By the 30th October, I was reminiscing about ex boyfriend’s and remembering my relatively relaxed and simple time at Leadale Rd, the final April housing co-op house I had lived in. along with the parties we had held there..
God: that was another world. I was so far away from this. So long ago. I must write a book!
There was going to be a lot of water, running under a hell of a lot more bridges, before I finally got around to that. But it had been a busy October, a busy first month at the HEA and quite different to much of what I’d ever done before. I wasn’t calling any of the shots anymore and that was going to be hard to adjust to. In the following week though, we had a number of further meetings with the creatives at BMP to try and come to some agreement on how to proceed best with the campaign.
The agencies idea, based on what they had presented to us so far, was to get peoples’ attention by using a shot that looked very ‘stylish’, similar to some of the work that Robert Mapplethorpe or Bruce Weber had done. They had asked several photographers if they would do the shoot and the American photographer, Herb Ritts, had offered his services for nothing (or rather to give his fee to charity) as it was an issue he felt strongly about. He also had a reputation for very stylish shoots. He had shot the very famous image at the time of the lean muscled man holding two tires, and indeed a few years later went onto shoot the iconic Calvin Klein ad of ‘Marky Mark’ Wahlberg, holding his cock, clad simply in white Calvin Klein pants (which are still recognised as being iconic images over thirty years later).
He had already worked with everyone who was anyone and a dozen famous brands of the era by creating successful advertising campaigns for Calvin Klein, Chanel, Gianni Versace, Giorgio Armani, Levis, Polo Ralph Lauren and Valentino. Clearly a damn good pedigree then. But we were a bit concerned about whether that ‘americana look’ would work for everyone it was aimed at but I couldn’t be too critical, as I’d already made a safer sex short film myself (Taste) in the SLL trilogy that used one of Bruce Weber’s moody images of the sailors in Waikiki as inspiration. It’s also worth remembering that such imagery was seen as quite innovative and fresh then, whilst now it’s been done to death, in a hundred and one vacuous magazine shoots.
By December 13th though, our Programme Director, Sue Perl, was getting cold feet generally and was thinking about pulling another key campaign that was currently being developed, aimed at heterosexuals. I was worried that if that was contentious, what on earth was the gay work shot by Ritts, going to be seen as. ‘I reckon the axe could fall heavily on all of us’ I wrote. On a better note, I had had a good meeting with Frankie Lynch just starting at the THT that day and found her ‘warm and easy to work with. I want to work for the Trust’ I wrote, ‘perhaps I should suggest it. Trouble is I’ve done nothing as yet to prove I’mworth my salt‘. Retrospectively, I’m not sure this was actually entirely true but perhaps I was being especially hard on myself.
On December 16th as Christmas approached we were all invited to the BMP Grand Xmas party at Soho Soho in Frith St. Now long gone. Those were still the days of lavish, no account spared parties, and this was no great exception, I wrote:
‘I gotquite drunk, imbibing far too much champagne/gin and tonic/white wine. Luckily though nothing more embarrassing, like making a pass at anyone straight or-more likely- moaning about their work’.
But by the 20th, just before we broke up for Christmas proper, tensions were ratcheted up as we got a command from above to present a wrap up of ideas so far and I was worried that work was getting on top of me, as we developed further sexual health campaigns:
‘David Mellor (the Minister for Health from July 1988) wanted to see the gay work today, I really hope he’s not going to decide it should be curtailed or restricted. I am starting to feel that anything is possible. Does Sue Perl really have any control over what’s going on?’ ‘Trying to negotiate two campaigns (we had started on a new creative brief for bisexual work, which would go on to be a new nightmare). Both are going to present some real problems I think. I have high hopes, that feel like they are bound to be dashed. Making our own films at Cleancut seems very, very simple in comparison, with far fewer hurdles to jump through’.
However, as can often be the way, with some time off over Christmas, running into the New Year 1989, I was feeling somewhat more optimistic about everything. On the 8th January, I’d been to the Bell with Mark Simpson, who I had known for many years by then.
‘Hot, smoky and difficult to really enjoy‘ I wrote. Mark and I talked about opening up a place for clean living guys to have a good time. I‘d like to see them as safer sex parties, I wonder if I could get the HEA to sponsor them, I feel quite excited by the idea. I think it would go down well , an environment which is sweet, fantasy laden and clean, where it’s easy to talk, and cruise to your heart’s content. (You might wonder what cloud I was on at this point? We were a little too far ahead of the game just then. Interestingly enough, similar ideas were later taken up by some of the outsourced MESMAC groups that we eventually set up) and indeed other organisations that were becoming established then, like Gay Men Fighting AIDS (GMFA).
Just into the New Year and back to work. In the event, BMP’s creatives presented us with a moody black and white image of two white, bare chested men, oiled up, vaguely gazing at each other (see below). It wasn’t Marky Mark but it had that Ritts style to it. By producing the image across a double page central spread in gay papers and magazines they hoped it would create enough attention, for the accompanying message to be taken on board by its readers. The advert and body copy went up to the Department of Health and was also shown for information to the Gay Men’s Advisory Group. (With this first advert I think we didn’t ask for proposed changes but just showed it as a finished concept). As this was the very first time the government of the UK had ever aimed an advert specifically at gay men, there was a lot of nervousness about how people might react. Less worry about gay men I think (although that was clearly an important factor), more about the more conservative elements with the ruling Conservative Party. It went to the minister and was approved but it went further up than that, we were told, to Mrs T herself.
The message came back that it was too ‘slick and sensual‘. I can even hear her saying it. There was no shock factor (like Volcano & Iceberg) and it seemed that we were encouraging promiscuous sex. Some of the body copy was too explicit as well. The approach, it is true, was certainly tailored to be very different to the earlier ads. We responded by writing a detailed reply, outlining the reasons why we felt this was a more appropriate way of presenting a positive message about the value of safer sex practices. It went back to the DoH and up again to the top. The message duly came back, that ‘ok, we could have it’ as long as we tweaked some of the words and cropped the image above the men’s nipples. This was the very first time I had ever experienced the concept aired that men’s nipples could or should be considered as erogenous zones (though I had known it for decades!) but most bizarrely, I thought, it had come from the British Prime Minister, Mrs T herself!
In the end we got the ‘ok’ to keep the nipples in the glossy posters that we had produced to be sent out to pubs and clubs but not in the magazine adverts. In fact they (the ads not the nipples) did end up going into some other non gay magazines too, like the Face, Time Out and Blitz and I think music papers like the NME. The response to the advert was not too bad from the great and good of the various communities but it was quite negative to me personally from some people, who said it should have been far more explicit, using colloquial language like ‘wank’ and not medical terms like masturbation, as it was about sexual partners and sex acts.
There was an element of this I agreed with but quite interestingly we had found that there were quite a large number of people in the pre-test groups, who said they didn’t want to see images or read language they would regard as ‘pornographic’ in magazines that they might be reading on the train, tube, in a cafe. They also felt it would not send out a ‘good message’ to the population as a whole, if this was the case. I was actually quite surprised that we had such feedback but I had to recognise that as ‘activists’ we -and most of the people I knew- were pretty much on the relatively radical end of the spectrum, with a lot of gay men both more conservative (and Conservative) and more closeted or ‘less out’ than we all were in London. It was an interesting dynamic to come across, but we realised we needed to respect it and as I say, as it turned out, we were not really going to be able to be much more explicit anyway, in those first ads. They were testing the water and generally the reaction was positive (or shall we say ‘muted’ from would be critics). It was, at least, a start. I went into the New Year of 1989 feeling reasonably positive.
Sex, love and life (The Sacrifice) 3.07 Lurch, launch and feedback
