Category: Writing

Things were at least developing more positively in other areas , especially politically in London. The mid eighties was quite a strange time here.

Although Maggie and her Tridents (a type of American built nuclear missile she had bought into) ‘ruled the Brittanic waves’ at Westminster, just across the Thames in County Hall ‘Red Ken’ Livingstone was in power, running the Greater London council (GLC). This is a well documented period now but suffice to say there were therefore some very positive initiatives in London, aimed at lesbians and gay men, which were funded with GLC support.

In particular in 1985 the GLC published a booklet called Changing The World – a London charter for Gay and Lesbian rights and supported a number of open meetings in the council chamber of County Hall during that summer. I still have my copy and leafing through it today, feel I can now appreciate better quite what a pioneering document it was, for its  time. At the time though, it felt like it was the least we could expect from a left wing labour council, purporting to represent all Londoners. However in a 48 page booklet, under 19 separate headings, starting with language (‘Words and tones can break your bones’) through violence (‘Beaten up’..) classroom studies (‘Tell it in the classroom’) the home (‘Home Sweet Home’), Disability (‘Don’t disallow Disabled People’) and the law and prison (‘Sent Down’) it made a large number of measured recommendations.

Inside, it tells us that the charter has been produced by the Gay Working Party of the GLC as a declaration of lesbian and gay rights – the party being an informal group made up of lesbians, gay men & bisexuals from all over London. It remains, at least  in my opinion, a superb document in the way it clearly, sensibly articulates the very wide range of issues that existed then (and still today in many cases) where there was discrimination occurring. The authors write that ‘the Charter has two main aims: to

‘identify the changes necessary in the policies and practices of those providing a public service and those who establish and enforce the law , control information and communication or employ people so that the needs of lesbians and gay men are fully recognised and accounted for‘. Secondly it aimed to bring about a change of attitudes amongst the public to dispel ignorance and foster positive attitudes towards homosexuality and shows that heterosexism (the term will be explained later, a note adds..) should be condemned. 

Pages 39-45 contain a summary of the recommendations, there are in fact 142 in all! 

It was a hugely ambitious document at the time, when prejudice was being fostered by the Section 28 legislation against the teaching of sexuality and supposed ‘promotion of homosexuality’ in the classroom and attitudes towards HIV & AIDS by many in the media and others, in positions of responsibility and authority. However it also serves as a gentle reminder of how far we have come in  the 35 years since it was produced. Things were if anything to stagnate or go backwards though, before progress was made, at least in some areas. With the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic and Clause 28, polls show us now that the public’s acceptance and support for lesbian and gay equality and rights did slip back for some time. It was to be a constant uphill battle to move such attitudes forwards for much of the rest of the 1980’s.

The meetings of the working party also resulted in the creation of a working group, who’s task it was to initiate and create one of just a handful of LGBT community centres already operating in the UK, (after Edinburgh Gay Centre which opened in 1974, Manchester Gay Centre on Bloom Street in 1981) and the Birmingham Lesbian and Gay Community Centre which had opened in 1976).

After much discussion it was decided that a former meat warehouse near Farringdon tube could be suitably converted and this was purchased by the GLC. Vegetarians, look the other way!  It was already operating by December 1984, and there were some very ambitious plans developed to ensure it was a multi purposed venue with services that represented all the LGBT communities needs at that time. There was to be a performance space, bar & cafe, bookshop, daycare centre, lounge and meeting rooms and other meeting spaces.  The four floored centre had a second floor designated as women only space and the top floor was converted to offices for the Centre management team, and other organisations. So far , so good.

However, as London’s first ‘non-commercial gay venue’ the centre was to attract criticism by various groups who felt underrepresented. It also had issues with recruiting and keeping volunteers, elements of political infighting and high staff turnover. With the abolition of the GLC by 1986 and ownership transferred to the LRB (London Residuary Body) the team worked hard to keep the building commercially viable for the next five years until 1991 but it was in the end unsustainable and it was closed. There were those who said its location was always a problem, being out of the centre of London. In terms of cafe culture the collectively run First Out in Tottenham Court Rd was often packed, whilst the centre’s cafe languished.  Without a doubt it had its moments though.

Some were unfortunate; there was the loss of thousands of pounds from its safe, which the insurance firm refused to cover as the safe had seemingly not been tampered with. Rumours were rife. Equally divisive was the discussion (and subsequent ban) over whether to allow SM (sado masocistic) lesbians to use the centre with arguments in favour and against gaining alternate ground for some time. Equally, there was much debate about whether bisexuals should be allowed to use the centre; for example some lesbians felt that bisexual men might harass them. There was a ban on bisexuals using the centre for some time, as a result, too.

For a decent period though, for many people, including myself, it served us well as a multifunctional space offering a wide variety of possibilities. Vice wrote an article about it in 2016 interviewing some of the people involved in it. Steering group member Lisa Power (a grand dame on the scene, who has been involved in one way or another in just about everything gay & lesbian related, happening in the capital in the past four decades) had no qualms about telling it like it was. She felt that ‘the centre wasn’t run by those who had had enough experience in running anything similar in the past,’ and that there was fraud/petty theft at all levels, ‘from volunteers who thought it was fine to let their friends eat for free, to bar deliveries where half the stock went straight into someone’s car’.

She made the point that the women’s floor was only open to the “right” sort of lesbian and that as mentioned, openly bisexual and straight people weren’t allowed in at all initially. She also makes the point about the rapidity of change at the centre ‘every time there was an EGM or AGM depending on who attended and voted. Lisa has never been one to shy away from ‘telling it like it is’.

Interestingly though, she also makes the point (and I very much concur) that issues like S/M were constantly fought over but eventually (and perhaps remarkably) it was a club night called ‘Sadie Maisie’ that eventually became by far the centre’s most successful night. Lisa says ‘many of my friends went who had nothing to do with SM but who just knew it was a great “anything goes” club night’. And she is right, it was really the first occasion as far as I’m aware that gay men and lesbians (and indeed bisexuals) got together under an ‘SM banner’ and danced.

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Remembering the 90s; The London Lesbian and Gay centre

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For a lot of us men then, dancing with women in an ‘SM’ atmosphere was a very interesting and quite liberating experience and charged with a different kind of eroticism than we had experienced in most of the totally male dominated clubs at that time.  Although Lisa is right in saying that you didn’t have to be into SM to go (how one wonders would they even have policed that?) many were and wore sexually explicit clothes and costumes with accessories to match.  There were sometimes lesbians I recall who went topless, which was a ‘shock’ to some of us guys (there was a dressing cloakroom, where you could change and store your street clothes).  The music was decent though and the atmosphere did develop into something that was tangibly charged. It was ‘the place to go’ for a time for some of us.

I generally used to go wearing a short rubber one piece and DM boots. It was usually fun though due to the nature of the venue it was generally not acceptable to actually have sex on the premises, although I know it did happen in some places (there was a slightly more secluded area of the roof garden and fire escape steps that overlooked the Circle, Hammersmith & Met underground lines for instance  If you knew where to look you could easily spot the gatherings outside on the roof garden, whilst on the tube.  

Being outside was fine in the summer in a rubber one piece but not so good in winter. One of the more amusing episodes retrospectively, that occurred, was the night at Sadie Maisie’s when someone (accidentally?) set off the fire alarm in the building. Rules stated that everybody in the building should proceed immediately to the designated gathering point, which was about 150 metres away from the building and just outside Farringdon tube entrance. Half way through the club night with everything in ‘full swing’ the fire alarm went off and we were told to immediately evacuate to the meeting point .. there was no possibility of getting clothes from the cloakroom. So about 150 gay men & lesbians in various states of kinky undress trooped up to the tube entrance where we had to hang around for an hour whilst the fire brigade arrived and ensured it was a false alarm. You can only imagine the looks we got from the people using the underground; we played it up at first but it was not summer and as it got colder so we were left standing around wearing virtually nothing, hugging each other to keep warm. There was a definite reluctance from the punters to put stuff into the changing rooms, for a month or so after that event!

Eventually people tired of the novelty of a mixed SM club in a right-on venue, with no sex and we made our way to pastures old & new but I hold a soft spot still for the centre at 69, Cowcross Street. Some wondered why, if Edinburgh, Manchester and Birmingham had managed to run successful centres for so long, why London couldn’t follow their lead. It’s a reasonable question. At its best it was a great thing but I think eventually the communities very diversity and its ability to vociferously articulate its needs got it into hot water, far too often for its own good and in the end it closed its doors in the early nineties. It is now after various incarnations a corporate restaurant called ´The Fence´. Nevertheless, it was a sad day when London’s Lesbian & Gay Switchboard’s big red ‘Ent’s book no longer had its listing in.

Sure, there were other things that came from the GLC’s ‘Changing The World – a London charter for Gay and Lesbian rights’ booklet but that was probably both one of the best and yet, equally, the most controversial.

ON to Sex, love and life (The Rituals) 2.23 1987 Cleancut & ‘Gearing Up for Safer sex’

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Development of the gay counter culture

At the same time, as a still spartan network of gay clubs were developing, the effects of the radicalised liberation movement of gay men & lesbians (and to some lesser extent then, bisexual & transgendered people) was also blossoming.  This movement was fuelled more by radical literary & political thought emerging from the effects of a less censorious network, the decriminalisation of homosexuality and other radical thought from the counter cultures of the 60s, feminism, marxism & socialism in particular. It held more radical views about the way forward for minority groups: the demand for free speech, equal right, equality, even the official sanction of same sex partnerships- a notion that seemed frankly unthinkable early in this period, even to the most forward thinking activist.

Progress was not going to be made dancing in windowless clubs behind closed doors but on the outside: the way forward was to be seen and accepted publically, we needed to be on the streets, arm in arm, not down on the disco floor, off our faces. In retrospect, there was undoubtedly a somewhat puritanical aspect to this, a backlash perhaps to the drug fuelled excesses of the late 60’s and early 70’s but it seemed likely to most involved, that such rights would have to be fought for, long and hard. For those old enough to remember, the 1967 decriminalisation of homosexuality had not come easily but had been an extremely long process since the initial Wolfenden report of 1957. For myself, as a young out gay man in London, in my early twenties, I hardly realised then the battles that had already been fought, on my behalf, to enable me to benefit from the ability to socialise, meet, live and love other gay men.  When a battle is won, history will record the outcome but seldom has much time for those who put in the groundwork to make it happen.  

Nevertheless, I understood enough at least to know that for those of us involved in these debates, there were some difficult choices to be made. How could we enjoy ourselves as gay men, lesbians, without selling out our principles? Be seen to be remaining committed to the cause?  It’s certainly the kind of discussion I had with people like Mark Ashton, a highly politicised co-worker later on with me, on London’s Gay Switchboard and many other close friends at regular intervals in the early 80’s.

One of the first things I did when coming out in London in the late 1970’s, after listening to no nonsense counsellor Anna Raeburn on London’s Capital Radio, (Capital jingles and intros 1970s..) was to find myself some literature to read, to educate myself a little better about this strange new world I was about to enter. However, it is also indicative that one of the first books I bought, in 1977, in an effort to educate myself about ‘my kind’ was from the Gay News mail order service and was called ‘Male Homosexuals‘, (Amazon link) published in 1974, a rather academic tome written about homosexuals and their habits.

Although it was not actively negative, it was notably written in the frame of it being deviant behaviour. Nevertheless, I read it from cover to cover, fascinated by its context, trying to place myself in the structural narrative and relate to its mysteries. Apart from books of poems, for example those by CF Cavafy, the Greek poet, it was hard to find anything especially positive about gay men then. Even this was subtitled “Their problems and adaptations”, a title which seemed to scream out don’t get your hopes up buster.  None of this was new, I soon came to realise. Despite there being some visibility of ‘queer behaviour’ in the 16th century onwards, at least in the largest cities (for example there were networks of male prostitution in cities like Paris and London), homosexual activity was outlawed in England by the enchantingly named Buggery Act of 1533. As a result, across much of the United Kingdom (and indeed Europe) in the 17th to 19th centuries, the legal punishment for ‘sodomy’ was death, making it dangerous to publish or distribute anything with overtly homosexual themes. In fact up until the mid 1950’s British authors could be prosecuted for writing openly about homosexuality. The earliest book that focuses specifically on a homosexual love affair in probably the german novel A Year in Arcadia: Kyllenion published in 1805 by Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Gotha Altenburg. Set in ancient Greece, it features several couples—including a homosexual one—falling in love, overcoming obstacles and living ‘happily ever after’. The Romantic movement, which was becoming popular early in the 19th century, allowed men to “express deep affection for each other”, and the motif of ancient Greece as “a utopia of male-male love” was an acceptable vehicle to reflect this, but some of the Duke’s contemporaries were said to have felt that the male characters “stepped over the bounds of manly affection into unseemly eroticism.” Henry Blake Fuller’s 1898 play, At St. Judas’s, and the 1919 novel, Bertram Cope’s Year are also noted as being amongst the earliest published American works in literature, on the theme of homosexual relationships.

Although a few contemporary bookshops were starting to stock some similar and later novels based on lived gay experience, there was not much available in London in the early to late 1970’s. What became known as ‘alternative bookshops‘ like Housmans in London’s Caledonian Road however had already started stocking a range of ‘alternative books’ (and also given a home above the premises to a fledgling organisation called London Gay Switchboard, offering support & advice over the phone to gay men and lesbians). 

However, I was lucky enough to benefit from the opening in 1979 of a bookshop that has now become pretty much world famous, called ‘Gays The Word‘ at 77, Marchmont St, Bloomsbury, WC1.  It was the first bookshop in the UK to dedicate itself to stocking a wide range of literature, both books and magazines, of relevance to lesbians, gay and bisexual men. I recall in particular an amazing Canadian publication, that I would likely never have seen otherwise called ´The Body Politic´. I first picked up a copy in Gays The Word. It had a great contemporary feel to it I recall, at the time. It felt fresh and forward thinking, somehow more progressive than our own ´Gay News´ here in the UK. Oddly enough, after all this time, I remember it also smelt different, possibly to do with the different papers and inks, they used in Canada, but I don’t know. It is a smell that still gives me hope! These went some way towards answering the questions that we had about how we might construct a progressive lesbian or gay identity for ourselves, within our communities, that melded other aspects of the progressive libertarian polemic of the time. They inspired me in different ways to think about how I might want to construct my own future, given there seemed to be no clearly defined way forward in the late seventies.

Sex, love and life (The Rituals) 2.11 Development of music as a political statement in London and the UK

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My life took an unexpected turn after living for about eighteen months at the Regina, when my boss Bill Richardson, the superintendent at Kew, asked if I would come and live in the Observatory. 

The caretaker and his family had moved out quite suddenly and ¨the girls¨ had been worried by strange men knocking on the door, in the late night, which given its relatively remote location, down a long track, and its history, he considered it would be useful to have another person in the building all the time, to help with any problems that might come up and also help with the safety. Actually, I think the two women working there, Charmaine and Lesley, would have given as good as they got but it was something that Bill was worried about and felt responsible for. The flat had originally been in what felt like a rather ‘spooky’ basement but had been moved up to the second floor in the twentieth century, and occupied three rooms there, otherwise I think I would have said no!

So it was, that for about eighteen months I lived in the flat of this 18th century gem of a building, in the middle of the floodplain by the Thames. When I was doing my night shifts, I’d be by myself anyway again, so having free access to roam the building at leisure, exploring this place where all sorts of scientific history had been made (but not the basement). 

The strange thing about Kew Observatory was that it sometimes became even more isolated, on its own island, as being built on the flood plain, at very high tides, the Thames (long before the Thames Barrier was built), would quite quickly spill out of its banks and over onto the Golf course and in doing so completely surround the -slightly higher- land that the Observatory was built on, effectively cutting it off. Usually, when the tide receded, it was possible to negotiate the access road again, even with some water left on either side

Built just on or just to the north east of the site (various maps differ) of a Carthusian monastery, founded in 1414 by Henry V, named the ‘Charterhouse of Jesus of Bethlehem of Shene’, the observatory itself was (and still is) a rather good looking octagonal Georgian building, following a popular Swedish plan at the time, of placing a rounded cupola on the roof, and was then painted a pale green.

It was originally commissioned by the keen astronomer King George III, to observe the transit of Venus, on June 3rd 1769, (long before his accidental poisoning by arsenic, which is now surmised to have caused his later ‘madness)’, and later to accurately test and recalibrate royal chronographs and watches. It was built by a Solomon Brown, who also built the famous pagoda in Kew Gardens. It had had an illustrious and impressive history but when I was there it had somewhat fallen on hard times, with its staff complement reduced to just six. 

To get there you walked down a long track from Richmond, over the mid Surrey Golf course. The day that I arrived, on the 1st October 1975, I had been told to report to the Superintendents office and I was a little nervous, not knowing quite what to expect. As I came through the gates, a gardener was standing in wellington boots and a spade, busily digging a trench. I’m looking for Mr Richardson, I enquired? Ah! You must be the new chap we’ve been expecting, said the gardener, I’m Bill Richardson, the Superintendent, welcome to Kew! So began a couple of years, doing a dream job (for me at least), taking and collating weather readings,  and working with various experimental instrumental prototypes. On that first day, he was actually in the process of putting a six foot (two metre) rain gauge in, to see how accurate it would be in relation to the normal gauges we used, which were just six inches (fifteen cm) across. The problem was that in strong winds rain tended to blow straight across the top of the smaller copper gauge, rather than falling into it , so with a bigger gauge the idea was there was less room for error; this meant measuring both totals daily and comparing the respective daily differences in total amounts in different types of weather.      

For many years, the official time was regulated at Kew and not Greenwich (as in Greenwich mean time) and a large number of famous scientists have worked at Kew over the years: Sir John Herschel (son of Sir William Herschel who discovered Uranus), discovered and catalogued many new astronomical discoveries and invented an early form of photography, Frank JW Whipple, the inventor of the jet engine, and Superintendent of the Observatory, like Bill Richardson from 1925-1939) Faraday (of Faraday cage fame), Sir Napier Shaw, who wrote the Manual of Meteorology and did work that created the model of the development of the atmosphere that we still use today and the later Director General of the Met Office, Group Captain James M Stagg, who made the famous D Day forecast for Operation Overlord in June 1944. Both Livingstone’s journeys to Africa and Scott’s fateful journey to the Antarctic relied on Kew, for advice and instrumentation.

The History of Kew Observatory, Robert Henry Scott, 1885

Following the King’s lead, Kew became the place in the early 18th century where mariners would send chronometers to be calibrated against a ‘gold standard’. When they had been correctly adjusted again, they would be returned to the owner, with the inscription ‘OK’ (Observatory, Kew) on, which is where we get the expression that something is good, is ok, from. However this may be an old wives tail, as other documents suggest that work validating scientific instruments began in 1877 and that ‘KO’ was inscribed on them in fact.. although looking at the actual inscription below it definitely looks ok to me! It’s a good story.

We kept records from very old instruments there as well for continuity, such as an original set of thermometers eleven feet (four metres) high on the north wall of the building, housed in a very early version of a white louvered screen called the Welsh screen, (so it was never directly in the sunlight), which had begun in 1867 when Kew became the central Observatory for the Met Office. As well as manual readings taken regularly, it used the very first photo-thermograph, which recorded temperatures onto a photographic plate. In fact in 1975, we were still taking measurements and maintaining this instrument, by changing its photographic paper in darkness every day, developing the two foot long sheet, drying it and measuring the images recorded on it. Readings from the North Wall screen were usually about 0.5F higher on average than those in taken on the more modern, much smaller, white louvered ‘Stevenson’s screen’ thermometers, out in the grass paddock, well away from the Observatory itself. In turn, these were compared (from 1969 onwards), with readings from an aspirated psychrometer (where air is pulled past the thermometer bulb or sensor to ensure it does not stagnate), and printed on an initially experimental, new digital thermograph sensor, taken by the ‘MODLE’: a large rather noisy machine, that printed the reading accurate to tenths of a degree centigrade, every few seconds. From 1959 Kew began work on rocket and satellite equipment, designing instruments to be sent up in American satellites, including a spectrometer designed and made at Kew, and in 1961 for the ‘Skylark’ rocket.

Once you had been working at Kew for a while though you realised that in certain settled conditions, especially in the autumn, the paddock, being on the flood plain on the Thames would often form a layer of very dense ground fog, where temperatures would fall dramatically compared to those just above this cold layer.

One summers night I phoned our observation taken at 10pm (2100 GMT) into the London Weather Centre, which was based in High Holborn in central London (who collated all the London observations at that time), and reported a temp of 17C. The person there asked me to repeat the reading, as he was sure I had made a mistake, as the temperature on the thermometer in the screen there in central London was still 26C, some 9C greater than at Kew, about 6 miles to its west.

Of course we now understand the effects of a UHI (urban heat island) like central London much better but this was being exacerbated even further that night by the low but dense cold fog that had formed at Kew. We measure the visibility taken at weather stations at the level of two metres, so again sometimes our reports of the visibility there would drop from twenty kilometres to just twenty metres in a few minutes, as the layer of thick fog on the ground became slightly higher, to be just on average just above the two metres reporting level. 

Generally, as a result, the mean temperature in the instrument enclosure in the paddock in the late summer and autumn was often a lot lower than in the North Wall screen. You might think at a glance that the mean (average) temperatures at Kew had suddenly cooled but of course nothing of the sort had happened and it illustrates how very difficult climatologically it is, comparing ‘like for like’.    

The differences in all three temperature readings could often be quite large, but were entirely relevant for understanding better how to compare different temperature readings taken in the past with different instruments, in different situations: still a huge challenge that Meteorological offices the world over face now- and especially important, given the effects of climate change. How do we know how much temperatures have changed in the last century, unless we can very accurately gauge the effect using different instruments has?

Another of our daily duties was to change and read the filter papers on a set of instruments that recorded the amounts of carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide in London’s air. London then was still a very dirty place, despite the introduction of the clean air act in 1968. The colour of the filter papers on damp gloomy winter days especially, at Kew told the story, they were (literally) black. We used an instrument to read the papers and it gave us a measure of this pollution. This is one thing I often notice with period dramas set in London: they are often far too clean! Everything then had a patina of dirt on it.. windows, public seats outside, cars, especially in the winter. Actually, the Netflix drama ‘The Crown’ in its first season did justice to this, in the episode featuring Churchill and the notorious London pea-souper fogs of the fifties and sixties. They were certainly somewhat better by the seventies but still present, to some degree.

A layer of dark, fine gritty particulates (much of it emitted by the capital’s traffic exhaust fumes) would settle over everything. Including our lungs of course, with resultant ill health for many. Only really in the past few decades, have things thankfully finally improved, the London congestion charges and better filtering systems in both private cars and public transport facilitating this improvement.     

Along with Kew’s long history, as you might expect, came elements of notoriety too. There were three ‘rings’ of vaults built under the observatory and its immediate surroundings, some using the medieval bricks from the monastery, which were still accessible in part when I was there, though they would often become partially submerged under water when the Thames flooded. A map from 1927 exists of the original network. It was possible to still explore some of them, (though I’m not sure we were meant to), and parts were bricked up by 1975. Sometimes the basement itself would be flooded: in 1881 we know it was flooded for the third time in five years. 

In December 1924 the ‘worst flood for 30 years’ flooded the vaults for over a week, and on 7 January 1928 ‘the highest flood on record’ not only completely submerged the ‘observation lawn’ but came up in the basement almost to the level of the new floors.

 The rooms in the lower basement were unused when I was there and we always felt somewhat ‘strange’ in them. Interestingly, I came across an article when researching this piece, written in 1889 by a journalist of the time, one R. H. Scott who commented:  

‘The chamber in which most of these instruments [magnetographs] are situated is a somewhat ‘eerie‘place. It is underground, in order to be kept constantly at the same temperature, and as care must be taken to shieldthe sensitive photographic paper from all light.. the chamber is all but totally dark.

There were always mutterings that someone has been killed in there from the staff but I didn’t take a great deal of notice of them. However, a decade or so after I left Kew, I came across another history of the place, which stated that in 1795 John Little, who was at one time a curator at the Observatory, was hanged for the murder of two old people in Richmond, and was also suspected of having caused the death of a man named Stroud, whose body was found under an iron vice in the basement room in the building. This man, Little, (as played by the equirry in the recent Bridgerton series on Netflix) had often been George III’s only attendant, when he walked in the gardens. So it seems it was true in fact. Suffice to say I never went down there at night, when I was there alone!

All in all, it was a fascinating place to spend some time. Eventually, on December 31st 1980 it was closed by the Met Office, as it was felt too costly to run and cutbacks were being made, and was sold by the Crown Estate to become a private office building for 35 years, although now it has been beautifully refurbished as a private home, that you can rent for a mere £37,000 a month, though outside it still effectively looks much the same as it ever did, (apart from various outhouses, which were demolished and a newly located car park). Much of its antique equipment of any value was hauled off to the Science Museum in central London and its books and records to the UK Met Office’s headquarters, then at Bracknell, Berks now in Exeter, Devon.

It may seem strange to have spent so much time talking about a place that I spent relatively little of my life at. However, I cannot emphasise enough the impact ‘being at Kew‘ had on me. On one level it immersed me in this grand building, which I came to love, with its patina of age, its dusty rooms, some now shuttered, where great experiments had been carried out in the past, its huge library of books and records, some with the meticulous copperplate handwriting of weather records kept every day for centuries by other observers, that I could relate to, as I was continuing them. Living in the building night and day I came to have a different relationship to it than the others working there, indeed I would have been exceptionally sad if I had still been there on the day it finally closed, in 1980, I think. Living there gave me a sense of the passage of time, that even now, half a century later, I struggle to put into words and to explain well. How time in some ways is so very fleeting and yet in other ways is immense: how could fifty years possibly have passed (I think) since I worked there? When I was working there, looking at the weather records made during the First Great War (when a Zeppelin bomb had landed in the observatory grounds) it had seemed an impossibly long time ago, and yet that much time has passed again since I was there myself. 

I dreamt of being ‘at Kew’ for years and years afterwards, I always had a recurring dream where I had woken too late to do the first 0600 weather observation of the day and had to rush to do it .. I would dream of running up and down its stairs and realise I had gone the wrong way or forgotten my observation pad (this actually happened quite a few times): in itself a dream all about time. Kew was literally all about time in fact, I came to realise, it was written into its history. Kew was time itself, in its own way a kind of travel machine, a ‘tardis’, as you went through its elegant doors each day, you could imagine how busy it once was, bustling with ideas, discussion, activity, experimentation, then read all about it, in its books. I came to be there at the very end of it all but it still felt I was contributing to history and it gave me a sense of my place in the world at last, a sense of how things change and how it was possible to influence things, to change things. And that was an important lesson for what was to follow, at least for me, in the next few decades.

How we can influence things if we try. It may feel difficult, it may feel as if we are going forwards two paces and then backwards but change is possible if you believe in yourself…  

There’s future, there’s hope, hope for you
 Hey young man just believe in what you do.

I’ll be your friend, I’ll be around
 I’ll be everything you need
 I’ll be your friend, I’ll be around
 I’ll be everything you need

Pride is something good for you
 Believe in yourself.

The Communards & Jimmy Somerville, Disenchanted, London Records, 1986

Kew was the first place in my adulthood that I grew to love, perhaps in fact my very first true love, with a very interesting job where you could clearly see what you were doing was useful, worthwhile. It was however, to be the last job I had, where things were quite so neat, so simple.

As it happened, the first move towards exploring my own sexuality proper, was made by a woman that I worked with, Charmaine. She was about 5 years older than me, quite thin and taller than I was and really quite a different character as well. But after working together for about a year, she asked if I wanted to go to the ‘Best Disco in Town‘ with her at the Lyceum Ballroom in central London, one Saturday. I was a little surprised, as in all honesty, no way had I been envisaging her as a romantic partner but I said yes and thought ‘why not’.

We began a reasonable relationship for some time, she was very into ice skating and went to practice at the famous Richmond rink near our workplace regularly. She suggested I should try it out too. I did and was no natural by any means. She said ‘no problem, you just need a teacher’ and so I was enrolled for a couple of lessons a week, taught, no less, than by the bronze medal winner of Ice dancing in the previous Winter Olympics. It was very much a thing in the rink social calendar then, that couples were ice partners. She perhaps had hoped one day we might became competitive. Sadly it wasn’t to be, as I simply wasn’t good enough in the end. Yes, I could skate backwards, do toe loops and single axel rotation jumps  but never much more or with any great panache. In truth my heart wasn’t into it and I felt a bit of a fraud.

She was quite sporty actually and also enjoyed skiing, and so we booked a winter holiday, my first ever plane trip, to go skiing in Kitzbuhel, Austria. Actually I did take to skiing more readily and really enjoyed it, getting out on the last day on the proper runs with her, as opposed to the nursery slopes. We did get on surprisingly well, she was engaging, intelligent and quite witty; in short a really nice girl. Obviously, we both had meteorology in common too as an interest. Potentially, despite the age difference, she was right to consider that the relationship had a lot going for it. The one snag obviously was that, try as I might and boy, I really did try, I could not find her conventionally ‘attractive’.  We were going down the street holding hands and I was still finding it difficult not to be staring at the lads. I particularly recall going to see the film ‘Midnight Express’ with her in Kingston and being quite affected by it, I had no idea it was going to feature the element of homosexuality it does (and Alan Parker had toned it down, as it was). I was slightly embarrassed I think how affected I was by it. I still think it’s a great film with its tremendous, innovative moody score by Giorgio Moroder.

Eventually, in 1978 I left Kew (and Charmaine) for new pastures or rather runways, working at Heathrow Airport in the large Met Department there in Queens Building. It could not have been more different to Kew, busy, functional and efficient. I settled in with my other workers there but it never felt like I would stay there very long. I also finally found a flat of my own, in the suburbs of Teddington, close to Bushy Park. I carried on with my Met work at Heathrow, still doing shift work including nightshifts, working with a team there of about 15, including the husband of Charmaine’s good friend Lesley, who had also worked at Kew with us. In the time I was at Heathrow I started to explore things more and eventually came out as ‘bisexual’ to Malcolm and Lesley, the very first people I did so too, (besides a few men I’d already met by then). In retrospect I must have trusted them very much to do and it is to my eternal gratitude that they were very accepting of it, if not a little surprised.

I was quite worried what Charmaine would think and when we did actually meet again  she told me she was very surprised. I was in turn surprised that she was surprised, as I’d thought I had been all too obvious before. But I did learn later that it’s amazing what you don’t see sometimes if you don’t want to, even when it’s staring you in the face. She got over it though and we eventually lost touch but the last I heard she was joining the Wrens.

There was still a steep learning curve to come for me though, and once I had begun climbing that curve I wanted to understand everything about this new culture I was getting myself involved with. I still had the impression, even then, that it was quite seedy, all underground and ‘hush hush’. As I started to meet other men though I soon realised the one thing they had in common was how very ‘normal’ they all were. It was a genuine but pleasant surprise.        

Mostly, I met men through contact ads initially but it wasn’t that long before I was meeting men who were also frequenting the social scene in London and regularly going out to a pub or club on a Friday or Saturday night. Soon I was going with them to places like ‘Spats’ on London’s Oxford St and ‘The Salisbury’ on Shaftesbury Avenue and entering a new glamorous world of club culture. Clearly it was time to start learning some moves- new grooves.  At that time there was only one big sound that was being played at all the clubs, the dance craze that had originally’ come out ‘ of the States, that was still proving all enveloping,  D-I-S-C-O.

ON to Sex, love and life (The Rituals) part 2.3 Disco and the dance floor

BACK to Sex, love and life: an Index

After some issues at the Pied Bull, the Movements DJ’s Berni & Martin fairly quickly managed to find another venue willing to host a group of dykes and faggots partying on down together, at the bottom of the Pentonville Rd, The Bell.

The pub called the ‘Bell’ on that site was built as early as 1835. Whilst there is some confusion now as to the exact order that things happened, as far as I can ascertain it had started  a ‘women only’ night (as a way of raising regular funds for the charity Women in Prison, around early 1982. The first lesbian and gay night, (according to Peter Cat, who should know as he regularly DJ’ed, rather well, there) was actually a fundraiser for a fledgling organisation called ‘London Gay Switchboard’. Ros Hopkinson then recalls that the ‘Women’s City Disco’ begun in 1981, this being a women-only event held once a week, on a Wednesday after they were offered the pub by the landlady, Doreen and then, when it became successful, twice weekly on Saturdays too with the music provided by the ‘Sleeze Sisters’. They introduced a mixed night after that too. After that also came a night on Friday, run by what became the ‘Nightworkers’ collective, which had also moved ‘down the hill’ from having a regular Friday night too, up at the Pied Bull. ‘Movements’ really just ‘piggy backed’ onto what was quite a successful venue by then, with a further night on Sundays (Saturdays being already taken by the women only disco).  

Its big advantages were that it was quite a large space and it was easy to get too, Kings Cross nearby being a major rail, tube and bus intersection. The pub was quite close to the station, in a busy well lit area, it was more or less right next door to the popular Scala Cinema too. It proved to be a very popular location: so popular in fact that it was to remain as a gay venue in one form or another until as late as 1995 (though there was a night on Saturdays after this which attracted a queercore crowd for a while). The venue has gone down in the annals of alt gay culture, in fact even now decades later it still has a Facebook group about it, dedicated to its memory, with over 1,500 members. The Sunday nights with the Movements DJs spinning the choons probably become the most iconic. By 1984 the place had morphed into what the alternative London’s listings magazine ‘City Limits’ described as ‘the steamiest night club in London’. It was hot in there!

In its initial years, I was still living in Hackney and would get the 73 bus there, usually getting the N73 night bus back. In a few years though, by 1986 and (lucky me), I was living in a flat in Phoenix Court, Somerstown, just behind what is now the new British Library and the Frances Crick Research Institute- but was just an old coal & dairy depot, when I initially moved there, in 1985, west of a decidedly untrendy and very dirty Kings Cross at the time, so the Bell was a short 5 minute walk away through Kings Cross. Equally, Housmans bookshop with Switchboard above it, was also two minutes away at 5, Caledonian Rd, and so it was entirely feasible to do an evening shift on Switchboard, finishing at ten and be in the Bell, quaffing a well earned beer just five minutes later.

There are so many stories about the Bell, it’s hard to know quite where to start with it. It became a ‘legend’ in its own lifespan, such was its effect and reach. I’ve rarely seen any actual video footage of the Bell in full swing: there is a minute or so, from an LWT documentary someone in the facebook group recently shared  and a few other grainy videos about on facebook and youtube, with no mobiles about then, (bricks yes but not mobiles) but I had taken some interior footage there, in early 1985 as part of the ‘Nightshift‘ video we had made about Switchboard.

Looking at it again, quite recently, after many years, the thing that struck me most was how ‘camp’ most of the men were and I noticed this in the LWT footage too).

Though I’m really not sure that’s quite the right word.. there is something I noticed about the kind of identity we all carried: was it a softness perhaps? It was a surprise, as it wasn’t something I felt I saw anymore in most gay men today and I certainly don’t recall thinking at that time that we were coming over as being particularly ‘camp’ or ‘soft’ then. Perhaps part of it was something about being able to be unguarded, at one, completely amongst ‘our own’? I want to be quite clear that this remark is in no way any kind of criticism: in fact, retrospectively, I find it quite lovely: kind of retrospectively, achingly beautiful.

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One of only a couple of filmed pieces in existence, of live ´´Bell´´ footage in the Movements era https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9_2jeYb3

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There was a lot of beauty on display, both male and female and often, inbetween. It was, on the whole, a scene that was pretty image conscious, more so I think than the ‘Carved Red Lion’ initially.

We thought in Kings Cross that we were a world away from the glitzy new romantics of the West End, of Blitz and the Mud Club, but now, well I’m not quite as sure as I was then. There were crossovers anyway, George O Dowd did come to ‘The Bell’ a number of times (and was let in this time..), a number of people who frequented the Bell had artistic and cultural & personal connections with the New Romantics and went to their clubs too. Various bands that became very well known cut their teeth at the Bell.

There was even a copycat venue called the ‘New Depression’, an antidote to the Romantics, off the Balls Pond Rd for a while and a string of other infamous venues which had a similar vibe that someone could easily write a book about (in fact to some extent Dylan Jones did so, in his weighty tome about the New Romantics ‘Sweet Dreams’ (2020, Faber & Faber) although this is a somewhat disappointingly heterosexual affair, though to be fair it does only cover the ten year period from 1975-1985.

The writer Robert Elms, heavily involved in that particular scene, sums things up quite well though I think, when he described ‘The Blitz’ as being:

..a place that was both simultaneously bitchy and individualistic and also a support group, because often people couldn’t walk down the street on their own without getting beaten up. London back in the seventies was a homophobic place and you could get chased down the street for wearing the wrong trousers, let alone looking like how we looked. Blitz was one place you could go looking like that and feel safe, so therefore we sort of stuck together. ‘The Bell’ was undoubtedly similar.

I think people would agree that there are similarities here to the role ‘The Bell’ & other alternative places in that period were playing for those who went there regularly. I might be wrong but I don’t think the Bell was ever particularly ‘bitchy’ though.

We kind of thought that was something we had left behind us in the ‘normal’ gay clubs (and indeed clubs like The Blitz et al), as some had ‘come over’ from that side of the tracks too, but not too many I would think. I do think the Bell slowly became more mixed (diverse, if you like) in terms of its style, its discreet cultural resonance diluted perhaps after a few years. If this made it less elite, well perhaps that’s a good thing. 

For, in retrospect, I wonder now if there was just an element of eliteness to the Bell (others may disagree and I probably would have sworn blind then, that there wasn’t) but probably never in the way that there was in the New Romantic movement, with its various movers and shakers. Also, of course, any venue that lasts that long has it regulars, who perhaps feel so at home there that they use it more like a living room. People used it to ‘hold court’ as well: there were some extremely witty, inventive people who went regularly, who could banter on and on. Banter is not bitchiness but still has a sullied reputation now (personally I blame Dave) but there were some friends (Joe, Mark, Andy: you know who you are..) who often had me and others in stitches. Mark Simpson in particular was adept at exceptionally good banter and of course he went on to use that skill in his own writing later.

Banter, nevertheless in a relatively politically correct venue like the Bell, had a very fine edge: the art was to remain just on the acceptable side of what was permissible, whilst both hinting at the unacceptable and remaining acceptable by being clear just how unacceptable it was. But it often made the evening incredibly stimulating and exciting. There were also the huge opportunities that presented themselves for flirting, sometime outrageously so, and to some extent, it being a mixed venue, there was always an edge of latent bisexuality to be explored.

It felt perhaps a little like that thirties Bloomsbury literary scene must have seemed sometimes. Actually, Neil Tennant alludes to this, in his achingly beautiful song ‘Being Boring‘, of which more later. Explicit sex on the premises was limited and generally frowned upon by the management and the clientele possibly too, though I’m not so sure of that (but this restriction often added to the compound element of desire and tension and it certainly did happen sometimes, in the slightly skanky cubicles.

The tunes spun of course, it perhaps goes without saying, were great: bang on the counter culture of the day. You could dance however you wanted, nobody gave a flying fuck what you did, as long as you didn’t drunkenly flail about too much and throw up on the dancefloor. Which in my experience is never a good look. And it always ended too early, leaving you wanting more (a trick that the DJs at Duckie, in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, if anything the Bell’s most famous reincarnation, now a grand dame on the scene itself, learnt so well to exploit: right, you fuckers..!) One of my personal favourites was dancing to ‘Fascist Groove Thang‘ by Heaven 17, which starts by injecting a huge amount of energy into the song and then manages to sustain it all the way through. And any song that manages to contain the line ´hot your ass, I feel your power´can´t be bad. But of course that era really wasn’t short of tunes: Panic, Temptation, almost anything by Bowie, anything by Depeche Mode, the Eurythmics and Annie Lennox. Dancing was a hugely important and enjoyable part of the whole Bell experience. 

 Of course Movements was not just about Martin and Bernie and the music, but also about the team that worked on the door and behind the bar and looked after everyone, people like Keran, Pom, Trill, Andy, Corrine, Jeff to name just a few in its time, who did the honours.

It is difficult to explain exactly what made the venue so good, simply, in words. I’ve tried in this narrative to do so about a number of ‘special’ venues that were very dear to my heart. And still are. Perhaps you knew these places yourself. If so, like me you’ll perhaps find yourself thinking what you wouldn’t do to have just one more night in such a venue. Is it possible to be in love with a venue? Probably. If so, then I must declare my love for ‘The Bell’. If the current facebook group is anything to go by, there are at least 1,000 people out there who may still feel the same way too.

The Bell is duly listed in the June 1983 edition of ‘Him Magazine’ , which was by then the key monthly gay publication (squarely aimed at gay men) in the UK then from the Millivres stable (especially since the demise of Gay News). It was described as

‘a large comfortable mixed club’ with ‘Friday: disco by Icebreakers & Gay CND 8.30-12am 90p (40p UB40s),’ ‘Sundays: Movements alternative disco 8-11.30 80p’. 

On the front cover though, its key story was headed in a lurid large red banner AIDS: ‘Gay Death- Plot Panic’: Fact or Science Fiction? Accompanying it was an image: a large glass flask with heat and flames being applied to the bottom and young gay men swimming around inside it, some being burnt by the boiling water (drawn by the then popular cartoonist, Oliver Frey). It is a very strange image now and although you feel they were simply trying to satirise the red top papers of the day, I’m not sure it wouldn’t in fact have served to alarm gay people yet further.

Perhaps however that is what they were trying to do? Inside, on p3 the editorial, written by Roger Kean reads:

If anyone considers our cover this month to be sensationalist nonsense, then he should pause to reflect: today America is alive with rumours and counter rumours , gay extermination plots by the government etc. These may be true or fanciful but what is certain is the indication that even is if AIDS is not some mad homophobic plot, the effects of the disease could well lead to one. Even the gay press has done little but cause confusion. The American paper, the Advocate(the key American gay monthly magazine then) has waffled in alarmist terms whilst the income from dubious medical cure all ads (in its advertising pages) rolls in. Whether their own front page really helped matters is also questionable I’d suggest. However on p33 (with the same whole page image of the flask, in black & white) there is a fairly comprehensive seven page article about what was known then and the then current developments. Generally, in retrospect it does it quite well, with a lot of frank information given in the seven pages about what was then known and ways of decreasing the risk of contracting the disease:

Number 1.Cut down on the amount of anonymous casual sex; ie: avoid promiscuity. Particularly avoid partners who are known to be promiscuous. Avoid group sex. 

This was very strong stuff then. No mention of the term safer sex, it had not yet been coined or indeed the advice added about using a condom for anal sex, which was later to become the key message. Up until April 1983 it tells us, there had been 14 cases in the UK BUT (my emphasis) only 5 of those were homosexuals, reported the Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre (CDSC) in Colindale, North London. New York in comparison had had 450 cases by then. A paragraph on the penultimate page also mentions the new Terrence Higgins Trust, an organisation set up by the friends of Terry Higgins, who had collapsed in Heaven and later died, an early victim of AIDS; to fundraise, offer a helpline service, write a leaflet for gay men about the facts and co-ordinate information and knowledge with the also relatively newly set up Gay Men’s Health Crisis organisation (GMHC) in New York.

It is I suppose a credible effort to try and provide non sensationalist information to its audience, despite its sensationalist front cover. From now onwards HIV/AIDS would continue to always be close to the top of the agenda for gay men (and of course in theory at least, other men having sex with men). There was no doubt, agendas were changing.

ON to Sex, love and life (The Rituals) 2,22 1985 Changing the World and a Centre all of our own

BACK to Sex, Love and life, The Index

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In September 1982 I’d decided to go back to school. 

I’d been out of work for quite a while, doing volunteering jobs at that local Hackney housing co-op committee – the one which went by the enticing name of SLUG, (short life user groups). As I’ve mentioned, cash strapped Hackney council rented out unloved council properties to needy groups for a fiver a week.  There was a test for getting in to our co-op April but I can’t remember it now, I think as I mentioned you needed to attend a certain number of meetings to show commitment. Unofficially, maybe someone made a pass at you and monitored how you reacted. That was where I saw Jeff the first time. I lived in five houses over a seven year period, the second I’ve mentioned already in Bethune Rd, Stamford Hill but the third one in Carysfoot Rd, closer to Stoke Newington and on the 73 bus route was a favourite.

By the summer of 1982 I was living there with Gus, Nick and two lesbians, Pauline and Sue.  It was a somewhat more obviously communal house in some ways, than Bethune Rd, we usually ate together, there were rotas for shopping and cleaning and other tasks and we would have regular house meetings to discuss any ‘issues’. On the whole we all got along very well together and arguments were few and far between. I had a larger bedroom finally too after my single room affairs at Fordwych and Bethune Rd, & more importantly a big bed (my first futon I think?). Both Pauline & Sue were heavily into the womens’ movement and in particular became very involved with the Greenham Common CND anti Cruise missile protests, both eventually living on the womens’ camp there, over various periods.

Nick in particular, of all of us, was very involved in counselling and keen to bring all that he knew, to the men of April Co-op. All of us valued the role of counselling, in one form or another, and this was very much something that felt entirely natural to participate in. I still have a flier that Nick produced  when he ran a day called ‘Men in April’. There were two men with arms wrapped around each other standing up holding a large umbrella with ‘April’ on it. Mens symbols (the circle with the arrow) were falling onto the umbrella, some singly , some in pairs. Dear Dave, it reads,

Please come to a day for men in April Co–op 10.30– 5.00 on Saturday November 20th. It will be a chance to get to know each other better, and learn to be more caring towards each other and will be led by Nick N.

Bring enough food for yourself to be shared at lunchtime. Let me know beforehand if you are coming for certain. but you are welcome to come at the last minute too. This will be an introductory day for a regular April Men’s group. Hope you can come. Nick X.

This was something that was completely commensurate with the ethos of April and living together in community houses at that time and it felt an entirely natural, holistic thing to be doing. I can’t remember much about the session at all now but can imagine the kind of things we would have done: warm up exercises, some trust games, sharing experiences of both negative and positive things we had each been through as gay men.

Nick was particularly involved in a form of therapy called co-counselling (couple counselling) which was quite popular then and he introduced me to it. It was a relatively simple process where two people sit and face each other and listen to what the other has to say without any judgement or intervention but simply ask questions that probe how the other person really feels about these things. One of the key questions being ‘how does that make you feel’?  Often you discovered there was a particular phrase, just a few words, that unlocked a roomful of pent up emotion. Often too, you built up a deep level of trust by having many sessions with a particular partner. As a process, for many of us, this was quite a radical notion. It could produce some unexpected results though. I recall doing it with a lovely guy, who was heterosexual but as we spent sessions together, we found ourselves bonding more and more; in the end we developed something akin to a love for each other: a very caring deep bond, which wasn’t sexual but did involve being very close and intimate with each other. This intimacy was not really meant to be ‘part of the process’, and we had to work our way through these feelings for each other. I think this kind of counselling process is less popular today.

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´Never let Me Down Again´, Depeche Mode 1987; bands were exploring the body politic too, such as this song from Depeche Mode, that I´ve always loved, that asks more questions than it answers..

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I think that whilst I was more aware of the possibilities of such feelings with other men, it took my heterosexual partner completely by surprise, as it was never something he had felt before and he did not quite know how to ‘process’ such feelings. There is an element of personal liberation to such a bond, and there were tears from both of us, as years of oppression came out. In later years, I went to a number of mixed (gay/heterosexual) men’s groups, where we became very close to each other. For many men, such intimacy with other men is full of worry, concern and unease. It questions many of the patriarchal assumptions they have grown up with, about their role as the breadwinner, the dominant force of strength in a relationship.    

This process however, very much fitted the way I was leading my life at that time and it felt very good. It gave me a confidence in myself, inside myself, that I had not really had before. I think it showed on the outside too, as I held myself, carried myself differently. It made me feel I could do things that I would have been too timid to try before. It is nevertheless something that I have to an extent lost, as least  to some extent, over the decades and now miss.     

One of the things it helped me do, was not to be too afraid of trying new things. I realised that I had an ingrained fear of failure, which I had carried about, a weight on my shoulders for years and years, I felt I had not lived up to what my family, and more widely society itself expected me to be, and to act like, ‘as a man’.

One of the things that I tried and became quite involved with, during the summer of 1982, was to become part of a lesbian and gay group, making a video funded by Channel Four. It ended up being called Framed Youth: Revenge of the Teenage Perverts.  The start of quite a few lesbian and gay careers in fact- Jimmy Somerville, Rose Collis, (for a time the Right Reverend) Richard Coles, Isaac Julian. They were all involved. I’m not sure I did an awful lot to be honest, except hang out around a studio they had rented in Brixton, above some gay film archives.

Eventually released in April 1983, darn me though, if it didn’t go on to win the BAFTA for ‘best UK independent documentary’ the following year. I went to the presentation, which was an inherently unglamorous event then, unlike the current yearly glamathons hosted by Steven Fry or some other notable english treasure. 

Anyway, for me it re-sparked my interest in art and film and  based on this idea of trying to develop new things in my life and be less afraid of ‘failing’, I enrolled at a Hackney College in Jubilee St, Bethnal Green, in September 1982 to do a year’s ‘Art A level’ with the idea of going on to do a foundation course in film. It ended up being one of the best years of my life in fact. I fell in with an arty, bohemian crowd. I can still see them clearly in my mind’s eye: the lovely soft spoken, curly haired Danny from Israel, proper east end grrl Dawn, a tall Goth in black, well spoken Millie, always with her briefcase: the sensible one, Mac, the tall thin sexy Scot and girlfriend Nic (the lovely Nicola, whom I think technically Mac just about outquiffed, though she would say I am lying).

I was the oldest one by a few years. and I was ‘out’ as soon as I arrived, due to my ‘Framed Youth’ story and I felt about as free as I’ve ever felt in my life. I still have a picture somewhere of me lying down after a student cuts protest rally with Dawn & Danny, in my little black military top with a red star, a bleach blond quiff a la (depeche) mode’s Martin Gore, smoking a joint. It is perhaps, the coolest picture anyone has ever taken of me. Of course at the time I had no idea it was particularly cool- which is of course -you come to realise rather later in life- the very definition of cool. Turned out, as the year unravelled that I was not the only homo in the group by a long piece of artistic chalk but that’s another story.

Rallies were what we did best then. There were no end of rallies you could go on if you wanted. Cuts rallies, protest rallies, Anti Thatcher rallies, Pride rallies, CND rallies. And to go on a rally you needed a really good banner. A big banner, the bigger the better. So there was a definite need for a very good banner when the arts class decided we must go on a student funding anti cuts rally. Millie, Dawn and Nicola quickly got on the case and fashioned from 2 large bedsheets dyed pink and a lot of lace, ‘City and East London College against the Cuts’ cut out letters in black sewn onto it. I think it’s fair to say we came up with one of the campest banners I have ever seen in my life. And trust me, I have seen an awful lot of banners.

Around half way through my year there, in February 1983, the National Union of Students (NUS) called for ‘an occupation of your college to protest the cuts’ (there were always cuts..), which they called the ‘Grants and Cuts Campaign’. I think I was my classes NUS rep, I’m not too sure now, but it’s possible, as I was the oldest by some years then. I still have the leaflet we produced, as a handout to all students.

We determined that we would have a vote on whether or not to occupy the college for a day. In the event students voted by a massive majority to occupy it on the 23rd February for 24 hours. 

‘The NUS are asking the Government that no more cuts in education are carried out and that every student is entitled to a £25 a week minimum grant. So far the government have IGNORED this demand and that is what this campaign is fighting for’ it told them. ‘The occupation will start at 10am and go on for 24 hours’. Many activities are being organised to keep everyone amused. These will include: Films, Music and Jamming, Theatre group from the Half Moon, Sponsored cake bake/knitting/face painting, FREE food, mural painting, meetings and speakers.

It duly went ahead and we kept ourselves entertained for most of the 24 hours. It got very quiet about 4am, as everyone battled sleepiness (and too many joints, I would rather think) but perked up by dawn again, courtesy of some strong instant coffee. I recall there being about thirty of us, who stuck it out through the whole 24 hours, whilst the ones who had given up and gone home to bed, were much derided by those of us who had stuck it out, which I think included all those I knew. It’s all something of a blur now, but I remember we had the banner and were standing chanting outside for some time, to the passing cars and that posters were put up on the windows ‘THIS COLLEGE IS OCCUPPIED. NUS SAY NO TO CUTS’ . The teachers were all quite radical and left wing then (it was Hackney remember) and I think fully supported us. Both at the time and retrospectively it was all great fun and brought us all together even more, as a group. I’ve had busier years, and more interesting years but that year was pretty much perfect in many ways, and perhaps when I was most conspicuously happy. 

I went straight to Farnham from September 1983 to do a degree in fact after that, as I by- passed the foundation course & got in on the basis of my age (26.. mature student) and to some extent Framed Youth’s credibility by then. Another three years spent having a ball really, at first living there in Surrey but commuting by year two from Hackney most days; which was a trek and a half.  I resisted London’s pull for a year but it had me gripped. I had a boyfriend, the lovely Mark there, was still living in an April housing co-op group house in leafy Stamford Hill & more to the point was heavily involved by then, with London’s Gay Switchboard. 

On to Sex , love and life (The Rituals) 2.21  1984- The best of the best – all about ‘The Bell’

Back to Sex, love and life: The Index

According to the alt gospel of spent Watering Holes, before the famous Bell was the Pied Bull and before that the Carved Red Lion

But along with all those and just as off the beaten track, but in another special groove, was Traffic. So close to the ‘Prince Albert’, those GLF and Icebreakers discos- and yet so far. On the ‘Cally Road’ by the canal bridge. Now, that was a place that you’ll hear the old timers talking about. Those left and those that care to remember. Owned by a guy called Jim Baker I heard, much later. I took my gorgeous German boyfriend Andreas from Hamburg there and he went into a shamanic rhapsody. And him from exotic Hamburg, mind you. But this was evidently better –though to be fair he was a London groupie through and through.

It was a small, hard club with black walls and men in black boots and soft black leather.  Leather was definitely ok here. You could melt in there and I don’t mean from the heat.  Men dancing hard to indie and techno music, in leather. That was pretty much unheard of anywhere else in the early 80’s. You never actually danced in leather. It smelt of that warm fuzz of chalk, talc, sweat, paint and beer. Maybe they streamed dope, poppers or pheromones through the air conditioning. Who knows, it was intoxicating, with a rhythm divine. If that’s what did it for you, you’ll know what I mean. It was an absolute keeper. 

Traffic though, had an extra secret, an ‘after hours’ special that -if you were in the know -made it more of a finders- keeper. I stumbled into it by pure accident, one semi-moonlight, balmy summer night. 1am was lights up time at Traffic in those days. Out the door & over the canal bridge, back towards Kings Cross and right, into Somerstown, where I lived. I urgently needed to pee. Steep steps led down to the banks along the canalside. Under the bridge was the Grand Union Canal and the Camden Towpath. Almost pitch black, stumbling down I could see other shadowy figures walking the tow patch. Perfectly quiet, except for a few muffled distant city noises. A flash, just ten yards away, of a cigarette inhaled. Another lit. The moon came out. There were dozens of men down there! And they certainly were not down there just to pee.  It seems odd to describe this as a religious experience and yet it had something of that in it. The silence, the signs, the stigma, the sin, the smells, the sweet small success of contact. I thought of my catholic gay friend Mark Ashton, who loved the same things and wondered if he had discovered it yet.

It had me trapped in its spell, almost as soon as I realised what I had found. The drug was intoxicating, mesmerising and perfect. It involved delicious risk and delicate rhythm. And so I embarked on a regular dark journey down to that grand, Union canal, each Saturday night after Traffic’s clientele had spilled out. Even in the winter it had its charms, frost crunching underfoot, breath steaming out, the tight embracing warmth of leather, doing its rightful job. They used to say it was safe down there, as it wasn’t patrolled by police.. British Waterways territory you see. Who knows? Maybe they just thought better there than on some city street. You’ll scoff at me but I used to go as much for the atmosphere in the end, than anything more carnal. That other-worldliness of pure ritual, alternative routine and changed boundaries. Forty years on, thinking about it can still send a shiver down my spine. And that shiver is not cold, or a chill or anything fetid but one of delight, of anticipation, of yearning for that other world. The notion that this was an alternative place we had all entered of our own volition, for consumption and pleasure, unfettered by the boundaries of the humdrum and everyday.  

And always above us, Traffic, and the traffic flowing on over the bridge, as the night taxis carried people to their warm, safehouses. 

One night, I was down there with a friend, we were stood looking at the little cigarettes lighting up all along the bank side, like little fairy lights I thought; catching the faint sweet smell of a joint, drifting from way downstream and a suited policeman with cap walked past, giving me the fright of my life. Don’t worry about him, my friend said, he just dresses like that for the kick. Everyone down here knows him. Just on some big power trip: some guys love it.

There were codes of course. Unwritten rules, etiquette and procedures. You never asked for what you wanted, you never said anything much. You never took the piss out of anyone else. You never asked to go home with someone, well at least not before trying a few things out.

‘Traffic’ got watered down after some years and less exclusive, though still gay but eventually closed. I went back to that stretch of the canal at night, a few years ago now, before Kings Cross got itself all tarted up again, for the craic. Still as a grave down there, bar a few caught short from the pub. ‘Traffic’ went the way of so many others, turned into an Aussie backpackers club. People moved on. Then it was renovated, refurbished, turned into new flats. Sad really, the way these things go. No-one was even smoking down there anymore. 

We all moved on as well of course; we always did.

On to Sex, love and life (the rituals) 2.20 1983 Back to school, protest and the rise and rise of the alt political march

Back to Sex, love and life: The Index

By the late summer of 1982, the Carved Red Lion basement where gay DJs Berni and Martin played their choons on the Essex Rd, was getting too small for its reputation.

 ‘Gay Noise’ had folded, despite our letter to the collective and protestations and so it was no longer a benefit night as such but its popularity saw the demand for it continue. There would be a queue down the street to get in. And it wasn’t necessarily a street you wanted to hang out too long in, though, en masse, the queue gave as good as it got and much more. The landlords finally fell out with the promoters and this precipitated a move to a new venue, just down the road to a ‘safer space’ in the middle of fast trendifying Islington, close to Angel Islington tube.

The Pied Bull was a larger venue than the ‘Lion and as such was able to take more punters in each Saturday night. It was at 1, Liverpool Rd, N1 so an easy address to remember and had a mock tudor frontage from a bijou restoration in 1932. It had had a very long history as the ‘Pied Bull’, a public house remarkably going back to 1793 but was a music venue in the period when Movements was there, every Saturday. It tends to get forgotten now in the archives, as the infamous ‘Bell’ in Kings Cross, which was to be their next move, was to be so seminal, for so long, with the gay alt crowd. 

It wasn’t around as a venue for Movements for too long, as I recall there was some trouble there with a gang of skinheads that attempted to raid the place one evening, the police having to be called. It had a little bit of a reputation after that, with some people feeling worried about visiting the place. It had its moments though. The delightful Paz Paschali, editor of Attitude back in 1994, recalled the time when Boy George tried to get into the Pied Bull after doing an interview

‘when he went on and on about poofs..we were outraged, he was clearly a traitor’. The doorman at the Pied Bull challenged him saying ‘ Someone in your position should support gay rights, I’ll have you know I’ve been beaten up for wearing a gay badge‘. As Paz noted ‘we weren’t quick to forgive in those days’.

In fact Berni Hodson has since said, that they got on very well with the manager there and that there was talk at one time that the manager might take over the management of the Bell. It didnt happen though in the end. Certainly the Pied Bull was a good space for a while but, as it turned out, was just a taster for even better things to come. Central London was slowly taking off too as the number of bars there increased along with the number of punters out and about wanting to visit them. Someone with a sense of humour had opened a new one in central London’s St Martins’ Lane, called Brief Encounter, which was your full bells and whistles New York style bar: very modern with lots of chrome and tasteful eighties style pastels. Perfect for a pre theatre gin and tonic upstairs or a longer stay down in its busy but still fashionable basement. But there were always other spaces, other vibes and tribes to be a part of. In fact, for quite a while in this period I discovered a completely new watering spot. Men only though, so the vibe was always going to be pretty different to place like the ‘Lion & Pied Bull.  

On to Sex. love and life (The rituals) 2.19  1983 Ch, ch, changes: Traffic & getting to know the outdoor cruising scene 

Back to Sex, love and life: The Index

On June 16th, 1981 something specific happened in New York, which was to go onto change everything for us in London.

A thirty five year old, white, gay man was very ill and exhibiting symptoms of severe immunodeficiency and so was admitted to the Clinical Center at the National Institute of Health (NIH) there. Against expectations however, he did not respond to any treatments and his condition did not improve. In fact, he never left the Center again and died there on October 28th, 1981.

Back in London initially we knew little of this detail however and its potential implications. It was though, at around about that time, in the early summer of 1981 that I decided it was perhaps time to give something back to this community, that I was, frankly by then, getting an awful lot out of and having a great deal of fun within. Living by then in April, Hackney’s gay short life housing co-op, at Bethune Rd and still paying a fiver a week, I was not working but studying part time and doing voluntary work at various places, so had plenty of free time.

One of the people, Gus, that I had met in April housing co-op had been working as a volunteer for some time already with London Gay Switchboard, which at that time was about 8 years old, having been launched in early March 1974 and as I mentioned earlier, holed up in a few small rooms above Housmans famous bookshop in central north London’s still rather grimy Caledonian Rd, running just east of Kings Cross station. 

In 2004, when it was celebrating its 30th birthday (it’s now in 2024 a remarkable 50 years old), one of the early members there, Dick Stabbins, was speaking to the Guardian about it in fond terms. “It was a 70s-style collective, huge and unwieldy,.. the volunteers had to commit themselves to do some non-phone work as well as staffing the helpline.. that’s how the bureaucracy got done.”

Clearly it was very different to some of the political collectives I’d already been involved  Switchboard (now a charity) was a volunteer-run democratic group, (by 2004 albeit with an elected trustee board and two paid staff – an admin officer and an information worker). The article noted then that ‘In an age of increasing professionalisation in the voluntary sector, Switchboard has not bothered with so much as a chief executive’.

“It’s part of the ethos of the organisation – it’s in the DNA,” said David Harvey, another of the early  volunteers, (then the chair of Brighton & Hove’s legendary Pride event, and now after living in Spain since 2011, sadly passed away, a victim of Covid 19’s legacy). “We don’t want to get in a situation where we’re told what to do by someone who’s paid. If there’s a structure with a paid person at the top and volunteers under that, it’s a bit like going to work. But it’s not a workplace – it’s ours.”

In those early days, as a young gay man, I had seen a copy of its 1981 Annual Report: that year -my soon to be flatmate- Gus, had featured in a photograph on the front cover, looking very engaged on a call. I had picked the report up. London Gay Switchboard it said ‘is a voluntary non profit making telephone information and help service run by and primarily for homosexual and bisexual men and women. We started in 1974, since when we have received over 650,000 calls‘.

In January 1981, the report went on to tell us, ‘London Gay Switchboard was made up of 78 unpaid volunteers and during 1980 alone had taken 184,941 phone calls, hence making an average of around 500 a day’. It went through the accounts in some detail: everything was meticulously documented. £8,697.54 had been collected that year, including interest of £408.57 from its reserve fund. £8,697.54 had been spent, including £972.32 transferred to its reserve fund.

Now this gay organisation I could see, really had its head screwed on. I still have that report from 1981 and I see that it also came with a special ‘legal report’. This was an analysis of all the legal calls received by London Gay Switchboard in that year. ‘Legal calls represented a small proportion of the total number of calls we received’ (1496 in all, less than 2% of its total calls that year) ‘but they are a vital part of our service to callers’. It went on to say that as from the 1st July in the preceding year they had begun using logsheets designed with help from GLAD (Gay Legal ADvice) and the NCCL (National Council for Civil Liberties).

‘Volunteers do not give legal advice themselves’ it told us, ‘as they are not qualified to do so but try to refer callers to which ever law centre, legal advice centre, solicitor or specialist legal agency can best help. Considerable work on the effectiveness of the legal file together with in service training for volunteers has equipped us with useful procedures for callers in many different situations. It broke down the proportions of calls into a number of categories, which retrospectively tells us the types of legal concerns that were particularly occupying gay men & lesbians in that period (at least in relation to their sexuality). 21% of the calls were about the state of the law: here it mentions the 1967 Sexual Offences Act and makes the point that for many gay men, sexual activity was still illegal. It also makes the point that some of the callers were transvestites or transexuals, who at that time were also potentially liable to be charged under a 1936 Public Order Act and that some of their callers were in the Forces, where homosexuality was still an offence under military law for both sexes. 

9%  of the legal calls taken were from foreigners in the UK. It notes that many tourists, students and visitors with short stay permits phoned Switchboard when they were here for advice on how to extend their stay, as some of them were afraid to return to their own countries, where attitudes to homosexuality were often very much worse than in the UK, with in some cases the death penalty applying for homosexual acts. 7% of the calls were regarding employment and often specifically in relation to discrimination in employment, relating a specific example they talked of the John Saunders case, where a gay worker with no convictions or complaints against him was sacked because of his sexual orientation. This was by no means an uncommon occurrence in this period with campaigning organisations like the NCCL often helping to fight such dismissals.

Then there were issues around divorce and child custody, which were discussed by 9% of the callers. The reports touches upon the raft of issues that could crop up in this area then, arranged marriages, the need to marry and have children to prove to others that you were ‘normal’, the emotional breakups that might occur when a spouse discovered their partners sexuality and not least the fact that many gay men and lesbians DID want to raise children as loving parents but found the law discriminated against them. Switchboard had a list of sympathetic solicitors who specialised in this area of the law.

Another issue that was commonly brought up then was the subject of blackmail, raised by 6% of Switchboards legal callers. The reports mentions that the disparity in the age of consent at the time (21 for gay sex, 16 for heterosexual sex) led to cases of blackmail for those between 16-21 who had had gay sex. Also, that the social stigma that still surrounded homosexuality then meant that they might well be threatened by family, so called friends or an employer. ‘Often the caller does not have sufficient confidence to resists threats’ the report notes and does not realise that blackmail itself is a very serious offence. 

A small percentage were complaints against the police (3%) and under the umbrella of ‘other’ the report noted that 20% of callers didn’t fall into any of the above categories and this area included issues such as Mental Health, drugs, libel/slander, consumer complaints and anticipated arrest. It makes the point that also in this category were many callers who were so nervous that they did not even want to tell the switchboarder exactly why they needed a solicitor. There was then a separate section entitled ‘Callers involved in a Incident with the police‘ of which there were 390 calls (and it notes that all but a handful of the callers were men). 60% of the callers falling into this category reported that they were subsequently charged with a sexual offence. It says that most of the offences appeared to fall into four situations, common to the lifestyle of many gay men.

The first was ‘Cottaging‘, the term used by gay men relating to casual sexual encounters with other men in public toilets. The report notes that ‘to many people this may seem a sordid way of expressing their sexuality‘ and indeed this was very much the majority view in that period (from both homosexual & heterosexual people). It makes the point that many men went to such ‘cottages’ for three key reasons: that they were married and could not visit commercial venues to meet men, secondly, that the stigma attached to being gay prevented them from going to a local gay pub or social group if there was one (this could especially be the case in smaller rural communities) or three, they knew of no other alternative available – and so it was the only option open to give them some way of fulfilling what was often a desperately felt desire, a need for some form of close contact with another man.

 There were primarily two offences which arose from these situations, for which charges might be brought against them if they were caught. The first, known legally as importuning was a charge brought by the local police that would allege that the man had been loitering in or near a toilet looking for a sexual encounter. The police often resorted to agent provocateur activity, entrapping men and the officers who were officially engaged in this behaviour became known as ‘pretty policemen’.  Many men were caught in this way and prosecuted over the years causing great trauma to themselves and often their families, as they were then named and shamed by the press (including the actor Laurence Olivier for instance) and it was only in 1999 this practice was finally abolished.  (In fact Switchboard went on to have two hugely successful gala fundraising events in the 80’s called the ‘Pretty Policeman’s Ball 1/2′, the inspiration being the famous ‘Secret Policeman’s Ball’ fundraisers for Amnesty International). 

The second charge that was often brought against those caught in that period, was that of gross indecency. The fact that it was not well defined legally and hence could mean just about whatever the police wanted, made it all the more difficult to deny. The police frequently spent ‘many hours in broom cupboards’ the report notes, ‘up step ladders or behind false partitions in order to entrap gay men’. It makes the point though that often the men arrested had low self esteem that undermined their confidence and they felt might well feel obliged to admit to a crime, which the police could never, in fact, prove.

The second lifestyle factor that could get men into trouble in that period was outside cruising, often in specific areas. One of the most famous of these areas in London was on the western side of Hampstead Heath but there were many others, of which more later. One thing that Switchboard did not do was to give out information about the locations of such cruising areas to callers, although often a call would start with something like ‘I heard Hampstead Health is a good place to meet other men, is that right?’ to which one could only reply ‘I can’t possibly comment’ or words to that effect.  If caught by police in such an area gay men could be charged with importuning or gross indecency – and often were. There would be periods when police activity would increase and other times when it would wane in specific areas.

The third area which was sometimes prosecuted was if sexual activity had occurred (in private or public) between a man over 21 and one under 21, and more specifically those men over 16, for whom sex would have been legal if they were have to have it with a woman over 16 but illegal if with a man. Often in practice if the two men were both under 21 no action would be taken, a caution would be given. The report says Switchboard had received calls which made it clear that sometimes gay male teenagers were being threatened by the police, in order to build up a dossier on their older friends as a result of which charges could later be laid.

Finally, the report talks of gay pubs and clubs, and whilst it was perfectly legal by then for men to meet in pubs and clubs, it makes the point that such places were often subject to raids and the harassment of patrons at closing time. A pattern that sometimes emerged they say, is one of deliberate attempts to frighten and humiliate men. Charges of importuning could be brought against men loitering near a pub after it had closed and many of those men would allege that the police had used an agent provocateur.  

So what we can see from the contents of this illuminating report is that there was a widescale pattern established in the UK in that period which attempted to make the sexual lives of gay men very difficult, full of the possibility of entrapment and arrest. Clearly things have changed greatly in the past four decades; the evidence is clear from such organisations that keep similar records now and the fact that on marches and parades it is quite common to see lesbian, gay and bisexual policemen walking in the parade. The attitude of the police on such parades has changed completely too. However, reading the report then for myself although I obviously knew of such legal activity, it was a revelation as to the extent of such practices and was one of the factors that made me feel I wanted to offer some kind of support to those who found themselves in such a situation.   

Switchboard’s 1981 report finished by making three points. ‘WE NEED YOUR HELP’ it stated in large bold type. 1. We need you 2. We need money 3. We need information. I wasn’t sure I could help significantly with 2 and 3 but my interest was piqued by point 1. Could I give something back to the community? I wasn’t sure, as I had had no experience on a phone line before. I earnestly consulted Gus. What did he think, should I apply to become a volunteer there too? He told me that the selection process to become a ratified volunteer was notoriously tough and run by one of the four organisational arms of Switchboard called ‘Training Group’. The interview process was quite long with two interviewees and you had more or less to say exactly the right things, (according to current credo), to be accepted. 

Each interview would then be dissected later by all members of the group and the interviewees would make a recommendation based on the interview to accept or reject the applicant.  (Even thirty years later it is still too early to say who was rejected at those meetings, for fear of community ostracisation.  I jest of course- but only slightly!) Try it he said, I think you’ll be fine. Thankyou Gus, for having that belief in me then, as in its own way, it is no exaggeration to say the experience changed my life.

To be fair to Training Group and the process, it was important that those allowed on the phones were pretty good at what they did. It is also absolutely no exaggeration to say that you might get, one after another, a suicidal caller, someone scared because they had caught some kind of venereal disease (VD) and having no idea what to do, someone arrested by the police for some kind of illegal public sexual liaison and a young gay person just about to come out and tell his or her first person, that they were lesbian or gay. All very different callers and all had to be handled carefully, delicately and honestly. It is to Switchboard’s eternal credit that day after day, night after night over the decades such calls were (and still are to this day..) handled very well indeed by an unpaid rota of around fifty to sixty people. It is also no great surprise that in 1983, Gay News was moved to call London Gay Switchboard ‘the best thing the movement ever made’.  So on the 12th May 1981 I was pleased to pass these hurdles and be accepted on Switchboard, where a training programme then prepped you for those different calls you might be receiving on each shift.

On the 18th May I duly reported at Switchboards office on Caledonian Rd  where Les, my assigned trainer was waiting to guide me through my first shift. from 2-6.30 in the afternoon, which at that stage was just listening to how incoming calls were handled. The following Monday 25th I was there by 9.30am ready for a morning shift and on the 27th another afternoon shift. By June 1st I was ready to do my first unaccompanied afternoon shift along with the another volunteer (there were always two people on shift in the daytimes then) and from then on there was no stopping me! 

Switchboard’s phone room then was quite tiny and in retrospect, pretty dingy – it’s remarkable how we managed day after day to offer advice to people from all over the UK (and in fact the world) about any number of things affecting lesbian and gay life, in what now seems a far off period.  The vast majority of calls were ‘ents’ (entertainments) related and various red binded files were updated very regularly by those in the ‘info’ (Information) group and the stirling work, in particular, of the marvellous and now sadly departed David Seligman. A few years into my time there and we also had the innovation of an actual  ‘white board‘ where David would use his coloured marker pens to add the newest clubs & bars to open on the fledgling scene, to keep us up to date with the trends. Often, they would last a few weeks only and we would then see the name crossed out again and the ubiquitous & rather bleak ‘dead‘ written by the name. If they lasted longer they’de make it into the red files, to continue to be regularly given out by switchboarders.

On being accepted as a volunteer, everyone had to join a support group as well and I went for the Admin group first I think and then made it to FR group (Fundraising) when I felt a bit more confident having learnt the ropes and tied the knots. I’m pretty sure I was on Training group too for a while doing those interviews and reporting back with a recommendation about those in the hot seat. The aim of FR group though was to raise enough money each year to keep Switchboard going;  it was run pretty efficiently but bills for things such as the phones and premises had to be paid.  Gay pubs and clubs would keep donation boxes on their counters for Switchboard but it was the benefits they did and those special events that FR group organised that really brought in the cash. 

These developed over the years into some pretty grand scale events and included many mainstream names as performers. In particular I recall being involved in two large events, as mentioned previously, the ‘Pretty Policemens’ Balls’ in 1984 and 1985 held at the Piccadilly Theatre in central London. Amnesty International had originally arranged a fundraising event called the Secret Policemans Ball  in 1976 and then staged three more subsequently until 1981 (including members of the infamous Monty Python team) but Switchboard hit upon the idea of a ‘pretty policemens’ version, this being that euphemistic name then given to policemen whose job was to entrap men in public toilets (cottages) by offering sexual favours. The first event featured some of the best LGBT talent of that period, including the musicians Bronski Beat and Tom Robinson, actors Miriam Margolyes and Simon Callow and stand-up comedians Bernard Padden and Simon Fanshawe. The events were managed by two stalwarts of Switchboard at the time, the much missed Mike Rhodes and Barry Jackson. The first one raised £10,000 for the switchboard coffers in 1984. 

At one stage there was concern voiced though, that the prices for tickets at these events, for many, were too high for some of those that nevertheless still wanted to support switchboard. Initially in 1984, there was a ‘Poor Punters Party’ at a marvellous old building called the Diorama in Regents Park, which I attended and I then volunteered with others to arrange another all night ‘Poor Punters Party 2’ at the much missed original Scala in Kings Cross (today a more sanitised version exists), before the ´Pride 85´ March in central London on the 29th June 1985.

The theme was ‘The House of Cards´ with a pack of 41 players hung all around the walls of the Scala, with four suites: The Suite of Gay men (pink triangles). the Suite of Lesbians (black triangles) our friends (Hearts) and our enemies (boo, hiss: Clubs) plus a joker. The vibrant programme, printed in black and pink, promised a party from 1115 till dawn and inside the line up told us that ‘the Sleaze Sisters (Trill and Pom, whom Id first met whilst working on Framed Youth) would start the music rolling, with Movements DJ’s Berni & Martyn taking over and lasting (hopefully!) until about 5am’.  In the cinema and on the stage would be ‘Ransome & Oppenheimer at midnight, Parker and Klein presenting material from their current show at the Oval House at 1240, Gus Cairns with his new band ‘Skin to Skin’ (weren’t switchboarders a talented bunch?) at 1.40, Derek Jarman shorts (that’s short films..) at 2.40, an early (1967) edition of the Avengers, with Patrick Mc Neil as Steed and the iconic Diana Rigg as Mrs Peel at 3.00 (on 35mm film, entitled ‘the Joker’) and That’s Entertainment at 4.10′. I thank the Switchboard organising team inside:, Mark Sreeves, Eamonn Andrews and Jim Mc Nicholas, as well as a host of others.

I think that’s what was the best thing above all about the Switchboard Benefits, the fact so many people gave up their time and energy to create a ‘special’ event, which was ultimately benefiting others in the lesbian & gay community.

The event, even the day after, remains a bit of a blur and I’d imagine (knowing how these things are..) that I was chasing round most of the time trying to sort out minor catastrophes but I do recall walking into the cinema at about 3am and seeing it was quite packed and then hearing a huge, huge cheer break out right across the whole cinema, as the iconic music theme to the ‘Avengers’ struck up, in enhanced, loud stereo (those of you old enough will understand what I mean..). In fact I can still recall that moment and hear it, quite vividly, in my mind.

It was, all in all, a good night, however, I am, to this day, somewhat embarrassed by the fact that we misjudged most punters desire to come out, before rising for the Pride March the following day and the numbers attending, though reasonable, meant we actually lost money on the event. To their eternal credit I can’t recall anyone on FR group chastising us for it but making the best of it, by saying people had said they thoroughly enjoyed it.  The all nighters, an eclectic mix of club music dance and film, which the Scala hosted between 1984-87 were usually legendary but that’s another story. 

Eventually, it was decided that Switchboard was so grubby and so over-used it needed a regular cleaner (and trust me, it really did..) and it was decided that some money should be offered for having the place scrubbed down every week.

I was still a broke student and took on the job, for three hours each week. The windows in particular which got cleaned outside and inside by me every fortnight were often black with dust, grime and particulates. It wasn’t the healthiest place to live or work then. The Channel 4 ‘Russell T Davies drama series ‘It’s a sin’ mocked up the switchboard phone room in one episode and despite a good effort my initial reaction on seeing it. was that it was far too ‘new’ and -more especially- far too clean! 

At about the same time, I was also doing my film degree and as a part of it made a video documentary about doing a nightshift on Switchboard, (ingeniously called ‘Nightshift‘) in which we mocked up a range of typical calls that might be received by someone on an ‘all night’ shift there, between 10pm and 8am. It was often a long gruelling night, especially at weekends, not surprisingly the entirely voluntary shift was often hard to fill and there are a number of people out there today (and sadly too many no longer with us ) who still have my unreserved thanks for filling in those big rota gaps, when I was the Switchboard rota coordinator for a year or so.

‘Nightshift ‘showed us a guy who had been arrested outside The Bell; a young guy, played by the much missed Toby Kettle, ringing from his parents house at 2am in the morning, who was coming out for the first time and a lesbian looking for somewhere decent to go on a Saturday night, in a London town that still predominantly catered for gay men. Debbie Klein (at the time one half of that comedy duo Parker & Klein I mentioned) doing a weekend only 11-2am shift) & the late, also much missed, James Neale Kennerley were the two ‘real life’ switchboarders, hamming it up for posterity on the shift. (I realise re-reading this I have been writing much missed a lot. It is true though, I really loved those guys, the camaradery we all had was incredible. I allow myself a few tears to fall, silly old fool that I am, as I type this).

Often the key referral for coming out calls even then, in the mid eighties, was to one of those hundred or so CHE local groups that I mentioned earlier, based in regional cities & towns around England & Wales. There were sometimes local youth groups or sections affiliated to these larger groups by then but in the main there weren’t. By then the groups had usually mainly devolved away from their original political roots and affiliations and had renamed themselves as gay societies– a place that people in smaller locations, away from the largest provincial centres had a place to go and meet other gay men, bisexuals & lesbians. Even then, the significance of these groups in this period for offering support and assistance to many isolated gay men in England & Wales, cannot be understated. The acronym ..AGS (Area Gay Society) was usually prefixed by the local group town’s name such as KRAGS (Kingston & Richmond area gay society) RAGS, (Redhill Area Gay Society) and the still functioning, rather memorable GAGS (Guildford Area Gay Society). These all formed part of a rich network of constantly evolving groups that Switchboard had, to connect people with a potential local support network.  

The fact is however, that real night shifts were sometimes even more harrowing than the fictional one we portrayed in Nightshift, as the many dozens of switchboard volunteers notes attested to in the switchboard ‘logs’ that were kept from its inception onwards. These were invaluable logbooks that volunteers would use to keep a note of any ongoing issues relating to events, particular calls that had taken place where information had been given or shared, that were felt to be of use more widely or in case the caller rang back again with further developments or news. Their importance then (and indeed, as a historical archive now) was recognised recently by the creation of a series of podcasts called simply ‘The Log Books’ which used  this large archive to tell some of the stories they contained (maintaining confidentiality of course); the producers of the podcast read through hundreds of pages of notes and interviewed dozens of people to collect their memories  and they are still available as an online download, should you care to listen to them. 

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Switchboard: The log books: https://www.thelogbooks.org/about

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Before starting a shift, we were strongly encouraged to read the latest entries in the logbook to familiarise ourselves with any legal, social or commercial developments that might have taken place or related ongoing calls , for which we might receive follow ups.  Some callers became quite regular over a period, updating us with life events as they progressed, often asking for advice about decisions that needed to be made  or professional organisations & people that could be turned too. A particularly infamous regular caller to Switchboard in the early eighties was known simply as ‘ Bob from Bicester‘ but there were many over the decades.

Although switchboarders were encouraged not to become too close to callers, maintaining a professional emotional distance, we were allowed to give out a first name- such as David W- and let them know when we would be on again, so the caller would know that the person they spoke to already had some understanding of their situation. The need to keep clearly defined  boundaries with callers was often a difficult and highly nuanced one, no more especially so, than during these night shifts, which often allowed for a longer call than during the day time, and which we would note down on the log sheet as a ‘chat’ call. These often become more personal over time, as you offered a little more of yourself to the caller, that is, as ideas were shared, and your own experiences about dealing with aspects of gay life- in a still relatively hostile world- were imparted. These naturally created some element of bonding with a caller, especially I think for the younger callers.

There were clear codes of conduct about how far to take this and sometimes switchboarders would decide it would be in the callers best interests if they asked another person to take over a series of calls, if they felt there was a likelihood that boundaries were starting to be being blurred. There were also calls  where the resonance of the callers situation was such for volunteers, that it become emotionally difficult to continue a call and in those instances too another volunteer might take over a call or series of calls.

As we were putting up some tinsel and decorations in the phoneroom just before Christmas in 1982, on the 12th December, ‘AIDS’ came a step closer to us all however, as a 49 year old gay man, who was a frequent traveller to the United States died in London’s Brompton Hospital due to an Aids related illness. In response London Gay Switchboard and the Gay Medical Association held a public meeting about AIDS at Conway Hall, London to address the issues and concerns about this new disease that were now becoming widespread. Terry Higgins also became another person here in the UK known to die of an Aids-related illness. His partner, Rupert Whitaker, and close friends Martyn Butler and Tony Calvert formed the Terry Higgins Trust (later renamed the Terrence Higgins Trust) in his memory, after a further public meeting at the London Apprentice pub in the East End.

In this very traumatic early period of HIV & AIDS, when callers were often highly distraught and upset, it was sometimes difficult to maintain calm and composed yourself when the callers fears played to some extent on your own concerns and worries, as we knew so little about the virus and how it affected people, but we did the best we could in the circumstances. These ‘AIDS’ related calls were to continue increasing through 1983 and 1984. By the end of 1984, there had been one hundred and eight ‘AIDS’ cases and forty six deaths in the UK; this felt like a lot to us all then but in fact this was just the beginning of the ‘storm’.

Switchboard continued though, as ever, answering all sorts of calls from people, and indeed many were very positive with switchboarders assisting in helping people to ‘come out’. Of course there was a complete ban on meeting callers personally and in the very few instances where this was found to have happened, switchboarders would be asked to leave the organisation. As with all voluntary organisations though, it was sometimes difficult to know in which direction to take a caller in order for them not to get ‘involved’. I personally never forgot that we often had a great deal of power in such situations and that a huge degree of trust was being placed in the switchboarder by the caller, even in making and continuing a call. We all knew it was absolutely vital to Switchboard’s success as a credible organisation, that we had to remain ‘squeaky clean’, a completely reputable organisation. To its credit, its existence to this day I think, says something about the success of that endeavour.         

Nevertheless, many  of us loved ‘Switchboard’ as an entity though; it was another, more or less, labour of love- perhaps because it was so clear that there was a real need for it, as services of its kind were simply not being offered, at the time, in the statutory sectors.

So nightshifts were often times of greater emotion, heightened by the dark, the type of calls taken at those times and the likelihood of specific issues being raised and the fact that they could be very tiring, as they were long and continuous, there was no break. A lot of caffeine (from some frankly pretty awful coffee!) often got many of us through the night. I still recall being on Switchboard over a Saturday nightshift weekend on the 20th August 1989, which I can date now by looking at the history books. I had a call at about five am from an emotionally upset caller, who told me that a cruise boat on the Thames in the centre of the city had been ‘rammed’ by another boat a few hours before, then had taken on water quickly and had sunk mid river. The caller said that several friends he knew had been on the boat and he hadn’t heard from any of them and was very worried, did I know anymore? If I recall rightly he said that he was meant to have been going with them but for several reasons couldn’t make it. I didn’t know anymore about it at the time but duly noted the call in the log book, asking for more details, if anyone else rang in with more information. I didn’t need to wait long, as the event was the sinking of the ‘Marchioness’ pleasure boat, by the much larger dredger, the Bowbelle, and it turned out that quite a number of gay men had been on it, for a friends private 26th birthday party: that of Antonio de Vasconcellos.

The Marchioness had been hired for the evening and had about 130 people on board, four of whom were crew and bar staff. Both vessels were heading downstream, against the tide, the Bowbelle travelling faster than the smaller vessel. Although the exact paths taken by the ships, and the precise series of events and their locations, were never fully clarified, the subsequent inquiry considered it likely that Bowbelle struck the Marchioness at about 1.30am from the rear, causing the latter to turn to port, where she was hit again, then pushed along, turning over and being pushed under Bowbelle‘s bow.

It took just thirty seconds for Marchioness to sink; twenty four bodies were found within the ship, when it was raised from the Thames, and fifty one people in all died in the disaster, all on the pleasure boat.  The collision and the subsequent reports led to increased safety measures on the Thames, and four new lifeboat stations were installed on the river. 

The tragedy caused the greatest loss of life on the River Thames since the sinking of the Princess Alice, near current day Thamesmead, in 1878. The hearings and appeals dragged on for a decade after the event. Civil claims for compensation were brought, on behalf of the victims’ families; the amounts received ranged from between £3,000 and £190,000. Eileen Dallaglio, the mother of Francesca Dallaglio, one of the victims, reported that she had been awarded £45,000. After the costs of having to go to the Court of Appeal to obtain damages, and the bills for the memorial and funeral service, she was left with £312.14.

For me, it was both a shock and a reminder though, that the night shift was often the time when a lot was happening in the lives of the gay men and lesbians we spoke too, London then having a busy all night scene: contacts were being made, lives were being shaped and there were many who needed to talk to someone at the end of them, about the experiences, both good and bad that they had been through. 

Queen Elizabeth II acknowledged the fortieth anniversary of the organisation’s founding, in 2014, marking the first time she has had any involvement, voiced support or recognised an LGBT charity during her reign (You would think she might have been a little more grateful for much of her staff’s years of service wouldn’t you?), and the first time the Crown has ever publicly supported the LGBT community. Now rebranded as LGBT+ Switchboard it continues to be there for people that need to talk day in day out, and celebrates its fiftieth birthday in March 2024. As Gay News said, all those years ago, it is surely ‘one of the best things the movement ever made’.

On to Sex, love and life (The Rituals) 2.18 1982: A Brief Encounter with The Pied Bull

Back to Sex, love and life: An index

I had a dream last night, one of those dreams that you wake up a little shocked that a dream can be so real, leave you feeling a little weak, dizzy even.

In this dream I was at my parents old house in Cornwall, probably around my own age (why is it so hard to determine your age in dreams?) and behaving badly. I was in a dramatically bad mood and they couldn’t work out why. I couldnt even tell them. And so they had decided that  they would have to do something drastic if I didn’t relent with those bad vibes very soon. I slept on it and woke the next day to see all the things thay had put in place to try and change me, or block me or both..both literal obstacles and mental attitudes.

I was mortified at being unable to tell them I was upset because I had been blown out by a man I felt very strongly about it, had had an intense crush on, but that I knew could go no further. I saw my mother looking cross, angry even that I was being so odd without any reason. Sometimes I wish we hadn´t had you she said. (she did actually say this to me once in the middle of a blazing row with my father, that happened quite a lot when I was in my mid teens and sadly, I never forgot it, forgave it but never forgot). I held her and started to cry. ´I miss you´´ I said. You are all I’ve got. I explained to her as best I could why I was so upset for truth to tell I could not really understand it either). She relented and said It´s ok, I understand now. It´ll all be ok soon. My eyes fill up with hot, salty tears.

And then I woke up. My eyes full of hot salty tears.

I remembered the evening before. I still felt sore. Mentally not physically, and it was just a dull ache and not raw. I had become upset when Juan moved away from me in the pub. He had just sat opposite me rather than next to me. But I felt really let down. Let down more by myself because I´d thought that I had grown up enough to be mature about the crushes I had on other men. All those ones that had never been reciprocated. They mainly weren´t. Even when I was a kid growing up. On Huw, on the rugby team captain nicknamed Bucket (so called as he was always needing one), on Andy Moore, the really big one,that drove me nearly insane. But I realised I hadn’t, that this crush had caught me unawares. Having not had one for years it was off my radar. To my surprise. I was angry with myself for feeling it ..and yet laughing as well at the absolute absurdity of it all.

Because, until it´s verbalised you always think, imagine, assume that the other person has some kind of reciprocated feelings too. Never mind if they are younger, handsome and witty. They laugh with you, they send messages of admiration, they sign off with kisses. Yet it doesnt proceed beyond that and you think maybe that they want more but don´t want to say it. That they are also secretly infatuated, surprised too at their own desire. So you go along with it, looking for any sign of desire. Expecting and getting a written kiss in the next text message. One step forward. Not coming to a meeting you had planned, one step backwards. Being there in the pub by themself when they had arranged to be there. Suddenly innocent actions all look more promising.

But then Juan had, suddenly, sat opposite. That distance suddenly spoke volumes. It wasnt just a metre away, no, it was a mile, a country, a lifetime away. And so I fell, came crashing down and back to earth. Back to reality. And then there comes a point when you have to just say it, to voice it, just to carry on. You have to move forwards and the only way is to smother it, by departing that stage forever or simply confront it. And so you confront it, knowing in your heart of hearts that your hopes, feelings, happiness are about to be steamrollered. But first you hint at it.

´Sorry I´ve been behaving oddly, it´s just difficult´

´Difficult, why, what´s up´ (tender look.. hope again).

´´I´ve fallen for you and it´s hard.. ´´

´Fallen´? (Blank look, you´re in full engage mode now, running up that hill..)

´You know a crush. I really, really, like you´. (You hold your breathe, oh shit, no going back now. You´re at the top of the hill and about to start freefalling back down).

´´Oh´´! (Nothing look.. nonplussed, fuck, how do I get out of this look. I´ve got my own problems god, I dont need another. Oh look, everyone else is still chatting away but looking out of the corner of their eyes. What´s going on there then?)

´´Oh , I see, oh. No, sorry. I´m sorry. Uh.. No´´ (apologetic look). 

´´No, I didn´t mean that by the kisses, everyone gets them, no I didn’t mean that by the messages. I really think your a good person but no, not like that¨ (And I secretly hate him saying the word that´)  .

And you talk. And you breathe. You hope the parachute has kicked in, and in truth, it usually has. There´s the ground, coming up fast… and it´s over. Wasn´t so painful was it. Now you know. Now you can move on, pick up the pieces, salvaging what you can and dusting yourself off as best you are able in the circumstances. A public scene. Oh fuck. But who cares?

´It´s ok, I´ll be over it, it´s fine, all my fault. I was just being really silly.. ´

But underneath the fine words, you can´t believe you let yourself do it again. You thought that kind of thing had finished years, decades ago. But here you are again, feeling like a little kid. And you think, gosh, if I can feel this way now, others must too. Even at sixty plus we can believe, behave like a little kid again. How is that possible even? And I remember others who said the same to me. (There were some, yes!) And how hard it is to really appreciate what they are saying to you when you are thinking no, no way, I´ve not go those kind of feelings towards you. Why ever did you think I might have. And I´m thinking as I write this of all the songs and words written by songwriters about unrequited love, lost love, broken love, tainted love. And suddenly how every song is there to taunt you, there to upset you. There to remind you. And yet, and yet, here I am, still standing.  

Don’t you know I’m still standing better than I ever did?
 Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid
 I’m still standing after all this time
 Picking up the pieces of my life, without you on my mind

I’m still standing, yeah, yeah, yeah
 I’m still standing, yeah, yeah, yeah

And collectively, after a confrontation is over, we all breathe again and move on. Humbled in the knowledge that we can be floored so easily, that our feelings for each other are so important to our well being, our stability, our balance. And retrospectively we wish we had talked, wish we had been a little more articulate, wish we could have explained, wish we could have understood better, wish we had been a little more caring, a little more tender, a little more responsive in the past. Wish we could have explained to our parents how that unrequited crush was hurting us, it seemed at the time to our very soul. Wish we could have said what we truly, honestly felt. Wish that the consequences of reaching and going over that cliff edge hadn´t been too awful to contemplate.

Wish that we hadn’t had to bottle so much up that it drove us nearly crazy. So that we were still having dreams about it, almost half a century on.  And we realise we are, after all only, each and everyone of us, human. And there is so much visceral hatred in the world. We need Juan´s in this world though. A little more tenderness, a little more understanding, a little more analysis of each other could go a long, long way.

World, my wish is that you please do a little more listening in 2024.

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But I am rushing forwards. Tumbling over myself, in the effort to recollect what happened, at what time and to whom.

Fortuitously, I have kept my diaries from those days. Diaries then were important things to have, with nothing remotely digital around to store one’s life on. If there had been I probably wouldn’t be able to access it now anyway (always a slightly sobering thought). My very first ‘alternative diary’ was bought from Amsterdam in 1979 and was a 1980 Flikkeragenda. It was beautifully put together, a work of art as much as anything, by a collective signing themselves as ‘Lieverds’ and consisting of Will, John, Ger, Hans and Kees Karel.

Dit is-t-ie dan,it began.’ De eerste agenda voor nederlandse flikkers en belgiese janetten. Inspiriert von unseren deutschen Schwestern  zijz we al in Jamnuari 1979 begonnen met lachen , geile praat , typen, lijntrekken, schrijven plazzen ruzie maken, telefoneren uitgaan vrijen fotografferen en heerlijk eten!’

Which roughly translated means: This is it then, the first agenda for Dutch fags and Belgian janets (gay slang for homosexual men in Belgium). Inspired by ‘unseren deutschen Schwestern’ we started in January 1979 by laughing, talking hornily, typing, drawing lines, writing, arguing, making phone calls, going out, having sex, taking pictures and eating delicious food!

In other words, they had kept themselves busy. Inside there was poetry, photographs, history, short stories, information about gay issues and cartoons. I had never seen anything like it before and although it was all in Dutch and I could hardly understand a word, it went with me everywhere for a year (and was quite a talking point in fact when people saw me using it..).  There was even a report from London’s 1979 Gay Pride week in it, with a picture of the ‘Dutch Gay support’ banner being carried proudly aloft in the march, which was the first one in fact, that I had been on, too). The entries I made in it that year are very much of their time. In May I had carried it all round Europe with me, whilst camping (yes..I know) and inter-railing for 3 months or so with Gary.

We had started by crossing the North Sea from Harwich to the Hook of Holland and thence up to Amsterdam (which we knew a little of already, from having been there before for a week with two female friends from Ealing, Kryssie and Pauline in the previous year).

We also revisited the Melkveg (Milky Way) club again after having seen some great bands there the year before (it is remarkably still going strong after 50 years, today) but my diary records that May 23rd 1980 found Gary and I at the COC Disco in Amsterdam, where evidently ‘we met Roland‘ and smoked ‘a lot; I supported Gary going home to the tent for the first half, he supported me for the second half’. We also went a number of times to the Viking Club, the first club with a darkroom I had ever been too. This was basically just a very large house over four floors and the darkroom was in the loft. It had been converted by owner Reint Koning in 1977 into a club and it had a different vibe on each floor. It felt quite ´home made´in slightly kitsch way. It was, frankly, an amazing place to be off your head in but equally it was quite fun stone cold sober too. I´m not sure I´ve ever been to a place quite like it before or since. It was one of the reasons Amsterdam felt so special at that time.

The next day after our Melkveg night (and for some time afterwards) the weather was foul: cold and windy, no fun in a tiny pup tent, so we waited or day or two then decided to head south for the sun. We arrived in early June at a campsite in Monfalcone near Trieste; finally, I wrote on the 4th June, ‘finally it is hot. At last‘!

By the 5th though, it had started to rain yet again (it was a poor summer generally across Europe) and now with thunderstorms too. On the 7th I noted ‘it rained all day, 2″ fell (50mm)- quaggy outside with the tent now leaking slightly’. It carried on raining on the 8th and 9th, finally clearing and giving the first glimpse of the sun for 60 hours. ‘Everything is steaming, including us‘ I wrote, after 90mm of rain. We upped and repitched the tent closer to more solid ground. Then we overdosed on the sun. By the 14th Gary was a sort of chocolate brown and I was more of a golden colour.

One balmy evening which still sticks in my mind, forty years later, we played Bowies ‘Heroes’ (thanks goodness that I had brought my Philips cassette tape recorder with me, in an already overstuffed rucksack: it was quite bulky and heavy but absolutely essential to two very musical lads) and watched a storm to the south over the Adriatic flickering and pulsing with bright lightning. I wasn’t used then to continental thunderstorms and it seemed a marvelously atmospheric thing to be doing, whilst listening to the second side of Heroes. One of those ‘perfect life moments’ that I was to write about in diaries decades later, when trying to piece together what had been important in my life up until then, and that I can still clearly recall, many decades on. 

By the 26th June we were in Firenze and holed up; we looked for the gay places to go mentioned in our 1980 Spartacus Gay guide (another weighty tome we were carting around) but I noted that most seemed to have closed down, ‘the authorities must have had a purge’. It was no great surprise in those days when this happened, it was relatively commonplace. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a further flood later and the diary entries of the rest of our time away are now an illegible pink mess. I do know though, that later in Florence, we got talking to a very serious ‘goth’ looking man, with very short cropped hair, dressed in black army pants and boots, who was always studiously reading Dostoevsky in the cafe there. Gary was convinced he was gay, whilst I wasn’t so sure. We just couldn’t think why he didn’t seem more interested in us!

Eventually, after some days and much more agitated speculation had passed, Gary plucked up the courage to go and speak to him. It turned out he was English, from Kent, wasn’t gay- his girlfriend Lisa, was working in Florence at the time, but he was into much of the same things we were at the time (apart from sexually that is) and we hit it off immediately. He wasn’t in the slightest bit phased that we were together (it was often the case in those days, that you really couldn’t be certain, even in those with quite left leaning credentials, that they would be positive about homosexuality or maybe if with the concept not the reality -and we were both quite ‘full on’ I think) and even better, he had some very strong dope on him, (and a local supplier) that he was quite happy to share. We more or less talked every night, all night after that and slept by day, with long deeply meaningful conversations, musings and debates, mostly fuelled by strong black leb. It was a key moment for us, as he was to remain a lifelong friend to us both, despite our separate paths, in time, as was his girlfriend, whom we eventually met and also became close to.

I also know, that it was quite soon after that meeting that we heard from a friend in a letter picked up Post Restante in Firenze that the Joy Division front man Ian Curtis had committed suicide, aged just 23 -more or less our ages (retrospectively I see that it must have taken a long time for the news to get to us, as this actually occurred on May 18th). This was a huge shock at the time (right up there for me with the later shooting of Lennon and of Bowie’s death), as we had all been hugely appreciative fans of ‘Joy Division’ having seen them live several times and been blown away by Ian Curtis’s stage presence and completely captivated by songs such as ‘Transmission’ and ‘She’s lost control’.

It is hard now to appreciate the huge impact this death had on certain sections of youth like us, then. As Pippa Bailey mentioned in an article in the New Statesman recently ‘the story of Joy Division (and later New Order) is repeated so often it feels more like myth than reality’. The two albums they produced (‘Unknown Pleasures’ and ‘Closer’) are of course legendary, the latter released after Curtis death. A podcast about the band produced in 2020 (Transmissions: The definitive story), has little of Curtis’s personal life (his epilepsy, the drug cocktail he took to try and control it and his troubled marriage) but, she writes, ‘you can still hear his friends forty years on trying to make sense of his death’. His fame, when alive, was all over in a year, (Unknown Pleasures was released on the 15th June 1979), although of course for other band members, Bernard Sumner et al, it was just the beginning. Retrospectively, I think it was hard for us, as this was the first person we felt we had ‘known’ in some way that had died; the first suggestion that life could so easily be snuffed out, that we were not in fact invulnerable youths but that, as those war poets had found decades earlier, life comes and goes, waxes and wanes. ‘Out, out brief candle’, we reflected, musing to ourselves.  

Whilst it was very sad, I think there was also an elemental understanding that his legacy would very likely live on, as indeed it has, as he joined the elite, select list of musicians that have died young. We went on to Roma after Firenze, leaving Richard & Lisa behind there, with plans to keep in touch, and for a time were happy enough, as we met a gay group of french men staying on a campsite there and got in with them (their English was pretty good I recall). Eventually though, we recognised that whilst the journey was interesting there was too much happening back in England at the time, that we were missing out on. It was time to go back home, and around the date of my 23rd birthday on July 25th, we crossed the Channel again by ferry, into Dover, ready to carry on with life in England.        

Now home and armed with a waterproof pen, my diary becomes legible again and I can see we soon met up in London with Richard, who had also come back to London and was working as a nurse in Hampstead and ended up eventually living in digs in Fitzjohns Avenue, NW3. We also met up again with a friend of Gary’s, the big, good humoured Welsh gay lad called Bob, who was living in that communal short life house in Fordwych Rd, Kilburn with a few others. As I’ve already mentioned in that period (at least in London but some other large cities too) local authorities would often allow housing stock that was relatively decrepit to be used by licensed groups, the idea being that taught self help would allow them to be patched up temporarily, whilst the council found the time and money to renovate them properly.

The rent therefore was often of a peppercorn amount, somewhere between £4-10 as week, so if you didn’t mind the accommodation being somewhat basic, you could live very cheaply.  Also, as far as the councils were concerned, if you had officially licensed people to live in them they couldn’t be squatted, which was happening a lot in the decade before this time and councils were finding it increasingly difficult to evict people.

We saw a lot of this group at Fordwych Rd in the next few months. On August 25th I write that ‘Gary, Bob, Piers, Alison, Richard, Angel and her sister’ and an unnamed ‘girl in a fur coat’ all went to Notting Hill Carnival: lots of police but no trouble in sight’. I appended ‘Comment by a policewomen: Lots of poufs in London ain’t there‘. This wasn’t that remarkable in those days though, and I suspect the only reason I noted it, was that it came from a woman. 

Bob had told us that there was going to be a spare room going at Fordwych Rd if we wanted it. So we upped sticks from Gary’s Mum’s house in West Ealing and moved into the communal house in Kilburn. It was within walking distance of Richard’s in Belsize Park too, which was useful.

Every month was crammed full of things happening then: parties to go to, gigs to attend, shifts to do, people to be met: dalliances, alliances, and some suppliances. We fitted a lot in, in those days – lots of live music gigs especially. As an example, looking at one month in my ‘flikkeragenda‘ now, I see we went to the Associates gig at the Hope and Anchor on Sept 24th (‘excellent gig, especially the encore Bounce Back’). They had just released their stunning debut album ‘The Affectionate Punch‘ which was on repeat play in Gary’s bedroom at the time. However, that gig at the Hope & Anchor was the start of a change in our relationship, as I met a rockabilly guy called Chris there (he kept dancing into me at the gig) whom I thought was god’s gift to man at the time and by the 1st October I was meeting him at the Ship pub in Wardour St for a drink and ending up ‘getting quite pissed’. He was living in a pretty poky rented flat above a shop in Agar Grove in Camden at the time, when the area was very run down. Not that I cared too much about the flat. It didn’t really go very far sexually, as he was in a relationship already with a guy called Kieran, whom I also eventually met and kept in touch with them both for quite some years afterwards. Lovely couple. And I had started to see a guy in Balham called Paul, who was just as lovely and not involved with someone else, (as far as I knew). 

By the 5th Oct, Gary, Bob and I were all round at Richards small flat (a room really) for the night. ‘Stoned and pissed’ it says. Par for the course then. Friday 10th saw Gary, Alison and I shlep down to Brighton for the day to picket the 1980 Tory Party Conference, where Mrs Thatcher was giving her maiden speech. Unemployment had risen to 2 million as a direct result of Thatcher’s policies and we felt it was our duty to protest. ‘Pouring rain but great fun’ I wrote, ‘though I kept losing Gary and Alison’. There was great pressure on Thatcher at the time to change her policies and much talk in the media of a possible ‘U turn’ as Edward Health’s government had been forced to do in similar circumstances. However this was not to happen.

Inside the dry, warm conference hall to all the Tory grandees, there she announced: 

“To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning”.

This became one of her most famous phrases, from the very many speeches she made in her long premiership. It made headline news the next day and we were all suitably frustrated and angry seeing them. The following year in fact, despite concerns expressed in a letter by 364 leading economists, her Chancellor Geoffrey Howe was to go on to actually increase taxes, in the middle of a recession  

That was all still to come. On the conference day itself, I was dried out and back in London by 7.30 in time to meet Paul for a drink at the Salisbury in central London. I was helping out as a volunteer at ‘Gays the Word‘ bookshop at the time and did a shift there on October 17th, from 2-7pm, then went straight up to the Hemmy (Hemingford Arms in Islington) disco from 7-11, on the door evidently (this must have been a Gays the Word benefit, as I wasn’t normally doing the door there then). 

My diary notes some altercation with Kieran and Chris that had to be sorted out (not about me, it related to skinhead friends I think) but I was there at Agar Grove ..all night.. until 2pm the next day and that evening was up at the Black Cap in Camden (always just known as the Cap by regulars) with Bob and his friend Boog, who was visiting from Scotland, who was always charming and great fun. The next day I was over at the studio of another friend of his, Eugene, who was a photographer in Pimlico, where he was taking some artistic shots of me and others, wearing animal masks. I have no idea why. I was wearing a dog mask and still have those shots: actually they were pretty good! In the evening I was over at both the Boltons and of course the Coleherne in Earls Court, well known gay pubs by then. No problems entering them now after my first visit in what seemed a lifetime ago.

We were out ‘posing in the Kings Rd‘ on Monday 20th before I ‘saw P and S again later‘ (I have no idea); then doing another Gays the Word shift on the 21st and seeing ‘Sugar and Spice’ at the RC (Royal Court I assume) in the evening.

A friend of ours from Holland, Dirk, was arriving on the 22nd and we had planned to see the Associates at Dingwalls on the 23rd with him. In the event it was cancelled, so we went to see the ‘Women in Art’ exhibition, at the then still exceedingly hip ICA gallery in the Mall instead. Another shift at Gays the Word on the 24th was followed by a trip to see the band Tuxedo Moon at the Moonlight pub in West Hampstead (‘very good live show’) and on Sunday a visit to Liverpool St followed, where the ‘Flip‘ warehouse provided an incredible array of cheap second hand Americana threads for some time, that I practically never stepped out of for a couple of years (different things, not just one outfit!). I was rocking a kind of ´Haircut One Hundred´rockabilly look then. I think rockabilly Chris had got me really hooked into it. ‘Flip’ had branches in Covent Garden and the King’s Road, but the Shoreditch warehouse was the place to go for bargains, with lots of original 50’s and 60’s clothing. As others have since noted, walking up to Curtain Road from Liverpool Street back in the early 80’s really did feel like you were entering ‘uncharted waters’.

Sunday 26th saw me at ‘the P.A.S rally in Hyde Park’, (again I’m not sure now what the initials are shorthand for), then going on to meet a ‘Robert, at the Ship in Wardour St at 8pm’ and seeing the Associates again with him at the Marquee. ‘Good as always’ I note, especially ‘No, Livingstone’ (which it now seems was either never released or renamed). A whole day was spent, probably fairly hazily, at Richard’s flat on the 27th with doubtless a quick trip to Mac Donald’s on the Finchley Rd to stave off hunger pangs and there were further shifts at Gays the Word on the 28th and 31st whilst the 30th saw me back at Eugene’s for more arty photography, nude this time I think. The month ended with a ‘Halloween Party at our place in Fordwych Rd, ‘from 10-oblivion’ my diary simply states. ‘Yeh!’ is scribbled in the diary after this. And so ended a typical month at Fordwych Rd. It was fuelled by the energy of youth, the creativity of the people I was mixing with, the cultural milieu that was London then and the fact that we made a little go a very long way. That the rent on the house was just £5 a week each, helped considerably.      

There really was a lot going on in those days, for us all. We lived vicariously day to day and packed a lot in. A week later I was watching one of the greatest gigs of my life, ‘U2’ at the Moonlight in West Hampstead. I´ve even found the gig listing for this online, it cost 1.50 and they were supported by Midnight and the Lemon Boys. They normally opened with ´The Ocean´ and ended with ´I will follow´. ‘An excellent set’, I’ve written, ‘especially the last encore, Father was an Orphan’. It seems they only ended with this three times on the tour. The band had just released their first album ‘Boy’ on the 20th October, two weeks before the set they played there and it was already creating quite a stir. This gig really stays with me still; yes, the details have faded but the overall impression of a band with so much energy, so many inventive ideas, stays. I watched it from the front row, about three feet away from Bono, determined to be right up there ‘in the action’, since the previous one at the Marquee I had been much further back in the crowd. I knew that once the group came on stage it would be impossible not to pogo dance all the way through the set, as by this time there were a band of U2 groupies who simply went apeshit from the start to the final encore and to survive you had to more or less submit to the will of the crowd as one living entity. The music, the sound, the raw energy was such that it sucked you in, whilst it thrilled you to your core.

Those whom have had similar relationships with up and coming bands, seen them performing live in a small setting will understand what I mean, There’s a rush of pure adrenaline that comes from the band, often the lead singer, that hits you in the gut: a wave of sound that carries you to a place that’s not entirely rooted in this world, a euphoric combination, where you became at one with the band, the band became at one with the audience, feeding from the energy, one giant feedback loop of love, for it is all similar to a love affair really, between the performer(s) and audience. At the Moonlight that night, there seemed to be a vulnerability to Bono, his voice at times pleading, asking us for reassurance, unsure of himself, especially of course in ‘Into the heart’ and ‘I will follow’. ‘How can man do this to fellow man’ he seemed to plead with us. Why do I have to grow up and understand all this.. and yet I must’. The cover of this first album ‘Boy’ was slightly controversial at the time, in the way that it had used the innocence of the very young boy, his large eyes, his vulnerability (indeed the cover was deemed too risque and changed for the album’s American release). And that one gig at the Moonlight stands out for me still, decades later, as something of a masterpiece.

Of course it can’t last: if the group is that good, generally they play to larger and larger audiences and it changes the dynamic of the group live into something that’s less intimate and personal. It’s no wonder that bands burn out. I can’t imagine what giving off that energy must feel like year in and out. I must have really loved U2 then, as by November 27th I was back at the Marquee to see them again, ‘another excellent gig by U2’ I wrote ‘but tinged by Bono’s ‘macho-ness”. This is an interesting comment, as I’ve put macho-ness in inverted commas. It is hard to recall exactly now but there was something about his performance on that night that jarred slightly, obviously; perhaps what I was seeing in Bono, was the realisation that he knew by this time that ‘Boy’ was going to be successful, as indeed it eventually was; critical reviews were good.. Paul Morley of the NME had called it “honest, direct and distinctive” while Betty Page of Sounds dubbed U2 the “young poets of the year”, though it only reached 52 in fact on the LP charts on its first release in the UK), and that he was going to be ‘big’. The world was his for the taking. And of course, it was. By March 1987, they would be iconically performing ‘Where the Streets Have No name’ the opening track from The Joshua Tree album, for a legendary rooftop video shoot in LA, next to the infamous Hotel Cecil. But, perhaps at the price that that special vulnerability had been lost? 

There were other bands who performed marvellously live in small venues at that time too. I’ve mentioned the Associates already, where Billy Mackenzie’s vulnerability was also on display at close hand and arguably never lost (though sadly he was very much lost from this world too early: another suicide). Jim Kerr of Simple Minds definitely ‘had it and lost it’, as they grew bigger. Some lesser known bands like the Au Pairs and Orange Juice and 23 Skidoo were very, very good live, in the small venues that I saw them in too.

For 1981, I switched to the english ‘Big Red Diary’. ‘1981 Utopias‘ it said on the front cover, ever hopeful. This publication from the Pluto Press was very different to the diary I’d had the year before with its ‘Flikker’ agenda. It perhaps shows in retrospect that I was becoming more politically orientated in my outlook, which was no great surprise really, given the company I’d been keeping. Britain under the Tories it starts on p3 and then goes into a long spiel about cutbacks, changes and future plans of the Tories then in power, led by Margaret ‘Maggie’ Thatcher. I appear to have also felt the change in tone keenly, as I’ve stuck various gay stickers over this page. There’s a particular vitriolic portrayal of Thatcher on p4 with a Medusa like cartoon of her, her famous bouffant made up of serpent tongued snakes. Strong stuff! Recently Gillian Anderson’s portrayal of her in The Crown was uncannily accurate, though doing something of a job reminding us that she was a women operating in a man’s world. Years later, my concerns about her would be re-amplified, as we attempted to run a credible, government funded safer sex campaign, for gay men, with her always watching from the touchlines. 

We had ended 1980, with one hell of a New Years Eve bash at Fordwch Rd, ( I think this was the one where Jimmy turned up and stayed over). I was back over at Richard’s telling him all about it though, by the afternoon of the 1st and then off to see the Passage play a gig at the ICA in the evening and out again on the 4th to see Josef K and Orange Juice at the ICA again  (‘interesting gig’). Later that month I was attending meetings at another housing co-op, this one especially for gay men & lesbians called ‘April’ and based in Hackney’s decrepit council stock. I felt it was time to breakaway to new pastures. By attending the meetings regularly you could get offered a housing space if it came up, and so I was attending them every two weeks.

By February 17th, I was going to Cabaret Futura at 13, Wardour Street in Soho, with Richard, his girlfriend Lisa and Gary, which was hosted by Richard Strange. This was an alternate incarnation of the so called ‘New Romantic’ movement (with Steve Strange) but Richard Strange’s version (absolutely no relation) was more political, aesthetic and slightly dystopian: very much of its time really. Strange has since described how

‘our clientele would enter through a small glass door, then go down a tacky mirrored staircase to a small lobby, all gilt and red flock wall paper, like a Louisiana whorehouse, where our enchanting door girl, Giussepina de Camillo, would meet and greet. She always arrived for work accompanied by her pet, an 11-foot-long python named Sainsbury, who would lay dreamily coiled at her feet, under the cash register, for the entire evening‘.

‘Once past the slumbering serpent, the guests would pass through a small archway and into the main performance room, dimly lit with a small, raised stage with steps leading up from the floor. Tables and chairs ranged halfway back, a pall of blue cigarette smoke over the bar, and the exquisite thrumming of gossip. It had always been my intention to style the physical space of the club on the German model immortalised, if not invented by, Auden and Isherwood.’

In her intriguing book ‘Cabaret’, (link with preview section) the writer Lisa Appignanesi wrote in 1984, ‘Of all the cabarets to spring up in Britain over recent years, it was Soho’s groundbreaking Cabaret Futura, the brain-child of Richard Strange, which bears most atmospheric resemblance to its Weimar kin. Cabaret Futura became the focus and meeting place for the energy which fed the explosion in fashion, photography, filmmaking and music. More than that, it suggested a reaction to television, the growing demand for a live venue to serve specific, not standardised tastes.’ However it was always interesting but often in a rather worthy kind of way. It was also basically pretty ‘straight’, (but not straight) which jarred a little from the cruisy places I was more used to going by then. Alternatively, it might have just been that the gay men there were on their best behaviour.

The 6th (of February) was memorable, both for seeing what had developed from the ex Joy Division members after Ian Curtis´s death, for the first time, with New Order playing an early gig in their career (about 6 months in) at Heaven (‘underneath the arches in Charing Cross’ at it always styled itself) but also as Gary & I finally decided to go our separate ways. By the 20th February  I was ‘in’ to April Co-op,  having been offered a place in Bethune Rd, near Manor House in Hackney. It was a bit further out from everything but not especially so. For the first time I’d be living in a house full of gay men: it could be heaven, it could be hell!

ON to Sex, love and life (The Rituals) 2.14 Living together – a short 101 primer on how we learned to alt.live together, as lesbians and gay men 

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