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Collecting Crises on Old Compton Street and Beyond
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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. |
