Wednesday 16th September 2009

Ironing and bed linen has done it this time – the Poor Little Rich Gays have been wheeling out the missile launchers after a couple of chance remarks in my Sunday posting. Mrs Solomon Bung of California cannot imagine anyone self-ironing (I know that doesn’t mean what I want it to, but I’m not going to let that stand in my way), Laura Malcolm, our only, treasured, straight commentator, condemns the ‘bourgeois’ preoccupation with high-end bed linen manifested by some PLRGs.

 Mrs S Bung, who appears to be at least an honorary PLRG, once made a distinction between 4 and 5 star hotels, you know. She said, 4 Star – Death , 5 star – Life. Simple as that.  Don’t tell me there isn’t cruelty in Poor Little Rich Gay life – of a bracing and necessary kind, of course.

 As you know, I have never been quite rich enough. So I have to think what I can get away with when no-one is looking. Ironing, certainly; and eating. A few potatoes will go a long way. But, to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t let staff near my frockage in any case unless they had had 40 years’ experience running the Queen Mother’s duster coats. You chose your pieces, often in agony; at last you find something that’s right. To then have it boiled alive and scorched by the cleaner –  it’s unthinkable. Top Gay life abounds with stories of laundry disasters occasioned by staff. Rufus Pitman discovered that his femme de ménage had been moistening the ironing with Windolene. The Limpney/Smallmeals often appear with their Gucci lifeless and bleached at the edges by their supremely gloomy lady from Hackney. In Prague, Anthony Mottram takes an ironed shirt out of the cupboard…puts it on  – no buttons. Sheared off by aggressive, meat-eating Old (I’ll have to explain another time. ‘Old’ is Mottram-speak for cleaner) as part of the ironing process. The cleaner of a frosty Poor Little Rich Gay called Sebastian Scott ( in fact not a PLRG because grim and no fun), something huge in TV, spent an entire morning bashing the £1000 creases out of his Issey Miyake – not a house I have ever worn.

 Bed linen is another matter. The glory of this business about thread-counts is – it’s new. For at least the first 49 years of my life it was never mentioned. We like new. Otherwise there’s just death.

 So there is disagreement and diversity. Each grand gay will insist that there is only one true path – and that’s their way of doing things. All our born days we might wonder what it is to be a Poor Little Rich Gay. Last week I suggested that goodness was not part of it. But Mottram has declined involvement in the Ceausescus’ rat-poison venture on moral grounds. I was wrong. Taking a moral stand is somehow possible in a life of sublime frivolity – especially when there is a chance to be a nuisance.

 These days there is an idea that we are all the same: men and women, gays and straights. It is wrong to talk about difference. It is stereo-typing, it is discriminatory. But I prefer difference. Difference is the point, it seems to me.

 Even though we cannot be sure what the difference is.

 What is certain, though, is that to be a Poor Little Rich Gay is a demanding calling; Poor Little Rich Gays must have plenty of rest in the afternoons.