Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Thirty Three - Alone Together

The date is Monday the 9th of February 1992. The time is evening. I don't know why I am in a public toilet, but I am there for the same reasons as I have been the before. To make the loneliness I felt more bearable than life would  be if I did not have this place that I felt entitled to go to. If everybody I knew in my every day life would have rejected the self expression that I thought acceptable in this place, then I still had here to go to. Never mind that, well, a policeman could arrest me. I was one of an unknown number of men there. All of us were looking for our own version of that same private moment that seemed important to us alone. Our being alone together seemed both obscure and important.

Moments that were meaninglessness to the world outside of the place were what the place has been adapted for. Where resisting other peoples common understanding is something that has to be done quietly, though a Quaker meeting would do the same thing far more openly, and with a far better grace and efficiency. I am there because after several months of avoiding looking for anonymous sex I am gripped by the need to seek it. I am too far past caring as to ask myself why. If I am named and thanked by anyone after the sex happens then I am determined to sort out how I feel about that after the event. I have to learn afresh how to own the experience of being named when the name for what I we were doing when before being names I thought it was a secret, and I was anonymous.

The night is dark and cold. The time is between 7 and 7.30 pm. The lights are out, some bulbs have been broken or removed. There is a large disabled cubicle with a wide entrance. Next to that there are two small regular sized cubicles with narrower doors . Lastly there are three urinals to the left of the cubicles. One of them is very smelly, we don't know which. It is probably blocked. There is also a queue for the use of each facility with probably five men, including me, waiting in row against the wall with the three doors in front of us. Nobody knows how many men are in the cubicles. Not even the men in them. We, well I, knew better than to be surprised if when one man left a cubicle the door closed again. And a few minutes more another man could exit and the door would stay open. The men who stood against the wall in the dark were starting to sort out with each other who wanted what and how to get it from each other: In the dark nobody could see anything so why look for a cubicle? It could be less public in that lack of light. Only not everyone there is sorting out their needs with the others in the queue.

Some in the queue seem to just not want sex in the dark with who is there. They may want sex, but not in this setting, nor with anyone who was present at that moment. Maybe better weather and natural light was what they really wanted. Until then their sexual appetite could wait for somewhere that smelt better. In the silence and timidity of inaction in that moment who knows what the men there really wanted? None of those present could say.

I decided that I had waited long enough, and for no clear reason decided that a majority of the men were married anyway. They were married because a majority of the men in society were married anyway. And when they married had said words that assumed that marriage was for life, even when it turned out not to be and no fault exists from marriage were not cheap but were available, at an uncertain price. The young men I had met socially in church, who I discovered later where married and were now separated could often not talk about their experience of marriage without their descriptions making them seem incomplete as people to what they had signed up to.

Modern marriage was clearly a very leaky vessel for it to create the exit clauses that it did. I was one of the more temporary get out clauses, I could not mind that: it came with the territory of having sex with married men maintained their marriages by getting their needs for non-relational sex met outside the relationship. Through marriage society had made sex rational and proscribed the less rational avenues it took. But human beings were not particularly rational and would carve out spaces for their more irrational intent and behaviour, including making best use of the common rationality to hide behind. What frustrated me was being pushed into the sexual equivalent of 'The Samaritans' with less of the virtue of being recognised as being supportive where if they spoke their first words would be 'My wife does not understand....    '.

As I left I made eye contact with somebody almost without realising I had done it. A man roughly the same height and build as me, maybe slightly shorter, was following me as I walked away from the toilet, over the grassy area nearby towards where I knew there was a log big enough for two people to sit on. With no light on us nobody would know we were there. He dressed as if he was single. I hoped he was not a married man. It was too easy to build in my head the image of some handsome ghost who I would later retreat into the world of marriage, never to be seen again.

The air seemed fresh and clean after where we had been.  In relative comfort and in the dark, we talked enough to negotiate the sort of sex we thought each of us wanted to prove that that was why we were there. We talked because we could, because we were on our own, well away from the toilet which was in effect a sexual library, where, like regular public lending libraries, being quiet was the custom. There, where we described it as library or cruising site, silence was a given. We undid each other's tight jeans and both had a fumble, attempting to please each other. But between the cold, the dark, and where we had first found each other, our reason for being at the cruising site had gone. But we could both talk, and we both had beards, and seeing his beard made me find my own voice. My beard was slowly growing back after I had shaved it off the previous November, in the hope of the shave symbolising a restart, a change of life. Who knows? Maybe this my personal advent, the change of life that I had shaved it off for His beard was trimmed but fuller than mine and in good light I could see it was ginger against his pale skin. He was not the first bear, gay bearded/hairy man, who I had attempted trust in intimacy with. But he was the first bearded man to remove from me the expectation that gay sex always had to be quiet and anonymous.

When we were fully dressed I said to him 'Would you like to come back to my house and share some soup. I want to be able to talk to somebody. Would you listen to me?'.  He probably said 'Yes' because the question I asked was the question he least expected to be asked. He followed me the ten mins walk to Agape house the shared house where I rented a room. From the distance in memory that I am at now, I have no idea what I thought of the risk that I was taking, expecting to be listened to. What I was doing was either unusual or a risk, or both. But what I was asking for was quite chaste in tone if not intent. But the house was empty when we got there. I had nobody to improvise any excuses to.

I made the tea and warmed some frozen chicken broth from my shelf of the freezer in the microwave, and we sat in my room. He ate and drank but out of politeness than hunger. He was here to listen, and ask the odd question. He listened, and no doubt wonder where the punchline was in what I shared with him, when so much of it want so far towards a punchline or action point and then retreated from actually saying the line.

He found the exit line when I told him that I had never been in a gay pub. I did not know where they were, and I had been told 'They are very lonely places' by the church leaders who I had hitherto trusted enough to share my wanting to go to one with, who I expected to know anything about such matters. His response was brief and immediate 'We could go to The Admiral Duncan tonight, just eat up say when you are ready?'.

The walk to the city centre took most of an hour, which was time enough for us to talk away from the pressure points of the depths of my inexperience, and get me onto more general conversational ground. We arrived at The Admiral Duncan at near ten pm. The place was nearly deserted. Both the house-oriented disco music and fancy light show underwhelmed me. The music I normally listened to was music where musicians listened to each other to know what to play. The 'feel' of the music, empathy between the musicians mattered.  

The dance music might as well have been the theme to 'The Magic Roundabout' for all I could pick out any tunes and musical empathy in it. But Russell had empathy for me, though in the surroundings he showed me, his empathy lay in proof that loneliness was far more relative than it seemed. And when some people say that other places are lonely then they may be hiding the loneliness they want to keep others in, as if it is company.

We kissed as we agreed to leave the pub. He had to go his way home and I had to go mine. He asked me 'Will I see you here next Friday?'. Lost in thought in the moment, and not thinking through that Friday was Valentines Day, I said 'Yes, and I hope I have completed my apprenticeship.'. This was my indirect way of saying 'Now I can go where the gay men talk to each other, and give each other greater choice than secretive silent sex. I can be among some men who will actually kiss, and talk and listen, to each other.'. That was my hope.

Please left click here for Chapter Thirty Four.