Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Fifteen - Life Away From The Care Factory

Less innocent in humour, but nonetheless an equally acknowledged as a universal truth is that in any mixed group of adults attending an alcohol based entertainment, the first person to get silly-drunk will always be the nurse or the nursing assistant. 

I was never invited to parties and whilst I had a few church friends my own age I often found that whatever social life I tried to organise away from the care factory was on a tight budget. Such that the discipline of organising became a strong part of the reward. I enjoyed my days off, but getting the maximum out of them meant accepting vegetating a lot of the time. To get two days off together I had to work shifts for ten days. After such a run my first day off was always spent recovering by doing nearly nothing. The second day was the day I was able to organise myself and be sociable.

The few friends I had developed locally over the year were mostly people I knew in church. There, my shift work and our narrow shared interests limited how much we might know each other. One way of the better ways of living with fewer friends whilst disguising being anti-social was to go to the movies on my own. I have no list of the films I saw in 1988.  I know that I enjoyed 'Who framed Roger Rabbit' and 'A Fish Called Wanda'. I stuck with the popular films of the day. I was too tired to enjoy witless violence, machismo, militarism, and guns which made my choice of film easier. Aside from how American the films were that depicted those subjects, they explained too little about why the activities they depicted were necessary. Such films  too much like hard work for me to watch. The films did not even explain that they were made for fourteen year old boys to watch, viewers who cared nothing for any lack of continuity in what they were watching. They wanted action. But offer me humour, an urban peacetime depiction of life, and a British actor in a decent role, and I was easily drawn in.   

Later on, the place where my interest in movies broadened was the Broadway Cinema House in The Lace Market area of Nottingham. It was the first cinema I had found that showed foreign language films with English subtitles, where the films reflected the broader range of human life as well as the better end of Hollywood product. One aspect of the foreign language films I liked was not only having to listen less, more to watch the subtitles, but also enjoying films by directors who embraced location filming. There the location became an extra character in the film. Also European film directors resisted always filming an actor face on as if they were doing a 1940s style close up. I found the indirect approach to be helpful for my enjoyment of a film. It was at the Broadway Cinema that I would have seen my first gay films, at least in the trailers if not in the film I went to see.

I had been opened up to gay themed films by seeing 'My Beautiful Laundrette' with it's infamous gay kiss, just as I had been opened up to the uplifting modern post-kitchen sink dramas by Mike Leigh when Gainsborough Trinity Arts Centre started showing films from 1985 onward. But there films were rare events. In Nottingham there were several cinema house beside the Broadway Cinema. At last, a visit to the cinema could be a regular and repeatable event. 

The most regular event close to home was my weekly Christian House Group. In Lady Bay I had not only landed on my feet with where to live, but also with where to go to church. West Bridgford had a large late nineteenth century Baptist Church building close to my place of work. Their evening services were usually full and enthusiastic. But to support church membership at a neighbourhood level the church also  shared out of responsibility of teaching to 'satellite churches' they had 'planted' in neighbourhoods for Sunday morning meetings. There in turn satellite churches divided into house groups of six to eight people who met weekly in one person's house one evening mid week. As with the macro economic structures behind bedsits and nursing homes that dictated where and how people lived, so West Bridgford Baptist Church had to adapt around the model of how property worked in the area.

I settled well in the Lady Bay satellite church. My house group met every Wednesday evening. I enjoyed the Bible studies, where I veered toward the liberal and inclusive side of any theological opinion on which we sought a consensus on. I had to be theologically liberal because in my self belief, even without an explanation for it, I knew that I was gay. Even at the micro/personal level in the church, any attempted conversation around actual modern homosexuality ended up being a Biblical monologue about how homosexuality 'did not exist'. And if the subject did exist, then it shouldn't. 

I say I settled well. In 1988 I never got the miracle conversation that I hoped for with any church member, where not only was my homosexuality was a real everyday thing. But also I could 'come out' as gay to them and we could share and ask constructively what God had for me to do next. But then again I didn't know then, and don't know now, how a monoculture like the church could openly discuss any minority culture with any sense of informed inclusivity.

I don't know how I would have believed myself if I had said to a church witness that I waved my willy in public toilets hoping to attract the same, and so had my father, where that constituted practical proof that I was gay. That said, there were men who led the church who admitted they were gay, but by omission denied all the detail of how they came to accept what they said they were. I wanted somebody that first accepted that I was gay, then explained to me, by what means I was going to be able to stop cottaging and finally why did men wave their willies at each other.

The normal way of talking about what homosexuality was in church was to talk about it in the past tense, quote The Bible, and talk as if it could not, and did not, happen now. The 'clobber passages' were six passages in the Old Testament and the New Testament where some odd sounding same sex sexual behaviours that were unlike any everyday 20th century homosexual behaviour were condemned. One response from me when these rhetorical condemnations were trotted out once again was to imagine the television personality Barbara Woodhouse, and see myself as a particularly disobedient dog in a dog training class where the more the trainer was training the owner of the dog and the dog together, the more she said 'Sit', the more restless and unable to sit, as ordered, I felt. The Bible was right and I was a failure because I cold not stop myself acting out what I was tired of being too readily shouted at about, to be trained to not do it.

Away from my retreating from the feeling of being shouted at and not knowing where to go, I merely felt lost. Never more so than when a Franciscan monk picked me up at the toilets that had become my favourite haunt when I was denying to myself how low and tired I was. In the toilet he wore ordinary clothes, a Marks and Spencer checked shirt and bland coloured jumper. I only discovered that he was a monk when he invited me to his bedsit room where I could see him in better light, and see from his room how he was 'on mission', living away from the monastery. Rosary beads lay on the dressing table. On the walls were more prayer aids. Beyond that it was a typically untidy bachelor pad with worn and mismatched furniture.

What he wanted was a wanking pal. He got that from me that night. After all, discreetly wanking the boss off for free had been part of my youth training in Wilson Carpets ten years earlier. By mutual agreement I saw him several more times. But the more of  ourselves we shared with each other, the more we were blocked from getting to know each other better by the opaque explanations that we had each been coached to live by. Each time a blockage got shared then an increasing sense of detachment set in. Conversations retreated from the personal, to the safer ground.

He liked his films, but on video. And they were not porn, at least not porn in the conventional sense of the word. I did not know what to say when he got personal enough to reveal that his favourite film was Ken Russell's 1971 shocker 'The Devils', based on the 1952 Aldous Huxley book 'The Devils of Loudon'. He showed me his battered looking VHS copy of the film, thankfully not making any move to play it for me. He liked the film because it broke taboo and depicted sexual behaviour. That the sexual behaviour was characterised as hysteria was where my opinion differed from his opinion. For me, frankly, there were too few male nudes in it. I only learned much later that in the earliest days of silent film making, that nuns defrocking themselves and 'having sex' with naked priests, was one of the earliest forms of popular filmed pornography. 

The subject that I wish that I could have opened up with him, but could not, was how video players changed the definition of porn and made a porn habit seem like poorly thought out prayers, both prayer and porn seemed more viable the more repetitive they were made to be. With both, the images we returned to required a deeper self examination, for us to recognise why we liked them. The habit of porn was part of our imagination, and long predated video, as I had seen on public toilet walls.  But if he truly enjoyed the film for how much it portrayed a pre-Marquis de Sade sadism and cruelty then he was a masochist. And masochists will burn through a lot of relationships out with their expectations.

Please left click here for Chapter Sixteen.