Don't You Want Me Baby

Brighton's "King of the Fringe" contest with "Estuarine Eddie" aka our Caroline Osella

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I’ve had a thing for drag kings ever since I saw Elvis Herselvis play Ernest Borgnine in San Francisco’s Sick and Twisted Players’ 1994 production of “Poseidon Adventure”—complete with extra-large gap between her teeth and her wife, Linda, played by a blow-up doll.

For many, “drag kings” isn’t even a familiar term, but women dressing as men is as time-honored a tradition as the more flamboyant reverse. From Athena disguised as various men in The Odyssey to Shakespeare’s Portia in The Merchant of Venice—not to mention Barbara Streisand’s Yentl and Glenn Close’s Albert Nobbs—people have been proving for millennia Rupaul’s timeless wisdom: “We’re all born naked, and the rest is just drag!”

So sit back, relax, and let “Estuarine Eddie” serenade you to that quintessential 80s new wave throwback with spurned stalker vibes—“Don’t You Want Me”—from the King of the Fringe festival in Brighton, UK.

Don’t You Want Me, Baby? 

by

Caroline Osella

of

Rewilded Anthropologist

---

I hear the opening bars, grab my cock in my hand and bound onstage, all energy and defiance. 

“You were working as a waitress in a cocktai-ail ba-ar…” The crowd know the song, doesn't matter if it’s the original or the remake - it’s a song that all the generations know. This is, of course, why I chose it. That and the chorus, of course. Perfect for a gay bar shout-along. 

The vest is mine, the underpants too, the cock - well I suppose it’s mine. I bought it. I hope the crowd get the joke that the pants are Calvin Klein with a lurex waistband and don’t think I actually wear this kind of underwear in real life.

I’m Estuarine Eddie right now, and he’s a wannabe flash bastard. Genuine schneid from the market and a bottle of Disaronno hidden in the pocket for the ladeez. The beard feels good and I know it looks good, too. Real. It gives me an absurdly exaggerated sense of confidence. 

Eddie onstage at Brighton’s (UK) 'King of the Fringe' drag king competition

My outfit is carefully folded over a chair, stage left. I’ve practiced this reverse strip so many times now, but still, I’m aware that it needs split-second timing if the dressing and the lip-sync are to work with the music. The shirt cuffs have been an ongoing problem and I thought of cutting them off, but in the end, I’ll be leaving them unbuttoned. Nobody will notice, once that sharp jacket goes on. I know that I need to get to that last chorus just as I’m doing my tie up, with a casually violent gesture suggestive of strangulation. I’m sober as an athlete and high as fuck right now.

I pick out one of the women near the front, come right upstage, give her my best lascivious sneer of macho contempt and thrust myself at her while we all yell, “Don’t you want me, baby?” 

We’re playing, we’re all playing, we all bloody well know she doesn’t want me - or the persona I am right here - and that my question is at once a commentary on toxic masculinity and also a lament for all the failed pickups that all the queers in this room have themselves made down the years. 

Right here, with this stage and this song, we’re doing therapy. Mine. And theirs.

No need for a shower- quick squirt of deo should do it for Eddie

Caroline Osella

BIO:

I grew up on a council estate in Medway, UK and have been as bent as a 9-bob note since 1971 - dashing in and out of the closet several times. 

I spent 20 years as an academic social anthropologist, researching and teaching across topics from migration, religion, sex/gender and (an enduring obsession) how societies perceive differences - and then (re-)produce and naturalise them as social hierarchies. 

The 1970s and 1980s offered few words, little community, no internet - and plenty of stigma. It was sometimes a miserable moment. The 1990s allowed me to come to terms with my own singularity as a manifestation of being non-binary, queer and a bit neurospicy.

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