On Paul O’Grady and fighting back with funny
A letter from the editor
With Paul O'Grady’s death on Tuesday evening, queer and trans communities in the UK have reflected on how his ubiquitous 90s television presence as Lily Savage would be unthinkable in the current anti-trans, anti-drag climate.
Without erasing the very real presence of anti-LGBT sentiment during the golden years of O’Grady’s television career – such as the section 28 legislation that prevented 90s kids learning about homosexuality in school, even as the “blonde bombsite” drag queen regularly graced our pre-watershed TV sets – I wonder if one of the ways O'Grady won the hearts of the British people as an openly queer entertainer was with his acerbic wit. And if so, what might we learn and apply from his politicised comedy to the queer and trans struggle today?
As news of the beloved entertainer’s sudden death spread on social media, so too did anecdotes of his (frankly) iconic behaviour. One of the most popular being his incisively funny intervention during a 1987 police raid on the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. As 35 rubber-gloved cops descended on the queer venue, Lily Savage quipped “Well, well, looks like we have help with the washing up.”
It’s a moment emblematic of O’Grady’s ability to speak truth to power with a perfectly-executed punchline.
Seeing his riotously funny ripostes play on repeat across my social media feed has gotten me thinking – we could really do with a little Paul O’Grady punching up power now. As the “gender debate” continues full steam ahead, culminating in anti-trans bills, trans athlete bans, anti-drag protests and increased neo-nazi activity, there’s the sense that things might get worse before they get better. It’s a tough time to be trans. And it’s not as if being trans would be easy without this uptick in moral panic – even if every gender critical pundit and politician were to recant their thinkpieces and repeal their anti-trans laws tomorrow, as a community we’d still face all the healthcare, housing, employment and socio-economic barriers yet to be overcome.
Considering all that doom and gloom, a little comic relief wouldn’t go amiss. Without being flippant about the dangers we face, could we benefit from channelling the spirit of Paul O’Grady and using comedy as a tool of resistance?
Today isn’t the first time this thought has crossed my mind. Being both Black and trans, I straddle online communities and am often struck by the humour-gap that exists between Black twitter, and a largely white trans twitter. Black communities have much to grieve and process when it comes to structural oppression, and we do. But I’ve consistently found Black twitter to have a greater propensity for side-splitting tweets than trans twitter when similarly faced with cruelty and opposition. I don’t say this as a criticism – and I’m not telling people they must laugh at injustice, but perhaps something is lost when we underuse this small yet mighty weapon.
George Orwell once wrote that “every joke is a tiny revolution”. And while I take the point that a funny tweet about the Gender Identity Clinic may not get you materially closer to a hormone prescription, I think there’s truth to the sentiment that there’s political potential in comedy.
One of the gifts of comedy is its ability to flip power paradigms and send up unjust, hypocritical ideas parading as serious thought. Sociologist Majken Jul Sorensen has written about humour as a strategy of resistance to oppression and dictatorship, citing the success of the Serbian Otpor movement in using “humorous actions as a part of its strategy to bring down Slobodan Milošević from power”. In Folklore Fights the Nazis, Kathleen Stokker has documented how Norwegian resistance to Nazis was bolstered by jokes, puns and cartoons lampooning the occupying forces – even as a 1942 ordinance mandated death for the ridicule of Nazi soldiers. And to return to my earlier point about Black twitter, a recent academic paper titled Laughing While Black argues that Black communities use humour to resist inequalities while “cultivating individual and collective identity in/through leisure”.
On a biological level we also know that laughter decreases stress hormones and increases happy hormones – a pretty useful biochemical boost when you’re exhausted and overwhelmed by oppression. Something to keep you going against all odds. I can’t count the number of times a screamingly funny tweet has given me the strength to endure another day as a queer Black trans man and citizen of ‘terf island’. According to director and writer Neil Bartlett, in the 80s, watching Lily Savage perform at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern as a harassed and beleaguered queer man had a similarly mood-boosting effect: “It was meat and drink. It was lifeblood… To turn all that misery and hardship around with that much panache and sheer bloody nerve!”.
From the caustic one-liners of Lily Savage, to the elegant reads of NYC ballroom queens, queers have drawn strength from and created community through humour.
While Lily Savage’s drag performances were energising brutalised gay men living through the 80s AIDS crisis in the UK, across the atlantic ocean, another form of queer flamboyance flourished in the face of structural violence. Enter Dorian Corey, the ballroom Mother immortalised in Paris is Burning (1990) with her oft-quoted definition of reading and shade:
“Shade comes from reading. Reading came first. Reading is the real artform of insults… You get in a smart crack, everyone laughs and kikis because you found a flaw and exaggerated it. Then you’ve got a good read going.”
From the caustic one-liners of Lily Savage, to the elegant reads of NYC ballroom queens, queers have drawn strength from and created community through humour. To me, it’s one of our most sacred traditions.
Ultimately the homophobic police raid on the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in 1987 led to significant community backlash involving political engagement, satirical cartoons (pictured) and eventually parliamentary scrutiny. It has even been suggested that the resulting fallout contributed to turning the tide for gay liberation at the time.
Jokes of resistance came from the stage that fateful January night, but they were followed by organised community opposition. Which is to say that humour alone doesn’t get the goods – it’s most effective when paired with practical and material interventions. This is a sentiment that Paul O'Grady seems to have lived by. Alongside clips of his acerbic quips, social media has also flooded with stories of his solidarity. From raising money for AIDS patients in the 80s through drag performances, to insisting that vacancies on The Paul O’Grady Show were advertised in the local Jobcentre to give working class people a shot, he has demonstrated there’s a way to fight back with both wit and pragmatism.
Thank you for this wonderful article. I left the UK years ago and this is the first I’m hearing of Paul O’Grady’s death. I have such fond memories of watching him on TV and giving me language to some of my trans desires. This is a great substack and you’re writing is fab!