Ellis is moving to London. Amidst her panicking and packing, she falls into a fretful sleep. Suddenly, Mia and Finlay are with her. Turns out they’re the gods of Sapphic desire, summoned to needful people confronting things they can’t cope with, to help and heal. But Ellis doesn’t have anything she needs to deal with. Does she?

Diary of a Gay Disaster is a glorious musical romp of a show. It’s also an astute, very funny script that risks wrenching your heart out and wringing it dry before returning it. Mia (Talya Soames) and Finlay (Kip Jackson) are determined to help Ellis (Rachael Mailer) face her demons so they present her with her diary, to try and figure out what’s bothering her so they can prescribe a solution. We flip back to various gay disasters that have unfolded through their respective formative years, all comically empathetic judging from how much this audience enjoyed them.

Mailer’s writing is sharply observed, perfectly willing to laugh at the community clichés, and is often painfully close to the bone, encapsulated in the poppy, bop-able, ‘Is She Queer Or is She a Hipster?’ When they’re not making you weep for her characters, her songs are infectiously anthemic. ‘Everybody wants to be Gay’, the final rallying cry, is full of optimism but shot through with the same wistfulness that makes this show so endearing.

But above all, what makes these so-called disasters a treat is the production’s sincere certainty that this community needs to be seen. Needs to be taken seriously. And needs to feel safe. It’s just over twenty years since Section 28 was repealed and in some respects, we’ve come a long way. In others (note Mailer’s mischievously spiky lyric, ‘but which bathroom do you pee in?’), we still have hundreds of miles to go.

Diary of a Gay Disaster is at Underbelly Cowgate – Belly Button until Sun 25 Aug 2024 at 22:10