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Collecting Crises on Old Compton Street and Beyond
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Monday, December 20, 2004
Island Life
As part of his job as a money-launderer and part-time smuggler — I do keep the most select company, my dears, you really ought to come out with me more often — one of my erstwhile friends used to fly over on a regular basis to the UK, or the "Island" as he called it. It wasn't meant as a term of affection. Depending on which piece of bad attitude he was sneaking through customs that particular weekend, it was either a reference to what he perceived as our Little Englander mindset, or to our ramshackle infrastructure and general inability to organise even a dose of the clap in a Camden Town knocking-shop. Considering he was then living under one of the most corrupt regimes in Africa, and that he hailed from a South American country tangoing its way to bankruptcy, coming from him I thought that was pretty rich. But when you've just returned from a place where not only do the trains run on time, but you suspect they don't run at all, as your rail journey is so smooth it feels stationary and instead it's the scenery outside your window that's being moved by eager Bundesbahn scene-shifters… ….and when the no-frills and delayed tin can you're travelling in has only egg-and-cress sandwiches left, and your stewardess, far from being a gentle colleen from Kilkenny, is an Amazon huntress from Andalucia with an accent so strong you half expect Sylvia Vrethammar to turn up and lead the service team down the centre aisle in an enthusiastic chorus of "Y Viva España"… …and when you touch down at a supposedly international airport, where all the signs are in English, and there's not an Ausgang, sortie, or salada to be seen, and you're informed the last London-bound train left at nine because it's Sunday and that's what always happens Sundays, even though scary señorita was merrily fleecing passengers for twenty-two quid return tickets up in the air just thirty minutes ago… … and when you turn up for the replacement coach service to find you can't board without a ticket, and the driver isn't allowed to take any money, so you've got to get your ticket from the little man in the ticket-booth who isn't there any more… When all this happens, as it did last night on my return from Berlin, then you start thinking my dodgy Anglophobic friend might just have had a point after all. Wednesday, December 08, 2004
You'd Better Watch Out…
I'm flying off to Berlin next week for a couple of days. Regular readers will be aware of my long-time love affair with the city on the Prussian plain. You all must know by now that I'm really just an Isherwood wannabe, brooding in a bar, and searching for his very own Sally Bowles. This time, however, I'm particularly looking forward to the trip. When it comes to the period leading up to December 25th, I definitely belong to the Scrooge school of thought. Anyone wishing me tidings of comfort and joy is likely to be seen off with a joyless and uncomfortable piece of mistletoe rammed up somewhere the winter sun never shines. The pubs are overcharging, the trains are running down, and there's only a certain number of times a grown man can listen to a group of winsome carollers murdering "Silent Night" and not decide old Herod had the right idea, after all. And I also hate the hypocrisy of the supposed birthday of someone, in whom a large percentage don't believe, being hijacked as an excuse for one mega-fest of tack and trash, of cack and cash. And no, I don't get many cards or presents, since you ask. Which brings me to the reason why I'm so looking forward to revisiting Berlin at this time of year. For if there's one thing Germans do really well — and with a charm and a panache and a sincerity we Brits could do to learn — then it's Christmas. Beneath their often icy exterior, there beats a heart of the purest slush, and during the big Advent countdown, you can't move without stumbling across a Christmas market, from the tiniest Bavarian village to the largest Prussian metropolis. These aren't corporate-sponsored cash-ins, well, at least not so you'd notice. Rather they’re effectively traditional craft fairs, their creaking stalls selling all manner of superbly hand-crafted wooden toys and marionettes, home-made candles and ornaments, sweetmeats and gingerbread men, as well as more Glühwein and Wurst than this particular homo knows how to handle. And even with the glitz and the glitter, and yes, the occasionally naff carol singers, they somehow keep to just the right side of kitsch. Sentimental old sausages, my dear Krauts. Of course, you'd expect the slightly camper Berlin establishments to get into the act, but even the ever-so-butch bender-bars join in the fun as well. And you've never really experienced the festive season (and nor may you want to) until you've unwittingly stumbled into some perverts' palace, where the management has twisted sprigs of holly round the handcuffs, and hung sleigh-bells on the slings, and there's a leather queen in a Santa bobble-hat, rubbing his crotch by the twinkling fairy-lights leading down to the darkroom. Why, it's enough to make a Stranger believe in the magic of Christmas, after all. Only not quite. For when you return home to your flat in N7, as I did last night, to find that the five-quid-from-Woolies, glow-in-the-dark, plastic Santa has tumbled from the upstairs neighbours' window-ledge, and is now dangling from a cord and maniacally ho-ho-ho-ing at you through your front-window, then it's very definitely time to reach for the humbugs. You can keep your Christmas, my dears. Just let me have my Weihnachten. Friday, December 03, 2004
Small World
Once I used gently to mock my mother's class and generation for spending their entire lives working, living, playing and dying in the same tiny town, often down the same narrow Coronation Streets, never thinking of venturing outside its cobble-stoned borders into the wider and foreign world Now, as I stumble dazed towards a crisis not just on Old Compton Street, but in mid-life too, I think I might just be turning into one of them, as far as my adopted London is concerned. When I first arrived in the capital, I had no concept of the city being a collection of discrete villages, each one with its own boundaries and character. No-one had told me of those ancient statutes forbidding North Londoners from ever going south of the river, or that genuine East Enders rarely left their local manor to go up West. For a wide-eyed and innocent Stranger, London was just one big whole, a brand-new toy-shop to explore. North, south, east and west, I ransacked it of all its cultural and historic treasures, of all its sights and sounds — and a good few other things as well. Pretty soon I had a passing acquaintance with the capital so comprehensive I could probably even have made a halfway-decent attempt at the cabbies' Knowledge, if I'd been bothered enough to pass my driving test, that is. (The bitchier of you may point out that much of this familiarity was gained during my Slapper Years, when I seldom ventured out without my toothbrush and a copy of the A-Z to help me find my way home in the morning after a night spent at Heaven. For my part, I would point out that you're just being grubby, and, besides, you can't prove a thing.) And now? Well, apart from theatre trips to the National and the odd venture into the gay republic of Vauxhall, I haven't been south of Leicester Square — never mind the river — in years. One simply doesn't do west of Marble Arch (well, Selfridges, actually) these days, darling, and no-one's caught me north of Hampstead since they downed the trees behind Jack Straw's Castle. And as for the East End, all the chopped-herring bagels in Brick Lane won't get me past Bethnal Green Road come Saturday night. This Stranger's life is spinning around in ever-decreasing circles, like mucky bath-water glug-glug-glugging down the plughole. His homo h(a)unting-grounds are shrinking faster than an E-bunny's boner, and his social life seems now confined to a few not-so-mean but safe-bet streets and venues in Soho, the Angel and Camden. Someone wanted to take me on a romantic date to Ikea the other week. When he told me it was in Zone Three, the poor love didn't see me for fairy-dust. And it's pretty obvious where all this is going to end, isn't it? Mark my words, this time next year, I'll have become a virtual recluse. You'll find me rarely leaving my tiny room and its two-bar fire, confined to my bed with a swansdown wrap around my shoulders, going grumpy and gaga on gin. If it was good enough for Marlene, my dears, then it's certainly going to be good enough for me. Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Ask Me
These days, I rarely wear a red AIDS ribbon. From once being a badge of awareness and solidarity, it’s now been reduced to a mere token, no longer even a politically-correct fashion statement, and so common and everyday it's for all intents and purposes invisible. And I don't want it to be. And that's why today is the only day you'll ever catch me wearing one. And I want people to stop me in the street. And I want them to ask why just this one day of all days. And I want them to ask about Buddy, and about Stephen, and about Alastair and Miles and David and Phil and all the countless others. Oh my friends, forgive me And then I want them to tell me what they're going to do to help.
Thursday, November 25, 2004
Mistaking Identities
I love shattering illusions, and altering the way people perceive things. I don't do it maliciously though. Well, not since I was a brat in short pants and I gleefully informed next-door's pig-tailed six-year-old there really wasn't a Santa Claus after all (although in later life I was to discover that there were very definitely fairies at the bottom of my particular garden). I particularly like putting people, er, straight on sexual stereotypes. Despite what Graham Norton might have us believe, not all gay men are prancing sex-mad nancy-boys, and not all Sapphics pipe-smoking, bull-dyke Gertrude Stein look-alikes, and occasionally they even talk to each other as well. Sometimes it's fun to point out that the butch building-site worker is, in fact, a raving screamer, or that fragrant mincing hairdresser has a wife and three kids, and has shagged more women than you've had crises on Old Compton Street. In my experience things are rarely what they seem, as was displayed in my usually quite well-adjusted and metrosexual-wannabe local only the other day: Sweet Innocent Barmaid: "You know your friend, the Stranger, well, this might be a kind of personal question but…" You couldn't make it up, my dears. Monday, November 22, 2004
Here I Am In A Roomful Of Strangers
A couple of days ago, I got a call on the mobile. It was one of those frantic Friday-evening SOS calls, when you suddenly realise it's the weekend and you've nada on your dance card, and where's the Queertown kudos in that, my shallow Soho socialite? Never mind though, when everyone else has stood you up, there's always Stranger. He'll never let you down, and he's anyone's for a Stella. Sadly I had to tell my desperate friend that I couldn’t meet up, as I was on my way to not one of my favourite pubs for an appointment with a group of people I'd never even met, or spoken to, and, what's more, I didn't have even the slightest notion of what any of them looked like (although I was led to believe that one of them might have been wearing a pointy blue hat). The "oh-yeah?" tone of her voice, and the fact she hung up in a huff, makes me think she didn't believe me, or at the very least thought I was taking the piss. Either that, or she was convinced I was on my way to a secret speed-dating session, and what did my mother always say about talking to strangers anyway? For when you think about it, meeting up with people you think you know well, solely through what they choose to reveal of themselves on-line, isn't possibly the most normal thing to do, and, quite frankly, it's a little scary too. The only other time I turned up at one of these blogging get-togethers, I chickened out at the last minute, and high-tailed it back to the comparative safety of Old Compton Street and last orders. So a million-and-one mwah-mwahs to everyone who made a Stranger feel not like a stranger, and relieved me of my blogmeet virginity in such a delightful and alcoholic way last Friday night. The only disappointment was that there wasn't some sort of quiz. I don't think anyone realised quite how much revision I'd put in, and how many individual archives I'd read in the days before, just so I wouldn't be caught out and put my size-nines in it with the wrong person. All that hard work to impress, and not even a starter for ten! Of course, while I didn't know what my fellow webloggers looked like, they were in the same situation when it came to me (with the added disadvantage that I am invisible, after all). And later on, when I had finally achieved some kind of opacity, it was remarked that certain people had previously always envisaged me as being a Tom Baker sort of character, all long scarf and Fedora. I'm not sure how to take that one. Did they see me as a fine actor and writer, a wit and raconteur, a bon viveur bringing a fin-de-siècle elegance to the proceedings? Or did they imagine me as some thousand-year-old geezer, bonkers as a bandersnatch, with a dodgy line in cyber-chums, and a history of being heroically sozzled in Soho pubs? Please don’t answer that one. Thursday, November 18, 2004
The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd
The Producers, Mel Brooks' smash-hit stage version of his cult movie, is currently the hottest ticket in London, with the homo-world and its shag-on-the-side prepared to sell their comprehensive stash of Class A's and Clarins just to nab a couple of tatty seats up there in the gods. And for once it's a show worthy of the hokum and hoopla, the best of its kind in the West End since the near-legendary revival of Guys and Dolls at the National well over twenty years ago. And what's more, it's a real, honest-to-goose-stepping musical, none of that seriously dreary and Really Useless nonsense. And it comes complete with brassy Brunhildas, show-stopping storm-troopers, and an up-for-it gang of sex-starved old biddies doing a tap-dance routine with their Zimmers, The highlight, of course, is the "Springtime for Hitler" sequence ("Don't be stupid/ Be a smartie/ Come and join the Nazi Party"), the sort of glitzy spectacular Leni Riefenstahl and Busby Berkeley might have come up with after one too many nights on the Liebfraumilch. It manages to be offensive to Jews and Gentiles, Germans and gays, and Bavarian pigeon-fanciers alike, which can't be bad. All done in the worst possible taste, natürlich, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world, or even a little piece of the Sudetenland. But the best bit for me comes earlier in the show, when one of the two leads, a spineless, do-everything-by-the book, fourth-rate nobody (accountant), played by the excellent Lee Evans, decides he's done with the old corporate kow-towing and tells his slimeball of a boss just where he can stick his Dixon Ticonderoga number two pencil. And then, accompanied by a veritable cleavage of chorines, he chucks the certainty of routine, and soft-shoe-shuffles his way off into the sunset, or, in his case, the Broadway lights of the Great White Way, to realise his dream. I wanna be a producer Oh, my nine-to-five darlings, that discordant twang you hear is a chord being struck somewhere in the atomic alarm-clock this Stranger has in place of a heart. Ditching what you've settled for, in favour of what you've always dreamed about, setting off on that high-wire with no safety net to break your fall. Isn't that really what we all want to do? You know, it's not the things you do in this life which you regret, but the things you don't. Sitting in the stalls as a kid, I would always much rather have been up there on stage, dancing with the chorus boys. Of course, at that age I didn't realise that dancing wasn't quite what I wanted to do with the chorus boys. And despite the twisted sisters of today saying I'm "theatrical" enough already, and that I've been performing ever since my first Streisand LP, whenever anyone asked I'd always say I wanted to be an astronaut instead. (Whichever way, I suppose I'd still be flying off with the fairies.) I did some Am Dram at University, when I wasn't making a colossal flop of whoring my way to a non-existent job in the mee-jah, that is, and surprisingly always got given the over-the-top and "camp" roles. (I can't think why.) But I never developed my theatrical – ahem – bent, after I graduated. There's a reason for that. You see, back in infants' school, we did a couple of little plays a year. I even got to act the Virgin Mary in one of them, and let me assure you that never has a Mary been more winsome in a wimple as this Mary was at a mere six years old. However, the play I remember best was the tale of Jonah and the Whale. My fellow classmates had to lie on the classroom floor, forming the outline of a whale, the idea being that the spotty and obnoxious kid playing Jonah would be swallowed whole by them. Taking pride in the fact I was most certainly the spottiest and most obnoxious kid in the world, I naturally assumed the star role would be mine for the taking. Imagine my horror when the role went to my then-worst enemy. Imagine the tears! Imagine the tantrums! Imagine the childish sulks and the hissy fits! Imagine me at chucking-out time on Compton Street come Saturday night: it’s pretty much the same thing. Finally, and to shut me up, the teacher took me to one side and assured me there was one part left to be cast, one part which had been written especially with me in mind. And, as she lifted me up onto a desk so that I could now look omnisciently down on Moby Dick and his dinner, she reminded me how pivotal my role was to the story, and how no-one but Master Stranger himself could give the part the authority and the dignity it deserved. And that, my dears, is why I've never seriously pursued my acting ambitions. (And, come to think of it, probably explains a whole lot more as well.) For once you've played at being God, then everything else can only ever be a bit part. (This wasn't the post I'd planned and, to be honest, I'm not quite sure what it’s all been about. But if you hear that I've suddenly run off to join the circus then you shouldn't act in the least bit surprised.) Thursday, November 11, 2004
Waiting For My Man
When the most exciting thing you're looking forward to is Saturday morning's home delivery from Sainsbury's, and the best fun you've had recently was an argy-bargy last night with some call-centre chappie from Mumbai, then reason suggests that, if you intend remaining a card-carrying Compton queen for much longer, you really ought to start getting out just that little bit more. Friday, October 29, 2004
Clothes-Lines
Over the weekend I spent a couple of hundred quid on a new leather jacket to replace the third-favourite one I've had for I can't remember how many years now (no, it's not this one – it'll take more than a twister in Kansas to part me with that particular piece of designer cowhide). Now, a Brando I most certainly am not, and the closest I ever come to being a Wild One is when someone nicks my Stella when I'm not looking, but as I schmoozed the Soho streets last night, I don't think I've ever before attracted so many admiring glances, at least not since I started shaving. Motorbike jacket, white tee, and faded blue jeans, it’s the classic nelly look, all mean, moody and Mary-magnificent, and the fact I'm too much of a weed to ride a Harley or a Suzuki is neither here nor there. For on Planet Gay, when all else fails, and when the DKNY's been dumped and the Diesel discarded, and you realise that Versace isn't fun or ironic anymore, but just that tiny bit naff, then there's always your reliable leather jacket, the gay world's equivalent of Coco's little black dress. It was a wrench throwing out the old one, but what really decided me was when I realised that our marriage had been merely one of cheap convenience, entered into purely so I could gain admission to those sort of sleazy perv-palaces I never could with my other swish and designer gear (not even when all the lights had been switched off, as seems to happen so very often in these places). So sadly it won't be joining my other sartorial souvenirs, those fashion mistakes and triumphs I'll probably never wear again (even if I could fit into them), but which I just can't bear to chuck out. Things like the silk sarong from Lamu island, the memory of a perfect African summer, and a look I was sporting years before Becks; my Eric's tee-shirt and my Trade flying jacket, the only two clubs ever to have me as a member and let me get up to the things I did; that raggedy old school tie together with the platforms and bell-bottomed jeans I wore at that time precisely because you weren't allowed to; the UNEP watch which stopped forever at exactly five minutes past midnight when my heart was broken for the very last time; and, of course, my hooded green pixie jacket with the tassel and the embroidered tattoo and the pixie boots to match (don't ask). Clothes maketh the man, so they say, and you really wouldn't want me to shop at Marks and Spencer's now, would you? Monday, October 25, 2004
The Waiting Game
If patience is a virtue then I'm Public Enemy Number One. I don't do queues, you see, and if my name isn't on the guest-list then don't expect me to turn up and grace some sorry little shindig with my strangeness. I've even been known to refuse to stand in line for the ATM when I was down to my last fiver in cash. And I once stormed out of a car bound for the South of France to take the train back home, after being informed at Dover we had to wait a further four hours to board the working-to-rule ferry. My, but I can be a proper tantrum-tosser of a Stranger when I want to be. And I like my coffee instant. (You might argue I could profitably use this enforced waiting time to read an improving book, admire the pretty flowers, or even achieve some state of Zen-like tranquillity, but I don't buy into that. As far as I'm concerned, books are to be read in bed, flowers are for funerals, and Zen is the name of a former flatmate's cat who used to pee a lot.) The very presence of a queue is, of course, a dead giveaway of managerial incompetence and indifference. Ask anyone who's camped out at Stansted overnight for the first flight to Fuengirola with just one check-in desk open, manned only an hour before boarding by Vapid Vera and her assistant, Cassie Couldn't-Care-Less. And don't even get me started on the perma-queue at the Islington branch of Borders which seems to have been there since Caxton was a lad. Call me Miss Picky-Perfectionist if you will, but for me nothing brings on the Violet-Elizabeths more than other people delaying this Control Freak of a Fairy by inefficiency. Or maybe it's just Other People, plain and simple, that I can't stand, and I'm nothing more than a stroppy and misanthropic Mary, after all. For it appears no-else minds standing, so many tin soldiers in line, happily striking up Spirit-of-the-Blitz conversations with people they'd normally walk widdershins round the Westway to avoid. But then, as Resident Alien George Mikes so accurately recorded years ago, even when alone an Englishman will always form an orderly queue of one. And it is in that one word, "orderly" where I suspect the problem lies, my ever so patient dears. I couldn't be orderly or ordered if I tried. I was out of step as a child, and I'm not intending to get into that particular line now and dance to someone else's drummer. The only regimentation I'll tolerate is a mucky video with randy and up-for-it squaddies, and if you find a round hole, well, just say the word and I'll bring along that square peg I always carry around with me. Petulant and contrary? You don't know the half of it. But then again, they do say that all good things come to he who waits. Which could probably be why I'm still bloody waiting. Friday, October 15, 2004
Swat
Of course, there's a plus side to all this sweetness and niceness lark, you know. — Bless, but Stranger is simply so nice isn't he? I always feel safe and secure when he's around. Oh my dear, I'd trust him with anything. — Oh, rather! That Stranger, well, he is just soooo sweet. He wouldn't hurt a fly. — Sppplaaaatt! — Er, what was that? — Dead fly. Thursday, October 14, 2004
Cat And Mouse
A friend recently revealed that until she'd got to know me she'd always found me somewhat intimidating, and regularly approached me with all the enthusiasm of Christian in the arena taking Tiddles his tea. And that was so silly, she said, as she slurped on her second sherry, because actually I'm really rather nice. (Sweet one week. Nice the next. If this carries on much longer then it'll be beatification by bedtime, and sainthood shortly after Sunday evening's Songs of Praise. ) I suppose I do have a bit of a reputation for having a loud line in put-downs, dropping acerbic acid-drops and lobbing coruscating comments like a third-rate Dorothy Parker knocking back the Absolut in her own Vicious Circle of one. And I am, after all, never knowingly underheard. It's a habit I should temper, learnt back in the bad old gays, when pre-emptive attack was the best form of defence against criticism and abuse. But like most wisecracking nellies, or Just Jack wannabes, beneath the bitchy badinage and brassy behaviour, the vitriol is strictly vanilla, and the sarcasm and barbed one-liners played largely for laughs. Honest, my dears, deep down I'm really just one big shy pussycat. Playing with my mice. Monday, October 04, 2004
Sour Grapes
Sweet. That's what he called me. Sweet. Now, handsome I can handle, cute I can cope with, and should you ever desire to describe me as "mad, bad and dangerous to know" then you'll get no denial from me. But sweet? Has there ever been a more saccharine, insipid, unthreatening and frankly vomit-inducing term of endearment as "sweet"? And no, I am not feeling bitter. Much. Monday, September 27, 2004
Stranger Takes A Trip
These days I hardly ever have hangovers. Perhaps it’s down to the quality of the upmarket plonk I choose to get pissed on, but the morning after the night before I'll usually wake up, if not quite as fresh as a daisy, at least more chipper than is proper for a pickled pansy my age. And even back in my old all-night-bender daze, I was always the one who never suffered the after-effects, very visibly a stranger to the comedown blues. So yesterday shouldn't have been a problem, when a planned Sunday lunch down the local spiralled so deliciously out of control that all sense of time or dignity was lost, and we ended up past chucking-out time, spilling the Absolut while discussing the individual merits of the French rugby team. Which meant, of course, that none of the Useful, Important or Improving Things I had been putting off for ages and had lined up for the latter part of the day got ticked off on the to-do list. Not one. Why, I didn't even floss my teeth before passing out. And that is why today I have been caught generally grumping around and hating myself, doing a passable impression of a bloodhound in a K-hole, eyes heavy and drooping, and with the combined forces of the Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band and the Edinburgh Military Tattoo playing and marching back and forth inside my head. Hangovers I can handle, my dears, it's the old guilt trip that gets me every time. Monday, September 20, 2004
Saturday Night's All Right
The general perceived notion round these parts (well, Compton Street come closing-time) is that we metropolitan Marys all lead hugely hedonistic lives, mwah-mwahing our way from guest-list to A-list with our cutting-edge clothes and designer drugs, setting the standard in all things superficial, and generally shagging anything remotely resembling a member from a boy-band. So by rights, and so as not to let the side down, I should have been spotted this weekend somewhere in a mixed-up and sweaty mess of muscled madness, amyl up the nose, trousers round the ankles, slappers at my side, and dancing to next door's Hoover after having partaken of far too much of the fifth and eleventh letters of the alphabet. Instead, my dears - and if someone had even been bothered to look - they would have found me at home, slopping around in my trackie bottoms, re-reading a favourite book by table-light, whilst sipping a fine red wine, and listening to the complete recorded works of Kathleen Ferrier. Staying in on Saturday night: it’s the new rock 'n' roll, don't you know? Now, someone get me my pipe and slippers. Friday, September 10, 2004
Suits You, Sir
As a single gay man, with a disposable income and a subscription to Arena magazine (sorry), I should be every fashion retailer's Only I'm not. In fact, I am so adverse to the whole clothes-shopping experience that doubts have been raised in some quarters as to whether I am, indeed, a fully-paid-up and card-carrying member of the homosexual community. (I'm worried too: only the other afternoon I was watching a game of football played on the pitch opposite my flat and found myself appreciating the skills and the mechanics of the game, rather than ogling the barely-started-shaving eye-candy on display.) On the other hand, I love spending money and buying things for myself, and only yesterday signed away bundles on Amazon as well as on on-line theatre tickets. And therein lies my problem: it's not the shopping I can't stand but the shops, and especially the store assistants, themselves (only I think we're supposed to call them "fashion consultants", these days). As far as I'm concerned, like children these creatures should speak only when spoken to. And it should be an offence, punishable by their entire wardrobe being replaced by something from Mister Byrite, for them to smarm and sidle up to this Stranger yesterday enquiring whether Sir would require any help. No, Sir doesn't want any help, thank you very much, and if Sir had wanted any help, then Sir would have bloody well called out for some. Sir likes to take his time and hates being pressurised into buying anything he might really want, OK? And that, my black-clad, bolshie and patronising beauty, is precisely why Sir is now flouncing empty-handed out of your shop, and spending his silly amount of cash in the bars instead. And furthermore, if you really think Sir looks nice in this, then Sir will just think you're taking the piss. Anyone got a copy of the Freeman's catalogue handy? Thursday, September 02, 2004
Carry On Doctor
If your body is meant to be a temple, then I reckon mine's more ancient ruin than gothic splendour, more the weary, seen-it-all rubble of the Acropolis than the thrusting, virile grandeur of Notre Dame. Yet, in spite of all the abuses I've put this crumbling wreck through over the years, I rarely get ill. Properly ill that is. I catch the odd cold every now and then, and the occasional I'm not too sure I take doctors that seriously anyway. I'm a firm believer in the body's ability to heal itself, and it's been proven to me many times in the past that there's precious little that a bottle of good red wine and a bowl of chicken soup with barley can't cure. Earlier this week, however, I had a little "scare" – subsequently shown to be nothing more than acute hypochondria brought upon by some dodgy kebab, and a desire to make myself the centre of attention – and so visited the surgery for the first time in two decades. Probably fresh out of medical school, my new GP doesn't look old enough to vote yet, and I wonder how her fresh-faced and caring innocence is going to cope with we winos and druggies, sleaze-balls and Strangers of dear old King's Cross. And, as she greased up for an examination of, um, well, let's just say somewhere the sun rarely gets a look-in, she sweetly warned that what she was about to do to me might feel "unusual" and "strange", and maybe even a little "uncomfortable". And then she wondered why I suddenly got an attack of the Frankie Howerd schoolboy titters. And, poor lamb, I just didn't have the heart to tell her why. Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Advice
If I had a penny for every time I've been told to cheer up, then I would be a very wealthy Stranger indeed. Sorry, my dears, but if you want insufferable chirpiness, and unbounded enthusiasm on demand, then I suggest you run off and get yourself a Bonnie Langford workout video instead. Drama queen that I am, I would, of course, love you to think I am carrying the weight of the world on my designer-clad and manly shoulders, or, at the very least, harbouring some glamorously tragic secret, but the fact is that this is the way my face is made, OK? A look of perpetual bewilderment, if not an off-with-the-fairies vacuousness, is its default mode, and should not be taken as an indication that I'm halfway to sticking my head in the gas oven. Besides, were you to spot me grinning inanely over nothing in particular, you'd rightly conclude either that I've gone gaga after one too many late-night benders, or that I'm laughing at you, and then you'd only want to punch me on the nose, which would get me looking even more depressed. So the reason I'm not smiling, Mr Concerned-Person-In-The-Bar, is because I am merely contemplating Solemn Things, such as my lost youth, which Findus I'm defrosting tonight, and exactly how I found myself waking up in a tree-house in darkest Hertfordshire at seven a.m. on Bank Holiday Monday. I might also point out I am a sophisticated and metropolitan gay man, and Not Smiling is what we're really, really good at, coming on all aloof and unapproachable and wondering why nobody can be bothered to come up and say hello. And if you want me to get really depressed, just tell me that it might never happen. Because that, my sainted and well-meaning dear, is the whole bloody point. Wednesday, August 25, 2004
Come Fly With Me
I make a crap Old Compton Street queen. Apart from the fact my hair is once again creeping over my collar, Madonna's currently my Mogadon, and I still haven't caught up with Queer As Folk, I spend far too many of my homo-hours outside the gay ghetto and in straight bars, certainly far more than any self-respecting scene-queen ever should. On the whole, it’s fun being the only obvious bender in a bar packed with breeder-friends. You're an instant hit with the ladies, for starters, and you're often seen as that "rather interesting but somewhat flamboyant young man". (I lied about the "young" bit.) Of course, it has its downsides too, and sooner or later someone - and it's usually a "bi-curious" bloke, whatever that means - will ask me when I first worked out I was gay. I ask right back when did he first know he was straight. It's a flip answer, but shuts him up, and sometimes also gets him thinking. In fact, if I work it just right, I can usually guilt-trip him into buying me another Stella as well. But the fact remains that I can pinpoint the precise moment when I knew. It was an afternoon in late August the year England won the World Cup, and I'd been taken to a summer-holiday screening of Batman. This wasn't the Tim Burton take on the Dark Knight, but an omnibus edition of the very first Batman TV series from the forties, released that particular year to cash in on the then-current success of the movie version of the über-camp telly show starring Adam West. In those far-off early days of the kinematograph, the main movie was always preceded by a short film or documentary. That afternoon, it was a brief travel-piece on the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, their vibrant colours a welcome contrast to the black-and-white awfulness of the Bat-B-movie that was to follow. Slotted in between the two movies were the ads, and one I particularly remember. It was flogging some hair-styling product, probably the Harmony of its day, and the scenario involved a glamorous blonde slinking, as only glamorous blondes are ever allowed to slink, down the steps of a recently-landed BOAC plane. And you know what? As a little boy, I so much wanted to be that glamorous blonde. Not, you understand, because I'm really a lipstick lesbian in drag (you really do not want to see me in a fright-wig and frock, and, if we all behave like sensible adults, you probably never will). I so much wanted to be that glamorous blonde because waiting for her on the tarmac with open arms was her airline-pilot hunk of a boyfriend, all tan, white teeth, coal-black hair and chiselled good looks. And it was at the precise moment, my dears, when that glamorous blonde bitch and her adorable pilot boyfriend embraced, that the old-penny piece finally dropped for a jealous, green-eyed schoolboy, just the first of many things to be dropped in the coming years. And thirty-eight queer years on, I realise I still haven't got around to visiting the Caribbean, my glory days as the masked Boy Wonder are long since gone, and the closest I've ever come to nabbing my suave and sophisticated sky-captain was a nineteen-year-old trolley dolly on a late-night Swiss Air flight to Zürich. Ah well. At least there's always Old Compton Street, I suppose. Thursday, August 19, 2004
Comedy Tonight
It won't have escaped the sharper ones among you that I'm something of a sucker for a show tune. Give me a pair of tap-shoes, a follow-spot, and a row of chorus boys, and I'll put on a performance for you. Oh, sod it: skip the tap-shoes and the follow-spot, and you'll get a performance from me any time you want. Of course, back in the old days, if someone enquired whether you were "musical", then it was a pretty safe bet they weren't sounding you out for the role of the butch baritone in the church choir. And even in these ever-so-straight times, the first night of any big West End musical is still invariably camper than backstage at G.A.Y for Kylie's birthday bash. And no, I'm not going to venture an opinion why that should be: the moment I ever start analysing anything is the instant it stops being fun. Just try me on Valentine's Day if you don't believe me on that one. So, from being a Theatre Queen, you'd think it would be only a few further footsteps on the road to that other gay cliché, the Opera Queen. Yet for some reason I've never quite understood the appeal, and, by the time the Fat Lady's done her stuff, I've already been gone for a couple of hours and drunk the stalls bar dry. I know there are some cracking tunes out there (I have seen Diva and that Bugs Bunny cartoon, after all), but it's the whole po-faced seriousness of the entire event itself that turns me off. I mean, when was the last time you ever saw anyone leave a performance of Aida with a manic grin on their face, a spring in their step, and change from two hundred and fifty quid? Thought so. I don't do serious. Never have done. Never will. And, with the odd really useless exception along the way, serious is not a word you'd ever attribute to a good old-fashioned Show, the kind of all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza that makes even the most straight and strait-laced long to grab the greasepaint and the glitter, and chuck the long-time girlfriend in favour of a fairy-flutter stage-right with that camp boy in the pink tights. I was reminded of this the other night when I went to the National Theatre, to see A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, Stephen Sondheim's vaudeville farce set in Ancient Rome, and the show on which Brit-com Up Pompeii was based. Lewd, lascivious and bawdy, and busting out all over with outrageously contrived situations and some of the corniest jokes you've ever heard, it's the most side-splitting and rollicking musical two hours currently playing in the West End. If it was packed with any more feel-good factor, they'd shove a government health warning on it. And with two-thirds of all the seats only ten quid I might just be able to get all serious and cultural with the toffs and corporate clients and afford that restricted-view seat at the opera as well. Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Invisible
Don't worry, my children, I'm still here. It's just that I'm a touch Invisible at the moment. But you do know I'd never dream of being a Stranger to you, don't you? Work. The curse of the blogging classes... Friday, August 06, 2004
Frozen Food
When I was young and pretty (and that's a thousand years ago), I had no problems making new friends, or even new "friends", for that matter. Most people on the London scene knew me, some of them actually quite liked me, and, at best, the others tolerated me even when I was being my most sickeningly cute. And believe me, no-one could do cute as sickeningly as me. Still can't, come to think of it. Inevitably, there was one person immune to my puppy-dog charms. Probably a couple of years older than me, and with classic all-American college-boy good looks, he could have stepped right out of the pages of GQ magazine, back in the old days when it was practically a gay soft porn title. On a scene which, even today, is predicated on youth and "beauty", and you're over the hill at twenty-five, he turned heads and broke hearts with alarming regularity as he cruised up and down the queer streets of 1980s Earl's Court and Soho. Of course, he was very probably a hairdresser from Halifax with a small willy and a fake tan, but that wasn't the point. The point was that, while realising he was way out of my league, I still so much wanted to get to know him, and for him to like me. I was even more of a superficial Stranger back then than I am now, and I thought that maybe if he became my friend then some of his beauty and coolness would rub off onto me. Yet whenever I attempted to engage him in a non-chat-up and casual conversation, he would sneer superiorly, and look down his oh-so-perfect nose at me, awarding me the kind of look I usually reserve for doggy-doo on the shoes, before flouncing off back to his plastic-perfect friends, and leaving me feeling about two inches tall, and slightly less alluring than Baby Jane Hudson. He didn't care. With those sort of looks he could afford to be as nice or as off-hand to any mere mortal he chose. Years ago, he vanished off the main gay circuit, and I'd forgotten all about him until last night, when I spotted him on London's Old Compton Street. Although he was still vaguely good-looking in a kind of distinguished older gentleman way, he'd obviously seen better days, the eye-tucks hadn't quite taken, and the hair dye wasn't fooling anyone. And when after twenty minutes not one person had fallen worshipful at his Gucci-clad feet, he reluctantly decided to try and strike up a conversation with the Stranger who happened to be standing next to him at the bar. Now, the way I saw the situation, I had two options. As a caring, sensible and reasonably together fortysomething member of the homosexual community, someone who insists that looks aren't that important (much), I could ignore the imagined slights and the frosty hauteur of twenty years ago, and respond pleasantly to him. Who knows? There might even be a mercy-shag in it for me. Certainly no-one else in the bar seemed much interested in even chatting to him. Then again, as a shallow, unforgiving, vicious, spiteful and frankly bitter old queen, I could freeze him out with all the haughty sub-zero disdain he'd once shown me. Which course of action did I take? Oh, do grow up, my children. Which course of action do you think I bloody well took? Life is sweet. And the dish on last night's menu was served especially cold. Monday, August 02, 2004
The Machine Stops
It used to be just plants and flowers that died on me. I've only to walk into a room or a garden centre, and wisteria wilts and cacti cower, and it's never a good year for the roses when I'm around. Now it looks as though technology's had it with me as well. My freezer was the first to go. I returned home a while back from a Saturday-morning food-cruise round Borough Market (over-hyped, over-priced but the classiest produce market in the capital), to discover that what had once been a well-stocked larder was now a mush of soggy cardboard, gelatinous ready-mades, lukewarm Absolut and an amorphous mess that in a previous life had been a couple of ostrich steaks, but now wouldn't have looked out-of-place in an early Star Trek episode, all swimming in what remained of enough ice to sink half-a-dozen Titanics. (By the way, the ostrich steaks had been on special offer a while back and were only in the freezer while I worked out what to do with the bloody things. Pop round chez Stranger and you'll get microwaveable Marks and Sparks Café Culture just like everybody else and be glad of it.) Except that you won't, as my microwave seems also to have pinged its parting ping, either through over-use, or possibly as a consequence of the two eggs which exploded earlier that morning as I tried to poach them for breakfast. And in the evening, and after the pizza delivery boy had finally delivered my American Hot, and I was considering settling down to watch a bunch of other pizza delivery boys deliver a rather different kind of American hot, the video clunked into inaction as well. (And no, I am not one of those queens incapable of correctly setting the VCR for Will and Grace. This twenty-first-century Stranger can multi-program that little box of delights in the dark, both hands tied behind his back, whilst executing a halfway decent arabesque and singing Buggles' greatest hits backwards. And anyway, he hates Will and Grace.) Machines are breaking down all around me. The alarm didn't wake me up this morning, although that's really down to the number of Sunday-night Stellas. My phone hasn't rung for the past few days either, but then that's probably just because I don't have any friends. Yet last night, strolling home down the charming, leafy lanes of N7, skilfully stepping over the syringes and crack-whores, the overhead street lamps started to splutter out one by one by one, just as I passed by. Coincidence? I feel like a walking Masque of the Technological Red Death, and already my PC's eyeing me warily, wondering if it's going to be the next to get it. One thing's for sure though. Whatever's going on, John Lewis is going to make a small fortune out of me this month. Wednesday, July 28, 2004
Only Make-Believe
Forty years ago, and all I really wanted to be was Doctor Who. Sure, he was a cantankerous old git but he did get to travel around a lot, have exciting adventures in time and space, and save the Universe every Saturday tea-time. Instead, I settled for a TARDIS moneybox and a PVC Dalek playsuit. At sour and spotty sixteen I would have given anything to have been Lois Lane. She was a feisty, independent journalist, who had loads of exciting adventures, filing her Daily Planet reports from glamorous, international locations. She also got to snog Superman every issue, and by that age, I'd sussed that snogging supermen was a pretty fun thing to do. Instead, I settled for an "A-plus" in English Composition and a grope with a Scotsman under the North Pier at Blackpool. By the time I was twenty-six, I'd turned ever so theatrical, and wanted to morph into a Wild Boy in a Duran Duran video, having exciting eighties adventures in Rio, or some other New Romantic locale. Instead, I settled for a bit part in an Undertones video, and a Joan Armatrading pop promo, shot in a sleazy fleapit of a cinema in South London. Nineteen-ninety-four saw my French phase, as I imagined myself as Julien Sorel, Stendahl's dashing anti-hero in Le Rouge et le Noir, beguilingly Gallic as he cold-heartedly charmed the haute bourgeoisie on his exciting adventures through the upper echelons of Napoleonic society, obeying no man's laws but his own. Instead I settled for caring too much, living in Brixton before it got trendy, and paying my council tax on time exactly like I was told to. And now look at what I've just gone and done. I've just gone and turned forty-six, that's what. And I've run out of fictional characters to imitate. It looks like from now on, my dears, I'm just going to have to learn to settle for Real Life instead. Thursday, July 22, 2004
Saint Judy
It may come as not a great surprise to discover I do indeed possess the odd Judy Garland CD or two. You'll find them filed carefully away in the "diva" section of my collection, right after the Dietrichs and the best of Gracie Fields, and just before the so-bad-it's-good Ethel Merman Disco Album. And yes, that's right, the crashing sound you hear is whatever remaining butch street-creds I had being chucked unceremoniously out of the window and kicked right back up that Yellow Brick Road. Mind the broken glass, as you skip off home to the Emerald City, won't you, my Munchkins? Camp? You don't know the half of it. I don't know what's behind the fascination some gay men of my age, and older, have for certain female singers, those they constantly refer to by their first names. You know the ones I mean: Dusty, Marlene, Shirley, Liza and Judy herself. And if you don't know who I'm going on about, then what on earth are you doing reading this blog in the first place? Traumas and tantrums, dramas and despair, and more pills than you can neck down Queer Street come Saturday night. And whether it's Marlene's screen siren, or Judy's little girl lost, each of them possesses an over-the-top femininity, exaggerated to such a point of caricature, that you realise you're actually watching a gay man in drag anyway. What queen could ask for more? The adoration of the Eternal Woman, without any of that nasty little hetero-sex getting in the way. And besides, as Marc Almond once so memorably sang, a diva a day really does keep the boredom away. (This post was originally going to be about Songs My Mother Taught Me, singer Lorna Luft's tribute to her "mom", Judy Garland, currently playing to half-empty houses in London's West End, and a performance of such stomach-turning and pseudo-sentimental sweetness that I threw up on the way home, and all my teeth fell out. Let's just say that Lorna's greatest talent lies in the fact she isn't Liza Minnelli, and leave it at that.) Thursday, July 15, 2004
Take Two
The more candles on the cake I blow out, the less I think about how old I really am. Anyway, there are always enough queens around who will quite eagerly bitch about it on my behalf, and wonder loudly what an eighties reject is doing wearing Diesel rather than Debenhams, and drinking in bars where the combined age in years is rather less than the combined price in pounds for a round of alcopops. Most times I'm fine about the anno domini thing. It doesn't bother me at all. No. Honestly. And pass me the La Prairie, why don't you? After all, shoot out the lights and blindfold the boyfriend, and I can certainly pass for a late thirtysomething. I've the energy and enthusiasm of E-bunnies half my age, and as for my emotional stability and personal hygiene, well, you won't spot much difference between me and your standard sixteen-year-old snotty schoolboy. For some reason though, my approaching birthday at the end of this month has been making me more and more reflective. It's possibly one of the reasons I haven't been blogging much. Yet it's not as if it's a landmark date: it was only to have been my forty-seventh, after all. Perhaps it was the sudden realisation that most of my contemporaries were either paired off, mortgaged off, or, if they had any sense, carried off by coffin-car. And then there was the sobering fact that by my age, several of my heroes had already done their little bit for immortality and were on their way out to that great big biographical dictionary in the sky. At forty-seven Kerouac was knocking back one last JD and coke, Nelson was sailing to Victory, and Judy was on her final trip down the Yellow Brick Road. Between them, they'd defeated the Wicked Witch of the West, written one of the best novels of the twentieth century, and kicked the merde out of the Froggies at Trafalgar. And the closest I've come to greatness, literary, artistic, military or otherwise? Well, I kissed Jilly Cooper once, but it was very quick and I don't think she remembers. It was during this rather enjoyable indulgence of self-pity that it was kindly pointed out to me, by a friend far less neurotic and self-centred than myself, that I was actually born in 1958, which made me, by his reckoning, forty-six this coming birthday, and not forty-seven as I thought. Innumerate invert that I am, I honestly had no idea, and for the past six months or so have laboured under the delusion I was a year older than I actually was. I can only conclude that those many years of all-night benders have frazzled out whatever brain cells I once possessed. I've always been crap at maths anyway. And of course there's an upside to the fact I'm now one full year younger than I was. It means I've just regained a whole whopping 365 days of my life, and been given another chance at putting down the Stellas and getting around to achieving all those Things I Really Should Have Done by my age. So if you catch me slamming my ruby-slippered foot down hard on the gas pedal as I cruise down Route Sixty-Six on the look-out for a kiss from the nearest Hardy boy, just don't say I didn't warn you. Wednesday, June 30, 2004
First Pride
There's a kind of hush over Queensville right now, as everyone stays at home, saving up all their pink pennies for this Saturday's fairy frolics instead. Last weekend was so quiet you could hear a pill drop on Old Compton Street. You couldn't move in the gym though, with a hundred Marys muscling in on just one pec deck, in a desperate last-ditch attempt to buff themselves up to perfection before the coming weekend. Yes, my dears, it's that time of year again, when our gay community bands together This coming Pride weekend is supposedly our Christmas, and the highlight of the gay calendar. At least, I think they’re calling it Pride this year, instead of Mardi Gras or some other nonsense, although I'm not too sure whether they've bothered to prefix it with the word "gay" or not. Come to think of it, I can't recall seeing any posters around town mentioning the P-word at all, although there's a rain-forest's worth of advertising for the twenty-five-quid-a-head open-air festival which follows the Gay P**de March, and which is being organised by what seems to me to be a primarily heterosexual website no queen had ever heard of three months ago. (Yes, there really is a P**de March as well, although you wouldn't know it if you asked half of Old Compton Street. I think we're supposed to call it a Parade, these days, anyway.) Now, I love a few dance-tents' worth of unbridled hedonistic excesses as much as the next scene-queen lying beside me in A&E the following morning, but I think it's a shame that, with each successive year, Pride seems to become less and less politicised, and the emphasis is no longer on the politics and the March but on the big E's-up afterwards. You could argue we've now achieved much of what we've campaigned for in the past – partnership rights, equality of sorts, as well as Todd in Coronation Street – but people are still getting queer-bashed, suicide is the biggest killer of gay men under twenty-five, and the Vatican's never going to let the likes of me become Pope Stranger the First. So don't tell me there's nothing to march about. I don't miss the oppression, but I do miss the solidarity of those earlier Gay Prides. The first Pride March I went on was about twenty years ago. I'd never much bothered with them in my first couple of years in London, as back then I was far too busy with my full-time job of being young and pretty. And, as we all know, the young and pretty don't do politics. Well, not until they become aged and grizzled at the grand old age of twenty-five, that is, and then swishing in gold satin shorts down Piccadilly is the only way they're going to attract any passing trade ever again. Back then, the capital was hardly the homopolis it is in these queer times. There were only about three openly gay pubs in central London: the City of Quebec (rent-boys and punters), the Golden Lion (rent-boys and Denis Nielsen), and the Salisbury (everybody else), although there were plenty of one-off nelly nights at other venues, usually on those evenings when no other right-thinking punter could be bothered to turn up. There was little visible pansy-presence on the streets, no-one had heard of the Pink Pound, and the only homo most people had consciously clocked was Mister Humphreys, and even then they weren't too sure. Everyone knew which team I batted for, but I'd never made any particular public statement of the fact. In fact, I'd only turned up to this Pride March because the previous year I'd watched a drag-show held in a pub on the Pride evening. There, the star berated all those in the audience who had turned up for that night's show, but hadn't been bothered to march earlier in the day. (To be more precise, she urged all those who hadn't marched to f**k off home. If they couldn't be bothered to walk for equality, and fight for those rights we still hadn't yet won, then she couldn't be f**king arsed to do her Liza Minnelli routine for them either.) No March, no Party was the message. So that year, I thought I'd make the effort, and the rag-tag collection of people I met on that rainy day made me realise not all gay men believed life revolved around a bottle of Liquid Gold, a HiNRG soundtrack, and which bit of totty you could drag back home after Heaven had chucked out for the night. There were men – and I'm their age now - who'd been around when male-to-male sex acts were illegal and they were put inside just for what they did beneath their flannelette sheets. Boys younger than me, more political and savvy than I'll ever be, who weren't going to take the prejudice any more. And moustachioed clones, whispering about a nasty little virus a friend of a friend of a friend of theirs had picked up in the States, demanding that something be done about it. And there were also – gosh – real, live lesbians, and, you know, they were actually rather nice. (That's not meant in a misogynist or homophobic way: back in the eighties the gay and lesbian scenes hardly ever crossed. They hardly do today either.) It was a politicised gay world, wholly different to the one I'd known up to then, safe and secure in my little scene-queen bubble as I was. But most of all, and something my straight friends still can't quite grasp, was that sense of empowerment I felt on my first Pride March. Imagine being able to hold hands and snog with my boyfriend in public, rather than in a club or bar, and not risk arrest or getting our heads kicked in (mainly because the boys in blue who normally did that sort of stuff were on both sides of the road now, there for our protection for a change). Imagine being the star, rather than the freak-show attraction. Imagine being united as a community in your common fight for something, rather than divided in your self-centred quest for the best lay of the night. Imagine being part of a family. And that's why I feel sad Pride has nowadays been effectively depoliticised and turned into just another big excuse for some gay, and increasingly straight, entrepreneurs and promoters to make a fast and exploitative pink buck out of us all. And it's also why I feel angry at those Compton queens who snootily say they'll "do the Park", but that they can't be bothered to "do the March". Because by saying that, it effectively refuses to acknowledge the part all those other Pride Marches played in winning us the almost-equal rights we enjoy today. After all, we should never forget those who fought for our right to party in the first place. (Thanks to John from Rainbow Villa and his Gay Firsts for giving me the idea for this post – although I think this is probably not quite what he had in mind!) Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Never Gonna Be Respectable?
The first time anyone called me "Sir", I was sixteen, and the other person, a particularly sarcastic and snooty hotel employee, was no more than a couple of years older, and clearly taking the piss. For people just don't call the likes of me "Sir". (Well, apart from one occasion in a deeply dodgy dive, and that was one of those, um, "special" requests it would have been churlish to refuse.) With my usually irreverent attitude to supposedly solemn stuff, as well as my Guardian reader's Until last night that is, when a fellow drinker in my local, half my age, called me over with an "Excuse me, please, Sir." I told myself that he spoke with a funny accent, and was, therefore, foreign and ignorant of the subtleties of the language. But deep down, that "Excuse me, please, Sir" has made me realise that it's all downhill from now on. For, despite all my best attempts, I have finally acquired gravitas, my children. It'll only be a matter of time now before teenage crack-heads are giving up their seat on the bus for me, whippersnapper TV researchers are buying me milk-stouts in the Snug in exchange for my reminiscences of the Gay Golden Eighties, and I'm starting to smell permanently of wee. Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Clean Queen
Believe it or not, I don't quite fit the stereotypical notion of a metro-nellie (yeah, right, I hear you say). For instance, my obsession with faux-zebra skin and my Warhol and Mapplethorpe prints aside, I'm not really one for soft furnishings, tasteful interior design and subtle lighting. There are, after all, only a certain number of ways you can stylishly hide the inadequacies of a shoebox in N7, and I exhausted both of them about three years ago. In terms of housework, I definitely subscribe to Quentin Crisp's four-year rule. Life's too short to be bothered with dust, of the household variety at least. Anyway, when you possess more unread books than is good for you, and you live ten minutes' industrial upwind of King's Cross station, you come to realise that the boys from wallpaper* will never be coming round to feature your cosy pied à terre in their magazine, No, the most you can hope for is a knock on the door from Kim and Aggie. But I've got a day-off today so decided to attack the eco-system in my kitchen, before it came to resemble a possible set-location for Alien5. And three hours later, I'm glad to say I've worked out such a sweat that I can get out going to the gym today, and my kitchen is clinically spotless. The windows gleam with a tarragon-vinegared and organic lemon-juiced shine, the floor is so shiny you could use it to look up ladies' dresses (if I ever invited that sort of boy back chez Stranger) and I've even discovered the source and vintage of that fusty smell behind the fridge. Why, I've even plonked a vase of flowers in one of the windows. Fragrant, that's me. The only thing left to be scoured and cleaned is the oven. And it is at this point that you really will have to excuse me, my dears. You see, I've got to head on down to the local offie. For there are certain things in this Stranger's life that can only be faced and attempted when he is very, very drunk indeed… Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Daydreamer
I decided to take a different walk into work today, detouring down relatively quiet side streets, away from the hated hordes belching out from Holborn tube. Contact with that pinstriped, corporate, Metro-wielding lot on any day is bad enough; in this weather I really can't be held responsible for my actions. So, unusually for a work-day morning, I was able to switch off totally, aware only of the warmth of the sun, the birdsong in the trees, and the occasional smell of freshly-brewed coffee or sizzling bacon from generations-old family-run caffs. But when, twenty minutes later, I woke up from my Zen-like trance, and discovered the automatic pilot in my head had led me, not to my offices, but right up to the (sadly locked) door of one of my favourite bars, I realised it's safe to say that at the moment my mind is very definitely not on my job… Friday, June 11, 2004
My Shout
(I wrote this in a slightly different form a couple of years ago. I'm running it again, because it sums up my mood at the moment, and is a sobering reminder that, for certain Strangers, some things just never change.) Apparently, I'm a Really Good Listener. Everyone tells me so. Most of my friends and acquaintances have at one time or another revealed to me their juiciest secrets or triple-X-rated emotions, secure in the knowledge I'll never repeat them to anyone else. Button-lipped Bertie, that's me. Hear the evil, see the evil, but definitely never speaka da evil. It's the same at work. Colleagues come to me with grievances that should be none of my concern, and when someone is having a real bummer of a day, then this good old bum-boy's always the first one to know. Why, it was only last week senior management came to me with a particularly detailed description of their haemorrhoid problem. If I wanted to, I could tell you who's doing exactly what to whom behind whose back, what the shy one in the corner let on to me he really gets up to on Sunday afternoons, and why it wouldn't be the best idea in the world to hand the Metropolitan Police that woman's home address. Believe me, my dears, with all the truckloads of dirt I've got to dish, I could make a killing overnight on the old blackmail lark. Yet, despite the fact I've now got a permanent damp patch on my right shoulder from the number of times it's been cried on, I mostly don't mind people off-loading their problems and insecurities onto me every now and again. And I suppose I should be chuffed so many people trust me. But occasionally, I wish they'd all just put up or shut up. For, my dears, I've got my very own silver-plated set of traumas and tantrums, and a personal life far messier than anything you'll see down Leicester Square come chucking-out time: this blog isn't strap-lined Crisis on Old Compton Street for nothing, you know. Sometimes I want to say: Look, just for today I do not want to hear about your problems with your boy-girlfriend/ creditors/ employer/ landlord/ self-image, and do I really need to know about that nasty little rash you acquired from last Friday's furtive fumble? Sometimes I 'd love to scream: Won't you listen to me for a f***ing change! But I never do. Because I'm "nice". Apparently. And, anyway, if I didn't listen to them, then who else would? But sometimes I think I should be a lot less nice. And shout. (Thank you all for listening. I'll shut up now and let you carry on.) Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Lord Snooty
In the Old Time, when I still naïvely believed that what matters is what you know and what you have done, rather than who you know and who you'll do it with, I actually bothered sending CVs out to potential employers. And when I did, along with all my other academic achievements, and made-up hobbies, I would always claim a deep and intimate knowledge of "popular culture". I'm not sure what it meant, and neither did they, but it sounded good at the time. What I think I was trying to say was that, while I'd been taught dead useful things at University like the path to fascism as evinced in the German horror cinema of the 1920s, or the role of allegory in the oeuvre of some French poet even his mère didn't care for, I was also a truly well-rounded individual, who had a proper appreciation of the "low-brow" stuff the man on the street was really interested in. It would be called "patronising" today, but we all did it back then, in our DMs and our black 501s, and not just because we were closet Janet Street-Porter wannabes and wanted to get onto yoof telly. Today, right snobby little Stranger that I can sometimes be, most so-called popular culture passes me by. I don't know, and couldn't care less about who Den is shagging in the Queen Vic (and judging by the ratings neither does anyone else), and find it terminally depressing to think that people don't seem to realise that the third-rate, infantile has-been's appearance in yet another reality show is just a desperate last-ditch attempt to save a washed-up career. Unlike a few years ago, I wouldn't now know a kids' TV presenter even if he went down on me round the back of Studio Four for my two Blue Peter badges; and all B*g Br*t*er is to me is some bloke from a George Orwell book. Proper pompous pain in the ass, aren't I? Anyway, everything I need to know about popular culture these days I can get from my best-loved blogs. Which must go to explain why, at an arty theatre performance last night featuring my favourite diva, no person in the audience other than Kate Moss had to be pointed out to me by a friend. I had no idea that was what she looked like. I didn't even realise she was white: for years I thought she was that skinny black bird from Streatham. So much for my deep and intimate knowledge of popular culture, then. I really need to get out and read the scandal-sheets more often, if only to understand what the rest of the world out there is talking about. Tuesday, June 01, 2004
Falling Apart
Aching where once I was shaking quite fetchingly, I'm still feeling the aftershock of a party from two days back. There was a time not too long ago when this gay blade could blag his way, and strut his stuff, non-stop from Friday night through to Sunday teatime, before getting home for a few hours at the PC, and then eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. Now, the pathetic pansy can't even survive a barbeque in Camden town. So to Patsy-Stone things up, and because he's been invited later this year to an establishment which expects certain, er, dress standards, he breezed into town to spend a disturbingly large amount of money on some ludicrously inappropriate items of clothing. He returned home with a sensible new teapot. And then, to add insult to injury, it took him five minutes to get served in a not particularly crowded pub, when once it'd be waiting for him on the bar before he'd even got through the door. And the barman asked him whether he wanted a "straight" Stella, as well. The all-nighter part of this bender's brain has been burnt out, someone's walked off with his Gay Shopping Gene, and he can't even console himself with the fact he's still got his Bar Presence left. If this is what's called Growing Up, then you can keep it. I don't want to learn serious things. I want always to be a little boy and to have fun. Clap your hands if you believe in fairies. Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Fears Of A Clone
This week, I chose to buy my very first Abba CD, rather than getting some obscure but ultimately rewarding World Music recording which I'd really have to work hard at to appreciate; and, in a particularly grumpy and snooty mood, I scowled at the middle-aged stranger who bought me a drink, while conveniently forgetting that I am also a middle-aged Stranger, who never buys drinks unless we've been introduced first. In addition, I spent an entire evening in a chrome-plated bar, and not a pub, quoting extensively from Will and Grace rather than Wilhelm Meister, and declined the pints of Stella in favour of bottles of Smirnoff Ice; while there, I also read the free fag-mags Boyz and QX from cover to cover, but didn't even pick up a copy of the Pink Paper, because, well, it's politics, isn't it, and what’s that got to do with us? I was also heard using the words "puh-leeaze", "like totally" and "awesome" in the same sentence. And finally, I was seized by what can only be described as the girly giggles when I learnt that skin-care people Biotherm have finally opened a concession in the UK; gave one female friend fashion hints, and another advice on a ménage à trois; and hissed at Gail while cheering Todd on Corrie. So much for my careful presentation of an off-line persona of a deeply caring, slightly off-the-wall but seriously cultured and non-stereotypical gay man. Looks like I've morphed into a mainstream Mary, while nobody was looking, just like everybody else. Now. Will someone please slap some good taste and common sense into me, before I get another round of those alcopops in? Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Manifesto
I know it was over five days ago, and it's already been blogged to death by the best, but bear with me. I've only just easyjetted in from a few days with Sal and Chris round their gaff, and I'm determined to chuck in my two Euros' worth as well. The highlight of my weekend away was, naturally, the Gay Cup Final (or the Grand Prix, as they call it over there, which makes it sound ever so butch, and you half expect Murray Walker to be doing the commentary, rather than dear old Tel). Now I won't hear a bad word said against the New Seekers and I consider Cheryl Baker's defrocking a seminal moment in British pop culture (although the less said about me and Mary Hopkin probably the better), but surprisingly I've never really got Eurovision before. I think the last time I actually watched it in its entirety was sometime in the seventies when I didn't know any better. In an attic Up North there's my battered and very mangled off-air C-90 recording of the 1973 competition, and I still know all the words to Maxi's chirpy "Do I Dream?", while continuing to get shivers at the Spanish power-anthem "Eres Tu" by Mocedades Yet I could never get myself excited over a bunch of glammed-up, glitzed-up, third-rate, tone-deaf, self-aware, superstar-wannabes with perfect teeth and no sense of shame. After all, apart from the perfect teeth, that's what I'm aiming for, and I do not like competition. But when you're packed into a busting-to-the-buttocks bar in Berlin's bender quarter, surrounded on all sides by supposedly "straight-acting" men, hailing from at least ten different countries and nearly as many time zones, and when the biggest scuffle breaks out when someone writes on someone else's score-sheet, and when tears are shed by the big muscle boy next to you as it becomes patently obvious his man is not going to win, so everyone decides to go for Greece anyway because, well, it'll really piss Turkey off, won't it, and mine's a Schultheiss, dankeschön , and that girl dancing on the bar knows all the words to the UK entry, but the bloke she thinks is her boyfriend understands exactly what Sweden's going on about. And when you realise that sixty years ago, most of these countries were kicking the s**t out of each other, and a decade ago some of them were stuck in a bloody civil war, and now the thing they're most concerned about is winning some totally inconsequential pop-pap piece of bubblegum nonsense… well, it's at times like this that my faith in a united and peaceful Europe is absolutely boundless. And that, my dears, and no matter how much you goad me, is the first and only political statement you will ever get in this blog. Now. Chicken Kiev, anyone? |
