Goodbye to the great Lily Savage ... and hello to the world of RuPaul

As I wrote at the time, the backstage O’Grady was “a long, lean, nicely blonding professor-type in v-neck and jeans”. He told me his drag persona Lily was modelled on the clients – and particularly the prostitutes – he dealt with when employed as a statutory social worker, adding: “I never met a brass, or a stripper I didn’t like. Never … Lily is quite proud of being a whore. Also, it’s the power over men. I take the sting out of it by making it a laugh. But it is about someone saying: ‘I’ve taken money for this and I’m unembarrassed and I’m not ashamed’.”

I saw a recent interview clip with Jonathan Ross on social media, where O’Grady was curtly adamant – while looking like a well-groomed patriarch – that he’d never go back to Lily. In 1999, Paul asserted he’d never be able to tell jokes without her slap and glitter.

“How am I gonna have a sister called Vera, and a whippet called Queenie, and that kinda mental humour if I do that? It would just be my opinion, you see.”

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O’Grady/Lily’s sad demise came on an auspicious night for me. Cutting across generations and predilections, my London family have agreed for some years about the TV show to watch during evening meals. So it was that the last episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race we could find in the streaming archives ended on Tuesday.

RuPaul’s show has been ... an experience. But amid all of its shrieking excess (anyone who’s watched it will know what I mean), I actually find it a familiar pleasure. My daughters, always keen to render their father as a grizzled reactionary, are inevitably thrilled to know that I’m “vogueing off to RuPaul and the girls”.

But drag has been in my life for as long as a TV screen has beamed into my wee eyeballs. Certainly through humour and cross-dressing comedians, like Danny La Rue and Dick Emery.

It was the done thing in our Coatbridge upper-working-class house to ooh and aah at Scottish comedy genius Stanley Baxter. Whenever he did his TV specials dressed up as female Hollywood icons and dancers, my parents would chorus: “Have you ever seen anyone with better legs than Stanley?”

Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot was always a domestic event whenever it appeared on the telly schedules. I learned to giggle at the sight of the generally unlovely Jack Lemmon, tricking himself out as a 20s flapper (and to be honest, always wondered how Tony Curtis could end up looking so convincing…).

So RuPaul’s “ladies” are actually just an extreme point on a familiar continuum for me. And that continuum was part of a norm that was deeply happy with difference, contrary to much current characterisation of the “mainstream”. I like RuPaul’s own justification for drag: “It’s very, very political, [it] challenges the status quo ... Drag says: ‘I’m a shapeshifter, I do whatever the hell I want at any given time’.”

That’s true. But what’s always struck me about Drag Race is some of its deeply traditionalist urges. There’s much reference to the “houses” that particular queens belong to. These are extended family-like structures, often to be fond in big cities, where gay men have found support in the practice of drag, despite often being estranged from their own families. (RuPaul is regularly referred to as “Mama Ru” by contestants).

It’s complex, though. The goriest fascination of the show is its constant bitchy competitiveness.

Lawrence Chaney, Scottish winner of Drag Race UK series 2 (Image: VOSS EVENTS)

The All-Stars series we’ve just finished took this to an extreme – the queens voting against each other in the later stages, while also having to convince the winner of the episode (with a deciding vote) how deserving they are.

It’s sometimes tempting just to reject this as rampant US individualism in another form.

Isn’t this continuous with deep American notions of constructing a persona for success, of “positive thinking” and “self-help”?

But Drag Race’s interpersonal savagery – which often breaks down into tenderness – is something I recognise from my years with jazz musicians. They can also be brutal with each other, but that’s only because they share a common predicament – that of being unregarded, poorly paid virtuosos, flaming extemporisers in cheap suits.

That’s not so different from some of the Drag Race flamboyants, transforming themselves from street scrappers to glittering sex bombs, their grace and achievement under pressure (and disdain) all too evident. (The Puerto-Rican “Vanessa Vanjie Mateo” was a notable example).

The most extraordinary drag artist I’ve ever met was while I was curating FutureFest for the innovation foundation Nesta. On to our panel about creativity tottered Glamrou (otherwise known as Amrou Al-Kadhi, a British-Iraqi-Muslim writer and performer), her glamour slightly wild and uncoiffed.

READ MORE: TV star and comedian Paul O’Grady dies at the age of 67

GLAMROU then proceeded to tell us about how quantum physics had really helped her understand her queer identity. This BBC interview gets the gist of it: “Classical Newtonian physics is obsessed with the universal formula that govern our reality, it’s so fixed on resolute answers.

“Quantum physics reveals that there is no fixed reality and it’s full of beautiful contradictions…

“I am very comforted by this as a queer person with no real fixed identity. It gives me immense hope that there’s this model of the world. This real, physical, philosophical knowledge, showing us that reality is just a set of contradictions with no real fixed foundation.

“It is in this model of space-time as a series of entanglements that I’m able to piece together all of the fragmented sects of my identity. Being able to identify as British and Iraqi, as queer and Muslim, as someone of many genders and potentially no genders at all.”

As Mama Ru might say: Can I get an Amen? Those of us who revel in the rich creativity of all this – maybe because creativity is our basic game – are often aghast at the phobia against gender play, apparently on the rise again.

The “trans” element of everyday social reality – about as shocking as a trip to a Glasgow or Edinburgh Christmas pantomime – is right under our noses.

What’s more androgynous-looking than a Jesus pic? Why can’t “family” be an active, inventive verb, as much as a noun attached to heteronormative assumptions? Is it possible, instead of freaking out about lovable drag queens reading to agog wee kids, to just relax, live and let live?

One of the earliest mentions of drag comes from the Roman playwright Plautus, where his lead character Menaechmus wears women’s clothing. He asks: “Look at me. Do I look the part?… Tell me I am gorgeous [Dic hominem lepidissimum esse me].”

In the wake of Lily Savage, Paul O’Grady and their spangly lineage, I salute drag’s lepidissimum. “Lippy wha?”

Thank you, Lily. Rest In Toupees.