Mick Hartley

We heard about the late drag queen Darren Moore a couple of years back, after he was found dead on a back street in Cardiff.

On January 23, drag queen Aida H. Dee, the stage name of performer Sab Samuel, announced on Facebook that he was fundraising for the funeral costs of Darren Moore, a fellow drag queen.

“Taken unjustly!” Samuel wrote in his post. “I’d like to help give my friend the send off he deserves,” he wrote, providing the link to a GoFundMe campaign for Moore and affixing to the post a photo of Moore and his husband.

But what Samuel neglected to mention was that Moore is a convicted child sex offender.

Moore, 39, was found dead in full drag costume on the streets of Cardiff City Centre on the morning of 22 January. Previously known as Darren Sewell, Moore was convicted of four counts of rape on a boy under the age of 14 while living in South Wales. As a result, he spent 3 years in a Young Offenders’ Institution.

It gets worse. There’s now been an inquest, and it’s, um,… .not very nice. A dog was involved. Sexually. Jo Bartosch, at Spiked:

When the entertainer’s body was found in an alleyway in Cardiff city centre in January 2023, his death prompted a frenzy of speculation. The BBC ran multiple pieces on the investigation and even covered a vigil held at Windsor Place, Cardiff.

‘It’s rocked the community, that’s all I can say, no one’s safe anywhere’, his friend, Richard Smith, told a BBC reporter. Drag performer Myky Webb warned it was ‘very worrying for Cardiff as a city and for queer people in Cardiff on the scene, to think that this kind of thing still happens in 2023’. Rob Llewelyn said he had watched Moore sing in Cardiff over the past 20 years. ‘Everyone in the gay community knew him, he was just liked by everyone’, Llewelyn said.

The unspoken assumption in the BBC’s reporting was clear: that the dead gay man, who was found in a luminous green dress, blonde wig and diamante heels, had been the victim of a hate crime. Amid the public outpouring, popular children’s drag entertainer Aida H Dee helped raise funds for Moore’s funeral. On the day of the funeral, Cardiff Council and the police went so far as to close roads across the city to accommodate a horse-drawn cortège.

Now, two years on, an inquest has revealed the truth about Moore’s death. And it is grisly. The coroner ruled that this, er, beloved pillar of the community might have died from an allergy to dog semen. I don’t think I have ever written a sentence as grotesque….

As no one in recorded history has died from dog ejaculate, it was not possible for the coroner to confirm that this was definitely Moore’s cause of death. Nonetheless, he found that he was not able to rule out the dog’s semen – and Moore’s allergy to dogs – as a possibility. The official cause of death was registered as ‘sudden death in a man with bronchial asthma in the cold who had consumed alcohol and in a temporal association with sexual activity including intercourse with a dog’.…

Today, drag has become a media shorthand for virtue, a glittery stand-in for ‘British values’, and nowhere more so than at the BBC. As spiked has noted before, the corporation has developed a curious fixation on this genre of performance. It churns out a steady stream of stories about drag-queen story hours, drag workshops and drag ‘educators’, as if these niche entertainers were a cornerstone of British cultural life rather than a small subculture, which most of the gay men I know consider somewhat embarrassing. It is hard not to view the prominence given to these diversity divas as part of an agenda. The BBC uses drag not only to entertain, but also to educate and inform licence-paying plebs about the correct opinions.

The trouble is, once any group is treated as above criticism, journalism slides into propaganda. It leads the likes of the BBC to pretend that a man becomes virtuous simply because he’s gay, or because he wears heels and dies relatively young. The sanctification of drag queens is barking mad.

Will the BBC be reporting on this latest development in the tragic Darren Moore saga? Perhaps not…

Added, from Reduxx:

The Daily Star reports that the police inquest resulted in a statement made by the last man to have seen Moore alive that night. The man, who remains anonymous, told law enforcement that he had been walking his dog in the early hours of the morning when he was approached by Moore, who solicited him for sexual activity.

The man accompanied Moore to the car park, but said he “lost interest” when Moore began to engage in intercourse with his dog. The witness told police that his dog had tried to join in, though he had tried to “shoo” the animal away. However, Moore took it upon himself to participate in bestiality.

He said: “Who would think somebody wants to have sex with a dog but apparently he did. I was told to leave him be. Because it was consensual and desired, I let him do what he was asked to do.

“I had never seen something like that before. I could have stopped it and I should have stopped it but I didn’t.”

DNA tests conducted during the inquest revealed “human and non-human” semen inside Moore’s body, with the “non-human” semen matching the DNA of the witness’ dog. Moore was known to have an allergy to dogs, prompting coroner David Regan to explore a “pathological relation with sudden death potentially arising from the dog semen.”