As I recounted in my post back in 2013:
On 9th September 1971 Mary Whitehouse, Malcolm Muggeridge, Lord Longford, Cliff-fucking-Richard and various assorted clergy, god-botherers and other nutters convened a mass meeting of their Festival of Light, a movement dedicated to opposing "the permissive society" in all its forms, at Methodist Central Hall opposite the Palace of Westminster.
Unbeknownst to the assembled worthies, Bette Bourne, Lavinia Co-op, Michael James, Gretal Feather, Martin Corbett, Peter Tatchell and many other founding members of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) had infiltrated the prayers. Many of Bette's coterie were disguised as nuns, and as the speakers tried to address the crowd they began slinging porn from the balcony. Others shouted, clapped and screamed at inappropriate moments. Mr Corbett, who had calmly pretended to be a Hall official and ordered technical staff out of the basement, brought the lights down.
As Peter Tatchell recalls: "On the night, mayhem erupted. When Malcolm Muggeridge, speaking out about homosexuals, declared, 'I don't like them.' The feeling was mutual. Mice were released into the audience; lesbian couples stood up and passionately embraced. A dozen GLF nuns in immaculate blue and white habits charged the platform shouting gay liberation slogans, and a GLF bishop began preaching an impromptu sermon which urged people to 'keep on sinning.'"
It all apparently ended, before the police and security were able to forcibly remove them, with the drag nuns doing the can-can on the stage in front of the astounded speakers!
The last word, of course, went to Bette, who, at her subsequent trial for her part in the protest, was asked by the judge to remove her hat, and said "No! It goes with the shoes."
The great avant-garde drag entertainer, actor, wit, creative genius and, above all, champion of the battle for gay rights in the UK, Ms Bette Bourne has departed for the highest echelons of Fabulon, where she will no doubt preside, bestowing her pithy quips on all who surround her.
We adored Bette Bourne. It was sixteen years ago that our gang first encountered him/her in person - at the Oval Theatre, portraying the lascivious Hollywood talent manager Henry Willson who made Rock Hudson a star, and afterwards being inducted into the "Homosexual Hall of Fame" - and fell under his spell. Two years later, we were overjoyed to be at Soho Theatre for the first run of his and Mark Ravenhill's partly dramatised A Life in Three Acts.
Then in 2013, a double-bill - not just a showing at the V&A of the film about Bette Bourne It Goes With the Shoes [see the link in the intro above for more on that], but he and his longtime partner and fellow Bloolips veteran Paul Shaw [who survives him] made a special in-person appearance at the venerable Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology to perform an extract of the troupe's classic interpretion of the lives of Roman Emperor Hadrian and his lover Antinous, Get Hur!...
He/she could turn her hand to anything - from Blanche DuBois to Lady Bracknell, Quentin Crisp to Queen Victoria, in drag or out of it. A remarkable individual.
We'll miss Bette!
A lot.
RIP, Bette Bourne (born Peter Bourne, 22nd September 1939 – 23rd August 2024)
