Anything Is Possible: Priscilla, Prostitutes, And VIPs In London’s Gay Theater District

“You could never get this sort of experience in New York,” he said, and he’s right. For as long as I can remember New York has tried to scrub away the porn shops and prostitutes in the Times Square Theater District. Meanwhile, Britain’s theater history has long dripped with queer sexuality: Just think of the boys playing women’s roles in Shakespeare, the women playing men’s roles in British Christmas pantomimes; Lord Cromwell outlawing the “immoral” and “degenerative” influence of theater in 1642, and Britain outlawing “buggery” and “unnatural sex acts” for the same reason; the Lord Chancellor demanding that any play staged in London first meet his approval and Oscar Wilde encoding all the gay sex in The Importance of Being Earnest just to pass the censors. Theater has always been a realm of desire, subversion and fantasy — for everyone and their queer desires.

After dinner and dessert and Mr. Pacheco arranged to have our group dance on stage during Priscilla’s ho-down musical number, another one of his VIP theater experiences and probably the only time I’ll ever perform on a West End stage. Just so you know, the musical captured the film’s best lines and iconic scenes in show-stopping pop-numbers with insanely over-the-top drag (dancing paintbrushes with pink paintbucket headdresses, twirling cupcakes with rainy umbrellas). Kris, the waiter from the Palace restaurant, told me that the LCD-covered bus alone cost about three million dollars to make.

And yet I wonder how long this campy musical — in which a drag queen reunites with his son and a male divorcee falls in love with a transwoman — can survive on Broadway. Not only because a glittery pop adaptation of an Australian film might quickly burn through its queer American audience, but because for all its openness New York remains a city that shortened its own Pride parade by 20 blocks, in a state where lawmakers refuse to recognize gay marriage in any form, in a country where we can’t seem to put on a gay Jesus play or a Pulitzer Prize winning theatrical piece about AIDS without politicians and citizens faking heart attacks. How could a musical so dripping with queer sex and fantasy last in a such place?

Which explains why I and everyone in the Palace Theater had come to London to live out a fantasy — to celebrate Pride in a march of millions, to enjoy a campy remake of an astounding queer film, and to partake in the decadent luxuries of theater and perhaps even some recreational sex. We had all paid admission (no matter how menial) and as such we were all accomplices, actors in a larger drama.