Tipping The Velvet

by Sarah Waters

There are more similarities between a fishmonger’s trade and a music-hall manager’s than you might think.

to salute the audience with a gay ‘Hallo!’

who thought my particular passion for her only queer, or quaint.

The world, to me, seemed utterly transformed since Kitty Butler had stepped into it.

the oyster, you see, is what you might call a real queer fish

every one of them made me flinch slightly, and colour faintly, with desire and confusion.

A difficult crowd, and you handled it admirably.

for all that I had gazed at her a thousand times before, I felt now that I was looking at her as if for the first time.

it must have been that moment, at the Canterbury Palace, when I first smelled the oyster-liquor on your fingers,

I knew that everything had changed – everything.

making love to Kitty – a thing done in passion, but always, too, in shadow and in silence,

I’m amazed you have managed to survive this long away from the sea, without shrivelling up like a bit of old seaweed.

what I would call tommistry but what they, like Diana, called Sapphic Passion.

She was like a queen, with her own queer court

had been quick, and driven me to desperate pleasures:

we were not mary-annes; we were only a couple of blushing toms,

One New Zealand bookshop kept its early copies shrink-wrapped, with a ‘Restricted to persons aged 18 and over’