“We will not stand for discrimination, we will not stand for alienation, we will unite all hands across this country, that country, my country, your country, every country on this planet, every race, creed, sexuality and religion ... we are all human and we all deserve to love and respect each other.”
As the speech made by house DJ Roger Sanchez rang out through NYC Downlow, the dark nightclub in the south-west corner of Glastonbury, at 1am, the crowd let out a cheer and clutched each other in sweaty abandon.
His words were particularly poignant, for they paid tribute to the clubbers who were gunned down in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, less than a month ago, many of whom had a similar Latino background to Sanchez.
NYC Downlow has been a focal point of Glastonbury’s nightlife for a decade, but this year, in the wake of the tragedy in Orlando in which 49 died, its position as the festival’s only gay club brought with it a mood that mingled remembrance with defiance.
Each night the parade of NYC Downlow drag queens – dubbed by the venue as “an army of 50 pansexual go-go boy butchers and a polysexual Meatpacking trans army not to be reckoned with” –took to the stage, the bar and the tabletops to perform and dance till sunrise.
Gaggled together in a makeshift dressing room behind the stage, littered with wigs, fake-eyelashes and mountains of sequins, the drag queens and performers echoed Sanchez’s defiance in the face of a hate attack targeted directly at the gay community.
“Orlando was an awful, awful attack but fear shouldn’t rule your life – life’s just too short,” said Sebastian Langue neur, 28, who performs as Anna Gressive Bottom.
“To have this queer space right at the heart of Glastonbury – which anyone can wonder into – is really important. It is a really open environment, and it’s really healthy environment because it shows that whether gay, straight, queer or trans, we can all party together. It normalises it, but at the same time embraces the different.”
Julian Smith, who sat resplendent in a tight glittery playsuit as he prepared to perform as Jacqui Potato, said that while there had always been a certain defiance to clubs like NYC Downlow, Orlando had heightened the feeling that “we are a minority who are not always accepted – and that has filled us all, I think, with a new fire”.
He added: “In the wake of what happened in Orlando. we’ve got to go out and be ourselves and allow people to accept it and feel it and enjoy it. It’s a terribly sad thing but we can’t morbidly retreat in fear or mourning. Instead we need to do the opposite and have this extreme party which declares : ‘We are here and you should recognise us’.”
He and several performers stressed how important it still was to have a space like NYC Downlow at Glastonbury, a festival hundreds of miles away from the safe spaces of London’s gay clubs, and which draws 180,000 people together from all over the UK.
“It does feel different performing at Glastonbury than anywhere else,” said Smith. “The audience here is very different to the people who come to the small east London bars where me and a lot of us perform. It does reach out, mixing cultures, and that’s a wonderful thing about us being here.”
For transgender performer Lucy Fisk, aka Lucy Fizz, who grew up in a small northern town where she never encountered anyone gay or transgender until she went into surgery, the Orlando tragedy made it “more important than ever” to introduce people to queer culture in order to demystify it.
“I think Orlando just made it hit home how far we have to go,” she said. “Being in London, it feels really safe to go out to clubs in drag, but for people outside the city you don’t get that opportunity. It’s really easy to forget about how narrow- minded people are and how isolating it is to live away from a big city. So it is still more important than ever that this space exists in this festival.”
She acknowledged that gay nightlife was still an unknown to many people, and that fear of the unknown continued to harbour prejudice, both on a small scale as well as with large-scale attacks such as Orlando.
“I think NYC Downlow demystifies what it is to be trans or queer or dress in drag – it makes the environment feel more open, more human and therefore more relatable for the rest of the population who don’t get exposed to it regularly, if at all.
“It’s not scary, it’s just really great fun,” she added with a laugh.
Bob Henderson, who performs as a Tracey Emin-inspired drag queen Tracey Ermine, pointed out that hate attacks against the gay community are not restricted to America. She gave the example of a gay bar in Canterbury which last week allegedly had its windows shot at by an 18- and a 17-year-old.
“This is happening in our country,” she said. “It’s quite easy to think that these kind of attacks just happen in America because of their crazy gun laws but that sort of violence is still happening in provincial towns all over the UK.”
Now that Orlando has emphasised how vulnerable the gay community remains to hate attacks, Henderson said it felt cathartic to perform with abandon and without fear at Glastonbury.
“We’re all a mess but in the best possible way,” he said. “And when you are faced with that awful, violent hate attack, it’s a release to be here. It’s an act of defiance.”
