AUCKLAND’S FIRST DRAG STAR: THE FABULOUS NOEL MCKAY

God, you wouldn’t want to have lived in 1950s Auckland. It was dull, dark and frightening; a city so repressed and constrained that the only glimmer of hope was when Rock Around The Clock opened at the Regent Theatre. It was like lightening had struck Queen St and opened a chasm of hope for the future. The movie was banned for months as the censors pored over the implications of freeing up the spirits and bodies of young teens. This was a country where virginity was supposedly sacrosanct; where sex and sexuality was simply not discussed; where if you were not married by 21, there was something seriously wrong with you; where people were hung in Mount Eden Prison at 6am on a Friday and buried within the prison walls; where the lights in the city were turned off at midnight.

Queen St on a Friday night did show some energy when groups known as widgies and bodgies came in from the outer suburbs and paraded their flash new clothes in the two milk bars, but by 9pm they had roared off to somewhere distant like Mount Roskill or Henderson, the shops