David Hoyle

David has crafted a meticulously detailed story of why those seats are unoccupied. A tale of a coach of sixth-form-college students from Sheffield who were on their way to his show “to hear all about LGBT culture and community” with the permission of their leftist, “practically neo-liberal” parents, only to have perished in a road accident on the way. “But not all of them are dead,” he adds, “and the ones that are in a vegetative state would want us to have a lovely time.”

For the majority of his four-decade-long career, David has never written a script or rehearsed his now infamous live sets. Later, in a pokey dressing room backstage, David’s best friend, photographer Lee Baxter, would ask, half in disbelief: “Where did that bus crash come from?” and David would simply shrug. “I like the danger,” he says, “that knife edge of being in the now.”

David’s material – often wonky or darkly absurdist – is based on what’s bothering him: be it British politics or the Bosnian War. In the ’90s, David earned a reputation for revolving his sets around that latter conflict, and performing it to clubs of gay men who were high on ecstasy. “I think some people were surprised and some thought it was a bit weird,” he says. “But I was just trying to keep it real.” That Thursday night, he calls the crowd “revolutionary anarchists” and suggests they all “disengage from organised government” by cancelling their rent and mortgage payments.

David has long been a figurehead for liberation in Britain – for queer people, the working classes and migrants, among others. He exercises that passion through his amorphous, ever-changing art. He is by turns an actor, cabaret performer, comedian and painter – though often positioned by others as a drag-adjacent act. His sporadic, sometimes challenging work is underpinned by a very clear ethos: that we live in a world marred by in­equal­ity and too many people are ignoring it. If he wants you to feel that ire, he has, for decades, fed it to you wrapped up in a lethal little joke.

In early 2024, the city played host to a celebration of his career, titled ‘Please Feel Free to Ignore My Work’, presented at the city’s new cultural centre, Aviva Studios. John McGrath – a longtime friend and supporter of David’s – is its artistic director. For three weeks, patrons could watch David paint live murals and host a pub quiz, witness his on-screen performances over the years and, in the gift shop, pick up cushions and tea towels bearing David’s artwork. (A best-seller was a Union Jack flag with “Fascist Dystopia” written upon it.) The residency culminated in a live variety show titled ‘Still Got It…!?’, replete with ten dancers, multiple costume changes, a re-written Sondheim show tune and a double-decker bus on stage.

It was a simulacrum of six decades of existence for David, a man who has known, since he was a little boy drawing fantastical figures under the guidance of his grandmother, that he always loved the idea of appearing as somebody else. “I was very inspired by German expressionism and the work of Willem de Kooning,” he says, without a glint of irony, “and so I thought, well, you could become like a three-dimensional living artwork.” That’s the synthesis of it, he explains: “The drawing, the painting and the performing.”

David’s work plays with the idea of “treating your face and your body as a canvas.” That is, perhaps, the first image that springs to mind for those who know of him, and the one that gets singed into the souls of those who witness his art for the first time.

His canvas is so often adorned with gnarly, dark glitter eyeshadow and smudged lipstick, like a dropped jack-o-lantern wearing a brazenly teased wig. To perform ‘Still Got It…!?’, he paired a Rick Owens dress – given to him by the designer, who calls himself one of David’s “disciples” – with heels from fast-fashion retailer Asos. Sometimes, those outfits are spangled and silver, or made from teddy bears, or look as if they’ve been summoned from the depths of a dead relative’s hospital bag. But David himself is beautiful: his eyes are almost unsettlingly blue, his jaunty smile harbouring a mischief every time he cracks a joke. He dressed especially well for our meeting, he says, wearing a floral buttoned shirt, dark jeans and a loose-fitting Vivienne Westwood blazer, with a peace symbol and a non-binary flag pin on the lapels. He washed his hair for the occasion, too.

“I think humour is defiant,” he tells me. “It is funny, the whole ‘lived experience.’ Once you’re born, you’re developing consciousness, trying to understand everything, trying to tabulate as much information as you possibly can. Before you know where you are, you’re probably losing your memory or losing your mind, and then you die. That, in a way, is the cruellest, weirdest joke on Earth.”
He uses ‘The Scream’ by Edvard Munch as an example: “In a way, it would be easy to think that that person is not necessarily screaming,” he says. “They might be laughing.” That fine line between hysterics and abject horror – his ability to make you laugh at an imagined fatal coach crash – is exactly where David’s work sits.

There is a chagrin he feels towards an ignorance to injustice, a privileged position that has made even members of his own community numb to the effects of it. “It’s like we’re living in a dream and we need to keep pinching ourselves,” David says now. “We’ve achieved everything. It’s all over! But people are still making a political football out of trans rights, you know, so I don’t agree that we’re now living in Shangri-La.”

Fifteen years ago, at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern – the south London gay bar that has, since the ’90s, been one of his regular spots – David performed a set in which he criticised the culture of modern, young gay men. Or, as he called them: “20-odd-year-old cunts out there in the world living their stupid, self-obsessed superficial fucking lives” who struggled to recognise that “people went through real hell and had to fight for you to be as complacent as you are.”

The film-maker and performer Amrou Al-Kadhi is a younger performer cut from a similar political cloth. “So much of drag and queer culture has been commodified on screen,” they tell me over the phone. “It has become formulaic and predictable, and with its political bite robbed. But David forces his audiences to wake up, to command the respect of the live queer experience, and to face the room no matter what.” They call his performances “rare and sacred.”

Even while holding them to task, David has learned from young people too. Now he knows how to articulate how he has always felt: that he is non-binary and not picky about his pronouns. It’s an identity he wears so proudly that he wears the pin on his jacket. “I’m very heartened by how young people now are more on the ball when it comes to self-identification, when it comes to gender issues,” he says. “They can have a clearer sense of self and who they are. They’re quite bullish and alive.”

That morning, David had listened to Woman’s Hour, a popular programme on BBC Radio 4. The conversation turned to the rights of transgender people, and he witnessed “the Labour Party and the Conservative Party trying to out-Nazi each other.” It’s a thread that’s become a common theme in his stand-up: how safety for those on society’s fringes has been traded in for centre-right scaremongering. “Maybe this is capitalism’s last hurrah,” he hopes. “It’s a time of flux and horror.”
He thinks it’ll take society burning down for something better to come from it. Or, ideally: “We should all, globally, decide to take a naturally derived hallucinogen at the same time, and then see if, in the morning, we’ll put up for one more second with the so-called governments that claim to represent us.” In less than a month from when we meet, the UK general election would take place. He would vote Green.

David grew up in a lower-middle-class family as one of three siblings. A lonely child embraced mostly by his grandmother – who, he believes, knew he was gay from an early age – he treated his home town of Blackpool, back then “at its Zenith,” like an escapist playground. He has vivid memories of watching the Blackpool Tower Circus, of its women parading around the ring dressed in full regalia. He distinctly remembers wanting to be glamorous and beautiful.

As a member of a local boy’s choir, David found respite from the pain of his childhood by performing. He enjoyed it until they rejected him as a teenager. “A lot of religious people don’t understand that they are worshipping heteronormativity,” David says. “They’re not necessarily worshipping the spiritual entity – which to me does not have any gender – it’s transcended. What they’re doing is worshipping the heterosexual sex act.” In the past, he has linked heterosexuality to a desire to commit mass murder.

Drugs are a little different. “I’ve done all sorts,” he says. “But not habitually. I haven’t taken a major hallucinogenic in a long time. It’s probably due, you know?” He stops and thinks. “Actually, I did a show some months ago and somebody squirted magic mushroom essence into my mouth. I think it was the equivalent of 2000 magic-mushrooms.” I think he’s exaggerating for effect, or has misremembered the dose. Still, he says: “That evening was very interesting.”

It was in the years following his recovery, as the ’80s came to an end, that Manchester felt like “the centre of the universe” to David. After a particularly brutal break-up, David took stock of what he had survived: not only his childhood, but the Aids crisis that had coincided with his arrival in London. The loss of his friends, he says, was “off the scale.”

At that time, he was upset and angry and needed to channel it somewhere. “I had nothing to lose, because I knew that I was heartbroken,” he says. So he created The Divine David, a gangly, mop-haired, violently make-upped, over-enunciating “transgender cultural terrorist” that hosted the pub quiz at the Old Steam Brewery, a since-shuttered student pub. “I felt like I was representing, in some sort of spiritual way, the people that had died,” he says. “Their souls and spirits were giving me the energy to go on to the stage, to encourage people to think about the world.”

The Divine David would later become the subject of their own titular television show on Channel 4. In the ’90s, when the British network programmed progressive, somewhat dangerous television (including the Jean Paul Gaultier-fronted ‘Eurotrash’), such a trajectory was possible. But David sensed the danger and mindless demands that come with celebrity status and, in the early 2000s, killed off the character in a dance extravaganza in an east London ice-skating rink. When the network offered him money to be an ambassador for them, he declined.

If there is a marked difference between David Hoyle the person and his performed alter egos, it is that the confidence only comes on-stage. His voice when we meet is clear but un-performerly – the Blackpool drawl a little more hushed than you would expect. “I’m a lonely person,” he says, “and I think I have to be grown up about it and admit to myself that I have consciously gone for loneliness as opposed to falling in love with somebody and for it to potentially [turn into] suicide-inducing horror.” He is, at this point in his life, “reliant on mental-health support services.” At the ‘Still Got It…!?’ show that capped his residency, mental-health charity Mood Swings had a presence, with money being raised on their behalf.

For decades, he has fought for an idyllic future that has yet to materialise. “We thought that in the 2000s we would all be living in a very shiny world with monorails, left, right and centre, but it’s ended up as a world of food banks and grinding poverty. Suicide rates off the scale, a lot of self-harm, a lot of depression – myself included – and it is soul-destroying.” Perhaps that’s why he’s still going: because the British government and its global allies continue to find new ways to make things worse for pretty much everyone.

In 2022, David was inducted into the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a 45-year-old legion of queer and trans nuns who stage protests and raise money for LGBT charities. They are the spiritual extension of David’s kind of art: staunch politics wrapped in lurid dress. He was the first British member to join the San Francisco-born group since Derek Jarman in 1991. Friends of David’s travelled from across the country to Manchester, and after-ceremony celebrations took place at local gay club New York, New York, where friends of his, including his comrade, poet Gerry Potter, read work they’d written to mark the occasion. “Well, to be swept up in that world is just completely surreal,” he says. “Just to see them! The make-up, the costume, the movement, you know? Why can’t life be more like that all the time? Why aren’t we singing and dancing in the streets like we’re in the musicals?”
Though they didn’t run in the same circles, David did meet Derek, “when he came up to Manchester, many, many years ago at the Manchester City Art Gallery,” he says. “I was very nervous, but I made sure that I spoke to him. I gave him a picture of a crucified non-binary person.”

The exhibition is being held in a cocktail bar called The Refuge inside the ornate Kimpton Clocktower building. A mural unrelated to the exhibition has been painted onto the walls, reading “The Glamour of Manchester.” “Let’s get a picture!” David says, putting on his sunglasses and posing with them for my iPhone camera. The exhibition, curated by his friend Rob Devlin, features works by mostly local artists. David’s contribution is a print blown up to an ostentatious size: an abstract oil painting with cut-out capitalised letters layered on top. They spell out: The North-West must declare autonomy with immediate effect.

“I don’t really believe in countries anymore,” he says. “I think they’re an illusion.” It comes back to the people in power, and their desire to “manipulate us to make us hate each other and become violently nationalistic.” One day, you imagine, he’d like Scotland to achieve independence, then Wales, and then – like some sort of David Hoyle fever dream – Great Britain will separate like Pangea, leaving Westminster as its own useless island.

We sit down for a drink; David orders a red wine. He thinks he sees someone he knows. Even with his glasses, he can’t make them out. It turns out to be a stranger. People in Manchester know him now; it feels like a village, he says, “but I’d like one major change domestically, before I die.” That’s a simple ask: just to be closer to Canal Street, the centre of the city’s gay district, and the people he likes to spend time with. “I know Manchester – and I always say, if you’re gonna be homophobically abused, at least be homophobically abused by your own!”

Wine glass in hand, gold eyeshadow catching in the glint of the club lights, he grins: “And government will become a thing of the past!”