OH I DO LOVE TO WEAR STOCKINGS AND SUSPENDERS
I KNOW Grayson Perry a little and I like him a lot. He is a wonderful artist, but I have to admit that I find his penchant for dressing up in women’s clothes a tad disconcerting — which is odd, since I’ve been doing it myself, off and on, all my life. Why? I wonder.
My friend Brett Kahr, noted Freudian psychologist, says it’s simply me being playful, ‘And that’s a good thing, Gyles.’
Aged seven, I played Christopher Robin’s nursemaid, Alice, in a stage rendering of A. A. Milne’s poem, Buckingham Palace. That’s when it began, in 1955, this thing with dressing up as a girl.
I had joined the local Cubs and at Christmas the Scoutmaster recruited me for the Kensington Scouts’ Gang Show.
A kindly, tall and balding man, with hairy legs and knobbly knees, he was surprised to learn that I had a full nurse’s outfit in my dressing-up box at home — complete with navy skirt, blue blouse, white apron and nurse’s cap.
But since I had, and I seemed keen to wear it, the part of Alice was mine. I did my best and I seem to remember (though it was 65 years ago) it went down rather well.
At home I had a huge playroom all to myself. It was my magic kingdom and my window on the world. Cowboy, pirate, policeman, spaceman — you name it, I had the outfit. I could dress up as everybody, from Robin Hood to Davy Crockett.
Performers like dressing up, and I like performers who dress up in style.
As a rule, when I dress up as a woman, I want to be the real thing. I don’t do it secretly, ever. I do it for public consumption, just once in a while.
Grayson Perry says of himself, ‘I just love dressing up in everything a man is supposed not to be, in all that vulnerability, sweetness, preciousness and impracticality.’
For Grayson in his teens, creating for himself a female alter ego called Claire was about sexuality, escape and excitement.
I have never been in the Grayson Perry league. I don’t have his baggage — or his courage or imagination. I just put on a frock now and again for fun, to feel different, to show off in disguise.
I legitimise it by doing it in a show. I’ve never been a secret cross-dresser.
When I was in a show called Zipp! in the early (and possibly aptly named) noughties, I spent several months wearing stockings and suspenders, and rather enjoyed it.
Zipp! was a celebration of musical theatre. We promised the audience 100 musicals in 100 minutes — ‘or your money back’. With a cast of five, at breakneck speed we zipped through a century of theatrical hits, from Chu Chin Chow to the latest offering from Andrew Lloyd Webber.
The bit the audience seemed to like most was the sequence from The Rocky Horror Show where suddenly I appeared centre stage wearing little more than fishnet stockings, a black suspender belt and a huge golden codpiece (it was stuffed, I remember, with a scrunched-up copy of the Daily Mail).
Whether it was the erotic power of my performance or the absurdity of seeing someone who had recently been a Conservative MP dressed to kill in a kinky rig-out, I don’t know, but at every performance, it drove the punters wild.
Zipp! was a huge hit in Edinburgh. We won the award for the most popular show, and played to capacity. I remember, after one performance, having a drink outside a bar in George Street, when the great Sir Ian McKellen, whom I barely knew, stopped to say hello to me.
He smiled, leant towards me conspiratorially, and asked, ‘Are you still wearing your stockings and suspenders, Gyles?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘How did you know?’ He grinned. ‘Because I’m still wearing mine.’