only rough because that makes everything funnier. Life is always going to be a lot more entertaining when you can take the rise out of something so risible as Showgirls. But there is nothing suspect about the cast’s insight into the phenomenon of this movie. Real support players from the 1995 original join the choreographed mayhem, the production values echo the tackier excesses of the Las Vegas settings and part of the momentum to the hilarious chaos is the audience’s familiarity with Christ’s set-up and shtick.

P1050010And this is all before the evening’s signature moment unfurls itself like Nomi Malone spewing forth from a Verhoeven volcano. “Free lap dance with every large popcorn” boasts the posters throughout the Castro. Was there really to be a thousand showgirls filling the rafters in the two-tier Castro Theatre? Well maybe not quite a thousand, but the finale of Christ’s elaborate spectacle is a now infamous tsunami of drag as at least a hundred acts, personas and gender benders tear into the audience searching for prey clutching a box of large popcorn. They just happen to feel like a thousand. This is the moment the night scores its infamy as the drag dial is turned to “Ken Russell” and all manner of faux-hedonistic ribaldry and slap and tickle fun spills into the very suspecting audience. Popcorn ejaculates in all directions, camera flashes make out the dry humping and comedy squats of the writhing figures and – like San Francisco itself – the lines of sexual orientation are fantastically blurred.

P1050009This is also the moment of no return for Showgirls the film. It cannot follow this. But it does, albeit with a slight sadness from this audience member that Peaches herself has not re-shot the whole film with her pals (though the filmed homages over the years are no doubt building up and could one day see no need for Elizabeth Berkeley and her unrehearsed twists to camera). But wait. What is this? Watching Showgirls in this context becomes an utter joy as its’ weird and sometimes brutal twists become total car-crash entertainment, its excruciating dialogue are gems of bad hindsight (“here, wipe your nose”), MacLachlan gets his twin peaks out for the boys and eventually nothing that road kill of a movie vomits up surprises us. The upshot is a totally immersive grand guignol of an experience, all refereed by Peaches Christ’s and her A-grade enthusiasm for the B-movie in us all. And I would put money on the Vegas gambling tables that to do this all over again next time is even more fun. But for now, my Showgirls cherry was not just popped. It was rolled in glue and petrol-blue glitter and stamped on with an eight inch heel. Get yourself to the Rio Cinema in October. Now.

“Aren’t you gonna come here and give me a big kiss?”. Actually, I think I might.

 

peaches 2As part of the BFI’s Days of Fear And Wonder, Peaches Christ’s Bearbarella is at Belfast’s BlackBox on Thursday 9th October as part of Outfest, Glasgow’s Film Theatre on Friday 10th October and Manchester’s Cornerhouse on Saturday 11th October.

In association with The Amy Grimehouse, Peaches Christ’s Showgirls is at London’s Rio Cinema on Friday 17th October.

 

 

And of course Peaches Christ has a great top shelf of a cine-skewed site.

 

Through the LOOKING glass… HBO’s new gay by the Bay series reviewed

August 12, 2014 / / 0 Comments

LOOKING2From an opening fumble in the cruising bushes of a San Francisco park, HBO’s new series Looking makes great play of not really being another gay show that starts with an opening fumble in the cruising bushes of a San Francisco park. Our main guy Patrick (Jonathan Groff) is already on the phone joking with his nearby pals like friends lost in a zoo no-one visits anymore. Already the path-paving brilliance of Russell T Davies’ Queer As Folk and its American remake cousin with all their nubile young lovelies and their helium heels hauled skywards now somehow seems so turn of the century.

Less a gold lamé baton handed on from the hindsight, camp and shock of Tales of The City, Will and Grace and Queer As Folk respectively, HBO’s Looking is not about running forwards. Like British director Andrew Haigh’s previous [and pitch-perfect] feature Weekend (2011), this is about half-seen exchanges outside busy bars and stolen conversations on various Lower Haight sofas as the work talk and weed pipes get passed round as inconsequentially as the prawn crackers from a Thai takeout (not a euphemism!). “I’m proud of you – you’re a pervert now” dismisses one of Patrick’s friends as Looking quickly proves it is not about coming-out stories, Cher gags, fantasy Madonna dance-offs in the bus queue or bottom licking commotions. This is not Sex And The City but just done with gay men replacing the ladies. We’ve had that. It was called Sex And The City.

Everything the possible detractors will level at Looking is exactly why it works. It is not a peaks and troughs screaming queen of a comedy-drama with sexual pratfalls and verbal grenades. Nor does it wear its politics on its leather/denim/tattooed sleeves. Equal marriage, Prop 8 and DOMA is not its agenda as it is not all of ours either. The show and us are aware of the principles at stake, but how many of us really fuss about it 24/7? When very straight comedies and dramas are tapping gay marriage as a narrative normality, it would be wrong of Looking to be throwing its bouquets out the pram in every episode (a wedding episode obviously touches upon such matters but from Patrick’s perspective of messing life up with his intended plus-one).

The opening story especially is a wilful almost inconsequential slow build – an afternoon-paced overture to these characters lives that may lose some viewers, but please stick with it. Episode Five is a beautifully languid Before Midnight exploration of a day off in Golden Gate Park, the planetarium and the kind of affecting character interplay which only Haigh’s Weekend ever got right in recent times. Yes, Looking is savvy enough to throw in a Golden Girls put-down (what isn’t, Rose?), but its gay pulse is not predicated on them.

Spring-boarding off creator Michael Lannan’s previous short film Lorimer (2011), there is actually an affecting delicacy to the lives and exchanges of games designer Patrick, lost artist Augustin (Frankie J Alvarez) and nearly-forty waiter Dom (Murray Bartlett). Like San Francisco itself, the differences and expressions of everyone’s sexuality is a given. There are no closeted jocks or intimate-shy handmaidens here. Moving too fast is a deliberate fault of some characters sex lives, but never the show’s writing or insight into at least three generations of contemporary gay men. These are [almost] nice people doing their thing – the Augustin character is a deliberate hard sell and carved with such pitfalls of attitude one realises he is totally familiar. The difference here is that for gay audiences – for good or bad – this is our thing now; and as one character astutely notes, “guys are guys”.

A key motif of Looking is “being who we think we are”. For the trio of main characters “looking” is indeed key. But looking for what? Maybe some are looking for love, intimacy, a better street to live on, better praise from their peers, better sex from a threesome (or not) or just looking for others who are also dissatisfied with their lot to validate everything (Augustin’s problem). All held together with a solid cast, the show slowly pulls you in. Whilst how Groff’s Patrick really knows Alvarez and Bartlett is perhaps not flagged up enough early on, the friendships are believable with a pleasing short-hand and explanations do arise without surprise.

Likewise Lauren Weedman’s Doris is a savvy, bubble-bursting best mate, Raúl Castillo’s Richie is a hot and kind Mexican and Scott Bakula is an old guard Castro florist with age and hindsight on his side – “we still had sex, but it was friendlier” he notes about the one-night stands of the 1980s and 1990s. Cyber-dating is of course a support app of the show – unavoidably used but not exclusively. Though there will be many a moment when some of us in the audience look to our overpriced brogues with acute embarrassment at the behaviour on show. Patrick and pals research their past and present dalliances and shag-obsessions on the Instagrams, okaycupid.coms and Grindrs of this world. Characters over-worry about the Instagram photos of a dinner date and the successful exes now with their own Wikipedia page. But their real stories are often advanced from chance encounters on the MUNI train, accidental glances through a bar doorway, in an empty sauna and works drinks nights. The relationship between Patrick and Richie is particularly lo-fi, not remotely reliant on new technologies. The politics of “friending” on social media and being “an 82%” match“ is rolled out, but so too are the real-life concerns about what messages Patrick gives his new Brit boss Kevin (Russell Tovey) when working overtime on a Sunday and when exactly does a three-way become a problem or a plus? And just when is it no longer polite to mock the Brits after too many bottles of free Bud?!

But is it identifiable to non-San Franciscan, non-American audiences? Of course it is. In the same way Haigh’s Weekend chimed with Top Ten film lists the world over, Looking is a wholly identifiable show, carved with the same incisiveness of its creators previous work. “If I was embarrassed about it, I wouldn’t do it” is a telling line from content, well-earning sex-worker CJ the adrift artist Augustin desperately wants to be like. Not every piece of dialogue need be a barnstormer. Not every quip requires its own t-shirt. Though “you gave him a winky, smiling face? What are you – a Japanese teenager?might do the rounds. It is never a glib show. Nor is it a dot.com, labels and luxury lifestyle fest. With an easy blend of ages and social backgrounds, Looking is thankfully never about whiny, white rich gays. The basement apartments, corridors and streets of Looking are worn and lived in. Like the characters and their love lives, not everything is new and shiny but all of it is functional. That is what San Francisco affords this series. And that is why it is the vital fourth character. Real-life Castro drag artists Peaches Christ and Honey Mahogany are on well-manicured hand, the Castro Theater cinema is the noble granddame backdrop it always has been, the leather-bound Folsom Street Fair plays itself to great effect mid-way through the series, Dolores Park plays Dolores Park, The Stud bar is a location must and the forever-vintage streets of Mission Dolores, Market, the Castro and their pizza [and men] by-the-slice sidewalks are recognisable to anyone familiar with the worlds of Maupin and Milk. What San Francisco brings to Looking is what the show itself gets very right. It is that sense of community, of a neighbourhood of characters and shared experiences often ticking over through nothing but an inexplicable and shared shorthand.

We may not have had the best timeline of televisual representation over the decades. But what doesn’t always embody us makes us stronger – and all that article-writing jazz (maybe).  The landmark likes of Tales of The City, Queer As Folk, Will And Grace, Angels In America, Beautiful People, Queer As Folk and the queer Carrington boy in Dynasty may have been all we had. But they were still ours. Looking represents a smart new chapter. Season Two has been greenlit and audiences – despite a minority of initial and lazy reactions declaring “it’s boring” (it’s not) – have grown and spiked just as the series and its wise writing has. And in the fun, warm, unexpectedly raw, real and fresh-telling style it has on offer, going through this Looking glass could well bring us to a wonderful wonderland.

 

Looking began in the US on HBO on January 19th 2014 and in the UK on Sky Atlantic on January 27th 2014.

 

Mark O’Connell is on Twitter and the author of 1980s gay childhood memoir, Catching Bullets – Memoirs of Bond Fan. With thanks to Sky Atlantic.

Reviewing THE NORMAL HEART

May 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments

THE NORMAL HEARTDirector Ryan Murphy clearly has no glee left in him for this thumping, harsh, but selfless adaption of Larry Kramer’s landmark 1985 play, The Normal Heart. Chronicling the part-biographical real life sorrows and fights of Kramer’s own early 1980s world, this ensemble piece drops any pretence of a slow build for a fearsomely frank look at the early impact of HIV/AIDS on the gay communities of New York. The Normal Heart is less about the hedonism hangover of the 1970s and more about the fear of losing the social and political progress (such as it was) to do all of that all over again if needs be without prejudice.

It is 1981 and Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo) is travelling to Fire Island for a bout or three of ‘Mighty Real’ no-strings debauchery. Clearly not at total ease with being in love, Weeks is a sexually adrift soul plagued by a small sense of self-loathing and a big of sense of self-righteousness. Within minutes friends begin falling by the wayside as director Murphy puts over the breathless speed and impact of the early 80s AIDS deaths via a clever piece of zeitgeist gay casting proving no-one was exempt. As this devastation takes its cruel hold, Ned is instantly compelled to begin the fight for better mayoral assistance and medical messages in a fiercely homophobic and two-faced world. Immediately, a concerned and already clued-up Dr Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts) is dealing with the now constant stream of patients and a bubbling resentment her Polio-blighted world sees her in a wheelchair as all around her guys are gambling with their very lives for a human contact she has never had. Enter Ned into her initially cold world of pragmatic facts and health budget honesty.

As lesions spread like Rorschach spots testing the psyche of the whole gay community, The Normal Heart throws most of its trailer beats out in the first fifteen minutes. The end result is that you don’t know what the end result is. Exploring the merits or not of “promiscuity” becoming a “political agenda”, the film is partly about sex versus sense as Ned battles his own role in gay society – defying harsh truths posed by his older brother Ben (Alfred Molina, on terrific form) and assuming all past infatuations should become romances. But make no mistake – The Normal Heart is a grenade of a film about a grenade of a plight. Kramer’s adaption of his own play shares the operatic emotions of Tony Kushner’s Angels In America but has none of the fantasy relief. Or even the episodic structure to gather breath. As cold food is left in hospital corridors by medical interns too fearful to feed the dying victims and gay activist friends refuse to ask favours of influential colleagues for fear of outing themselves, the multi-stranded hypocrisy of it all is almost as much of a gut-punch as the very frankly played effects of the virus.

Clearly trying to remember the stage foundations of the original play, Murphy and Kramer let ensemble dialogues unfurl in single rooms before showing the scared panic of lovers hauling their dying partners across town or further (one flashback anecdote from Taylor Kitsch’s Bruce is truly shocking in its telling). Ruffalo is on aggravating form as Ned – possibly becoming too much of an irritant as others are trying to tread more cautiously and sometimes fairly. Dr Brookner suggests his “big mouth” is not an irritant but a “cure”, but Ned does do a lot of shouting. This is a piece where many a central character is afforded a powerful monologue that will just – like the original play – truly floor the audience. Joe Mantello’s Micky has a particularly salient and honest monologue, a volunteer Estelle (Danielle Fernand) wants to do anything to help and details the tragic reasons why and Roberts’ last act lambasting of the bureaucrats required this viewer to have a press of the ‘pause’ button before continuing.

Almost too separately pitched from his campaigning colleagues to make him in any way likeable (and possibly creating the vaguest of faults of the film), Ruffalo’s Ned is however unexpectedly granted a true love in the guise of Matt Bomer’s Felix – a figure he has known before (played out in a nearly fun retro flashback advertising the pitfalls of the bathhouses within faux ads for themselves). By bringing that deliberately beautiful and fresh Clark Kent canvas to the story, Bomer’s Felix is a welcome breath of cute fresh air. But a single tear running down his chiselled cheekbones whilst making love is a chilling coda of Felix’s future. “Men do not naturally not love”, he remarks, “ – they learn not to”. Bomer will get award recognition for this. So will others. Not that awards are why narratives like The Normal Heart need to be told. There is the film’s constant dialogue about equating history turning its back on the gay communities for gay men who blindly do the same with the next casual partner. The film and play both catalogue all facets of the gay condition – its support friendships, contradictions and gay homophobes. But Larry Kramer, Ryan Murphy and The Normal Heart do not make judgments. Judgments don’t help the dying. The Normal Heart is about the search for dignity – in the characters loves, their workplaces, their campaign tactics and ultimately their deaths. The film does have its flaws. It ends far too abruptly and offers scant respite. But that is maybe its point. And Murphy is reportedly prepping a sequel for Ned.

And there are pockets of not-bleak. Jim Parsons’ quick-witted Tommy is the only near-fun figure of the film, becoming a calm and waspish mediator for both the characters and audience. His use of suddenly unneeded Rolodex cards – his “cardboard tombstones” – is particularly affecting, as is the film’s end coda with a choice of music that is almost too much to ever hear again without seeing all those faces that are not here anymore. Tommy serenely observes when pondering now dead colleagues, artists and writers – “all those plays that won’t get written”. Larry Kramer should forever know he did write this and Ryan Murphy’s brutal film creates a new immortality for a vital piece of writing about those who had so such luck.

The Normal Heart airs on HBO in America on Sunday 25th May and on Sky Atlantic in the UK soon.

 

POLARI – London’s Best Glitterary Salon

November 14, 2013 / / 0 Comments
Host and Mr Polari Paul Burston.

Host and Mr Polari Paul Burston.

November 13th 2013 marked the night the Polari Salon had its annual Polari First Book Prize. Catching Bullets – Memoirs of a Bond Fan was on the shortlist this year so attendance in spesh clothing and clean shoes was a must. And no, I didn’t wear the Octopussy dressing gown or Roger Moore ski-suit despite hinting on Twitter I would (the many open stairs at the Southbank Centre rendered the Octopussy nightgown a no-no for anyone underneath not wanting to cop a peek).

And what a grand night it was, putting – as ever for a Polari gathering – the great and the good better all together to honour all guises of the queer word – spoken, sung, poetry, narrative fiction, non-fiction, stand-up, performance art and speech. And that was just host Paul Burston’s entrance!

Before the Prize winner was announced, Polari took on its more familiar monthly form. The nights are held at London’s Southbank Centre, cost a very fair fiver and represent two hours (plus interval, book and beverage stall) of the best LGBT readers and writers out there. This month’s menu of salonistas included Rosie Garland, Patrick Flanery, Dee Chanelle, Helen Lederer, Dean Atta and Charlotte Mendelson. It is hard and wrong to underline faves, but Patrick Flanery’s prose was fragile and quick-fire, Dean Atta’s stand-up poetry struck a very contemporary and sadly apt chord (“racism is institutionalised thinking“), singer Dee Chanelle gave the Brazilian street dancers a run for their volume-levels next door and Helen Lederer (a comedy hero of mine) was typically self-deprecating all over the podium.

And then to the grand master-plan, the denouement of the night and Polari’s crowning glory – the Polari First Book Prize 2013. Announced in true “Acadamee Award” style by the quietly incisive VG Lee (a new comedy hero of mine), the Societe Generale sponsored trophy went to Mari Hannah and The Murder Wall. A lovely winner clearly in awe of her charity telethon sized and much deserved cheque took to the stage and made winners of us all. Okay, she didn’t at all. Nor should she. It was her moment and she earned it. Us other four shortlistees got to go home with the ‘win’ that Polari and Paul Burston took us under his sterling wing. Not only have I been asked to read at Polari this year but I have seen first-hand the immense value and support mechanism it represents for queer writers. Writing is a lonely practise at the best of times. Paul himself has rightfully remarked how writing needs a reader to complete the process. Polari allows all manner of voices a podium or chair or even sometimes just a Re-Tweet and gives an audience to so many people, including myself. That is worth its weight in gold. The use of words as help and support versus the use of words to hate and incite is still the centuries old dilemma of language. Even now the use of phrases like “dyke” or “queer” is over-worried by the over-worriers, when it is up to gay individuals to adopt it into their parlance and out of the box marked “abuse”. Included in the audience was Nigerian activist and TV host Funmi Iyanda and out-gay Nigerian Bisi Alimi (now a welcome UK resident having had to flee his home country and family). The pair have their own [and sadly very] valid LGBT story to tell and THIS is where Polari is more than a few dykes and queers supping Pinot from plastic glasses in the name of literature (not that Burston would allow that complacency to sink in – hence his ever changing rota of readers and performers).

Polari and the work and efforts of its alumni, audience regulars (the life and pulse of each monthly gathering), venue owners and just those that pass the word on is one of the greatest LGBT assets in London and indeed the UK (where Polari is stretching its wings north – see here).

Furthermore, Paul and his team of judges give their time and efforts to reading the longlist and shortlisted titles and for my tale of a 1980s Bond fan to even get dropped on the “to read” pile is the stuff of privilege.

The Polari First Book Prize 2013 judges this year:

Paul Burston (Chair of Judges) – author, journalist and host of Polari.

Bidisha – writer, critic and broadcaster

Suzi Feay – literary critic

Rachel Holmes – author and former Head of Literature at the Southbank Centre

VG Lee – author and comedian

Joe Storey-Scott – books buyer

 

The Polari First Book Prize 2013 shortlist:

The Murder Wall by Mari Hannah (Pan Macmillan)

Tony Hogan Bought Me An Icecream Float Before He Stole My Ma by Kerry Hudson (Chatto & Windus)

The Sitar by Rebecca Idris (self-published ebook)

Catching Bullets – Memoirs of a Bond Fan by Mark O’Connell (Splendid Books)

The Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones by Jack Wolf (Chatto & Windus)

 

For more on Polari and why you should get along, click here.

 

 

CATCHING BULLETS is shortlisted for the POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE 2013!

September 20, 2013 / / 0 Comments

QUAD SHEET - POLARI SHORTLISTING (1)Splendid Books and I are more than proud to announce that CATCHING BULLETS – MEMOIRS OF A BOND FAN has been shortlisted for the POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE 2013.

Polari is a monthly literary salon held (more often than not) at London’s Southbank Centre. Masterminded by author/writer Paul Burston, it is a queer / LGBT showcase of a brilliant rainbow-hued spectrum of writing, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, performance, works-in-progress, theatre and song.

Previous readers have included Jonathan Harvey, Celia Imrie, Damian Barr, Jake Arnott, Neil Bartlett, Rikki Beadle-Blair, Andy Bell, Sophia Blackwell, DJ Connell, Maureen Duffy, Stella Duffy, Fenella Fielding, Christopher Fowler, Patrick Gale, David Hoyle, VG Lee, David McAlmont, John McCullough, Will Self and many more. Oh, and of course yours truly (January 2013).

The POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE is an annual award to honour the best in LGBT writing. CATCHING BULLETS and myself never once imagined we would be rubbing shoulders with a range of very skilled books so are doubly chuffed to find ourselves on the final shortlist. The winner is announced on November 13th 2013 at the Purcell Room, Southbank Centre.

POLARI First Book Prize

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of “the World’s Best Gay & Lesbian Hotspots” for 2013! – ArtInfo.

“Lively, funny and inspiring – a gay-themed salon of interest to anyone remotely interested in literature, whatever their sexual bent. Paul Burston’s achievement in consistently bringing together writers and performers who will stimulate and inspire is remarkable” – Patrick Gale

“Always fun, always thought-provoking – a guaranteed good night out” – Sarah Waters, Tipping The Velvet.

“London’s most theatrical salon” – The New York Times

“London’s peerless gay literary salon” – The Independent on Sunday

 

For more details about past, present and future Polari nights then head over to the website. The evenings are a great and relaxed showcase of good writing, creativity, thought and ideas. A bar and book store is always at hand as are great views of London at night, whatever time of year. Though be warned – Polari often sells out quick so get in early.

 

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