Everyday People

Everyday People is a warm, sharp, painful novel about queer friendship, sex, class, shame, chosen family and political awakening in 1970s London. It begins at a drag ball in 1973 and ends in early 1975 with its protagonist, Mark, beginning his first shift volunteering for Gay Switchboard. The movement of the novel is from spectatorship to participation: Mark starts as a nervous young man watching queer life from the edge of the room, and ends as someone ready to answer the phone for strangers who need help.

Mark is twenty-three, from Reading, and living in Ealing with Ethel, a harsh religious landlady arranged through family connections. He has moved to London hoping to find “people like him,” but instead finds loneliness, chores, churchgoing, repression and fear. His closest friend is Andrew, a wealthy, sharp-tongued, flamboyant young gay man who still lives with conservative parents but longs to do drag. Andrew was the person who first approached Mark after seeing him too frightened to enter the Coleherne, a gay pub in Earl’s Court. Their friendship begins as a kind of rescue: Andrew recognises Mark’s fear because he knows exactly what Mark is afraid of.

The novel opens at Porchester Hall, where Mark and Andrew attend their first drag ball. Mark has secretly bought Andrew’s outfit: a pink Biba dress, tights, women’s shoes and a fur stole. Andrew changes in the men’s toilets among other queens, and Mark is overwhelmed by the glamour, dirt, risk and joy of the place. They meet a group who will become the novel’s central queer circle: Bertie, who performs as Beatrice; Steven, a muscular promiscuous man dressed as a sailor; John, a Gay News journalist; Diane, an American lesbian with a political edge; and Gillian, Diane’s girlfriend.