Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty Nine - I Am Named Where I Least Expect To Be

My 'Coming Out' to Pastor Lou, and contrary to church custom, him taking me at face value was a major positive change for me. If it was not the same as me getting to the top of the list for group therapy that I was due for, I felt like I was at the top of his list when he invited me to check in with him. Later, when I was scouting out second hand record shops in central Nottingham for the prices they sold their records at, with a view to me selling them some of mine then away from checking the record shops prices out I was surprised at how attractive some of the men were who I passed on the street, nearby. The attraction was mid way between the abstract and the sexual and I was meant to be musing more on which shop would give me the most for the records I had to sell. But man or record shop, both were deals I might want to make, but I did not rate my chance of finding the right one easily.11

I did not expect to be the figure of other men's wandering thoughts, but that happened once. I was sat on my own in St Peter's church in the city centre and, well, an older man was also sat there in a pew some distance away. he beckoned me over and we sat and talked, the way strangers with spare time do. We were alone, I was around thirty, he was in his fifties. He used some tactful evasion of language to say that he guessed that I was gay. I was not offended by that. His mix of tact and daring was engaging in it's own way. He talked abut his days of national service in the navy and how he fell in love with a fellow sailor but how strongly he felt the love but never had the nerve to declare it. Later he married and tried to put the episode behind him but it would never stay where he wanted it to, an episode of a single life that was over. He said that I reminded him of the love he never dared declare. Of course he quietly cried. I listened and responded but let him speak more. I felt oddly honoured and beholden to be the witness to his sense of loss and grief finally being released for him talking to me.24

I had no clue as to how he recognised me as gay when I was so uncertain about publicly recognising myself as being that way. But listening to the man in St Peter's church explain how he had lived all his adult life haunted by the love he dare not ask for, but he strongly felt was there at least gave me better reason for me to be more forgiving of my own poorly thought out answers to the questions of what sex love and marriage were for. My journal was the place for my reflections on those subjects, among others. There the writing revealed how much nearer I was to being lonely than contentedly alone. But also the journal revealed how much better off I was for my being clear that such was the case. About once a month, the need for sex became an issue that had to be dealt with directly. My playing of 'Relax' by Frankie Goes To Hollywood loud through headphones in my room was one way of trying to deal with the need. But often that was not enough. I would feel impelled to visit the near by public toilet in Lady Bay and hope that whoever was there was as handsome and generous as they were anonymous.37

When I went I reasoned that nowhere else could meet my need the way the public toilet did. From talking with Pastor Lou I knew that if anonymity that was not as anonymous as I wanted it to be was the answer then I needed to reset the question. Sometimes that worked, if I disliked the look of the company on offer I declined it ant left. But I still had to see it before I could choose to refuse it. Not looking for it because I not longer needed it was not an option when I felt the overwhelming desparation.43

A lot of what overwhelmed me was the implied ideals of what masculinity was where I grew up which barely go written about in the journal. They were too confusing and too personal for me sort out. When I was twelve or thirteen years old those ideals were that males were dominant, females were invisible and compliant. Males enjoyed receiving oral sex and disliked giving it-giving it was too much like subservience for them to be at ease with that. The more well endowed and muscular the male, the more justified their sense of  entitlement was. Where a male sucked dick he was 'gay' or 'sexually passive'. But a male who got their dick sucked by another male was 'highly sexed'. Bullying 'didn't exist'. It did my head in to be unable to reason enough, so as to discard, such inconsistent and obscure ideas of what was sexual, what was masculine, and what should be seen as 'normal' in such a hierarchy. Living with such a personally inconsistent logic about intimacy as that would be a test of anyone's reasoning. But I was not the only one who was disfigured by this faulty logic, as the silent brotherhood in the toilets nightly might bear witness to in their shared private moments.57

The best way out of this fog of inconsistency remained to seek a person who I could be frank with whilst using basic terms to map out these ideas about sex, and the consequences of them. I had male Christian friends. But I knew better than to burden them with something they were so unaccustomed to hearing. And Pastor Lou, who might have helped me unpick the logic of my teenage misunderstandings, was gone. But I had learned enough to know that whoever I met in the singularly sexual setting of my choice to know there was a strong chance that the men I met were probably in heterosexual relationships. Even in the silent places in Nottingham there was more hope there than I had been in Gainsborough. The married men in Gainsborough had always looked shabby and were usually sexually inept. The men I met for sex in Nottingham may well have been married but took better care of their appearance and had a confidence about them that sort of rubbed off on me. At least I think it was confidence.69

As it was out of who-know-how-many forgotten times in the toilet there were I had three memorable sexual experiences in 1990. Given that the men did not introduce themselves, the trick which was mine to effect but not mine to control, was to make eye contact with somebody who was handsome, physically memorable, and organised enough that they knew it when they caught somebody's eye. And they knew what to do with that effect. The sexual act that I was 'good at' for want of a better expression was me giving them oral sex where I asked for nothing in return. It had been something that I had first done it at the age of twelve in circumstance that were murky enough that even circa 1990, eighteen years later, the weirdness of the situation meant that I could not put into words who did what to whom and why they did it, beyond how the circumstance all the inconsistent  rules that explained masculinity to maximum effect. By 1991 the fog of my former misunderstanding had cleared enough for me to think that I knew the difference between what was presented as stylised aggression and any other sort of engineered loss of consent.  83

The first of the three encounters was with a well endowed bodybuilder who was very controlling and in a distinct hurry. I did not care whether he knew he was a living cliche, or whether he did not reflect on his self image at all. I was too astonished at what a feast for the eyes he was. If in that moment he knew he was a narcissist then that seemed quite justifiable to me. He had an energy about him that was as pressing as it was brief. The second memorable encounter was with bearded and hairy fat man who lit up the dank surroundings we found each other in. I was happy to do whatever eased him, and to marvel at how at the ease and self possession of his body language. He took matters more slowly than the body builder had, which gave me time to reflect as he directed events. He gave me my first gay kiss.93  

Marriage and alcohol were two lethal subjects that I found difficult to unpick 'the moral codes' of, both as a teenager and as an adult. In my journal I was divided by remembering, and being affected by, the Gainsborough pub culture where I wanted the distance I now had from that past to explain that past better than immersion in it had. I knew my father's place of worship was the pub, just as mine was the church. I wanted where I lived in Lady Bay to give a perspective on him that made who he was to make sense to me. But try as I did with the journaling, it was not working. Beyond the unresolved argument melting agreeably into my sleep when I stopped writing. With the journaling around how my did lived vs the projections placed upon him, I was looking for some sort of verbal alchemy where the gap between the life he lived and the detached way his life was explained to me would be explained in a way that made sense.104

The explanation would not come, I would write, write some more and write more again, the different writings would not marry up. Writing of marriage, away from my dad I found a generic take on my past that sort-of explained something.106

Marriage and alcohol were the two main reasons that men forgetfully waved their willies at each other in public toilets in Gainsborough. The men wanted their homes to have the ease of the pub. But terraced houses were made to be places to eat and sleep. The house they were persuaded to buy was full of dependent family they did not want to see. So to delay going home to them from the pub,  well, nobody buys beer, they rent it. You can guess where the men stopped instead of going straight home, and what subject their confused imaginations turned to instead. 113

I don't know which was the greater tragedy there. The tragedy of the men's awareness of how much their marriages and houses left them feeling trapped, and still wanting to be kept on their own terms, or the tragedy of their unawareness of how much their behaviour was repetitive, which other people could recognise more clearly from even a short distance away from them than they could.118

I associated gambling with men putting money on horses, racing far away from grubby looking bookies premises where the bet was put on. I was too much the coward to want to see the insides of those places. I did not see myself as a gambler. But with the cottaging I clearly was a gambler. In the grubbiness I was prepared to seek reward in the stakes were my life-choices, which I hoped to improve through encounters I could neither quantify or control. The bet was the interactions I had with whoever was there. I could refuse to go there out Christian pietism. But how else was I going to change the luck of my stuck teenage self? If I had found the courage to 'come out' to Pastor Lou, then who might find the courage to connect with me in some unexpected way?  

My third memorable encounter in the public toilet was where my life started to change. I was at the toilet late one Saturday summer night in 1991, being quietly generous in my usual way to somebody I thought handsome where the only oddity in the situation was the small size tight lilac coloured ladies lycra swim suit that he wore. And then he said 'Thank you Malcolm'. With three words he broke what seemed like a spell that had been over me. Before those three words I felt no need to put words how invisible I felt. And how such invisibility made me feel safe. 

Clearly, however much I had felt safely invisible before those words, I was not as invisible as I thought I was. I now had to reconsider what risk was, and how I calculated it. I did not go back to the toilet for several months to do my homework.

Please left click here for Chapter Thirty.