Invisible Stranger |
|
|
Collecting Crises on Old Compton Street and Beyond
Archives
Currently clicking:
Usually Playing:
|
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. |
