Stephen Brogan
An earlier piece in this series contextualising Leigh Bowery’s nightclub Taboo can be read here. The author’s second post, arguing for the importance of the club’s doorman Marc Vaultier, is available here. NOTCHES recommends reading them both before this third essay.
Legend has it that when the charismatic gender-bender doorman at Taboo Marc Vaultier (née Mark Golding, 1966-86) turned away clubbers for looking too suburban, he was prone to holding up a small mirror and loftily asking them, “Would you let yourself in?” Obviously shorthand for the club’s exclusivity, this brief tale of camp hauteur, Wildean in character, is central to the mythology of Taboo. The tale circulated verbally from the mid-1980s until late 1988, when it first appeared in print in London’s Time Out (12-19 October 1988). The magazine marked its twentieth birthday with some highlights of its coverage of the capital’s nightlife, including a piece on Leigh Bowery’s infamously trendy club and its renowned doorman.
The story has subsequently appeared in various books and magazines, including Boy George’s autobiography Take it Like a Man (1995), George having befriended Marc at Taboo. Recently, it has featured in Tate Britain’s exhibition on Leigh Bowery, and in the book that accompanies the Outlaws exhibition devoted to London’ s 1980s street fashion and nightlife. The story continues to appear in reviews of both exhibitions, such as this one in London’s The Standard.
The doorman and his mirror are central to Taboo’s lore and yet the recounting of the tale is problematic. Journalists relate the story smugly, no doubt assuming they would have been ushered into Taboo without any problems. Tellingly, although the story is relayed as factual, it is always reported briefly, unencumbered by details: How often did Marc use his mirror? Who did he turn away? What were people’s reactions? In fact, there are no answers because the story is apocryphal.
The origins of the infamous mirror tale are obscure. There are no principal characters to consult due to the premature deaths of Marc and Bowery, and to the lack of any clubbers coming forward to share their own stories of being shown the mirror and turned away. The story’s veracity is confounding, although it is highly likely that Marc rejected just one or two clubbers using his mirror for effect, after which the tale took on a life of its own. Bowery’s widow Nicola Rainbird (née Bateman) said as much in 2004, although her comment has gone unnoticed. This interpretation helps to explain the lack of contemporary evidence, a strange situation considering Taboo’s media coverage.
In the 1986 South of Watford documentary on Bowery we see Marc vetting the crowd at Taboo’s door, but there is no mention of the mirror. Nor is it featured in Taboo’s press, or in Bowery’s interviews. I asked some twenty-five Taboo habitués about it. All knew the tale but most just thought it was an urban myth, not least because it has also been misattributed to Steve Strange on the door of The Blitz club and to Scarlett Cannon outside her Cha Cha Club, as she recounted in a recent conversation we had. The story is also missing from the two well-researched documentaries on Bowery and his milieu, Charles Atlas’ The Legend of Leigh Bowery (2002) and Kevin Hegge’s Tramps (2022).
The story’s frequent retelling means that it has plenty of purchase – as do all apocryphal tales. Just as Marie Antoinette never said, ‘Let them eat cake’, those famous words have nevertheless been used again and again to quickly convey the indifference of the rich towards the suffering of the poor in pre-Revolutionary France. Similarly, ‘Would you let yourself in?’ succinctly delivers a strong message, namely, that clubbers can be neatly divided into the fashionable in-crowd (who got into Taboo) and provincial squares (who didn’t).
Further purchase came from the tale being camp, bitchy, and theatrically rude, all valuable currency on the cliquey club scene, where they were collectively known as being ‘cod’. This had similarities with ‘throwing shade’, or delivering an artful insult, a term particularly associated with the American queer Black and Latino vogueing scene. In the popular imagination, who better to personify this attitude at Taboo than the gender-bender doorman and his makeup mirror? Like all creatures of the night, Marc carried one wherever he went.
The story of the mirror seemingly confirmed hyperbolic media stories of the large queue outside Taboo, how difficult it was to get in, people being crushed in the throng, and even a rumour that someone had died in it (The Face, March 1986; LAM, 20 May 1986; Mail on Sunday’s You magazine, 1 June 1986; i-D, June 1987). Put simply, Taboo’s clientele was said to comprise artistic types, outrageous dressers, and people with the right contacts or a whiff of fame. Everybody else who clamoured to get in was turned away by Marc ‘with disdain’ (i-D, June 1987).
But how true is this? People did sometimes queue to get into Taboo, yet tales of being crushed outside the club are hearsay at best; certainly, no one died. In fact, there was nothing unusual about a queue outside a nightclub, especially since Taboo was held in a small venue. More importantly, queues were a standard part of London’s alternative nightlife, irrespective of a venue’s size. People queued to get into all the capital’s cutting-edge nightclubs, including Heaven, Bolts, the Mud Club, and the Batcave. Many clubs also had a separate queue for guests. Queues were a mundane part of nightlife. They occurred because lots of people arrived at a club at once, slowing down the admission process: the busiest time at a club door was between 23.00, when the pubs closed, and 00.30.
As for elitist door policies, people were sometimes denied entry to gay and alternative clubs if they didn’t look right, especially if a club was busy. In the South of Watford documentary Marc confirms that he rejects people who look ‘aggressive and unpleasant’, or who ‘wear clothes from Debenhams’, which is code for being suburban. He also declined a woman wearing fur, given he was a keen animal rights supporter. Obviously, a selective door policy added to a club’s cachet, but in reality the practice was partly fictional because a club could not survive without enough paying customers. This balancing act meant that arriving early or late — before or after the queueing — made it easier to get in. Even at busy times, there was latitude. As Scarlett Cannon recently put it:
You trust your instinct. You let friends in, and friends of friends … people you don’t know who are dressed up are also fine. Then there are people you don’t know who look normal. You let them in if they give off the right vibe as a good mix of people makes for a better night.
Thus, in the South of Watford documentary no one in the Taboo queue is dressed up, and we see Marc ushering in people who are attired conventionally, though not ‘from Debenhams’. Dressing down in an urban way (Levis 501s, Dr Martens shoes, and a flattop haircut) got you into a club because it was as much a part of the culture as was dressing up.
Taboo closed in May 1986 but the post-punk club scene, known for its door policies, remained intact until the summer of 1988, when Acid House arrived. This was a cultural watershed that torpedoed the selective clubbing of the last decade. For better or worse, nightlife became far more mainstream and democratic, urban and provincial types partied together, and dressing down was de rigueur. The door-vetting vanished and suddenly looked historical. This must help to explain why the tale of Marc’s mirror first appeared in print in late 1988: it belonged to a world which had disappeared as quickly and unexpectedly as had the French ancien régime in 1789. But elitist nightlife was now worthy of memorialising, and who better to personify it than the extraordinary gender-bender doorman at Taboo, Marc Vaultier?
The author thanks all the Taboo habitués that he spoke to, including Taboo DJ Rachel Auburn, Cornelius Brady, Dean Bright, Scarlett Cannon, Tim Dimoline, George Gallagher, Taboo co-organiser Tony Gordon, Michael Hardy, Matthew Hawkins, Bodymap designer David Holah, Louise Neel, Mike Nicholls, Carole Semaine, Jonny Slut, DJ Tasty Tim, David Walls, and artist Mark Wigan.
NOTCHES: (re)marks on the history of sexuality is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at www.notchesblog.com.
For permission to publish any NOTCHES post in whole or in part please contact the editors at NotchesBlog@gmail.com
