As You Are When the Autobus Calls

Sophie Howe

Sketch of the Elsa Maxwell by Emersyn Stevens

Introduction

I wish an introduction to Diana Souhami’s work was not needed, meaning that in an ideal world, it was required reading. As I’m compiling the work of writers, artists, and academics to share with my younger sisters as they grow up, Souhami’s No Modernism Without Lesbians is at the forefront of this curriculum. Her compendium of lesbians is an expansive education of the queer figures who shaped and supported culture, each other, and the future of the arts in the early 1900’s.

Among these figures is Elsa Maxwell, the gossip columnist, who alongside her long term partner, Dorothy Fellowes-Gordon, hosted the legendary ‘as you were when the autobus called’ parties that inspired this story. Maxwell invented the scavenger hunt, planned parties for Jackie Kennedy, and ‘turned partygiving into an art form and profession.' [1] Her article for Vogue, ‘The Secret to Hosting a Party for the Ages,’ originally printed in 1930 was republished by the magazine in 2023. Her advice — which we might all do well to heed in a time where connection and community is maybe the only thing we can rely on — is best summed up by this excerpt:

The making of a successful party is like the baking of a wonderful soufflé: the ingredients and proportions must be weighed and measured by the hand of an artist, should be taken out of the oven at exactly the psychological moment, and served hot. [2]

She is opulent in both her writing and her partygiving, which at the time was rebellious by virtue of her open resistance to patriarchal control. Her position in society allowed space for others to express themselves in whatever fashion they deemed appropriate.

I received some important feedback when I first wrote this piece while in my third year of university at Goldsmiths, University of London. One of my tutors, Dr. Sonya Dyer asked: why, in contemporary London, are these queer parties underground? I believe what she was wondering was: am I fabricating a fear that is no longer necessary? I wanted to carefully consider her suggestion, and I believe that instead of the secrecy of these parties representing a need to hide, they represent a desire to hide. Maxwell’s parties were private but they were not hidden. She detailed them in Vogue, after all! The safety that exclusion provided also propagated a sense of mystery, revelry, and wonder. It goes without saying that queer joy is not always possible, and safety is not always guaranteed. I understand why Maxwell was selective with her guests (they should be selected for their ‘human attributes’) [3]. I understand why my characters want to partake in debauchery behind locked warehouse doors.

Currently, it’s hard for anything surrounding pure celebration to not feel frivolous and distasteful. I don’t have an answer for how to contend with this. But I do know that as queer histories are being erased and ignored, I want to remember that at the heart of Maxwell’s parties was a desire to bring people together during a time of deep suffering. Her parties were a way of conjuring the stuff of fairytales, which I explore in a riff on Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia manifesting in the mode of the festival. This encourages my characters to consider that even in our wildest dreams and our most extravagant literary fantasies, we’re still limited by institutions (of magic schools, of militaries, of hospitals, of etiquette). When I couldn’t find a way around this while writing, I realized it wasn’t a content issue but a form issue. The only way to tackle this is through the deconstruction (or creation) of language almost to the point of confusion and nonsense. A homotopia is not simply a queer utopia but a kind of fantastical space where the absurd, abstract, and inexplicable become a form of resistance against institutions. We can’t escape the constraints of living — even at a party — but we also can’t forget how to celebrate and who to thank for inviting and encouraging lesbian merriment.

As You Are When the Autobus Calls

Until your first night, you’d never been to a party before. These nights, if you’re lucky, like the first one, have an iteration of cointreau, gin, and methylene blue. So Void-like, so fittingly blue, everything including your teeth and hers. It was an entrance, an interface, between your old life and what was to come.

That first one you’d dressed up for, (not so obviously as Clare-Louise in her double Gluck Medallion face or Erik in his silk dressing gown) you’d worn a tank to show off the new creeping vine around your growing bicep and a carabiner clipped to your belt loop. As if you’d do any climbing tonight. She’d worn a corduroy dress and clogs that plausibly she’d been lounging in before the bus called. Now you know better: you know to come as you are when the autobus calls.

When the hired bus arrives to pick you up, you’re baking a raspberry cake. Your apron is covered in white particles and red juice. Your skin is protected, but the cotton fabric tied in a bow above your lower back is shifting your body towards a feminine form you wouldn’t normally exhibit in the company of others.

The bus is already full, and there are at least four more buses making their way around London, stopping in Peckham and New Cross, steering clear of the City. There’s been a hold up somewhere around Tower Hamlets. The bus is now making its way to an undisclosed location. You’re grateful it’s the early evening because last time, the party started in a cold warehouse at 5am, hours before you’d normally get out of bed or ever want to see so many people.

Tonight we’re traveling on the bus as it passes Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping. We don’t stop when Clare-Louise spills her violet cocktail down her white dress and vomits on the floor beside her grandfather. We don’t stop when the light turns red, we don’t stop when a fox runs in the road, we don’t stop for fear of stopping. We must drive on. There is the discotheque fish by Waterloo, there is bad Tesco, there is the block of flats where you loved someone a long time ago. There, far out of town are the fairgrounds, these marvellous empty sites on the outskirts of cities that...what? Teem? Once or twice a year with stands, displays, heteroclite objects, wrestlers, snake[people] fortune-tellers, and so forth. [4]

You thank the driver, who tips his hat at you.

It wouldn’t be a night like this unless something was served hot! with a wink and a finger snap. It wouldn’t be a party unless there was unholy laughter, and careful studied effects that appear to just happen. Effortless and cool, you’ll study these tactics, and ingest them for later use. What is a party but an overload of intelligence, an opportunity to learn how to get people to like you?

You see her across the room. You’ve never seen her outside of this artificial light. You never get her number, or her real name. You’ve never been on the same bus, so you must not live in the same borough. She could live anywhere. As you get closer, you eye her half-finished tattoos falling out of her. You hope to catch them in the air around you, in the flaking of her skin.

“Oh, the baker’s here,” she says, dusting some flour off your thigh.

What is ‘correct attire’ and true appearance? Who is the real person, unmasked? [5] Is she more real with her tattoos disappearing as she’s allowing you to know her through this transitory process? Is it possible to keep them in her skin? If you held her arm forever would the hollybush grow stronger? You’ll try, but first...

“Please welcome VERMIN SUPREME and Newt Gingrich to the stage!” Which is not a stage, but a space we clear on the dance floor to watch the re-imagined politicians battle it out as beautiful drag queens. They are the only ones allowed to prepare in advance. They know when the next party is starting before the last one even ends. VERMIN is shimmering green, convulsing on the floor. Newt has recently been rejecting the amphibious references, and taking her pick of the woodland creatures. VERMIN wins the lip-synch battle, and you excuse yourself to the bathroom.

When you get through the door, you’re sucked into a conversation by the stalls about sensitive auras. Someone looks at you and says, “Oh, you must be an empath,” and you have enough heart to tell her no. As you wait, the conversation drifts the way it always does:

“Why are we here? Who invited us? What is the link that draws us all together?”

A man in a cowhide jacket says he’s recently read an archived Vogue article, “The Secret To Hosting A Party For The Ages” written by the gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell. He’d heard rumours of these illicit high-society queer parties in the early 1900’s where you’d come as you are when the autobus called.

“So someone’s recreating these parties? But why? And who?” asks a voice from a stall.

“I don’t know. It could be any of you.”

“Yes, but why would I invite you? I don’t like you very much.”

“Double bluff.”

“Cheap shot.”

“What if it’s one of those murder mystery parties?”

“They’re playing the long game then, because it’s been years of monotonous parties,” you say, surprising yourself. You thought you had been running out of words.

“Monotonous? There are koi fish swimming in a tank suspended from the ceiling.”

“There are beekeepers on hire who can sting you to alleviate arthritic pain.”

“There’s an esteemed synchronised swim instructor auctioning off private classes if you win the kissing contest.”

You’re a collector, eavesdropper and plagiariser and you can’t do the rest of the night on your own. You need something lyrical, contradictory, maybe gossipy, contemporary, disgusting. Something of somebody else’s that you can repeat when you don’t know what to say. You won’t spread any salacious rumours unless you absolutely have to.

“Don’t get me wrong, they’re astounding parties. Better than anything I could ever throw but they’re monotonous because nothing new ever happens. We have the politicians, and we have the heartbreak, and the opulence and the knock-out performances and then we go home and live our lives until we’re picked up by the bus again.”

You lock yourself in a stall. You aren’t able to pee until luckily a voice starts to hum and the acoustics of the tiled bathroom fill with a cavernous resonance. If you were allowed your phone inside the venue you could look up Elsa Maxwell and gain some clarity. The coterie of six, including you, head to a table ornamented with steaming soufflés, alternating between savoury and sweet eggs.

“Did you make these?” someone asks, and you think: why on earth would I have made these? You remember your apron. She finds you again and joins the conversation. She brushes off Elsa Maxwell. She’s been formulating her own theories since the first party she attended.

“Why have you never thought about why you were invited? Were you just happy to have been included? Did you just think you were special?” she wonders. So many times she’d been on the autobus, and a different person had looked out of the window and said these exact words:

“There, far out of town are the fairgrounds, these marvellous empty sites on the outskirts of cities that...what? Teem? Once or twice a year with stands, displays, heteroclite objects, wrestlers, snake[people] fortune-tellers, and so forth,” with the same glazed eyes and faux-curious cadence. She’d found it in a Foucault transcript and memorised the text.

“If he’s describing the heterotopias, then whoever’s doing all this is attempting the homotopia.” She squeezes your waist. She whispers that she wants to go to the bathroom with you, but you’ve just been.

“Who cares?” she hisses in your ear.

The bathroom is empty and you kiss her finally. It’s been months since the last party.

“I don’t...what are heterotopias?”

“You’re asking the wrong question,” she says. “You should be asking: ‘what are 

homotopias?’ Heterotopias are worlds within worlds, mirroring and upsetting what is outside. Heterotopias are time in the mode of the festival.”

“So this is a fantasy brought to life? How strange that in the imagined lands of science fiction and fantasy, we picture schools, prisons, care homes and parties to be the same as the ones we have ourselves?”

“That’s why I’m saying that this is a homotopia. It has hardly anything to do with being gay and everything to do with the unexpected.”

“But this is so normal. We stay in this realm, and we drink ‘til we’re sick and confess our love for each other and eat hors d'oeuvres and throw punches.”

She scrunches up her face in disgust. “You’re amazing on a sentence level but you’re all words. I'm so sick of you.”

She pushes you away with her palm on your chest. You have no choice but to follow her out. You don’t call after her. You don’t understand. All she had come up with was a play on words, and she was mad at you for your sentence structure? You return to the group you met before, who are still by the soufflés.

“Something’s happening!” says a woman with a snakebite, and a man appears from a glass door, capturing the attention of only a handful of guests.

He brandishes a piece of fabric like he’s shooing a fly. A dozen people follow, pushing trolleys with hot plates shrouded in shiny metal lids. The man with the fabric asks for a volunteer.

“You’re wearing an apron. Perfect for the blindfold taste test,” says the man in the cowhide, shoving you forward. You stumble, leaving a dusting of flour in your wake.

“Welcome,” says the fabric man, and swiftly covers your eyes. Without eyesight, the sound of the bees becomes louder than any voices in the crowd. You wonder where she’s gone, if she’s dared to leave the party before it’s ended, or if she’s watching you. You’re offering yourself up to the night, believing that you’ll do anything anyone asks. Your indecision is often misperceived as a cool elusivity. When you’d first met, she’d said it was one of the things she’d found most attractive about you. At a party so cybernetic and self-referential, you weren’t afraid to not contribute anything at all to the conversation. Until tonight, when you’d taken a shot at assertion. Now, in front of everyone, you want to show her just how vapid and vacant you are.

“Open your mouth,” the man beside you says, “tongue and all.”

You hope this morning you’d scrubbed your tastebuds clean, that they are not white and dry. First you taste plastic, but when the spoon is flipped over, it’s just couscous and peppers. You chew and swallow.

“Do I have to guess or something?” you ask.

“No, just eat. You looked hungry.”

What a stupid show, you think, as salmon roe, sesame crackers, cheese and dill permeate your senses. Why are you so certain this is what you’re eating? Does something become something by taste, or by sight? If you taste it and recognise it, but your optic nerves and recognition skills are hinting elsewhere, who or what do you trust? You want to yawn but your mouth is full.

“Is anyone watching?” you whisper, and the man nods so close to you that you can feel it.

“Full house, baby.”

It’s as if in the face of revelry ancient rituals regain their meaning. In this certain space, the observance of ceremony becomes tantamount to doing drugs in the bathroom. You now dislike that you’re the vessel for this. You were caught off guard first in your apron in your kitchen, and that catapulted you onto this make-shift stage. You’d rather be the imaginary fly swatted by the fabric.

The blindfold is taken off. Nobody was watching you after all. The man urges you to bow. The party must be ending soon, but you’re never sure how long they last. With your ears still heightened, you slink through the party. Someone compliments the tattoo on your arm. You nod. It is not just a vine but a creeping root stalk. Sometimes they grow upwards, but they also move horizontally.

You follow a pattern in the black chequerboard floor tiles that brings you to the kissing competition. Contestants have to prove they provide the best mouthfeel, according to a woman smoking a cigar and leaning against a photobooth. Ew, you think, but you wait til the cigar is lingering in her hand and you plant a horizontal kiss on her full and wrinkled lips.

“Jesus Christ! Not with me!” she shoves you away, laughing.

Cigar breath is nicer than expected. Someone firmly grabs your shoulder in a way that you like, that feels like the beginning of a sequence of movements. You turn around to face them, this person who looks much like you do, minus the apron. They look better than you, and this makes you like them.

“I won the last competition,” they say, “so if you want to enter you have to get through me first.”

You kiss, wondering how anyone else outside the kiss can experience the mouthfeel of two people in competition with each other.

“I surrender, you win,” they say, and the cigar woman nods in agreement. You wouldn’t mind kissing that person longer, but something is missing, a warmth that you’d had earlier in the night.

“You understand what happens if you win, right?” asks the woman with the cigar.

You nod, because you’d already heard about the esteemed synchronised swimmer. A young man raises his hand and is selected next. You’ve never kissed a man, and it doesn’t unlock anything inside you. You win again, and kiss another man, and another, and then a girl with a long braid and you find yourself once again, bored.

“I forfeit,” you say, but the old woman clucks her tongue.

“You should’ve read the rules of the game before you entered. No forfeiting. You kiss until you lose.”

You start to argue, because someone had surrendered minutes ago, but someone named Yvette comes over, and says “I’m Yvette,” and she uses too much tongue, but when she pulls away you realise it’s because she’s split hers in two. You lose count of how many people you kiss, until finally, the cigar is dead. You can stop. You’d once thought exhibitionists were people who worked at galleries, and sometimes that is true, but gradually as the night goes on, you’ve taken on the attitude of someone who wants a lot from other people.

“Do I get a prize?”

The old woman closes her eyes. “Too many salacious rumours for my liking around here. Follow me.”

She takes you to the kitchen, and sits on the industrial counter. She pats on the surface, inviting you to join. You hop up beside her and she takes your hand, patting it gently.

“These parties don’t have to be secret anymore like they were years ago.”

You wait patiently for her to speak more, for her to conjure up a ghost or an ancient text, or for her to tell you more about her history. She knows you’ve spent all your words for the night, and you have a feeling she has too. She doesn’t take your temperature or ask if you’ve had too much to drink, or if you need a snack. This woman doesn’t seem the type to be under an illusion of romance. The unnamed girl was the first consistent relationship you’d managed since that person you’d loved in that block of flats years ago, but it wasn’t much of a relationship because it relied on half-truths and was reliable only in the mode of the festival. You won’t speak about it to anyone. You don’t really want to admit how easily unravelled your connection was once you got talking grammar.

The kitchen staff label plastic containers, wipe down surfaces, and switch off the lights. You wait in the dark, happy to witness a logical, sober routine. If you get sick of the celebrations one day, you might let something slip so you get off the list, swapping your merriments for theirs. You wonder if that’s the only way out: spreading the invite like a virus. You could ask the woman beside you if that’s how you’re able to leave: by moving on and letting someone else take your place. It’s not that complicated though. You can just not get on the bus one day. That’s why the woman took you back here to the kitchen, to have you sit with your foolish, hopeful imagination. There was never any esteemed synchronised swim instructor, there was never a sacrificial offering to a higher power. You just got to kiss some people. Now, you get to enjoy a moment away from the chaos.

Endnotes

[1] Souhami, 2020, p.6

[2] Maxwell, 2023

[3] Maxwell, 2023

[4] Foucault and Miskowiec, 1984

[5] Souhami, 2020, p.6

References

Souhami, D. (2020). No Modernism Without Lesbians. London: Head Of Zeus.

Foucault, M. and Miskowiec, J. (1984). Des Espace Autres (Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias). Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité , [online] p.7. Available at: https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf [Accessed 30 Dec. 2025].

Maxwell, E. (2023). The Secret to Hosting a Party for the Ages, According to Jackie Kennedy and Wallis Simpson’s Party Planner Elsa Maxwell. [online] Vogue. Available at: https://www.vogue.com/article/elsa-maxwell-how-to-host-a-party-essay [Accessed 30 Dec. 2025].

Sophie Howe (she/her) is a writer based in Brooklyn. Most recently, she has been published by Polyester Zine and Whitehot Magazine

Emersyn Stevens is on Instagram as @irisheggsbennie