Arguably – arguably! – I am not the literal exact target audience for ‘Sex Sex Men Men’, the latest show from London drag kings extraordinaire Pecs Drag King Collective.
But then again, maybe I am: it’s a mark of the current surge in the cultural capital of drag kinging – that is, female and non-binary impersonators of men – that Pecs’ new show isn’t taking place in a queer club, but a theatre: ‘Sex Sex Men Men’ is a commission from Hackney Wick’s The Yard.
Essentially it boils down to a revue-style show interrogating male sexuality, divided into sections in which members of the dragged-up collective mime, sing or dance to bangers and slow jams, interspersed with more pointedly agit-proppy skits, plus readings of anonymous blog posts by real-life men trawled up from the internet.
It’s a mixed, fun bag. The very first skit, in which a cocky Glaswegian enjoys a lengthy blowjob while lecturing us on the finer points of lesbian sex scandals in early modern Europe, is so good, and has so much going on in it, that the rest of the show struggles to quite keep up with it.
As a rule, the musical numbers are the strongest segments – the talky bits can feel a bit gauche, but there is something more profound, and nuanced, about the way the group reclaims the songs. Sometimes it’s a simple case of taking a libidinous R&B number and turning it into something joyous; at other times it becomes startlingly tender, with a love duet between two ‘bears’ being treated with almost mystical reverence.
The readings are wilfully varied, from a guy who knows his friend committed a rape and doesn’t know what to do about it, to the straight man reminiscing about a phenomenal one-off blowjob from a male friend.
If it makes a coherent argument about men – and remember it’s a cabaret, not a sociological treatise – it’s that toxic masculinity is a thing, it should be called out, but that men are varied, vulnerable and rarely beyond redemption. Indeed, it’s really quite a sweetly optimistic show, kinks accepted. Structurally it is a bit all over the shop: it’s a wobbly 90 minutes crying out to be turned into a tight hour. And maybe they could have afforded to take the piss just a little more. But ultimately its earnest belief in a better world plus telling us interesting historical facts about dildos is a winning combination.
Essentially it boils down to a revue-style show interrogating male sexuality, divided into sections in which members of the dragged-up collective mime, sing or dance to bangers and slow jams, interspersed with more pointedly agit-proppy skits, plus readings of anonymous blog posts by real-life men trawled up from the internet.
It’s a mixed, fun bag. The very first skit, in which a cocky Glaswegian enjoys a lengthy blowjob while lecturing us on the finer points of lesbian sex scandals in early modern Europe, is so good, and has so much going on in it, that the rest of the show struggles to quite keep up with it.
As a rule, the musical numbers are the strongest segments – the talky bits can feel a bit gauche, but there is something more profound, and nuanced, about the way the group reclaims the songs. Sometimes it’s a simple case of taking a libidinous R&B number and turning it into something joyous; at other times it becomes startlingly tender, with a love duet between two ‘bears’ being treated with almost mystical reverence.
The readings are wilfully varied, from a guy who knows his friend committed a rape and doesn’t know what to do about it, to the straight man reminiscing about a phenomenal one-off blowjob from a male friend.
If it makes a coherent argument about men – and remember it’s a cabaret, not a sociological treatise – it’s that toxic masculinity is a thing, it should be called out, but that men are varied, vulnerable and rarely beyond redemption. Indeed, it’s really quite a sweetly optimistic show, kinks accepted. Structurally it is a bit all over the shop: it’s a wobbly 90 minutes crying out to be turned into a tight hour. And maybe they could have afforded to take the piss just a little more. But ultimately its earnest belief in a better world plus telling us interesting historical facts about dildos is a winning combination.