Well, Don’t Buy Them Then!

It's a Christmas miracle, the 'Guardian' finding a drag artist to whinge about something other than how people are so mean to men in womanface:

It’s lovely going out for dinner in London. It’s a gastro capital with cuisines from all around the world. One night, Indian, French the next, Peruvian, Ethiopian. You can travel the globe without leaving Hackney.

And since we now have the recipes, do we really need the people as well? 

But one pernicious dining trend that refuses to go away and which I detest is “small plates”. My heart sinks and I become inwardly furious when I sit down and the waiter asks: “Have you been here before?” “No, it’s our first time.” “Well, we do ‘small plates’ and we suggest you order between three and 20 per person.”

A suggestion. Simply that. You're free to ignore it.  

People think I’m a hipster, being an east London drag queen, but I’ve got nothing on the purveyors of “caulifower bites”. Suddenly you’re handing out a tenner here, a tenner there, for tiny saucers of pomegranate seeds, things sprinkled in petals and a random blow-torched lettuce leaf. Just give me a bloody dinner!

Just bloody order one - or go to a restaurant that doesn't do the small plate thing. There's plenty, even in Hackney.

I’m 53. I grew up in Kent in the 1970s in a perfectly normal working-class, borderline lower-middle-class household, the kind so wonderfully explored in Mike Leigh movies. It was the kind of home where the food was dished from the pan on to the plate. And then the whole plate was plopped in front of you and you were told to eat it all up – or you couldn’t go and watch Grange Hill.

And look how you turned out, despite that upbringing... 

In small-plates hell, you end up trying to reconstruct a normal meal and paying twice the price for it. Death to small plates – that’s the hill I will die on. Unless you’re in Spain, of course; I love a spot of tapas, but that’s different.

Really? I fail to see how, unless you simply revere anything foreign over your heritage.  

Should Have Stayed In The Working Men’s Clubs Then

Drag artists are under unprecedented pressure as they are “more visible, but also more debated” than ever before, performers have said, as they paid tribute to The Vivienne. The international drag community came together in London for RuPaul’s DragCon UK over the weekend, its first large gathering since the Welsh performer’s death.

Danny Beard, a fellow winner of Drag Race UK who hails from Merseyside, believes a growing tide of bigotry towards the community is fuelled by transphobia. Drag artists are “more visible but also more debated than ever”, they said, and certain corners of the society have become more comfortable not viewing them as people.

Or more accurately, not viewing them as people who should be given access to read to children at the library.  

“There’s this real rightwing vile propaganda at the moment, and I feel that drag queens get the thin edge of the wedge when it comes to transphobia - I get to put this on and take it off, but our trans brothers and sisters can’t,” Beard added.

Juno Birch, an independent drag artist who identifies as a transgender woman outside of drag, said LGBTQ+ people, especially trans people, were under more public scrutiny than ever before.

It might help if they didn't put themselves in danger by pretending to be something they are not - not every community reacts passively when they find out they were deceived.  

Ginger Johnson, the winner of series five of Drag Race UK, said the situation was “as dire as ever” as drag artists had to live with constant abuse and personal attacks online from people who wanted to insult their “lives, passions and families”.

No, they are welcome to all that, just stay in their lanes and they'll be fine. We'll tolerate womanface even though we've been told blackface is a big no-no, for some reason... 

“It’s just identity politics really, and it’s anger over nothing. They speak about drag but don’t know anything about it. They don’t know the transformative power of it. They don’t know how it changes peoples lives, and they don’t know how it saves peoples lives.”

Ah, yes, we all remember that classic pop song, don't we? 'Last Night A Man In A Frock Saved My Life'.