There’s a performer I’ve enjoyed over the years in London by the name of Jackie Clune. Around five years ago, I used to go with my lesbian friends to a trendy mixed bar in Islington (Tuesdays: wimmin only) and watch her sing Karen Carpenter songs in a subversively innocent way. A gifted physical clown and a great mimic, she got the voice and the attitude perfectly, but with an undertone that was seriously fucked, and hysterically funny. In the finest traditions of drag acts, where adoration is ritualised, she made an icon of Karen; while we all sang along in gleeful harmony, the bright wide smile and the stylised tilt of the head parodied her to a sacrilegious degree. Devotion and send up – that’s queer performance.

And now, there’s post-queer. Jackie’s moved on, in more ways than one. As well as establishing herself as a serious performer, acting in Eastenders and winning plaudits in her one-woman show about Julie Burchill, as well as presenting her own BBC London weekly radio show, she’s started going out with men.

Last weekend I saw her in a queer club, noted for its highly idiosyncratic performance art and naff quizzes and other groovy silliness (not to mention DJs who play classics from four decades with deliberate gaps between them, as if lining up the needle over the album track).

Before she came on, there was a natty 20-minute film being screened on a loop with subtitles, action men dolls, GIs getting it on with each other in a bunker, a surreal pisstake of hard-core scat porn. “If eating shit is wrong, I don’t want to be right” went the subtitles, as the B52s played, one action man squatting over another. It was chocolate mousse blown through a straw, apparently. Splat. Urgh. Yum.

This being London, the crowd didn’t pay much attention. And they more or less carried on talking though Jackie’s act, which annoyed me. It’s one thing being indifferent to a background screening on a dance-floor, another showing disrespect to a person on stage trying to entertain you. But I supposed it would have been uncool to shush them. Or, worse, chivalrous.

Chivalry wasn’t on my mind, though, as Jackie regaled us with her stories of relief that she’s no longer “stuck on the lesbian not-so-merry-go-round” but happily cock-hungry. There’s something wincingly foolhardy about a performer baring all against the tide; but the payoff can be worth it. However, it only works if there’s a consensus that post-modern non-humour is humorous, that mockery of human experience is witty, a posturing self-consciousness that’s very Foucauldian and dykey. That consensus was around in the nineties. However much it made my teeth grate, at least it was intelligent, at least it was challenging. Now that we’re in a new World Order, it seems that intelligence is going out of fashion.

Jackie likes playing with fire. She gave us a moving rendition of ‘Beautiful Man In A Wheelchair’, about a man she fell for – “You’re legless, you can always get it up/I widened my exits today/Please don’t ever walk away/My handicap is you”. She takes sacred cows and barbecues them for us, smacking her lips and calling them Daisy. I loved it and hated it in equal measure. Fantastic.

As she was doing her routine, joking about how her last lover was a camp gay man, the crowd carried on talking loudly at the back. She was spilling her seed on stony ground. I watched her dying on stage – a performer needs to be in control over their audience; when they’re not, then they’re going through the motions and wishing inside for it to be over as soon as possible.

As I was up close to her, I felt a mixture of things: admiration for her utter professionalism and style, curiosity about what it would be like having sex with her, and, oddly, moved by her isolation, both in the moment and culturally.

The queers could at least have taken her seriously, paid her the compliment of getting offended, attacking the renegade. The mistress of Easy Listening parody was, sadly, fully aware of the irony that the only thing her audience really wanted was a Karen Carpenter singalong. She politely gave us a Karen encore, and was gone, out of the building as soon as she possibly could.

I’m left very frustrated. There’s something flabby and complacent about the gay scene now. Or is that the way it is in the world in general? I’ve long disparaged the quality of print media available to the gay community, and believe that, because it’s funded by the sex industry, there isn’t the space for serious critical thought or reflection. And as I watched this fine humorist and critic fail to find the audience and reaction she deserved, in a club tailor-made for exactly her brand of intellectual challenge, I wondered if it’s terminal. Is the queer challenge dead?

Doris Lessing has written about the decay of the grand ideal of communism in the ’40s and ’50s, a movement that was dear to her heart because it originally attracted people who wanted a better world. She realised that it was dying when she noted that it was impossible to tell whether its internal commentators and critics were writing parody or pastiche or realism – it had got to the stage that a narrative could be interpreted however the reader intended. Somehow, the movement had lost its anchor in rooted human experience and principle, and was drifting along under a mysterious nauseating complacency, a sacrifice of gritty individual perspective for the cause, a queasy acquiescence to grubby power-broking materialistic realpolitik, a collective decision to not-think. I’m beginning to understand how she felt.