16 November, 2005

Misspent Youth


RuPaul’s “Back to My Roots”** came on my Ipod this morning and reminded me of where I grew up. Perth is a medium sized city, with a population of about 1.5 million in the ‘metropolitan’ area. It is also often said to be the most remote major city on Earth.

I really felt this sense of isolation when I was growing up. I used to trawl through the UK based music and fashion magazines like ‘NME’ or ‘The Face’ and wonder at these stories about London and the people who inhabited these places that seemed to be in the very middle of the world, whilst I was sitting out on the edges. I longed to leave.

This sense of isolation, however, brings with it some weird and wonderful personalities. I was introduced to club culture at about 16, and soon was going to the ONLY gay club in Perth practically every night of the week.

Because Connections was the only gay club in the city, there was a huge variety of people who went there. The gays, the lezzas, the trannies (most of them tragic, as all the best are), old, young, leather queens, fetishists – they all turned up at the club on any given night. And all seemed to co-exist quite nicely.

My friends and I went, as I said before, practically every single night to Connections; mostly for fear of missing out on something.

None of us would leave before the club closed on any given night, for the same reason (i.e. Mindy the obese drag queen being so drunk she fell off the podium half way through Whitney Houston’s “Every Woman” or the aboriginal cross dresser tripping out so much that she pretended to push an imaginary shopping trolley across the dance floor).

At times, I miss the quirkiness of Perth. In London, you get all types of people and everything seems ‘normal’ to a degree, simply because of the amount of diversity.

In Perth, outsiders revel in their differences, and celebrate them together; albeit in isolation.

** RuPaul was a firm favourite amongst the Perth drag queens in the early nineties

11 comments:

Anonymous said...
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JM said...

I think no matter how small a town, there is diversity. I come from West Virginia, one of the smaller states. They actually make fun it all the time.
However, I've found that there is some diversity in Charleston, although subtle.

Walter said...

Didn't Rupaul have a chatshow?

Or did I dream that?
Hey ho...

Nunzia said...

umm... I don't think so... lol.. but my knowledge of drag queen trivia is very limited ;)

ziggystardust73 said...

oh yes, she did indeed. It was a rather short lived chat show on VH1 called 'The RuPaul Show', which begain in 1996...

DanProject76 said...

My first gay friend from school had Ru Paul's album. These days most of our British celebrities seem inspired by Ru's style. But they are genetically real women which makes me shudder.

ziggystardust73 said...

Dan, RuPaul maybe has a lot to answer for?! i.e. Jordan!? ha ha

Pushka, good times, good times.

Anhoni Patel said...

Perth sounds like a damn cool place. Ziggy - which kind of fetishist were you? Maybe I;m not getting around that much but London doesn't seem nearly as creative and crazy as it likes to think it is.

As for that tripping aborigine tranny, maybe she was doing the "shopping at the supermarket" dance move?

c nadeau & t johnson said...

ziggy,

have you read clive barker's "Sacrament?"

Nick Stephenson said...

You look great in turquoise, Ziggy, but lose the blonde perm. Just some friendly advice.

ziggystardust73 said...

Anhoni, I could never give away my fetish secrets at this early stage... ;-)

Scribe, no I haven't read that... should I?

Nick... you flatter me so....