Society scribe shares sleaze secret

Lance Leopard, love child of Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward, was a terrible singer but a fabulous entertainer who wrote for the Star Observer and Capital Q about life as a raffish man-about-town. He was a confidante and bon vivant who pronounced beautiful with four syllables, like a true homosexual connoisseur.

The people’s columnist wanted to be queen of hearts, if only he could wrestle that crown from the adorable Chelsea Bun.

‘I must be able to find some dirt to discredit her’, Lance wrote, ‘and present it in a way that makes me come out smelling like a rose.

‘You know me – if I see a dog, I’ll pat it. If I encounter a baby, I’ll hug it. If I see a ribbon, I’ll cut it. And if you hand me a glass – by God – I’ll drink it. That’s polite. Because I don’t really like champagne. You didn’t know that, did you? Well, now you do.

‘My secrets are your secrets. And I’ll let you in on a big one. I don’t know what I’m wearing to Sleaze Ball. See. I’m just like everyone else. Really I am. Apart from those people who do know what they’re wearing, of course. I’m nothing like them.’

If the queer publications Lance Leopard wrote for were a parade of expressive tricks and marvels, a whole print circus, as journalist Sylvia Lawson once described that other Sydney journal, The Bulletin, Lance Leopard was our circus magician. He pulled rabbits out of hats, he found meaning and metaphor in the mundane and the remarkable, he helped us see things that may or may not have been there. Mind you, he had incredible material to work with, including but not limited to the 25 most beautiful people in Darlinghurst, among them:

Lolita 2000: That Farrah Fawcet-Majors hair. That awful silver neckerchief. That unerring belief that beauty is only skin deep.

Rodney: What’s your last name, darling? You know Rodney. He looks like Astro Boy.

Nic Frankham: Is it just me, or is Nick Frankham simply beautiful? She’s a safe sex slut. She’s a fashion daredevil. She’s even a married woman. And she gives great eulogy.

Carole-Anne King: This woman turns midnight into midday.

Kerrie Cheers: What a charming name. If lesbianism is your cup of tea, you’ll always find Kerrie Cheers in the kitchen at parties. What exactly does she do? If she was my agent, I’d be a superstar.

Chris Sharkey: It’s your dark brown velvet eyes, you delightful darling. Even if you are working for Capital Q.

After the Star published Lance Leopard’s 25 Most Beautiful People in Darlinghurst (22 May 1997), an irate reader named Stuart Everlywilson from Wentworth Falls wrote a letter to the Star editor: Are you seriously sponsoring this shit? Does it have to be encouraged by your newspaper?

‘You know I get the impression sometimes that we’re a community that’s been granted a tiny room to express ourselves in and what we do in that room, because it’s a tad too small for us all, is occupy ourselves trying to out-bitch and out-dress each other. And I get that incorrect impression largely as a result of reading your newspaper.

‘Maybe it’s time we realised that freedom isn’t an end in itself. It’s what you do with it. And before you defend Leopard’s tragic column by reminding me it’s just a joke: as a joke-teller often enough myself I prefer to be laughed with, not at! But is Leopard too out-of-it to appreciate that unsubtle difference?’

Lance Leopard and his mother Carmel Pierce unexpectedly left the room this month. They died in a house fire in Brisbane. If there was ever a way to win an argument, that would have to be it. But that wasn’t Lance Leopard’s style. He had no need to skewer the world’s Everlywilsons because, like the Beverly Hillbillies, they did that themselves.

Instead, Lance knew what Jean Houston knew, which is that at the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities. He embodied the idea queer thinker Michael Warner spoke of, which is that we can build and inhabit a counterpublic, a kind of circus, be it an LGBT publication or a community, a club and/or a family, and our experience of the magic therein sets us free.

Warner put it this way, in his book Publics and Counterpublics: ‘It is often thought, especially by outsiders, that the public display of private matters is a debased narcissism, a collapse of decorum, expressivity gone amok, the erosion of any distinction between public and private, but in a counter-public setting, such display often has the aim of transformation.’

Vale, Carmel Pierce. Vale, Marcus Pierce, known to us as Lance. He was the columnist every editor dreams of: charming, clever and twisted. A gentleman magician with a Royal Flush.

Photos: Lance Leopard (above) out and about with Lolita 2000. Pic courtesy of Lolita 2000.

Archive material courtesy of Sydney Star Observer.