Bearded Blokes in Make-up and a Tranny Called Leona Lewisham: Welcome to Britain's Best Gay Night

Just like the garlic sauce dribbling down the back of your ink-stamped hand as you gobble a 3am kebab, criticisms of east London's nightlife run thick and fast. With the arrival of hotdog sellers, street pastors, curbside urinals and CCTV-implemented public drinking fines, Dalston looks like Camden (minus the corsets) these days. And if that's bad enough, getting into clubs has become enduring a 40-strong queue to get into a corridor-width basement full of all the people who used to bully you at school.

I could just go back to south-east London, where I grew up. The clubs are spacious and relaxed, populated by polite boys in ragged shirts and ponytails and jolly girls whose eyebrows are so naturally thick they don't need to be pencilled in. But the strength of east London's gay nightlife has kept me put. And my local club - unless Bethnal Green Working Men's Club ceases to be recognised as 'club' in the modern sense because you don't get frisked on entry and children will roam around until 1am clutching bags of Frazzles - hosts the best gay night I know. Sink The Pink is a clubnight that throws back to the glory days of The Blitz and Taboo - where you'd see the Phillip Salons and Boy Georges of their day.

They have been other other clubs that plunder this period, but they are normally full of posturing, preening men who would only make eye contact with women to jostle them for mirror-space while fixing their eye-glitter in the ladies. These exclusive nights were more about facade than fun, and beyond the outfits, which saw performance dressers like Daniel Lismore looking like an encyclopaedia had exploded onto Lily Cole, I wasn't that into it or that wanted.

The wonder of Sink The Pink–now five years old–is they let in dowdy lesbians like me. In other trendy East London gay clubs, I'm frowned at and pushed about, an obstacle to cock. I'm only worth remembering later on when they're doing some 6am bumming and looking to delay their climax. But at Sink The Pink, a man dressed as Vishnu - including fake foam detachable limbs – in 28 degrees, grins and welcomes me with a kiss on my hand, an "Y'alright darling?" Later on, outside, he pats my back as I hurl my guts into an alleyway. Considering that's allowed, straight people are welcomed, too. Not only sequined fag hags, but straight men, who know and respect what they're getting themselves in for as they queue behind men wearing little more than body hair and leather straps.

This inclusivity brings in the best sort of amateurism. When it comes to the London gay nights where people of all ages can dance to Little Mix and see a lot of naked blokes do cock-helicopters, Sink The Pink's nearest competitor is G-A-Y's Porn Idol. But that night, based on the Simon Fuller-created format of a team of judges of dubious talents and accolades sneering at misguided contestants in front of a room of thousands of jeering onlookers, is mean to the bone. Its twist; the (mostly drunk) contestants perform a striptease-cum-poledance for three old gays –doubtless assured of their own wit because they once reminded someone of Joan Rivers – to tear apart with bonnes mots such as "you've got horrible bollocks". And although there's something unidentifiably subversive about seeing a naked man getting booed while bopping to "Blurred Lines", I prefer Sink The Pink. It's kinder, and less of the you-versus-us.

Routines are rehearsed, but the crowd isn't silenced to watch them. They're allowed to dance along, sing along, even invited to stage-invade, to help the trannies up when they fall head-long off of the wobbly strippers' pole. They're our hype men/women, there to gee up the crowd, to a soundtrack of Christina Aguilera, Backstreet Boys and about twenty renditions of Tina Turner's Proud Mary. Downstairs you'll find local septuagenarians, arm slung over wife, supping on beer and pretending they're not checking out the lithe Spanish gays dancing to Geri Halliwell's version of It's Raining Men.

Errors are celebrated. One act, too skinny for his pink tutu, wriggles out of it, trips over its rim and exposes his bum. Whereas the sort of drag act who prides herself on lip-syncing perfectly to Barbra Streisand might get upset by the slipping of standards, this one sticks his thonged bum out and smacks it before doing a roly-poly and getting back to his intended routine of high-kicks. A man, not part of the official show, wanders around wearing nothing but two unstrategically-placed washing baskets. "Leona Lewisham!", the compere announces, as a muscular black man swirls his blonde-weaved bounce around then does the splits, "well, she's actually from Peckham!"

At Latitude festival, playing to an unfamiliar audience, Glyn crowdsurfs. A thick-necked boy in a rugby shirt (collar up) pours the remnants of his cider over Glyn's hair. Instead of smacking him, Glyn shakes the droplets off, smooths his hair back and leaps back onto the stage, flinging his limbs about to Destiny's Child's Survivor.

I've not been fussy with my use of she/he. Most of the performers are introduced as "she", and really, when people are can-can-ing to Proud Mary and their faces are - like Jonbenet Blonde's - as flawlessly stunning as a True Blue-era Madonna, you can't help but adulate them such an ornate pronoun "she". And at Sink the Pink, gender is performance. You don't struggle with it, you play with it. Though I'm listening to the same music that soundtracked my year 7 disco, I don't have to put on that dress I felt obliged to when I was 12. Similarly, a bodybuilder in a Marilyn Monroe wig, sunglasses, jockstrap and heels spends the evening rubbing his six-pack and grinding backwards onto whatever's there. Because he can. One "she" strolls around with her new boobs on display. Another wears a niqab. In one hand, a Selfridges bag. In the other, a Louis Vuitton. A window has been cut into the back of his burka so you can see his bum, and on his front is a sign saying: "My husband doesn't know I'm a mister".

Everyone bangs on about east London being full of people who take themselves too seriously. But at STP, the beauty is recognised in the chaos, the things that go wrong, the sweaty hour-long queue to retrieve your clothes from the cloakroom (it's easy to understand this when you consider how naked everyone in there is). When most discourse about gender is so dour, so clogged with verbiage and privilege-checking, it's so totally validating to see people go to a place where gender isn't negated, but celebrated, not only for its troubles, but for all the fun you can have by fucking it up.

Photos by Sharp Shock

Follow Sophie on Twitter: @SophWilkinson

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