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Collecting Crises on Old Compton Street and Beyond
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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. |
