R.I.P. DJ Tallulah

Tallulah was a queer legend. Part of the gay legacy worldwide, he DJ'd in London and New York for over forty years. He died last week aged 59. Last year he was, quite rightly, the first inductee into the House of Homosexual Culture.

Read this interview he did a while ago; it's a fascinating, detailed first-hand account of the gay scene of his two favourite cities. Wildly enthusiastic about ground-breaking gay clubs like Bang in the 70s, he is mischievously sniffy about totem clubs like Taboo in the 80s: "To tell the truth, I don’t think it was that fantastic, there were really much better things going on".

On Charles Hawtrey, the Twiglet-like Carry On actor: "He used to do [seaport town] Deal, because the marines were there and they had a marine band. And he used to walk along the sea front in red leather. He was really outrageous, he’d just go for marines, and they’d go for him, because he was a film star, or he was to them".

And Kenneth Williams, the nasal Carry On star: "We went for dinner, sitting in his little kitchen in Belsize Park around this really little glum table eating spaghetti hoops on toast. Very strange."