Julian Morris
IT’S A SIN
For five minutes last night I lamented my single state. This is after watching a doe eyed actor, playing an (unconvincing) vet, arriving at the door of his architect boyfriend to apologise for his philandering and offer to start again. Cut to them wandering London’s South Bank at sunset (‘What’s on at the NFT?’ “Taxi zum Klo”?). A jogger passes – as joggers tend to do in outdoors TV drama, where real people have been cleared out of the way to be replaced by extras (‘associate artistes’). Close up on the couple on a bench, with a final tight shot of their entwined hands as an orchestra surges. Gosh, I did enjoy ‘Man with an Orange Shirt.’ It’s gay with tasty lead actors who take their clothes off… Who wouldn’t want to settle down with Julian Morris, sad faced like the puppies he treats when he’s not on Grindr. I could have done with more of his veterinary work (I like work plays) but concede this wasn’t James Herriot. And realised I was much more interested in his Grindr life (Grufff, for some reason, in the drama) than the film makers. I remember my own pre-smartphone wanderings. Sitting by the pond on the edge of Hampstead Heath as light faded, a cheerful group of young queens passing me with the advice, ‘You won’t get anything sitting there, darling…’ I probably had about five years of this kind of occasional (mainly late night) promiscuity till the fear of AIDS and a sort of regular boyfriend (see ‘Joe’) put a stop to it. I’d leave London dinner parties early, like Julian Morris’ Adam, on an excuse to head off to some pick up spot. Or take a break on extended car journeys (John Major favoured The Happy Eater during this period) at bucolic spots like Ollerton forest in Nottinghamshire off the A1, or the powerfully disinfected – orgiastic - cottages on the A40 just short of Oxford: satisfaction guaranteed and all for free. There was no AA guide to these places, of course: you heard of them on the gay grapevine. But encounters could happen anywhere. I once picked up a bloke while I was shopping for shoes in Notting Hill Gate, seeing his reflection in the shop window behind me. We were behind the skip at the back of the shop – it was a Saturday afternoon – five minutes later.
The message of the film last night – unquestioned – was promiscuity bad/monogamy good. The desire for quick sex, knowing where it’s available, can be distracting, to say the least, though I note that it coincided with my busiest period as a playwright. But there are other forms of distraction of ‘the pram in the hall’ variety. Apart from in moments of what I like to think as weakness I’ve never fancied shared domesticity and the demands of a partner - let alone the misery of a break up. My priority has always been elsewhere. In ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ Beckett shows an old guy who ditched his love for futile scribbling. Always hard on himself, the author – as writers do – was drawing on his own experience, retreating into a world of silence at his little house at Ussy, 60 miles east of Paris, his wife and mistress and ‘normal’ human relations: friends, hangers on, and - for a number of years - the telephone. And in my own way, that’s the kind of deal I’ve made with the world, travelling around, the ‘house sitting’ ensuring I’m never too rooted. Is it a half life, I sometimes wonder? Is it worth it? I’m not Beckett - or Henry James (someone else I’ve written about). James felt towards the end of his life that he’d sacrificed too much to what he was able, with justification, to call his art, had ‘not dared fully to love.’ It’s the theme of his (bit too oblique) story ‘The Beast in the Jungle.’
But the Julian Morris character in ‘Orange Shirt’ gave me further pause for thought. Talking about the role, the actor said: ‘Shame causes him to repel any intimacy, and he seeks to punish himself through the sex he has. He’s banishing what’s beautiful about him - his need to love and be loved and he becomes his own oppressor.’
I was like a kid let loose in a sweet shop from the late Seventies on when I properly got going as a gay man but have slept (ziz-ziz) only on a handful of occasions for a whole night with a lover. In my early days up North I’d bring someone home after an evening at Sheffield’s only gay pub, ‘The Cossack’ and then, business over, bundle these slightly bemused, sometimes desirable chaps into a car to get them back to their generally unsuspecting families (or regular partners). There’s a brutally honest line from the poet Thom Gunn I like a lot: ‘But when I’ve had you once or twice I may not want you any more.’ Forget, in my case, about the twice. It wasn’t good manners and pretty indefensible behaviour, looking back. ‘And I need you more than want you. And I want you for all time’ - interesting lines from the Jimmy Webb masterpiece ‘Wichita Lineman’ (which I’ve been reminded of this week by the death of Glenn Campbell) realising I love the song but don’t really understand its sentiments. I’m more like that other Jimmy Webb character on his way to Phoenix. He knows she’s crying; he just doesn’t care – he’s on his way somewhere else. Well, I can’t be accused of sticking with or making false promises to anybody, though do remember one guy I liked saying, ‘Oh, I thought we’d got something going there…’ I also note, reading the obituary, that Campbell was married four times. What a mess, I can’t help thinking - meanly.
I’ve written a couple of plays about un-attached people, catching them in the process of moving on. I’ve not spotted the link before. They were both written during those kid in a sweetshop years. The first was called ‘Leaving.’ I remember spending a long time on it, my first attempt at a ‘big’ – statement – play. It was about a headmistress, based on real woman head, a bit of a star at a time before Academy schools and super ‘managerial’ types (now given gongs and paid shitloads). The real headmistress - the subject of an admiring Observer profile – had been quoted about her liking – need - for coming home each evening and shutting the door behind her. Though clearly a very attractive woman, she’d no husband or partner (still hasn’t, I gather - though I’ve never met her we now have friends in common). That stated preference of hers which, as a recent teacher, I concurred with was the basis for the play, set in one of the mining villages in South Yorkshire where I’d taught for seven years. My fictional head has a married, occasional lover, and – during the course of the play (somewhat wilfully I now think) - she decides to quit her job. I haven’t dared look at it for years: it was over-written, great long speeches and ‘argument.’ There was a girl called Kim in it, a fictional amalgam of a couple of ‘difficult’ girls I used to teach, who was being sexually exploited by her step-father. In an odd, pleasant, coincidence at the time the play was broadcast, I came across one of the girls on whom it was based. She’d spotted me at the ‘Salutation,’ the only gay disco in Sheffield, a barracks of a place way out of the centre of town, among the steelworks on the Rotherham Road. It was three years after I’d left full time teaching, ‘You’re here! I can’t believe it’. She looked at me, amazed (validated?) and was all over me, delighted. A young woman by then, no longer the scrawny teenager I’d taught, she was a bit pissed, and wanted to dance with her old teacher - which we did among all the mainly same-sex couples. In the same place, on another occasion, I also came across the female partner of a former (male) colleague. ‘Don’t tell him I’m here,’ she said.
I left the North because, among other things, I wanted more than ‘The Cossack’ and ‘Salutation.’ My main concern – work, again – was about losing my source material, mainly working class life and culture, and good contacts – as one of the relatively few writers in the area I could generally wangle my way into meeting folk whose stories interested me. What I wouldn’t be sorry to get away from was working class prejudice against gays – successfully and cheerfully handled recently in the feel-good film ‘Pride’ (it didn’t feel so good at the time). I also wanted to broaden my range as a writer -which happened.
A few years later, settled in London, there was one more play about an ambitious quitter (another woman but author in disguise), a journalist this time, on her way from her Sheffield newspaper to the BBC. It was called ‘Deadlines,’ a member of the cast providing the title: I’d worked with the actors on the research for the play – it was for the Royal Court and Joint Stock. Set at the time of the Miners’ Strike, it criss-crossed England, moving between the Party Conferences, TV and radio studios, newspaper newsrooms, to pit gates and council estates of the South Yorkshire I knew well. In the last scene of the play my reporter (pretty ruthless, looking back: I had warmer feelings about her when I wrote it) finds her way up onto a hillside outside the pit village where she was brought up, to interview a guy she knew at school who’s now living in a tent, a striking miner, his pit closed, his marriage having failed. The play was written rapidly, in six weeks, following a month’s period of research by me, the director and actors. The last (long) scene was written on the Saturday before rehearsals started on the Monday – I was in the zone, and near knackered by then – but knew, whatever the play’s demerits and strengths, I’d hit it with those last fifteen or so pages. The National Sound Archive recorded a live performance upstairs at the Court (because, I suppose, it was pertinent: ‘State of the Nation’) and I love the way the play settles at its end, resolves itself. I once went to the NSA to listen and particularly enjoyed – acoustically - the audience closely attending (I think) to that last scene.
I welcomed that freedom of being able to cut about – confidently - all over the place: London, Blackpool, South Yorkshire, indoors, outdoors – the Shakespearian method. I’ve never managed anything so panoramic since, and regret that. I’d learnt from my previous play at the Court to never allow never a play to settle into a predictable rhythm, advice given by the director Max Stafford Clark, who sugared it by telling me it he’d spotted the same problem with Caryl Churchill’s recent ‘Fen.’ His assistant, Danny Boyle, encouraging ‘Deadlines’ to be State of the Nation, gave the useful hint that, when you can, an indoor scene should be succeeded by an outdoor scene. I took a look again at Henry IV, which I’d acted at University (playing the aged king in Part Two: I was 19! - with the confidence of youth). I’ve never really gone back to the stage – or never succeeded - with a play which satisfies me. For me, there’s always that feeling, however nimble you are, that when you’ve got the characters on stage they have to stop there for a bit. I was just discovering the freedom and flexibility of film at that time and getting impatient with plays where the lights come up and you’re stuck with a set for however long, maybe with a few lighting changes and time shifts if you’re lucky: ‘The following morning’ etc… where Berta, the maid, brings in some flowers or removes a hat someone’s left behind before answering the door (people always popping in with good excuses) to an early visitor, a peripheral character we’ll call Mrs Elvsted (‘Is the Master not up yet?’) who’s come back for the hat and no doubt with some convenient information. Well, we don’t need to be so proscenium as Ibsen, a century ago, but I notice that all the young directors at the Court in my day - Danny Boyle, Antonia Bird, Simon Curtis - hot footed it to TV and film when they could.
Radio is even freer than film, outdoors blending into indoors instantly, with just an indicative change of acoustic. But what I most like is the intimacy of the single voice, that ear worm (‘authentic’/tell me a story) moving us on when needed, probably looking back - allowing a dual perspective on events (this is what it felt like then/this is what I know now). And radio is the medium for someone – like me, I’ve realised - who writes about loners. They’ve come from all over the place over the years - would-be policemen, priests, ex-choirboys or long distance walkers, and a whole assembly of artists and writers. Few are married, or if they are, you can be sure it’s not happily: Edith Wharton (marriage probably unconsummated – done her); Thomas Hardy (done him) and Tolstoy who left his wife the week he died (done him).
I’ve noted - but not written about – Ibsen. Towards his end, as he and his wife (hardly Darby and Joan) moved round Europe, he was plagued by sexual yearnings for a couple of young women: Hilde Wangel in ‘The Master Builder’ is straight from the life. And you don’t look to Chekhov, either, for descriptions of marital harmony. There is a good play to be written about the insufficiency of women to Chekhov. Not gay: I doubt if he would have known what to make of his near-contemporary Oscar Wilde. He used young (female) prostitutes a bit more tactfully than Oscar, contrived avoidable separations from several devoted female followers; didn’t succumb to marriage till he fell ill……and I’m instantly feeling better, with all these fine fellas and fellow writers, about my own commitment-phobia.
‘Man in an Orange Shirt’ concluded with an approved monogamous hand clasp, prefiguring (no doubt) a marriage. So that’s OK then. But I compare and contrast - amongst the celebrated - dear old Elton John and David Furnish with poor old George Michael. An acquaintance of mine once came back from Los Angeles in the early Nineties and said he’d had George in a sauna. We didn’t believe him till George was picked up by the police on the West Coast for cottaging a few years later, to everybody’s entertainment. Exposed (the Sun’s headline ‘Zip me up before you Go-Go’ should surely have read ‘Wank me off before you Go-Go’). George handled the furore of his outing triumphantly, which makes his final years a bit sad. Even with that example, when I think of what being gay is about I incline more to the George camp (so to speak), than Elton and David on the school run. I’d be rather tempted by the other dads at the school gates. I last picked up in a bar in Brighton twenty years ago – a guy whose name I don’t remember, though remember his age, 27, and that he was ginger. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ he said, coming over. And when I turned the drink down, ‘Don’t you fancy me?’ he said. He’d missed his last train home to a nearby town where he made industrial fridges. (‘Good job you didn’t end up in one,’ said a friend who I recounted this to, the way gays do). I walked the mile and a half with him back to where I was staying, rather than taking a taxi, sussing him out - I wasn’t quite sure about him. All came clear later. It was his first time. He’s the last guy I spent a night with (all night) – and my last night of that kind of casual sex, enjoyable enough for me to think that’s it, that’s enough. I was fifty. The fact that I was older, maybe looked reassuring, had probably made him come over to me. There were plenty others on a Saturday night in that seafront bar (‘He’ll do’) – was happy to oblige.
So have been mainly celibate for years. I notice monks feature in my plays, more than in everyday life. I visit a monastery annually, back up North, for what’s usually termed a ‘retreat’ but like to say to the brothers on my visits that I come for the company. Your fellow retreatants are often priests, and I met one some years ago – just short of Christmas we were the only two visitors. He was gay (he told me) and was having difficulty reconciling his sexuality with his faith. I kept in touch with him for a time afterwards by email and hadn’t realised quite how keen his conflict was till he mentioned that in the afternoons – free time at the monastery - he’d gone off to a nearby sauna for a bit of action (‘very lively. I recommend it..’) in between lunchtime Mass and evensong. He’d had ‘thousands’ of men he told me. It was clearly an addiction – but then I’ve read thousands of books.
I think the truth is I like our old outlaw status. Am a bit leery about our new respectability. It means I’ve some doubts, even, about the BBC’s Queer Britannia season – we’re gay/OK, part of the mainstream. Age of consent at 16, under John Major, civil partnerships in the Blair years, same sex marriage in Cameron’s – it’s been glorious to be alive, particularly from where I started. I remember, when we were rehearsing for the opening of ‘Deadlines’ in Sheffield, I noticed that there was a gay night at the big club over the road (– was it called the Fiesta? It advertised itself as the biggest club in Europe). I went over with one or two of the actors and we stood on a balcony looking down at a heaving dance floor: ‘It’s Raining Men’ the track. The disco was monthly, on Mondays. It looked as if half of the North – gay men and women – were there. It was 1985. Things were on the change. During my time a few years earlier in Sheffield there were battles with the City Council to get a non-commercial venue for our much less wild bops. We established one occasional spot, downstairs in the basement at the City Hall. Apart from that there was the one pub and one club (of happy memory). I left the area and came to London in the early Eighties. I wanted more; got it. And, towards the end of the decade, I went back again – where I can’t quite remember – some close to the Sheffield City centre night club. Again, thousands of gay men dancing (fewer women I think, this time; some separation having occurred) this time to the Pet Shop Boys ‘It’s a Sin.’ I miss its being a sin.
August 2017
For five minutes last night I lamented my single state. This is after watching a doe eyed actor, playing an (unconvincing) vet, arriving at the door of his architect boyfriend to apologise for his philandering and offer to start again. Cut to them wandering London’s South Bank at sunset (‘What’s on at the NFT?’ “Taxi zum Klo”?). A jogger passes – as joggers tend to do in outdoors TV drama, where real people have been cleared out of the way to be replaced by extras (‘associate artistes’). Close up on the couple on a bench, with a final tight shot of their entwined hands as an orchestra surges. Gosh, I did enjoy ‘Man with an Orange Shirt.’ It’s gay with tasty lead actors who take their clothes off… Who wouldn’t want to settle down with Julian Morris, sad faced like the puppies he treats when he’s not on Grindr. I could have done with more of his veterinary work (I like work plays) but concede this wasn’t James Herriot. And realised I was much more interested in his Grindr life (Grufff, for some reason, in the drama) than the film makers. I remember my own pre-smartphone wanderings. Sitting by the pond on the edge of Hampstead Heath as light faded, a cheerful group of young queens passing me with the advice, ‘You won’t get anything sitting there, darling…’ I probably had about five years of this kind of occasional (mainly late night) promiscuity till the fear of AIDS and a sort of regular boyfriend (see ‘Joe’) put a stop to it. I’d leave London dinner parties early, like Julian Morris’ Adam, on an excuse to head off to some pick up spot. Or take a break on extended car journeys (John Major favoured The Happy Eater during this period) at bucolic spots like Ollerton forest in Nottinghamshire off the A1, or the powerfully disinfected – orgiastic - cottages on the A40 just short of Oxford: satisfaction guaranteed and all for free. There was no AA guide to these places, of course: you heard of them on the gay grapevine. But encounters could happen anywhere. I once picked up a bloke while I was shopping for shoes in Notting Hill Gate, seeing his reflection in the shop window behind me. We were behind the skip at the back of the shop – it was a Saturday afternoon – five minutes later.
The message of the film last night – unquestioned – was promiscuity bad/monogamy good. The desire for quick sex, knowing where it’s available, can be distracting, to say the least, though I note that it coincided with my busiest period as a playwright. But there are other forms of distraction of ‘the pram in the hall’ variety. Apart from in moments of what I like to think as weakness I’ve never fancied shared domesticity and the demands of a partner - let alone the misery of a break up. My priority has always been elsewhere. In ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ Beckett shows an old guy who ditched his love for futile scribbling. Always hard on himself, the author – as writers do – was drawing on his own experience, retreating into a world of silence at his little house at Ussy, 60 miles east of Paris, his wife and mistress and ‘normal’ human relations: friends, hangers on, and - for a number of years - the telephone. And in my own way, that’s the kind of deal I’ve made with the world, travelling around, the ‘house sitting’ ensuring I’m never too rooted. Is it a half life, I sometimes wonder? Is it worth it? I’m not Beckett - or Henry James (someone else I’ve written about). James felt towards the end of his life that he’d sacrificed too much to what he was able, with justification, to call his art, had ‘not dared fully to love.’ It’s the theme of his (bit too oblique) story ‘The Beast in the Jungle.’
But the Julian Morris character in ‘Orange Shirt’ gave me further pause for thought. Talking about the role, the actor said: ‘Shame causes him to repel any intimacy, and he seeks to punish himself through the sex he has. He’s banishing what’s beautiful about him - his need to love and be loved and he becomes his own oppressor.’
I was like a kid let loose in a sweet shop from the late Seventies on when I properly got going as a gay man but have slept (ziz-ziz) only on a handful of occasions for a whole night with a lover. In my early days up North I’d bring someone home after an evening at Sheffield’s only gay pub, ‘The Cossack’ and then, business over, bundle these slightly bemused, sometimes desirable chaps into a car to get them back to their generally unsuspecting families (or regular partners). There’s a brutally honest line from the poet Thom Gunn I like a lot: ‘But when I’ve had you once or twice I may not want you any more.’ Forget, in my case, about the twice. It wasn’t good manners and pretty indefensible behaviour, looking back. ‘And I need you more than want you. And I want you for all time’ - interesting lines from the Jimmy Webb masterpiece ‘Wichita Lineman’ (which I’ve been reminded of this week by the death of Glenn Campbell) realising I love the song but don’t really understand its sentiments. I’m more like that other Jimmy Webb character on his way to Phoenix. He knows she’s crying; he just doesn’t care – he’s on his way somewhere else. Well, I can’t be accused of sticking with or making false promises to anybody, though do remember one guy I liked saying, ‘Oh, I thought we’d got something going there…’ I also note, reading the obituary, that Campbell was married four times. What a mess, I can’t help thinking - meanly.
I’ve written a couple of plays about un-attached people, catching them in the process of moving on. I’ve not spotted the link before. They were both written during those kid in a sweetshop years. The first was called ‘Leaving.’ I remember spending a long time on it, my first attempt at a ‘big’ – statement – play. It was about a headmistress, based on real woman head, a bit of a star at a time before Academy schools and super ‘managerial’ types (now given gongs and paid shitloads). The real headmistress - the subject of an admiring Observer profile – had been quoted about her liking – need - for coming home each evening and shutting the door behind her. Though clearly a very attractive woman, she’d no husband or partner (still hasn’t, I gather - though I’ve never met her we now have friends in common). That stated preference of hers which, as a recent teacher, I concurred with was the basis for the play, set in one of the mining villages in South Yorkshire where I’d taught for seven years. My fictional head has a married, occasional lover, and – during the course of the play (somewhat wilfully I now think) - she decides to quit her job. I haven’t dared look at it for years: it was over-written, great long speeches and ‘argument.’ There was a girl called Kim in it, a fictional amalgam of a couple of ‘difficult’ girls I used to teach, who was being sexually exploited by her step-father. In an odd, pleasant, coincidence at the time the play was broadcast, I came across one of the girls on whom it was based. She’d spotted me at the ‘Salutation,’ the only gay disco in Sheffield, a barracks of a place way out of the centre of town, among the steelworks on the Rotherham Road. It was three years after I’d left full time teaching, ‘You’re here! I can’t believe it’. She looked at me, amazed (validated?) and was all over me, delighted. A young woman by then, no longer the scrawny teenager I’d taught, she was a bit pissed, and wanted to dance with her old teacher - which we did among all the mainly same-sex couples. In the same place, on another occasion, I also came across the female partner of a former (male) colleague. ‘Don’t tell him I’m here,’ she said.
I left the North because, among other things, I wanted more than ‘The Cossack’ and ‘Salutation.’ My main concern – work, again – was about losing my source material, mainly working class life and culture, and good contacts – as one of the relatively few writers in the area I could generally wangle my way into meeting folk whose stories interested me. What I wouldn’t be sorry to get away from was working class prejudice against gays – successfully and cheerfully handled recently in the feel-good film ‘Pride’ (it didn’t feel so good at the time). I also wanted to broaden my range as a writer -which happened.
A few years later, settled in London, there was one more play about an ambitious quitter (another woman but author in disguise), a journalist this time, on her way from her Sheffield newspaper to the BBC. It was called ‘Deadlines,’ a member of the cast providing the title: I’d worked with the actors on the research for the play – it was for the Royal Court and Joint Stock. Set at the time of the Miners’ Strike, it criss-crossed England, moving between the Party Conferences, TV and radio studios, newspaper newsrooms, to pit gates and council estates of the South Yorkshire I knew well. In the last scene of the play my reporter (pretty ruthless, looking back: I had warmer feelings about her when I wrote it) finds her way up onto a hillside outside the pit village where she was brought up, to interview a guy she knew at school who’s now living in a tent, a striking miner, his pit closed, his marriage having failed. The play was written rapidly, in six weeks, following a month’s period of research by me, the director and actors. The last (long) scene was written on the Saturday before rehearsals started on the Monday – I was in the zone, and near knackered by then – but knew, whatever the play’s demerits and strengths, I’d hit it with those last fifteen or so pages. The National Sound Archive recorded a live performance upstairs at the Court (because, I suppose, it was pertinent: ‘State of the Nation’) and I love the way the play settles at its end, resolves itself. I once went to the NSA to listen and particularly enjoyed – acoustically - the audience closely attending (I think) to that last scene.
I welcomed that freedom of being able to cut about – confidently - all over the place: London, Blackpool, South Yorkshire, indoors, outdoors – the Shakespearian method. I’ve never managed anything so panoramic since, and regret that. I’d learnt from my previous play at the Court to never allow never a play to settle into a predictable rhythm, advice given by the director Max Stafford Clark, who sugared it by telling me it he’d spotted the same problem with Caryl Churchill’s recent ‘Fen.’ His assistant, Danny Boyle, encouraging ‘Deadlines’ to be State of the Nation, gave the useful hint that, when you can, an indoor scene should be succeeded by an outdoor scene. I took a look again at Henry IV, which I’d acted at University (playing the aged king in Part Two: I was 19! - with the confidence of youth). I’ve never really gone back to the stage – or never succeeded - with a play which satisfies me. For me, there’s always that feeling, however nimble you are, that when you’ve got the characters on stage they have to stop there for a bit. I was just discovering the freedom and flexibility of film at that time and getting impatient with plays where the lights come up and you’re stuck with a set for however long, maybe with a few lighting changes and time shifts if you’re lucky: ‘The following morning’ etc… where Berta, the maid, brings in some flowers or removes a hat someone’s left behind before answering the door (people always popping in with good excuses) to an early visitor, a peripheral character we’ll call Mrs Elvsted (‘Is the Master not up yet?’) who’s come back for the hat and no doubt with some convenient information. Well, we don’t need to be so proscenium as Ibsen, a century ago, but I notice that all the young directors at the Court in my day - Danny Boyle, Antonia Bird, Simon Curtis - hot footed it to TV and film when they could.
Radio is even freer than film, outdoors blending into indoors instantly, with just an indicative change of acoustic. But what I most like is the intimacy of the single voice, that ear worm (‘authentic’/tell me a story) moving us on when needed, probably looking back - allowing a dual perspective on events (this is what it felt like then/this is what I know now). And radio is the medium for someone – like me, I’ve realised - who writes about loners. They’ve come from all over the place over the years - would-be policemen, priests, ex-choirboys or long distance walkers, and a whole assembly of artists and writers. Few are married, or if they are, you can be sure it’s not happily: Edith Wharton (marriage probably unconsummated – done her); Thomas Hardy (done him) and Tolstoy who left his wife the week he died (done him).
I’ve noted - but not written about – Ibsen. Towards his end, as he and his wife (hardly Darby and Joan) moved round Europe, he was plagued by sexual yearnings for a couple of young women: Hilde Wangel in ‘The Master Builder’ is straight from the life. And you don’t look to Chekhov, either, for descriptions of marital harmony. There is a good play to be written about the insufficiency of women to Chekhov. Not gay: I doubt if he would have known what to make of his near-contemporary Oscar Wilde. He used young (female) prostitutes a bit more tactfully than Oscar, contrived avoidable separations from several devoted female followers; didn’t succumb to marriage till he fell ill……and I’m instantly feeling better, with all these fine fellas and fellow writers, about my own commitment-phobia.
‘Man in an Orange Shirt’ concluded with an approved monogamous hand clasp, prefiguring (no doubt) a marriage. So that’s OK then. But I compare and contrast - amongst the celebrated - dear old Elton John and David Furnish with poor old George Michael. An acquaintance of mine once came back from Los Angeles in the early Nineties and said he’d had George in a sauna. We didn’t believe him till George was picked up by the police on the West Coast for cottaging a few years later, to everybody’s entertainment. Exposed (the Sun’s headline ‘Zip me up before you Go-Go’ should surely have read ‘Wank me off before you Go-Go’). George handled the furore of his outing triumphantly, which makes his final years a bit sad. Even with that example, when I think of what being gay is about I incline more to the George camp (so to speak), than Elton and David on the school run. I’d be rather tempted by the other dads at the school gates. I last picked up in a bar in Brighton twenty years ago – a guy whose name I don’t remember, though remember his age, 27, and that he was ginger. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ he said, coming over. And when I turned the drink down, ‘Don’t you fancy me?’ he said. He’d missed his last train home to a nearby town where he made industrial fridges. (‘Good job you didn’t end up in one,’ said a friend who I recounted this to, the way gays do). I walked the mile and a half with him back to where I was staying, rather than taking a taxi, sussing him out - I wasn’t quite sure about him. All came clear later. It was his first time. He’s the last guy I spent a night with (all night) – and my last night of that kind of casual sex, enjoyable enough for me to think that’s it, that’s enough. I was fifty. The fact that I was older, maybe looked reassuring, had probably made him come over to me. There were plenty others on a Saturday night in that seafront bar (‘He’ll do’) – was happy to oblige.
So have been mainly celibate for years. I notice monks feature in my plays, more than in everyday life. I visit a monastery annually, back up North, for what’s usually termed a ‘retreat’ but like to say to the brothers on my visits that I come for the company. Your fellow retreatants are often priests, and I met one some years ago – just short of Christmas we were the only two visitors. He was gay (he told me) and was having difficulty reconciling his sexuality with his faith. I kept in touch with him for a time afterwards by email and hadn’t realised quite how keen his conflict was till he mentioned that in the afternoons – free time at the monastery - he’d gone off to a nearby sauna for a bit of action (‘very lively. I recommend it..’) in between lunchtime Mass and evensong. He’d had ‘thousands’ of men he told me. It was clearly an addiction – but then I’ve read thousands of books.
I think the truth is I like our old outlaw status. Am a bit leery about our new respectability. It means I’ve some doubts, even, about the BBC’s Queer Britannia season – we’re gay/OK, part of the mainstream. Age of consent at 16, under John Major, civil partnerships in the Blair years, same sex marriage in Cameron’s – it’s been glorious to be alive, particularly from where I started. I remember, when we were rehearsing for the opening of ‘Deadlines’ in Sheffield, I noticed that there was a gay night at the big club over the road (– was it called the Fiesta? It advertised itself as the biggest club in Europe). I went over with one or two of the actors and we stood on a balcony looking down at a heaving dance floor: ‘It’s Raining Men’ the track. The disco was monthly, on Mondays. It looked as if half of the North – gay men and women – were there. It was 1985. Things were on the change. During my time a few years earlier in Sheffield there were battles with the City Council to get a non-commercial venue for our much less wild bops. We established one occasional spot, downstairs in the basement at the City Hall. Apart from that there was the one pub and one club (of happy memory). I left the area and came to London in the early Eighties. I wanted more; got it. And, towards the end of the decade, I went back again – where I can’t quite remember – some close to the Sheffield City centre night club. Again, thousands of gay men dancing (fewer women I think, this time; some separation having occurred) this time to the Pet Shop Boys ‘It’s a Sin.’ I miss its being a sin.
August 2017