The Craziest B&B in London Part four of A gay life in the first year of It’s a Sin
(Contains spoilers and may trigger some AIDS survivor readers. Names in quotation marks are pseudonyms. Many of the names from the 80s aren’t mentioned because I don’t remember. Other names are real, taken from my occasional diary or letters I wrote)
When “Darren” and I arrived in London, we knew where we wanted to stay. Earl’s Court, then one of the centres of gay life in London. We had Let’s Go, the Harvard student guide to the UK.
The first place we called had vacancies, so off we went on the long tube journey from Heathrow to Earl’s Court and found our way into one of the elegant garden squares and to a columned mid-Victorian building, a bed and breakfast I will call the “King Richard’s Court Hotel.”
In The Guardian, Russell Davies described the Pink Palace, home to the characters of It’s A Sin, the scene of much of the drama, this way through his eyes and that of his alter ego Ritchie.
Jill … moved into a flat which she called the Pink Palace, and it felt like an endless party, the rooms filled with gay men and drag queens and show tunes.
“King Richard’s Court Hotel” was my Pink Palace. It wasn’t all that gay, certainly no drag queens (at least in costume) and parties were not allowed. Through the…
