British drag artiste Maisie Trollette – she still hates the expression drag queen – was a familiar sight in Pattaya’s golden-era gay clubs of 20 years ago. Based in Brighton UK for many decades, David Raven (his non-stage name) was hired by Pattaya club moguls to do his glitter music and chat routines over here and, in return, is said to have raised many hundreds of thousands of baht for aids-related charities, orphanages and good works.
Maisie, born in Cornwall, is now 89 and regarded as the oldest-working drag artiste in the UK. She made her reputation in crowded post-war London pubs, now mostly closed or demolished, and moved to Brighton in the 1970s where she has become a leading gay icon. Age has obviously left its marks and she now sits on a stool to sing her routines and exude that waspish humor which is the hallmark of English drag. She is in the early stages of dementia and is dependent on Donepezil medication.
An 80 minute docu-movie titled Maisie, directed by Lee Cooper, was released earlier this year following production delays caused by the Covid pandemic. It’s not so much a biopic as a record of her hectic home and professional life during one week several years ago. In music hall tradition, she sits between the old pantomime dames (Dockyard Doris and even Norman Evans) and the newer and bolder acts of Lily Savage and countless others. Maisie is equally at ease performing in a Marie Antoinette wig one minute and eating a bag of chips the next. That dichotomy is at the heart of English camp humor.
The subtext of the movie is “old age can be a drag” and therein lies its uniqueness. So many recent movies, such as Call Me By Your Name or Moonlight, concentrate on young people coming out or discovering their budding sexual identity. But this movie concerns itself with the other end of the spectrum – being gay when you have lost much of your allure and your independence. You can buy/rent the movie on Amazon Video, Apple iTunes, Google Play, Microsoft Store , Youtube and elsewhere.
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