Royal-themed drag queen bingo and an all-night gay club night are among events this week marking the Platinum Jubilee – but for some, the milestone is a reminder of the monarch’s difficult relationship with the LGBT+ community.
In Lincoln, LGBT+ venue The Scene will host a drag brunch hosted by local stars Celine Begone, Ruby Boy and Sperm Donna, as well as a Queen’s Terrace Party, which – unlike more traditional Jubilee parties – comes with free entry to a gay club night afterwards running until 7am.
National Lottery funding from the Arts Council England’s Let’s Create Jubilee pot will go towards an inclusive “Love is Live” cabaret in Camberwell later this month billed as bringing a “fabulous line-up of LGBTQ+ cabaret royalty to our real life stage”.
Meanwhile, a “family-friendly, royal Drag Queen Bingo” event at London’s Horniman Museum is going ahead on Sunday with “impromptu dance routines, silly sing-alongs and witty royal repartee for all the family.”
Co-host Timberlina, a seasoned pro of London’s thriving drag queen bingo scene, tells i: “It’s very silly, very fun, and it’s very easy to bring in different sort of themes, so that’s really what we’re doing… we’ve got a few things up our sleeve – musical things, bunting, and the prizes themselves, which I’m sure Her Majesty will be thrilled to know are entirely organic and upcycled.”
The drag artist, whose real name is Tim Redfern, adds: “Obviously, there is a hidden history of queers that do exist in the royal family. I firmly believe that she’s very excited to see that everybody is included in the fun, and making fun.
“Some people may not find it an appropriate thing…. whilst I wouldn’t necessarily cast myself as a monarchist, I’m certainly a fully paid-up member of the queer community, and I think that she’s a great role model.”
In 2016, the Queen’s cousin Lord Ivar Mountbatten came out as gay, and two years later became the first member of the extended Royal family to have a same-sex marriage when he wed his longtime partner James Coyle.
But for long-time activists such as Peter Tatchell, who has spent more than 50 years campaigning for gay rights, says the monarch’s personal history on LGBT+ issues remains a sore spot – one that led him to decline an invitation to take part in the official Jubilee Pageant outside Buckingham Palace.
The campaigner, 70, tells i: “The Queen has turned her back on queens. She is a patron of more than 600 organisations, but she’s never been a patron or visited any LGBT+ charity in seven decades. As far as I know, the words lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender have never publicly passed her lips. She doesn’t even acknowledge that we exist.”
The Queen has acknowledged LGBT+ people on occasion, but such instances have been rare. In 2014, she congratulated one of Britain’s oldest LGBT+ charities, sending her “best wishes” to the London Lesbian & Gay Switchboard as part of its 40th anniversary.
She has also acknowledged equality, regardless of sexual orientation in speeches made during her reign. In the 2017 Queen’s Speech to Parliament, she pledged: “My government will make further progress to tackle the gender pay gap and discrimination against people on the basis of their race, faith, gender, disability or sexual orientation.” But the Queen’s speech is written by government ministers.
In 2013, while signing a new Commonwealth charter, the Queen was praised for a “historic pledge to promote gay rights”. “We are implacably opposed to all forms of discrimination, whether rooted in gender, race, colour, creed, political belief or other grounds,” the charter read.
Critics at the time noted the absence of an actual reference to LGBT+ people, while a Palace spokesperson confirmed that, like the Queen’s Speech, the charter’s words were not written by the monarch herself. “The Queen does not take a personal view on these issues,” the spokesperson said at the time.
The decades-long code of silence towards LGBT+ issues in the Royal Family is underscored by the institutional push-back Princess Diana faced during the Aids crisis, when she repeatedly broke with royal convention to visit gay men dying from the illness. The Queen made her disapproval of the Princess’s actions known and advised her to do “something more pleasant” with her charity work, Diana’s former bodyguard Ken Wharfe later claimed.
Despite a “don’t-ask, don’t-tell” attitude, the proliferation of gay men across the Queen’s household staff has been well-documented over the years – with the palace forced to deny claims from a panicked Sun newspaper article in 1982 that up to a third of staff were part of a so-called “homosexual ring”.
“Having gay staff is proof of nothing, apart from the fact that the Queen likes well-mannered, well-groomed male servants,” Mr Tatchell says.
He notes that gay palace staff “were banned from bringing their partners to the annual Christmas ball” until the practice was exposed by LGBT group OutRage! in 1995.
It is not just history, either: 34 Commonwealth nations, which have the Queen as head of state, maintain archaic British laws imported during the colonial era that criminalise gay sex – and campaigners argue that the monarch’s continued code of silence simply prolongs the status quo.
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Mr Tatchell stresses: “Homophobic Commonwealth leaders read her silence as de facto support for their persecutory policies.”
There are signs that other royals are aching to modernise on LGBT+ issues, despite the Queen’s continued silence.
In 2015, Prince William led a school session on homophobia for Diana Award, the anti-bullying charity named for his late mother. After a meeting with young LGBT+ campaigners the following year, he told Attitude magazine: “No one should be bullied for their sexuality or any other reason, and no one should have to put up with the kind of hate that these young people have endured in their lives.”
Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, has also sought to continue his mother’s work on HIV/Aids, publicly taking HIV tests and speaking of the need to “bust stigma”. He has maintained his association with charities in the HIV sector even after stepping down as a working royal, explaining this year: “My mum’s work was unfinished, I feel obligated to try and continue that as much as possible.”
Mr Tatchell said: “There are signs that the younger generation like William and Harry will be more positive. However, they will still be royals who inherit their wealth and power by virtue of being born into a very privileged family.”
LGBT+ Royals
Perhaps unsurprisingly for an institution so focused on lineage, no member of the modern royal family has ever come out as LGBT+, and same-sex unions are specifically excluded from the tangled web of archaic rules that govern accession to the throne.
But the Queen’s distant cousin, Lord Ivar Mountbatten, who is not in the line of succession, unwittingly made history when he married his partner James Coyle in 2018.
He said to Tatler magazine of the royals’ response to his coming out: “They really don’t talk about it. I mean, the royals, they don’t communicate very well.”
He added: “Where I grew up, gay men were called poofs, queers, everything derogatory under the sun.
“In 15, 20 years’ time people will struggle to understand how we came to be having such conversations. People will look back and say, ‘What’s the big deal?’ But for our generation it was.”
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