Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty - Change Comes In Threes

It took my being unemployed to appreciate how well I had 'landed on my feet' when I settled into living in Lady Bay. The longer I lived there the more the ease of the middle class character of the area. It masked my previous life very well. In Lincolnshire I was seen as a working class misfit who was still somehow likeable. I was a people pleaser when I crossed the T's on my thanks and dotted the I's on my praise for the things other people liked when I was asked to. But that spring and summer of 1990 my life opened up on three fronts, all three of which fed into each other and changed how I saw myself.

The first event of the three that changed me was that The Broadway Cinema put on it's first gay season. Prodded by 'Section 28' which forbade 'the promotion of homosexuality' in schools, the British Film Institute and Channel 4 television looked outside of schools and put together a collection of gay themed films and television broadcasts which included comment on clause 28, along with older gay themed films from recent decades. If, as Alan Bennett put it, 'homosexuality came off the ration book' at least for gay men in London 1967, then the BFI and Channel 4 thought it was the right time for gay men who lived in English cities outside London to follow in the footsteps of their Capital forebears. Here was the proper follow up to 'My Beautiful Laundrette', which I watched five years earlier, that I had been waiting for.

In my head I was nearer being 'out', my questions around it were more open than before, but with my choice of company I was no nearer seeking acceptance for my being gay. I was precisely nowhere on that front. I was still giving blood at the blood donors twice a year. I read the notice about 'Don't give blood if...  ' and gave anyway. I reasoned that being gay in your head, and only there, did not corrupt your blood. My homosexuality was much more a psychological/existential conflict for me. A young and nerdy Woody Allen had once said 'I am not afraid of death. I just don't want to be there when it happens.'. I could surely have paraphrased Woody Allen's quote in my head when ever I was in company in which I could not talk as freely as I wanted to 'I am not afraid of my sexuality, I just don't want to be disbelieved when I talk about it'.

My way around what made the unsayable automatically unpleasant and unsayable was to see a 1971 film called 'Pink Narcissus' at the The Broadway Cinema. It was a unique gay art house/fantasy film in which there was no dialogue or plot. In the film the character seemed to live in some perpetual reverie as he explored different fantasies as if every fantasy was sexual. Some of the fantasies were more sexual than others, but the longer the film went on, the more explicitly gay, and sexual direct, the reveries became. I could not have chosen a better film to force open my closet door with. The film hugely lowered the levels of guilt that I felt when I chose to go to places I was unwilling to name after. When I went to my local public toilet to cottage, the film helped me admit to myself where I had been, after I had been there. I had to get past church teachings, the Woodhouse way. There instruction implied mechanical obedience, with no need for supportive reasoning to make the teaching stick better. I admitted to seeing the film to the one person in church who I thought might understand why I had wanted to see it. His mix of disapproval whilst understanding why I might want to see it was more humorous to me than it seemed to him.

I still had a long way to go to get my head around why I cottaged. But I no longer inwardly denied that I did it, and started to take on the question of why I wanted to cottage. Most of the time I did not want it. But I also accepted that simply being told by whoever to stop did not make me stop.

I examined the shorthand argument that both obliquely acknowledged homosexual behaviour and ignored the homosexual character. 'It is just a phase', as said by parents of teenagers, since being a teenager was first a consumer choice, which it had not been in their parents day when the teenage years were blank years. 'It is just a phase' had it's update in the churchy criticism of the then expanding gay culture, where 'homosexuality is a lifestyle choice', as if what the church did amid a consumer society, where everything was 'a lifestyle choice', was neither 'a choice' nor 'a lifestyle'. For anyone who had invisibly identified as gay from aged twelve, as I had, my identity seemed no more a lifestyle choice it the age of twelve than it did as neared the age of thirty. The only difference was my new found relative visibility.

I felt adjusted to thinking how in the television age we were all far more like the young man in 'Pink Narcissus' than we could admit we were. We all had fantasies that repeated and varied themselves. For parents to say to teenagers that what they wanted 'was just a phase' was the parent saying 'Don't grow up in my sight, grow up somewhere else. And don't ask for help from me to get you there.'. At least that is what I imagined my parents saying to me.

If the toilets were my place of peak fantasy then I had to work my way out of that conditioning. Difficult as this phase of rebalancing how I saw myself, I would see it through.

I had been at the top of the list for moving to Agape House for some time when a room in the house became available, later that spring. Adelaide's shared house was a three storey semi-detached house, four storeys high if the extensive brick floored cellar was included, with a phone, a big ground floor kitchen diner, a shared living room, an upstairs bathroom and four comfortable well furnished rooms upstairs. There was a fair sized low maintenance but smart garden to the rear of the house with a large willow tree in it. I resided there for a relatively short length of time. But from the time of my departure from Pierrepoint Rd to my  departure from Agape House, the difference the move made to my life was astonishing.

The Pierrepoint Rd house had a loose sense of family about it, that most of the time was much more 'loose' than it was 'family', and the place was pleasantly run down. To go from the looseness and neglect of the old household to being part of a much better supported substitute family in the new house was astonishing. One odd point was how similar they were as houses. But the big point to note is how all the personal changes that I had been stymied from exploring at every address that I had lived at prior to 'Agape House' opened out for me there. I felt much safer exploring new ideas and aspirations there.

But first a word about Jed, who moved there around the same time as me. He was a gardener, a church attendee, happily heterosexual and not at all homophobic, and 70 % deaf. His favourite television programme was 'Star Trek; The Next Generation' because with it's repetitions he found it easy to follow. He spoke quite clearly. As had happened to me, his life had been mangled and misshapen by institutions. He had one thing I did not have; a profession. He was a professional gardener. The church always had problems with single young men who were attracted to the image the church projected, but whose early lives have been disrupted. The church always wanted the unsettled young men to marry and settle, but had no supportive mechanism to ensure this. The young men would not settle easily if they could not be honest about how they had survived the mangled choices open to them. Adelaide's individual solution to the presenting problems that the church shied away from accepting, the disrupted early life, was to have a substitute family set up that allowed people like Jed and me to evolve improved approaches to becoming adults in their own way.

The third area of life that changed was work, well nearly. After thirteen weeks of being registered unemployed and quietly not looking very hard for work every claimant got the offer they could not refuse; to join a job club. The only way to leave this club alive was to get the job that you thought you could do, and where you could imagine leaving the job on win-win terms. The alternative was to stay in the job club and be so bored repeating useless actions you had already done too many times that you felt like the dead cactus in the window looked. Most of the jobs to be found were generic, low-skilled, and basic. If you disliked the job, then changing it for an equivalent job was both pointless and difficult. Employers were like picky teenagers. hey sought situations that advantaged them whilst resisting recognising that their advantage might disadvantage others. With many jobs the no-fault exit from the job was the most attractive part of a job description.

The job club met Monday to Friday, mid morning to late afternoon, in an undecorated sparsely furnished city council office room. There were tables enough to sit twenty to thirty chairs all around. There was no clocking on or clocking off, but members signed a contract to attend the length of a part time job each week. Our names and attendance times were noted, and the notes kept for promised 'review' interviews that never happened. Attendees agreed to look through the latest local newspapers and council lists of vacancies to be filled in each day. No attendee I knew of ever got a job with the council: the list might as well have been a fiction to give us hope. There was a row of high windows along one long wall that let light into the room, but gave no view out worth seeing. The windows remained closed. If they were opened then the dust and noise pollution from Maid Marion Way would have been a distraction. There was a kettle, milk tea and coffee for us all to get hot drinks with when we wanted. The set up made Pierrepoint Rd seem attentive and homely.

The manager was a friendly disabled man who walked with a stick who mostly sat away from the tables. His presence suggested that if the civil service thought he was fit to be 'our manager' then we should think ourselves fit for work, and further fit enough to find the work unaided. At one level the atmosphere felt like being in a class of mostly well behaved children on an infinitely extended indoors break where the teacher was absent. At another level we were all there by contract. There was no cohesion between us, and mutual support was rare. With the pens and stationery at the table we more or less managed ourselves whilst we scanned the city newspapers and vacancy lists for something to apply for, making notes of our efforts, whilst some openly looked instead at all the other sections of the newspaper, or brought their own tabloid paper, to fill out their time there.

Some of us were better than others at filling in application forms. The best knew how to fill in a job application form to present themselves as wanting the job whilst being obviously unqualified for it, as if they were ready made rejects who were helping the system out by applying. Finding that balance where we appeared to be willing but unlikely candidates was a balancing act.

Given the way I had been hurt when I was managed in the nursing home I set myself the goal of being able to work at a distance from where the management worked. Accepting this criteria ended with me getting a part time job as a postman.

Please left click here for Chapter Twenty One.