Can a show put on by two gay men really reflect what it’s like to be a woman? Maddy Costa finds out

By his own admission, theatre producer and nightclub promoter Simon Casson is not the kind of person one would expect to be involved in a cabaret extravaganza glorifying femininity. “The idea of femininity is quite scary to me,” he says. “In that way, I’m not unlike a lot of gay men, or men in general. I don’t want to get in touch with my feminine side.” Yet here he is, producing Gay Shame Goes Girly, at the Brixton Academy in London from tomorrow.

Satire is at the heart of Gay Shame, an annual event that Casson started in the mid-90s as a counterpoint to the increasingly commercialised Gay Pride. It was certainly the driving force last year when Gay Shame went “macho”, exploring masculinity and its mostly negative connotations. “It was all fighting, farting and football,” says Casson cheerfully. Robin Whitmore, the director and designer of Gay Shame, describes that night as: “A response to the very macho culture that the gay world has become, with the emphasis on body building, rough and unprotected sex, drugs and alcohol. We wanted to show it as brutal and aggressive – to exaggerate masculinity the way that a cartoonist might do.”

Gay Shame Goes Girly, by contrast, aims to be less belligerent, with a more complex mood. The 30-odd performance artists and theatre groups involved contemplate what it is to give birth or nurture someone, and invite audience members to participate in gentle pursuits, such as watercolour painting (of vaginas), cake-decorating and crochet. But there will be raucous, even violent elements, too: a chance to undergo an ersatz breast augmentation, attend a hen party or submit to a controlling, cane-wielding mother figure. But Whitmore’s overall aesthetic, inspired by Dior’s postwar New Look fashions and the photographs of Cecil Beaton, is “quite high glamour, beautiful actually”.

Whitmore accepts that the event is trading in a number of biological, domestic and even pre-feminist stereotypes. “But it’s not about male-female,” he argues, “it’s about what society does to that. ‘Femininity’ means something different for straight women, for gay women, for straight men and for gay men, and for people of different ages.” Casson thinks the audience will appreciate the chance to “play with all that archetypal feminine stuff. It’s great when those things become fodder for a nightclub to use as props, instead of trapping us and defining our existence.”

More than that, says Whitmore, many people “want to celebrate something that maybe has been stifled in their life”. A gay man born in the 50s, he long struggled with the received notion that boys should not be feminine. He recollects his childhood “sense of guilt about the fact that I had pink lacy curtains in my bedroom, and that I loved playing with dolls.

I would throw the doll across the room when my mum walked in, and pick up a car – even though she said: ‘You don’t have to do that.’”

Even now, says Casson, gay men who “show some feminine attributes get abused and objectified”. In an overwhelmingly macho culture, there is no longer a place for figures like the bouffant-and-cravat-sporting Quentin Crisp. “Gay men rejecting their nellie side, is that progress?” asks Casson. “I don’t think so.”

This interrogation of the relationship between femininity and homosexuality is
fascinating. Yet isn’t there something slightly odd about two gay men superintending an event dedicated to femininity? Amy Lamé thinks so. She is the compere for Gay Shame, but this year has demanded a more integral role. “I know gay men might like to think that they know what it’s like to be a woman, but they don’t,” she says.

Appointing herself Casson and Whitmore’s “femininity adviser”, she will ensure “an authentic feminine, lesbian voice” is prominent on the night. Lamé feels that femininity is misunderstood. “It isn’t about weakness. I think of femininity as a quiet strength that has been much under-appreciated. I see it as giving birth, as running small independent businesses, ie households.” That still ties feminine experience to biology and domesticity – but Lame is also suspicious of what she describes as “the nostalgification of femininity that has been happening in the past few years. It’s developed into this bizarre cult of cupcakes and crafts. I can’t say I don’t enjoy that, but I’m interested in feminist cupcakes, in radical knitting.” That’s why she is keen to expose the “gory side of an excessive idea of femininity, the primping and poking and physical monstrosities that women put themselves through”.

The element of the show Lame is most keenly anticipating is being put together by a (male) performance artist called Scottee, and is titled Abortive Tapestry. In one room, audience members will contribute stitches to a huge crocheted image – while in an adjacent room, backstreet abortions are enacted with knitting needles, as they were in the mid-20th century. “That’s the kind of rubbing up against ideas that I’m interested in,” says Lame. Yet this is the piece that Whitmore confesses makes him feel most nervous.

Lame also points out that, while effeminacy is outdated among gay men, overt femininity – the wearing of dresses and lipstick – is frequently rejected outright by gay women. She remembers how, on arriving in London from the US 15 years ago, she was turned away from lesbian clubs because: “I was wearing a skirt. I felt a real sense of rejection.”

Another Gay Shame performer, Karen Tom McLeod, similarly spent the 90s feeling as though “if you were a feminine-looking lesbian, you were second-rate. It was such a bizarre thing – it was almost misogynist.” It was so important to Lame and McLeod that Gay Shame address this “femme-phobia”, they arranged a private salon for Casson, Whitmore and a group of women to discuss femininity within the lesbian community. It proved so fruitful that Lame has set up two public debates on femininity (one each for men and women), to take place this month.

Working on the show has “really fired me up politically, and reignited my feminist spirit,” Lame says. “One of the hardest things about this project for me has been having two men in charge.” She has been rereading her feminist library and says: “Things haven’t come as far as we think.”

Whitmore is keen to incorporate a feminist agenda into Gay Shame: alongside Beaton, his other key reference point is the American feminist art group Guerrilla Girls. Yet, how different might Gay Shame Goes Girly look if women were in charge? “Cecil Beaton images are not my idea of femininity at all,” says McLeod. “The women look great but they’re in corsetry. It’s a male view of femininity.”

For all that she thinks of femininity as an inner quality, Lame knows that it is most often defined by a woman’s appearance. As such, she’s thinking carefully about what she is going to wear for Gay Shame. “It would be easy to wear a polka-dotted apron and be that cupcake-perfect image of a woman,” she says. “It’s more difficult to be confrontational, to show feminine strength.”

As for Casson, he is going to keep on suppressing his feminine side. “I will be wearing a skirt – but it’s very much a man’s skirt: discreet, black. Then again,” he ponders, “maybe it’s more feminine to be discreet”.

Gay Shame Goes Girly starts tomorrow. Box office: 0844 477 2000. For more information, visit duckie.co.uk.