Mendez’s Rainbow Milk was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn prize. They are working on their second novel.
The crowd at Margate’s Dreamland, for the final show of Sugababes’ first ever arena tour, was a mix of hen-party ladies in pink cowboy hats, long-term Sugababes fans and curious rock dads with their cameras out. Where we were standing, ten people deep from the middle of the stage, we had a clear view of the trio, now in their forties, all three glowing with purpose. Keisha looked so young she ‘must have been kept in Tupperware’, my friend Rosie said.
Ifirst encountered Linton Kwesi Johnson on TV. My family was watching a rerun of his performance of ‘Inglan Is a Bitch’, which aired on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1980. In a pork pie hat and dark glasses, Johnson delivered his poem about the Caribbean migrant experience of his parents’ generation in a rhythmic laid-back drawl:
well mi dhu day wok an mi dhu nite wokmi dhu...
‘Good evening,’ I said. ‘Welcome to Brunswick House.’ I never usually said that. Too corny. But I was in a good mood and the last two customers – this was the final table of the evening – were mature white gays. I wasn’t sure if they were a couple, but you always want to flirt a bit, fan them, feed them grapes: a wronged queen will out-Karen any Karen...
Until March 2022, I’d never seen an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the biggest queer cultural phenomenon in TV history. Even straight friends considered me a pariah. But then I went to stay with a friend who was determined that I lose my Drag Race virginity. Season 14 was midway through; over the course of two evenings, he took me through the first seven episodes, each an hour...
George Michael was the biggest selling musician in the world in 1988. He was 25 and seemed ready to outdo Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Prince and Madonna. In Freedom Uncut, Liam Gallagher describes him as a ‘modern-day Elvis’. Fans and the record business wanted more: more music, more appearances, more concerts, more everything. Almost disdainfully, he signed a multimillion-dollar, multi-album deal with CBS, and, with Michael installed as its flagship act, Sony bought out the company for $2 billion. By the end of the 1980s, anti-gay sentiment, compounded by the Aids crisis and the passing into law of Section 28, was widespread; the ideology of ‘gayness’ was trashed in the mainstream media in the same way that ‘wokeness’ is today. The wild success of Faith and the accompanying world tour induced PTSD-levels of overexposure in someone who had something to hide.
Rainbow Milk is a candid, sometimes uneven novel. But at moments it’s electrifying – an algorithmic pop ballad that suddenly transcends itself and sounds different, more affecting, like the opening...
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