So, right at the end of the year and at the very start of the nineties,
I was in a very discursive mood in my diary. Considering all the things that were changing or had changed. Julie Burchill (also in an unusually and reflectively positive mood) was writing about the new Green movement holding out hopes for the future, calling it ‘the safety net for our time, a slow cumbersome non progressive arm of capitalism concerned that the natural resources of this world remain to be re-exploited in the coming centuries’.
I was considering the state of eastern Europe and marvelling at how it was changing so rapidly but wondering if the western capitalist model would not create its own problems for those countries. ‘Things feel like they are changing so rapidly I wrote; small changes on the face of it but with the potential to become major dilemmas. ‘Rivulets that became a part of the torrents of life”(this was the last line of a poem I had written in the seventies called ‘Bluebells,’ reflecting upon leaving my youth behind)
I was also considering what I thought about the gay scene as well at that time. On the Saturday just before Christmas (23rd) I’d been to the Block by myself, already in this reflective mood. I’d enjoyed myself there, having not been for some time and forgetting quite what ‘another world’ it was there, compared to the ‘flatter reality’ of the Bell. ‘That’s the difference’ I write:
The Bell IS reality, the Block is pure fantasy. A place where people exist in a world that they have created, a space they‘ve created with an aura of illusion. It‘s unreal of course, in the sense that the real lives of its clients are not reflected in their mode or behaviour inside. The LA probably worked so well because it somehow managed to fuse that reality and fantasy together. In the ground level bar reality, the bottom, fantasy and that great area where you walked down the stairs between the two, into that seething mass below you, totally immersed in their own illusions (but grande illusions at that). I mourn its demise.
And how does HIV/AIDS fit into all this? Do both fantasy and reality exist here? I don’t think I really know yet what role this disease has to play, even after all these years, in terms of reshaping our lives. This sexual wild card thrown into the pack, seemingly at random. It has torn us apart and brought us (or at least some of us) together again. It is the one word we have as the eighties end, which is most feared and yet is still virtually as unknown as it was at the beginning.
I was being cruised by maybe four or five men at one time when I was there, yet I feel no need to pick up anyone or really even respond in any particular way, to this other world. I understand it now: its signifiers, its meaning, its depths, its imagination. And being a part of it during this last decade has helped me realise now, that the world of my imagination is just as real, as powerful, as the world of supposed reality. I can create a fantasy situation which in effect is every bit as stimulating and exciting (if not more so) than my reality. Or combine both. And nobody can take that away from me.
I suppose if I’d written this when I was twenty one, people would have assumed I was a little loopy:unbalanced. At least, reading it, I think I would have anyway. And yet eleven years later I’m not loopy, just mentally, creatively at a different level. Yet, I was writing things then:’Bluebells’, ‘Desert Rain’ and ‘Chance Encounter’, that I now realise do show a depth of field, a vision that I had no idea I possessed then. Where did that come from? Why and how did I want to write like that then? I was still searching for my heroes, my role models, still eagerly (desperately?) trying to find them. All those writers, poets, artists and scientists, who had the vision to push on creatively, whilst exploring their sexuality at the same time, that I’ve discovered existed, only in the past decade.
As for what the 1990’s will bring me? If I’m not careful it could bring sparse pickings because it’s easy to become ‘regimented’ as you get older, only exploring those avenues which seem absolutely necessary to survival. Creativity gets stunted by arrogance and condemned by increasing cynicism.
To survive I must continue to explore my psyche and the world around me. To explore new ground rather than old pastures. In ten years it will be time to celebrate a new millennium, I can’t quite imagine how I’ll feel then or where I’ll be doing it. Who will still be here, who will have gone from here, from my life?What could it possibly be like to live in the year 2000?
