‘People are still doing it, but nobody talks about it': queer collective Duckie break the chemsex taboo
'It's sort of a daytime TV chatshow, mixed with an avant garde variety show,' explains Simon Casson, co-founder and producer of the legendary queer nightlife collective Duckie. Casson is explaining the colourful concept of Rat Park, the group's latest project. 'There's going to be a big bonfire in the garden and candles outdoors in jam jars, it's all very beautiful,' he says. 'Inside, there will be discussions and performance pieces, then interviews, then another performance and more conversations – all about the terribly embarrassing subject of queer people and our sex lives.'
Rat Park will run every Saturday afternoon in February, which is LGBTQ+ history month in the UK. The collaborative events, which will be held at a 'secret location', bring together community names such as artist and archivist Ajamu X, HIV activist Marc Thompson and author Matthew Todd, alongside a selection of performers including cabaret act Rhys' Pieces and artist Zack Mennell. Each week is themed on a different body fluid. 'Blood' points the way to discussions of HIV and family, whereas 'tears' might prompt conversations about grief, rejection and masculinity. (Use your imagination for the other two weeks: piss and spunk.)
Sex and intimacy are the threads that bind Rat Park together. And although everyone is welcome, there is a particular focus on queer men over 40. This is because the event isn't just anchored around sex, but particularly chemsex – sex parties including the use of drugs such as methamphetamine (known as crystal meth or 'tina') and GHB.
Casson tells me that the event is purposely positioned in the so-called 'Tina Triangle' – the area between Oval, Vauxhall and Stockwell, where there is a high concentration of gay residents and chemsex parties. 'I'm 58, so obviously my generation grew up among a lot of homophobia. It's hard to get rid of that and sometimes it comes out in funny ways as we get older,' he says. 'And when you then introduce something like chemsex, with the power of a drug like crystal meth, it can become quite irresistible for a lot of us.'
In the 2010s, chemsex inspired a flurry of mainstream media coverage. More support services soon became available. But it feels as if the 'story' has now moved on, even though there are still three suspected chemsex-related deaths every month in London alone. 'A lot of people are still doing it, but it's a secret,' Casson says. 'It's underground. It's taboo. Nobody talks about it.' He sees Rat Park as a chance to restart the conversation.
As a sober event held in the afternoon, Rat Park has a different vibe to Duckie's usual offering, which culminates in 'dancing, drinking and disco'. The collective was founded in 1995 in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern – a London pub that has been at the centre of LGBTQ+ nightlife and activism for decades.
Like the RVT itself, Duckie's output is vibrant and varied. 'It was and is a bunch of queer misfits who were disfranchised by shit gay clubbing, who brought together artists, performers and drag queens from the club world and beyond,' says performer and writer Scottee, who started his career there. 'It's an alchemy of outsiders who make work that is motivated by the issues facing the community.'
The collective's 2002 Christmas show, C'est Vauxhall, seated guests at tables and offered them the chance to order short acts using 'Duckie dollars' from a menu. The following year, this was recreated at the Barbican, which won an Olivier award for best entertainment show – a watershed moment that brought them to venues including the Sydney Opera House. In 2022, Duckie announced the end of its weekly residence at the RVT, saying it would continue to put on events such as Rat Park on an ad-hoc basis.
'Duckie is a family,' says Neil Bartlett, whose award-winning career as a theatre director, performer and writer spans five decades. Bartlett used to test out his short performance pieces on Duckie nights and continues to collaborate with them because of the 'unrivalled' connection with the audience. 'I'm probably the only person whose CV includes opening a new piece at the National Theatre and at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in the same week,' he says. 'Some people might say: 'The last thing that he did was working with Emma Corrin in the West End. Why is he going back to Vauxhall?' Well, I never left Vauxhall.'
Rat Park is a natural fit for Bartlett, because sexual politics is a thread that runs through his work. 'The intention here is to create a warm and caring space, where we can get together as a community,' he says. 'There is a concentration of addiction issues, mental health issues and loneliness, but I think we also need to talk about how we're having a fabulous time, too. We're finding new ways to love each other, new ways to have sex with each other.' And these conversations don't have to be geared around younger people. 'Each week at Rat Park I'm going to be performing a new set of five-minute monologues,' Bartlett says. 'I'll be speaking as a proud gay pensioner.'
Scottee will be taking on the role of moderator and interviewer. He hopes to facilitate face-to-face conversations that, as the LGBTQ+ community has moved online, feel more rare. To some people, meeting in a physical space might even seem like a 'radical, old-fashioned' idea. 'The art of conversation in queer culture now often boils down to, 'Hey mate, what are you into?'' he explains. 'But this is going to go beyond that. I love a bit of chat, because I think most queens and queers are very profound. We've observed and watched the world for a long time.'
Reading the event description, it's impossible to miss a sense of warmth and sheer randomness that feels representative of the LGBTQ+ nightlife spaces Duckie descends from. Promised attractions include 'shaved arses' and performances by Shirley Bassey (a drag act, not the real one). Attenders will even be served jacket potatoes and cake. 'At the heart Duckie is working-class hospitality culture, so this is what happens when that meets radical queer culture,' Scottee says. 'When money is tight, giving people a meal is a gesture. That used to happen so much more in queer community spaces, so here you're going to get shaved arses and jacket potatoes.'
In conversation with Bartlett, I tried to define that specific irreverence – a campiness that feels homely, familiar and very queer. 'High-quality chaos' was the wording I eventually landed on. 'Ooh, I'm going to steal that one,' he says. 'A loving afternoon of high-quality chaos. Who wouldn't want to come?'
Rat Park takes place on 1, 8, 15 and 22 February in London
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He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet and books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates. He was an encyclopaedic reader who absorbed literature worldwide while returning yearly to such favourites as Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Henry Green's Nothing. 'Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,' cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in The New York Times in 1995. 'A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.' In early 1982, just as the public was learning about Aids, White was among the founders of Gay Men's Health Crisis, which advocated Aids prevention and education. 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He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet and books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates. He was an encyclopaedic reader who absorbed literature worldwide while returning yearly to such favourites as Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Henry Green's Nothing. 'Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,' cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in The New York Times in 1995. 'A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.' In early 1982, just as the public was learning about Aids, White was among the founders of Gay Men's Health Crisis, which advocated Aids prevention and education. The author himself would learn that he was HIV-positive in 1985, and would remember friends afraid to be kissed by him, even on the cheek, and parents who did not want him to touch their babies. White survived, but watched countless peers and loved ones die. Out of the seven gay men, including White, who formed the influential writing group the Violet Quill, four died of complications from Aids. As White wrote in his elegiac novel The Farewell Symphony, the story followed a shocking arc: 'Oppressed in the fifties, freed in the sixties, exalted in the seventies and wiped out in the eighties.' But in the 1990s he lived to see gay people granted the right to marry and serve in the military, to see gay-themed books taught in schools and to see gay writers so widely published that they no longer needed to write about gay lives. 'We're in this post-gay period where you can announce to everybody that you yourself are gay, and you can write books in which there are gay characters, but you don't need to write exclusively about that,' he said in a Salon interview in 2009. 'Your characters don't need to inhabit a ghetto any more than you do. A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.' In 2019, White received a National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, an honour previously given to Morrison and Philip Roth among others. 'To go from the most maligned to a highly lauded writer in a half-century is astonishing,' White said during his acceptance speech. White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but age at seven moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer, his mother a psychologist 'given to rages or fits of weeping'. Trapped in 'the closed, snivelling, resentful world of childhood,' at times suicidal, White was at the same time a 'fierce little autodidact' who sought escape through the stories of others, whether Thomas Mann's Death In Venice or a biography of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. 'As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,' he wrote in the essay Out Of The Closet, On To The Bookshelf, published in 1991. Even as he secretly wrote a 'coming out' novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. Edmund White was one of the leading gay American authors (Mary Altaffer/AP) After graduating from the University of Michigan, where he majored in Chinese, he moved to New York in the early 1960s and worked for years as a writer for Time-Life Books and an editor for The Saturday Review. He would interview Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote among others, and, for some assignments, was joined by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Socially, he met William S Burroughs, Jasper Johns, Christopher Isherwood and John Ashbery. He remembered drinking espresso with an ambitious singer named Naomi Cohen, whom the world would soon know as 'Mama Cass' of the Mamas and Papas. He feuded with Kramer, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag, an early supporter who withdrew a blurb for 'A Boy's Own Story' after he caricatured her in the novel Caracole. 'In all my years of therapy I never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery, especially toward people who'd helped me and befriended me,' he later wrote. Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would 'dress as a hippie, and head out for the bars'. A favourite stop was the Stonewall and he was in the neighbourhood on the night of June 28 1969, when police raided the Stonewall and 'all hell broke loose.' 'Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term,' wrote White, who soon joined the protests. 'Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.' His works included Skinned Alive: Stories and the novel A Previous Life, in which he turns himself into a fictional character and imagines himself long forgotten after his death. In 2009, he published City Boy, a memoir of New York in the 1960s and 1970s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels. 'From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling,' he told The Guardian. 'It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature – the holy book. 'There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious and it should be totally transparent.'
