I had time enough over the three to four days between Tuesday day and Friday night to think over what happened on Monday night. My first thought was to act towards church as if nothing had happened. I knew I had to have a defendable explanation for what had happened if I said anything about it. With the date to look forward to I still had ordinary things to do. and on the quiet I wonder what I was going to wear on the night. I had something to work towards and I could take my time. Russell had said something about the venue being much fuller on Friday.7
The odd thing was that about five years earlier I had been in a pub that 'had a gay night', Fridays, for a while when I lived in Gainsborough. The pub was The Tiger Inn. I was curious when I called in there. It was obvious there that the customers who presented themselves as 'gay' were mostly straight and presented as a curiously restricted alpha male version of 'being gay'. One or two of the men looked quite nice, one even wore a very nice checked shirt. But collectively they positively repelled closer engagement. The music was different to the ordinary music the pub played, by what was removed from the choice of music to be talked over.15
My memory of the few nights I attended have long since distilled into silent images where the vanity of the company were what was most clear. Many of them wore variations on the easiest Village People image to copy, the construction worker. Few of the men present had the build to pull the look off, though on the plus side the different T shirts and shirts worn that night presented some sort of nearly gay themed dress sense. Whilst I saw what they were aiming at, it took more than tact to not say to those present by what degree what they wore did not project what they meant it to. It would have been funny if they had an inclusive sense of the absurd. But when drink is more about drinking than anything else, it does not have a sense of absurdity. Where there is humour is mean and selfish. I had known this distantly from my dad coming home to a sober house and wondering where what had made him feel good had gone. But that was seeing just one man.27
Nearly all of the men in the pub were married, or acted like that. They were looking for extra-marital sex as if they were entitled to it. I resisted thinking about who they were when I saw them. But reflecting on my impressions of them a few years on, it was as if they had a collective back story where the alcohol reminded them of some misremembered grudge where if they got the sex they said they wanted they would forget the grudge until the next time, which explained to them why gay sex 'was not adultery', just revenge or a score settled. My curiosity settled, and my being uninterested in grudges, I made sure of the infrequency of my visits to The Tiger Inn.35
Friday night had to be different, even the way the music co-ordinated the lighting that I had seen when the place was nearly empty on the Monday had proven that much. The handicap I had no choice but to bring with me was that I was backward and beyond accounting for it. I had lived by being poorly supported where my lack of support supported itself better, whilst inhibiting me from being better supported where such support was known to exist. Since moving to Nottingham I had taken all the help I could find to be less backward and it had changed me. I was always thankful for the help I received, and always the helper did what they could whilst leaving greater need unmet. The language used about the help in Nottingham both affirmed me within it's limits and said that there was further help elsewhere, that would take me further. So my stop-start-stop-start-pause journey got me away from cottaging, and I thought 'out of the closet', where I thought that finding The Admiral Duncan was my being out. As if I had arrived.48
If Russell knew that the gay life was much more a relay where friends were easily found, and even more easily lost, then he did not say so that night. He was too engaged with 'showing me off' with whilst showing me round. 'Lonely' would be the wrong description for what I felt in the pub that night. 'comfortably out of my depth' would describe how I felt better. I did not get drunk The drunken atmosphere was woozy enough for me. The brevity of my introductions to Russell friends made sense when the music was loud enough to inhibit conversation. An introduction was the limit. I was left to find my own space at times as well, being left to guess how much I might be seen as 'fresh meat' and how much this was a human meat market. The walls were red. I could not tell whether they were red because of the colour they were painted or because of the way the colour of the walls interacted with the lights lit the walls up. The film that came to me was 'The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover' in which two lovers hastily embark on intercourse in meat hanging room where the colours of the walls changes with different coloured lights, as if the sex were incidental to a lecture about how different coloured light will change when projected onto different coloureds surfaces. The music seemed far less like 'magic roundabout' with crowds of men moving with no particular sense of rhythm to it. I may have noticed how the Stock Aiken and Waterman tracks performed differently in the pub atmosphere than they did anywhere else-where when the pub's lights were synced to the percussion in the music then the lighting made the music more immersive.68
The night did not end on the clear note I imagined it might, so much as dissipate into darkness as the effects of the drink slowed down how much more alcohol people could drink as the evening neared its end. Russell choreographed the end of the night between us. There was the obligatory slow dance number to encourage those remaining to stand up and pair off in a tactile way that echoed the school discos that I used to hate.73
Russell made this the cue to me to leave and met him outside where we could hear each other talk. He was going home, I was going home and to confirm this he gave me a piece of paper with his phone number on it, and with that he kissed me goodnight. I was to ring him next next week if I wanted to see him. One of his friends called him over and they went off together. I walked in the opposite direction alone.78
Looking back over the evening, the openness of it was what amazed me. The drink served to make gay men sociable and inclusive. Given the social minority that they were, they needed something the majority did to to make a majority of themselves. That night I saw practically none of the 'married men pretending they were gay' type men I had seen before when with drink inside them they formed a majority culture and it had seemed quite sour to me. The majority gay culture in The Admiral Duncan seemed much more positive and playful. The simplicity of what it took to reveal to me that gay men needed to be in the majority to give each other confidence.86
When I compared the confidence of the men in The Admiral Duncan with the furtiveness of the men who limited themselves to visits to public toilets no further argument was required. That one visit to the pub made me not want to return to the old hidden life again.89
A few days later, alone at home and wonder about this confidence/majority point. The conversation was informal but he was slightly distant. He set the tone where he invited me to visit him at his flat where what I drew from his invite was the better I got to know him the more slowly but clearly I would understand the dos and don'ts of 'the gay world', and same sex companionship. He outlined the 'bear' gay identity to me and encouraged me to let my beard regrow fully and keep the hair short. I had noticed this in The Admiral Duncan but on the phone he explained it much better.96
I did not ask Russell my big questions 'What is the gay community?' and 'How do I find it?'. That would have been to expose how little I knew about AIDS amongst other sexual health matters. He had a front door of his own behind which he could live in the world of his choosing. I had a shared front door behind which I lived a shared Christian life of some sort. I was living in a world he had left behind.101
No sooner had I got it calmly in my head that Russell could now part of my life, and that I was definitely gay and a bear than mother rang. I don't know what news from home I had missed, the letter in the Christmas card was short: good news only. How Grandad was doing was not mentioned. I did not mind-I had no particular feelings about him beyond wondering how he kept a full head of shortish dark hair at his age. I knew he had been in hospital. The silence from mother about that meant that he was not recovered, nor had he been sent home. When mother said that he had died I was neither shocked nor surprised: six weeks in hospital is a long time for a widower of four years who was near ninety years old. I made enquiries about the details, mother made reassuring noises. As evasive telephone calls went honour was maintained. Mother won on points by what she managed to avoid making clear. 112
I had to ring Russell back to postpone my first visit to his flat in the heights of 'fairy towers', the block of council flats for single people that over time had become mostly occupied by gay men because they were the most consistently single in the early 1990s. I had a funeral to attend and a family to be dutiful towards. I could not tell before I went what 'duty' might mean, beyond me silently owning that I was an outsider to a family who claimed me but disowned anything that did not flatter their right to not have to think. A trait most exemplified by my dad most consistently in his drinking habits.119
Please left click here for Chapter Thirty Five.
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