Category: Writing

Although consensual sex between men had been partially decriminalised for males (with caveats: in private, over 21, England and Wales only, (presumably Scottish men in Gretna Green could nip over the border for a quick spot of legal sex) with the passage of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967, in England and Wales it took some time for a network of support organisations to develop, in response to this newly liberated climate. The Stonewall Riots in New York in 1969 enabled a wave of development however in the USA and an organisation called the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) spread from the United States to London in 1970. A fledgling campaigning organisation in the UK, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) had already developed in 1969 with a stated aim from 1969 to promote legal and social equality for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals in England and Wales (not Scotland & Northern Ireland). 

After a meeting in Leeds in 1972, a counselling group called London Friend was also set up in London and CHE members took part in the first London Pride at Hyde Park, followed by a march to Trafalgar Square, (nominally to protest at the age of consent, still then age 21).  In 1973 it went on to hold its first national gay rights conference in Morecambe. CHE and London Friend shared offices and had close links until 1974, but it was separated from CHE in 1975. By 1977 its membership was falling as the group leadership supported a paedophile organisation and proposed an age of consent of 12, which for many conservative people at the time was simply felt to be too low (the heterosexual age of consent was still sixteen).

Whatever you thought about their policies, perhaps for many the most significant development was that they created as many as a hundred local groups in cities & towns around England & Wales. For the very first time people in smaller locations away from the provincial centres had a place to go and meet other gay men, bisexuals & lesbians. The significance of these groups in this early period for offering support and local advice to many isolated gay men in England & Wales cannot be understated.

It was where I turned first, late in 1978, when my copy of Gay News (that I had bought at a large newsagents in central London as anonymously as possible) told me that there was a group that met regularly called Feltham CHE close to where I then lived in Teddington. In fact there were as many as eighteen different groups in London alone, many connecting those in the suburbs for the first time. My copy told me to ring Toni on 5703914.

Doing so, saw me visiting my first gay group, though I cannot now remember where we met: I think in a members house. It also saw me meet up with my first bona-fide boyfriend too, Niall, and we went on a canal cruise (on a boat I mean) together, with others, organised by the group. I seem to recall however that, at twenty, we were the youngest members of the group and of course technically ‘illegal’ then, though that very seldom stopped young gay men initiating relationships at the time.   

I mentioned that I had seen this information in Gay News. This paper had been the response to a nationwide demand by lesbians and gay men for news of this burgeoning liberation movement in the early to mid 1970’s. It had become a fortnightly newspaper founded in June 1972 as a collaboration between former members of the GLF and members of CHE. At the newspaper’s height, its circulation was as high as 19,000 copies fortnightly. Its importance to the development of information and support networks right across the UK (and indeed more widely..) has been fairly well covered elsewhere. However, given the central role it played for me in the early years of my own activity and radicalisation as a gay man, involved in the burgeoning gay movement, I’d like, at least, to say a little more about it and its effect on me, personally.   

Many of its early editorial team members went on to become well known names in the political field. Its editor, for instance, Denis Lemon, became nationally famous when defending Gay News against a blasphemy trial by Mary Whitehouse: he was sentenced to a suspended nine month prison sentence, which after appeal was dropped eventually but fined £1000 with £9000 costs, which a subsequent public campaign paid for; in 1974, Gay News was charged with obscenity, having published an issue with a cover photograph of two men kissing (it won the court case); Martin Corbett, (who became involved in the burgeoning ‘Act Up London‘ movement in the late 80’s), David Seligman, in my own opinion the most essential early member of the London Gay Switchboard collective, (who sadly passed away in January 2021), formed in 1974, Ian Dunn who became involved with the Scottish Minorities Group, taking the fight for equality and legalisation of gay sex north of the English border & Glenys Parry, who was for some time the national chair of CHE.

Issue 1

Alison Hennegan (the newspapers Assistant Features Editor and Literary Editor from June 1977) has retrospectively described the paper as the movement’s “debating chamber”. Looking back now at the vast range of topics it covered, it is hard to disagree with that assessment. It carried reports of discrimination and political and social advances, campaigned for further law reform, (including parity with the heterosexual age of consent of sixteen (which was more to most CHE members taste), campaigned against the hostility of the church (which still treated homosexuality as a sin – and as already mentioned was rather wonderfully and memorably covered by the Pet Shop Boys song ‘It’s a sin’) and indeed the medical profession, which in the early to mid 1970s still officially treated homosexuality as a pathology: a ‘disease’ to be cured’. It also campaigned for equal rights in employment & the trades union movement at a time when left wing politics in the UK was still historically influenced by hostility to homosexuality. Under the influence of its features editors, Keith Howes and Hennegan, it also drilled down into the lesbian and gay cultural history of past decades, as well as presenting new developments in the arts.

Of course it was all well and good having a politically minded paper that covered the news from such a perspective but many wanted to be able to purchase something a little more, ahem, racy.

With that in mind there were several companies publishing materials that were aimed at homosexual men in this period in the mid seventies, of which one was the company that came to dominate the UK market, that of the Millivres empire founded in 1974 and owned by Alex Mc Kenna. At one stage they published three explicit magazines: Zipper, Mister and Vulcan. Later they also publiushed ´Him´ magazine as well. Each had its own editor and a specifically targeted market. However, at least initially, these were not explicit, in the form that we would understand today. Erections were not allowed above the so called ´angle of the dangle´, although sometimes publishers would test the water by adding a more explicit image with other less explicit ones to see if it was seized. Sometimes they were. The fledgling bookshop ´Gays The Word´ was to go on, to wage a battle against customs seizure of imported books for many years in fact.

Remarkably perhaps, although Millivres merged with Prowler Press to become the Millivres-Prowler group in 1999, Alex is still publishing magazines, thirty years on, in particular UK Beef, for hardcore muscle fans in 2024. This should very much not be confused with Beef, America’s leading cattle publication, publishing monthly issues for cow-calf operators, stockers, feeders, vets & more.

However, going back to the mid seventies, for many lesbians & gay men individually it was the fact that Gay News also published personal contact ads, in a more clearly defined way than, for example, ‘Films And Filming‘ had in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties and still, then, in clear defiance of the law (in fact, in its earliest editions this section was always headlined “Love knoweth no laws.”). 

It was one of the first places that I saw specifically gay contact ads, though it was not in fact how I first contacted other gay men in the press: that was still to come a little later. However, for many lesbians and gay men who had access to Gay News, especially those away from the larger cities it must have at least offered a way to potentially develop meaningful relationships for the first time, away from the other alternatives available at the time, which were mostly illegal, such as in public toilets (cottages) and outside cruising areas and so its role in helping to create a fledgling community cannot be understated. Equally, realistically, the influence of the ads should not be overstated, as there were still a multitude of barriers to overcome before you met anyone. Many lesbians and gay men would not even have heard of ‘Gay News’ or been able to access copies of it easily. Certainly for those youngsters living with their parents or in digs it would not have been possible to have it delivered to them. Even after finding the ads, responding to an advert took some courage, as you had no idea really, in a pretty hostile world, who you might be letting know about your sexual and romantic proclivities.

The threat of the possibility of blackmail was still used by many institutions in the early to mid seventies (such as the Armed Forces) as a reason not to trust or employ lesbians & gay men. So it was by no means ‘plain sailing‘.

On to Sex, love and life (The Rituals) 2.5 Icebreakers and the beginnings of an ‘alt gay’ scene

BACK to Sex, love and life: The Index

The Gilded Boys

The gilded boys are dancing

with their lovers brothers lover.

Those golden lads are having one fine time.

Swaying rather wildly

to the ever present bass hum

from a hundred hidden speakers

within their platform heels.

As colored lights come screaming

to glitter off their denims

to glance on plastic pins.

Felice Picano, The Gilded Boys (1975)

´Echoes of love lust (2am pop mix)´; a recreation of Felice Picano´s poem ´The Gilded Boys are dancing´

There’s a somewhat guilty secret I’ve not shared with anyone before.

I’m a gay man, out from the late 70’s onwards and I don’t really like disco. Not till it was far too late, at least. Shocking isn’t it?! I never felt that happy with it, within it, around it. To enjoy it I felt you needed to be off your face, inhibitions thrown to the wind.  What might have worked in Club 54 in New York seemed to me to fall flat on its face at Foxy’s or Roxies nightclub in outer suburbia. Sure, I went through the motions but it was more a Saturday Night Chill, than full on fever. I fully realise that I’ll be shouted down on this one though. For many, confident enough in their moves and grooves it was heaven – and Heaven every time.

In a seminal 2011 article entitled ‘Disco & the Queering of the Dance Floor’ Tim Lawrence succinctly covered the development & attraction of disco music and the power its clubs held over gay men during the 1970’s. Certainly these were the places that you went to in London, at least when I arrived on the scene in the late 70’s, along with such people I suppose as Neil Tennant, in his high heeled shoes. Clubs such as Spats in Oxford St, Bang in Tottenham Court Rd and Heaven in Charing Cross were already well established.

Looking back at footage now of men and women dancing in those clubs it seems a different era; well, it was. For me, standing watching Amanda Leer sing ‘Ring My Bell’ (clip below) in Spats and throwing samples of her record to the audience is a key memory.  I don’t think I ever managed to catch one in my life: blame my all too diminutive height.

I met someone who became a good friend, much later on, the much missed artist (there I go again..) John Mansell, who was able to recall the event as well;  by remembering our relative positions, close to the speakers, we realised that we must have been within touching distance then, maybe even next to each other. In fact we were able to plot our parallel lives through such relative positions when watching various club acts, in the period – Divine, Grace Jones  and on, often close but never meeting, just another face in the crowd. It was to be thirty years on from those nights, that we first talked.  

If I am to talk about the London I knew in this period and go on to address the ‘alternative scene’ to this alternate scene, as it developed in the early 80’s, I suppose that I must also address, at least to an extent, the hold that such large commercial clubs had on their gay audience by then, if I am then to explain why some of us felt the need to- if not reject it- create some kind of alter alternative.

Lawrence talks about how in New York, ‘by turning on a single spot, then, dancers could move in relation to a series of other bodies in a near-simultaneous flow and as part of an amorphous and fluid entity’. Well, you know what he means. He also mentions Ronald Bogue’s 2004 notion about how, in such situations: 

‘the dancer becomes a decentred body that has ceased to function as a coherently regulated organism, one that is sensed as an ecstatic catatonic regulated organism, a personal zero degree of intensity that is in no way negative but has a positive existence’.

Again, if you’ve been in such a place, you’ll probably well know what he is getting at. Disco music was arguably not the first to do this but it was perhaps the first time the barriers to create such an experience fell away to such an extent, so regularly and on demand.

For many, if not most, this experience was a revelation. The freedom to dance in an atmosphere where inhibition was minimal and yet the experience was a regulated one, controlled by the host, the DJ, a place of relative safety, security, where the everyday could be forgotten for a night. For gay men that covered a huge multiplicity of interests: desire, attitude, behaviour, dress and so on. The idea of looking and dressing in a similar fashion was becoming popular for men.. so much so that the word ‘clone’ caught on for this look. It enabled gay men to make a statement about their sexuality and its related power to other gay men and more widely to the world at large. That is not to say the look or dress code at such clubs was completely similar, as some men dressed flamboyantly, to make a similar statement. In fact clothes of the period were often flamboyant, partly as a result of the influences from the fusion of natural textures & fabrics which came into prominence in the late sixties during the beatnik/hippy period, along with the huge array of colours and textures becoming available using synthetic mass produced fabrics & materials such as polyester and rayon in the early to mid seventies, along with the notion of the boutique shop, in which to purchase them.   

However they dressed, gay men were always going to have a lot invested in this new disco experience that had been created, at least to some extent, primarily for them. The heyday of disco has been well covered in popular culture, in relatively mainstream films such as ‘54’ about the New York club Studio 54 which opened in 1977 and literature like ‘The Band Played On’ (full movie version of book, 1993). Most important to the disco experience however was of course the anthemic sound.

The notion of a gay ‘anthem’ is perhaps something developed in more recent decades, ‘I am what I am’ by Gloria Gaynor perhaps being the most commonly identified gay anthem, and something I can hardly even bear to listen to now, due to its over prominence on so many playlists, for so long. There were ten elements identified by the editors of the 2002 book Queer, which they claim describe themes common to many gay anthems: “big voiced divas; themes of overcoming hardship in love; “you are not alone;” themes of throwing your cares away (to party); hard won self-esteem; unashamed sexuality; the search for acceptance; torch songs for the world-weary; the theme of love conquers all; and of making no apologies for who you are.”

True, these were indeed the themes that we took to the disco and shared with our fellow dancers in the 1970’s. Yes, we held our head up high and shouted out ‘I am what I am’. (Unfortunately, in retrospect, probably rather too many times in relation to that particular song, as far as I am concerned). For me personally, I suppose the song I recognised then & now as being of my era was Sister Sledges 1979 classic ‘We are Family’ (see below). This was one of the most anthemic songs at ‘Bang’ on the Charing Cross Road in London, where I used to go regularly on a Saturday night. Another was ´Ring my Bell´ by Anita Ward, who I saw live at the gay club Spats in Oxford Street also during 1979.

It wouldn’t be right when discussing gay disco, not to mention Sylvester as well. Although he was performing well before the disco era (in 1970 he joined the San Francisco phenomenon The Cockettes, and released several albums of mostly R&B oriented material) he struck gold in 1978 with a pair of disco classics, “Dance Disco Heat” and “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real.”

As happens fairly often with a music track that does particularly well, it was actually the production genius of Patrick Cowley, who really delivered on the song and made it into such a huge success. The songs were often about the personal relationships we embarked upon in our lives (‘Its Raining men, hallelujah’ sang the Weather Girls in 1979, and a little later as disco’s up tempo cousin, hi energy (hi N R G) music developed ‘So many men’, so little time’ echoed Miquel Brown). The songs were seldom linked to notions of what became known as queer liberation though, beyond the personal.

Even as early as 1977, the experience had become homogenised, sterilised, cloned and recreated for heterosexuals to enjoy. Discos sprung up right across the UK in both large and small towns. Films such as Saturday Night Fever paved the way for the widespread commercialisation of disco music and clubland both in the USA and in most other western centres. None of this is new anymore and has been well covered by a host of writers in recent decades. Less well covered perhaps, is what this commercialisation did to gay sub culture, how it divided gay culture and marginalised some in the process. For some of us, its excessive masculisation never appealed in the first place or simply became a bore.

Yet for others it provided new opportunities and new beginnings. Many, in the larger towns where gay clubs existed had gone to discos to dance simply because ‘that was what you did’. Options were often very limited for gay men. Before disco, dancing between couples was very regulated. The freedom offered by rock and roll dance for couples, the Jitterbug for example, to engage in close physical contact did not extend to same sex couples. Disco changed that. You could dance closely, if you wished with just about anyone, if they were willing too. And very often they were.  

On to Sex, love and life (The Rituals) 2.4 1975: The rise and rise of political activism; GLF and CHE

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I have already mentioned that the British Film Institute (the BFI) became a beacon for me in the mid seventies , offering a way of escape into the fantasy of the film world.

At that period there were a large number of well known film directors, each with different ouvres, and people would await their next release with baited breath and an expectation that has all but been lost now. One afternoon, in around early 1979, I saw that a double bill of a film maker I had not heard of before was showing at the prestigious new ‘Gate Cinema’ in Russell Square. The two films on ‘back to back’ were Sebastiane and Jubilee, by someone called Derek Jarman. I noticed that one was entirely in latin with subtitles, which piqued my interest, and also that both the films had been given an X certificate (Sebastiane in September 1976 and Jubilee in 1978 (then meaning suitable for over 18 years only). My expectations were not especially high but the themes looked interesting too. Whilst Sebastiane was like nothing I had ever seen before, with its explicit imagery and strongly homosexual overtones and strikingly beautiful scenery and score, primarily by Brian Eno and I appreciated it, it was, nevertheless, thematically essentially a piece of art house cinema and not something that was especially original in terms of its production, though filming it entirely in latin was quite a courageous thing to do: it certainly added to its mystique.

So when Jubilee began, I had no great expectations for something different, especially as the first scenes are set in the era of Queen Elizabeth the First, with her occultist John Dee. However, as those of you who have seen it will know, this doesn’t last, as she is soon transported to 1970’s England with the aid of her -sexy- spirit guide Ariel, arriving in a run down decayed London. The Queen is dead and the first Elizabeth (Jenny Runacre) moves through the social and physical decay of the city with a group of punks: Amyl Nitrate, Bod, Chaos, Crabs and Mad (played by a very young Toyah Wilcox). They live in a squat and pick up random men, including -sexy- Adam Ant in his debut role (as ‘the Kid’), who becomes signed up by Borgia Ginz, (a wonderfully kitsch Jack Birkett) the media mogul and makes a debut television appearance singing ‘Deutsche Girls’ (actually an Adam Ant track that was released four years later, as he became famous, with the appropriate lyrics ‘oh, why did you have to be so Nazi’ changed to ‘oh why did you have to be so nasty’), that they all watch. He also sings Plastic Surgery in the film (plastic surgery it’s so…. plastic…). In one scene Amyl performs (actually, mimes) an outrageous version of ‘Rule Brittania’ on stage, (a 1977 released track, sung by Suzi Pinns), which we are told is the entry for that years Eurovision song contest. We are also introduced to the two bisexual brothers, (one is Ariel, the other Sphinx in Elizabethan times) who have an incestuous relationship together, Sphinx played by Karl Johnson, Ariel played by a young Ian Charleson (who later played the lead in the very successful ‘Chariots of Fire’) who seduce Adam in one scene. Charleson, who was gay, was later diagnosed with HIV in 1986, and  sadly died of AIDS-related causes in January 1990 at the age of 40.

Dee, Ariel and Elizabeth try to interpret the signs of anarchic modernity around them, before they return to the sixteenth century at the film’s end. It is a very violent film in many ways and essentially it rallies against what Jarman saw as ‘the nonsense of monarchy’ and the moral corruption of big business-obsessed Britain.  Jarman was also quite critical of punk though: its obsession with  fascism and the petty violence of its followers. Essentially, one wonders if the cast quite knew what they were getting themselves involved with, when they agreed to be cast in the film. It combined a range of different styles of film making, without bothering too much to blend these in together, somewhat like a magpie collecting different trinklets together, just for their colour and shapes. As a result it was however completely different in its way, from anything I had seen before and I was completely fascinated by it, blown away by the creative imagination it took to assemble something of that nature, or if you prefer, the guts and daring to produce something with such a mishmash of styles and textures. Critics struggled then (and even now) with knowing quite how to review it. I came to realise later, that I loved collage and montage in art and I think that is what I particularly connected with in this film. In later years watching it again I struggled to find exactly what had affected me so deeply about it when I first viewed it ( I came back to the cinema a few days later to watch it again, just for the craic).

I think I was blown away as much as anything by its sheer audacity, and the way in which it again, like Sebastiane in its way, creates a mythical world peopled by characters who look entirely at home in it. There was something again in it for me, in longing for a world that I could feel completely at home in. Clearly it wasn’t the land that Jarman showed us but things happened ‘as if by magic in it’ and in the Silver Jubilee year, he wove into it, this fantasy of an Elisabeth transported back and forwards in time. As is often the case, with trying to explain decades later quite why something ‘affected you’ in a particular way, you just have to say: ‘well you had to be there at the time too’; it was very much of its time. In a strange way the same things that happened with the ‘Sound Of Music’ were happening here too: yes, there are some similarities!  The theme of a ‘different kind of family’, life is portrayed and explained away through music and songs, both are about escaping from reality, and both deal with themes of retribution, escape and salvation and the notion of difference. They represent ‘different ways’ of being, of existing.

Jarman was to return to these themes again and again in his work but for me he was never more powerful  in his critique of contemporary Britain as in ‘Jubilee’. Punk as a movement had set out to offend with its nihilism: Jarman took that and created a powerful vision as to what might happen if that nihilism was to conquer all, how in effect it leads to a form of fascism: absolute power corrupts absolutely.

He didn’t ask us to like it or buy into it but I think he did show how it could excerpt a powerful influence on people. To me he is saying ‘Ok then, be like this but be very careful what you are playing with’. Derek, I think, had two sides to him: on the one hand a pessimism about society and just how easily changes in its fabric can bring out the worst in a nation and its people but also an essential optimism that, despite this, there was intrinsic good in people and that things ‘would turn out ok in the end’. He was undoubtedly a completely fascinating, tantalising and complex character.

I only met Derek three or four times, so I cannot claim to have known him well but a part of me wishes I had at least told him that he gave me the courage to be different. To stand apart from the pervasive normality of the late seventies and find my own way in life. I owe that man an awful lot.

For me personally, the film essentially took me to a headspace that said ‘don’t be afraid to be different’: you don’t have to conform to anyone’s expectations of you and you can go in any direction you like. It gave me the courage to give up my restrictive job in the Civil Service, recognising that, despite the fact I quite enjoyed it, it wasn’t taking me anywhere new in my head. I wanted to stop playing things safe and take some risks. The decision to do so was both enervating and a little scary.  It was time to move on: I had that feeling of stepping off the train and onto a new platform once again. A kind of Mr Norris changes trains moment, if you will.  

ON to Sex, love and life (The Rituals) 2.9 Soho, oh Soho: into the gay ghetto

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One could write a book about the ways gay men & lesbians

have created in order to live (and love) together in the last century and a half and indeed then, it is not surprising that Matt Cook has done exactly that, and produced a fascinating, detailed account of the history of the concept of alt.family life in London in the last 150 years or so. He makes hugely important and detailed observations about the issues, challenges, prejudices and superimposed moralities that gay men (and lesbians) faced in the period, especially in the GLF glory days of the 1970’s and 80’s in London. He does however concentrate on ‘couplings’ mostly in his case studies and only offers us a short (though nevertheless detailed) section on co-habiting in groups together in London, by using the perhaps most famous example, the Brixton Railton Road gay community, of which more later.

There is of course some history attached to communities of lesbians and gay men living together stretching back into the early part of the twentieth century and before, so it was not altogether surprising (although undoubtedly fortuitous for me personally) that co-op’s such as the one called ‘April‘ (formed in April and with an umbrella sheltering gay men and lesbians under it, as its logo) existed in Hackney, in the 1980’s.

In fact, there was some experimentation of alternative ways of living back in the middle of the nineteenth century, for example in the house where the writer and philanthropist Edward Carpenter lived openly with his partner George Merrill. Their home at Millthorpe in rural Derbyshire became both a refuge and place of pilgrimage for those who were openly challenging the customs of Victorian society. People such as the writer E M Forster (who modelled his novel Maurice on the working-class Merrill), the artist William Morris and the poet Siegfried Sassoon all visited Millthorpe at one time or another.

Charleston Farmhouse, nestling below the South Downs in East Sussex was another early example of such a community, with various members of the Bloomsbury set decamped there from 1916 onwards, some hugely influenced by Carpenter´s work and studies. The artist Vanessa Bell and her lover Duncan Grant, together with his then lover, David Garnett, moved there at that time; Bell’s husband also stayed there frequently and their children grew up there. It was ‘a deliberate attempt to re-organise the ethos of home and family life to allow alternative sexual relationships, new gender roles and artistic creativity to flourish’. There is a marvellous photo (see below) from the mid 1920´s of various members of the Bloomsbury group: Roger Fry, Clive Bell and Duncan Grant, dressed immaculately in tweed jackets ties and waistcoats standing in the garden at Charleston watching Vanessa Bell cutting Lytton Strachey’s hair. That is very much an ethos I can relate to from my short life housing days (not the suits and waistcoats though..).

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Homes and Domestic spaces website: Experiments in Domestic living, 1920

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During the Second World War in 1940, the artists Cedric Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines, who met on Armistice Night in 1918, moved to the 16th-century Benton End in Hadleigh, Suffolk, where they lived until their deaths (in 1982 and 1978 respectively). They created the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing as an alternative to London’s commercial art scene. Benton End was both a communal, domestic and artistic space, welcoming both live-in and day students, and hosting famous dinner parties. Its visitors included Vita Sackville-West, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and Maggi Hambling, and the two men created an atmosphere which has been described as ‘both robust and coarse; exquisite and tentative…faintly dangerous.’

By the late 1960s, into the seventies with the further development of the wider gay liberation (and women’s) movements, the idea of living together communally as an alternative to the more traditional family structure was becoming more viable, indeed quite desirable. There were squats in London in particular, in Brixton and Hackney but also other areas of London too, and indeed in other cities across the UK. It’s important to understand that squatting in residential property only became a criminal offence in September 2012, (though technically there were other ways to evict squatters before then). These houses and areas often by their very nature became centres of community and political organisation.

In particular, as mentioned, one of the most well known alt communities was centred around the rundown unused council properties around Railton Rd in Brixton. From around March 1974, a group known as the ‘South London Gay Liberation’ movement squatted 78, Railton Road in Brixton and opened the South London Gay Community Centre. This then, attracted a wider group, who squatted further unoccupied houses in the area, especially those in Railton Road and Mayall Road, (there was a common garden between them). I went out with several people who lived here in the early to mid eighties, so spent a little time there- and it was also the unofficial HQ of the ‘Gay Noise’ collective too, of which more later. I was also there during the infamous Brixton riots of the early eighties, which occurred in the period in which I was living at my first April house in Bethune Rd, N16, going out on and off with a rather handsome guy called Mikah, who lived in Brixton in Mayall Rd, closeby.  

The group in Railton Road and others in the area set up the 121 Centre on Railton Road. It was eventually evicted in 1999, but had acted as a venue to host events and in the 1980’s also regularly printed a squatters newspaper called ‘Crowbar‘. Eventually, most of these squats were ‘dismantled’ from the late 1980’s or incorporated into housing co-ops. For example, at the Railton Road squats, whilst the communal gardens remained, the buildings were divided up into single occupancy units and incorporated into the Brixton Housing Co-operative, (which continues to reserve homes for LGBTQ tenants). Similarly over in Notting Hill, West London there were other Gay Liberation Front communes, notably the Colville Terrace community and the lesbian feminist Faraday Road community off Ladbroke Grove. There was also a popular gay commune called Wild Lavender in South London for a time too.

At one stage in the mid 1970’s it was estimated that around 30,000 people throughout Greater London had reclaimed, repaired and squatted thousands of empty dwellings earmarked for demolition. A significant percentage of those people were lesbian or gay. For example in 1971, the Greater London area contained 23,100 empty dwellings awaiting demolition; twenty-nine percent of this housing stock was built before 1875 and sixty-seven percent between 1875 and 1919. 

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Sisterhood and squatting in the 70s, Urban change in Hackney

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Recognising the huge issue and challenges this faced, a 1969 urban development plan in London had identified five Inner London Boroughs – Tower Hamlets, Newham, Southwark, Lambeth and Hackney – as containing seventy percent of Inner London’s ‘unfit houses’. These were houses which lacked the three essential household amenities: exclusive use of their own water supply (including hot water), a bath, and an indoor toilet. Quite remarkably, even by 1969, only thirty-six percent of Hackney households had all three amenities. It goes someway to explaining  why London boroughs like Hackney had so much housing stock in the early to mid seventies that was not being lived in, as it built large new tower blocks on monolithic estates re-housing it’s council tenants, with all three amenities taken for granted. The old stock was degenerating every year as a result, and much was being demolished. In fact in some boroughs the houses were initially partially destroyed, simply  to prevent reoccupation.

Hackney did have some history in relation to offering refuge for gay men and lesbians (albeit in squatted properties) before ‘April’. For example by the late 1970’s there were as many as an estimated fifty women-only squatted households scattered throughout the streets behind the Broadway Market area, including one continuous terrace of seven women’s squats on Lansdowne Drive. The majority of the women living there identified as lesbians. However, in most of the houses essential services like water and electricity needed to be re-connected and by the mid 1970s there were women electricians and plumbers who were skilled enough to be able to assist new squatters reinstate these essential services.

However, things quickly changed when the Conservatives gained control of the GLC in 1977. With Horace Cutler as Leader and George Tremlett in charge of housing, a right-wing agenda was introduced, with the aim of ending the GLC’s role as a provider of council housing for rent, this to be achieved by selling off council housing and by transferring the GLC’s considerable housing stock to the London boroughs. The GLC had actually handed out ‘licences to squat’ previously; suddenly this all ceased. Squatters were offered new housing in ‘hard to let flats’ (often on the old 1920-30’s inner London estates) and the larger houses then sold off very cheaply, mainly to middle class professionals able to buy them, to refurbish with special grants from councils.

Those who objected to a move to the ‘hard to let flats’ or individual home ownership and who wished to remain in their homes and retain control over their housing, were given the option to form housing co-operatives, hence the Broadway Market Squatters Association split into three separate housing co-ops, one of which became London Fields co-op in 1978.

This period in the early to mid 1980s saw the rise of a new housing ‘bureaucracy’ needed to organise and fund short-life repairs and licences for newly created housing co-operatives. Short-life funding for basic repairs was available for co-ops, which had not been given funding to purchase their properties but were allowed to manage them until they were either sold, often to newly created Housing Associations, or refurbished to go back into council’s housing stock.

For example, some of these housing co-ops in Hackney then became members of the ‘Short Life users group’ (‘SLUG’), an organisational arm that facilitated the necessary co-ordination between the co-ops and the council’s housing department itself. There was agreement that some of the housing stock in Hackney, that was not going to be demolished, could be used by needy groups for short life periods, until the houses were scheduled to be repaired and sold or re-let. To ensure legality with then current law, a peppercorn rent was charged (around £5 a week). As Hackney had already many lesbians living in the Broadway Market and subsequent co-ops, it was perhaps no surprise that a group called April, (simply as it was formed in April and no one could agree on a better name), was developed to assist further groups of lesbians and gay men to live in some of the short life houses that became available. Initially, these were mainly same sex houses but in time these often became more mixed.

Often, over time, the people living there would form close bonds and so when a house was needed they would all move to a new house together as a group. In fact I did this no less than three times in April Co-op, to Hackney houses in Carysfoot Rd, Cassland Rd and finally Leadale Rd. Quite often, the date of planned work commencement & refurbishment by the councils contractors would be put back again & again though, due to delays on work which had already commenced or a lack of funding, so for example, an initial house offered for 6 months might in fact be occupied for more than 2 years in the end as we did in Cassland and Leadale Road. Sometimes though, disputes arose in houses and two people living together would fall out with each other. There could be many reasons for this but the most common were when there was a clash of personalities, when two people in the same house had formed a relationship but it had then broken up, or when one member of the house started seeing another members partner. All these events occurred relatively regularly in my time with April. One person would then be asked -or ask -to move out of their old house to a new one (assuming one was available) and a new vacancy would become available in that house. At one stage in April, there were about 10 houses, each with about 5 people living in them, so making about 50 April residents in all. Some of the Co-ops had more houses than us, some less.

Remarkably, given its significance then and now, there seems to be very little documentation online about ‘April’ Housing Co-op. Whilst there is plenty about squatted gay communities houses (as I mentioned above, especially in the Railton Rd area of Brixton, South London) the (legal) housing co-op in Hackney, which lasted a good 15 years or so is seemingly not well documented. This is a surprise to me, as it was to play a great role in my life and those of many other gay men & lesbians, who lived its short life housing stock for some years. Suffice to say, as I grew up, I had absolutely no idea that such possibilities existed and when I did think more deeply about it, was very worried about what the future might hold for me in this area. In retrospect I needn’t have been worried, as in fact I have had an infinitely more richly diverse experience of living arrangements in the last four decades than almost all heterosexuals I’d imagine (and probably most gay men as well, truth to tell). 

My first April house, 80, Bethune Road N16, where I  initially moved after my mutual split with Gary and Fordwych Rd, was a large four story house, close to the reservoirs on the ‘New River’, just east of Manor House tube. These houses now sell for around 600,000 pounds. Oh, how we would have chuckled then. When I moved in there were five of us there: Brian, Tony, Steve, Don and myself. Before I’d moved in, the guys had been knocking down a wall, that had separated the house into two flats, in the middle part of the 20th century and so there was a load of rubble left down in the basement, which was only slowly cleared in my time there. We didn’t have a huge amount of furniture either, so it was pretty spartan. However, it had a reasonable kitchen with hot water, (this was deemed essential in all houses), toilet and sink so it could have been a lot worse. I thought it had a proper bathroom too, but someone I saw for a time, Monty, and remain in contact with today, reminded me recently that there wasnt one in fact! How did we shower then?! I can’t recall but probably at other April houses which had them. I had a rather small back room overlooking the long narrow garden at the back, I remember, which I made as homely as possible. It was, truth be told, one of the more austere houses I’ve lived in, very different from the relative homeliness of another April house in Cassland Rd, that I lived in later.

I recently got back into contact with Steve in fact, after nearly four decades had passed, on facebook and there is something about this renewed contact with others who shared your past for a time, that always seems quite special to me. It’s also particularly special simply to know they have survived the intervening period, with everything that was to be thrown at us, in the intervening years.  

Another housemate Don, was an intelligent, highly politicised but somewhat tortured soul and we had a rather tempestuous relationship at times but he was certainly a very thoughtful and caring person that I learnt a lot from, in time. I still have most of the various apologetic cards, notes and letters that he would give to me, after we had had yet another clash of personalities and requisite shouting match. Flossie, one began, after we had rowed then made up and understood each other much

better (we had nicknames for each other, very Wildean, I suppose; I had nice teeth), ‘I’m sorry but I’m also very glad too! Love Don’. And a birthday card too, with on the front a picture of an extremely camp Nijinsky, as the Golden Slave in Scheherazade in 1910, inscribed ‘Drink, dance and be extremely gay on your birthday, love and kisses Don. Ps Leave Nijinski (sic) alone, he’s going out with Diaghalev!’ He was a sweetie. A difficult sweetie sometimes but nevertheless..

Tony, who was Dutch and Steve and Brian were very much easier to live with and generally sweetness and light. On the whole, the experience was a very good one though and whetted my appetite for further, slightly unconventional, communal living. One of the benefits as I’ve mentioned, of having a large old house to live in without a lot of furniture, is that you can have large parties and not have to worry too much about the decor being ruined. Which we certainly didn’t.

One of the first parties that we held there was a ‘Nuclear Alert party’; my invitation shows a drawing I’d made of a man with his eyes bandaged. Retrospectively (even to me) it seems slightly offensive and risque but don’t forget these were pretty dystopian times.

It didn’t seem at all odd then. We invited everyone we knew and told them to bring friends- and we knew quite a few people. The house was rammed but I can’t remember much more about it. I don’t think the police came to complain about the noise (always a bonus) but I can’t be sure of that. Luckily, it was the last house in an otherwise terraced block in the street, so having no ‘party walls’ on one side helped.

It is now possible to revisit the scene of past dalliances on google streetview and there it still sits: in 2008 looking fresh with a newly painted dark blue door and neatly trimmed box hedge but by 2020 with an untrimmed hedge in an unloved garden and a now, rather scrubby, light blue door, bringing back vivid memories of who lived and what happened in each room some forty years ago.  Do you ever imagine what happened in your house in the past? What each room might tell you? It’s a well worn trope now but still quite fascinating I always think. I know those rooms could tell some interesting stories.

We were to have many other parties, especially at 19, Leadale Rd which I lived in with Gus, Nick, Sue and Pauline, where on the 7th May 1982, I still have an invitation we sent out far and wide to a ‘May Day do-da’, and open house from noon, with brunch at 1pm, afternoon tea at 4pm and from 7.30 cocktails and a late supper party. Which all sounds far more civilised than I now, vaguely recall, it turned out. It was a success though clearly, as on the 6th June 1983, we were having our ‘Second Tacky Cocktail Party‘ at Leadale Rd, (after other parties in between) with the requested dress code being ‘austere tackiness’. My ex housemate Gus. has recently said he remembers coming down in the morning, finding various people still passed out in the front room and a pool of green Creme de Menthe in the middle of the kitchen table. I can attest to that as I also recall rather better now, that the amount of spilt, sweet liquor (think a mix of creme de menthe, curacao and advocaat), which had run off the kitchen table, was enough to ensure the kitchen floor was exceptionally sticky for the next few weeks, despite our best efforts to clean it. Suffice to say, a good time was had by all. 

Actually we had two burgalaries in this house, the last one in mid winter with snow on the ground, when the police were delighted to be able to follow the footprint tracks down the road and ascertain that the burglar had been accompanied by a small child, who had squeezed in through the tiniest window in the back and had scoped out other properties before trying ours. There really was little of value to take to be honest, apart from a video recorder, which I recall had a bootlegged gay porno tape inside. We were more concerned about being done for that than the robbery I recall. At yet another April house, 79, Cassland Road, in Hackney E9, we had to ´turn one room into a bathroom with bath and toilet, as there wasnt one inside when we arrived. it was here too that we also had a small fire, when the cat knocked over a two bar electric stove left on, when we went to Hackney Tesco supermarket shopping. We came back to find the house full of smoke and a small fire in the living room, which luckily, as we caught it in time, only damaged the carpet and singed the floor boards and was easily dealt with. Since then I have always been excessively fire conscious, whenever I go out. Especially now, with two cats around!

I was also to become very involved with April for some time, becoming its representative on that ‘Hackney Short Life User Group’ (which went by the delightful acronym of SLUG), which met regularly to assess needs, check in on how everyone was doing and give up to date news on house repossession and new house availability. As I’ve mentioned, the great thing about the houses is that they were completely legal and not squats, (which were always struggling with problems about getting electricity, water and gas put on and liable to be raided by the police).

They also taught the people living in them basic DIY, plumbing and electrical wiring principles, for which there would be related workshops, every so often. All of the work we carried out had to be checked over by a professional, who would then give the go ahead that it could be connected by the relevant authority and used. The project was to continue till 1993, when Hackney council sold most of its short-life stock to those residents who were able (and wanted) to get mortgages and put the rest on the open market. 

The concept really was a great one though: to make use of unloved properties creatively for specific groups or communities through local councils, recognising that such co-ops could substantially reduce the previous reliance on ‘undesirable lodgings’ which some landlords were offering then at inflated prices and help to house many vulnerable members of the community. By the mid 1990’s though, with the policy of selling off council stock to tenants at reduced rates for them to own firmly established, London councils were attempting to transfer their “Shortlife” stock, which was still not usable, as part of their main stock to Housing Associations to look after instead but such deals often evaporated due to frequent policy changes.

There are however, thankfully, some co-ops still trying to work within the more restrictive boundaries, laws and legislation now; for example Lambeth United Housing and Phoenix Community Housing Co-op in Hackney which declares on its website: ‘We’re told short-life is over in London, but we’re not yet willing to give up. Phoenix has worked with short-term leasing for over 30 years. We have managed houses and flats with a ‘life’ of anything from six months to 10 years‘.

On a positive note, one of the legacies of these squats and co-ops was the formation, as far back as 1983 of Stonewall, a housing co-operative initially set up by a small group of women concerned that housing providers disregarded lesbians and gay men (and not to be confused with the larger campaigning group of that name which was in fact set up later). Stonewall still provides help support and advice to the LGBTQ community in London, with 13 paid workers on its staff.

On to Sex, love and life (The rituals) 2.15 Icebreakers and the early’ alt discos’

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In the early eighties the counselling group that I’ve mentioned before, ‘Icebreakers’ was also to play a significant role in my life.

The GLF and later Icebreakers had run a fundraising disco at the Prince Albert on Wharfedale Rd (later to become and remain to almost this day, Central Station) in Kings Cross, from as early as 1974. In April 1974 a Saturday disco for the fledgling (London) Gay Switchboard was held at the pub but GLF decided to stopped running discos on idealogical grounds and by Jan 1975 a group called Gay Alliance were running gay discos at the pub, though an advert appears in Gay News issue 52 (1 Aug 1975) from the North London GLF again, who were holding gay discos there on Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. In fact London’s Gay Switchboard used to hold their regular annual and quarterly general meetings upstairs there too, of which I later attended many.

By May 1976 Icebreakers had taken over the regular disco there and it ran quite succesfully for over three years but in August 1979, after a disagreement with the landlord of the Prince Albert, they moved a mile or so north east, up to the Hemingford Arms in Islington, where they held a disco every Friday evening. Admission was 30p with the disco itself upstairs in the roomy pub. As I mentioned earlier, I had first discovered it in October 1980, when Gays the Word had a benefit there and I was on the door. At the time though, it was pretty well established and had already been running for a year or so.

A little later in the following year, my boyfriend Mark’s good friend, Ian, just happened to live right opposite the pub and so, often on a Friday, we would go to his place for a meal and a few drinks, then carry on partying at the ‘Hemmy’, as it was fondly called,  just opposite. It was 30p well spent because you were almost always guaranteed a good time there. It was also one of the few venues that was truly mixed, with both lesbians and gay men dancing together, which was quite a rarity at that time. These places were a million miles from the big gay mainly male nightclubs of the time, like Heaven and Bang. The DJ generally played more alternative poppy or indie selectio of music as a change from the disco music then prevalent in the (mainly) gay clubs.I suppose it finally fitted into my perceptions of what a proper ‘community’ should be then, as it also attracted quite a left leaning, somewhat trendy, politicised crowd. Oh, why am I being so coy? The bottom line was that you could guarantee that you would probably fancy someone there and if unattached potentially meet them too and more to the point have something in common with them. That was definitely worth 30p. But sometimes we mixed up being alt left with being alt open. We talked about having open relationships but the reality could be more brutal. Oh, so many arguments, so many tantrums I saw and reader, I was often just as bad when I was on the receiving end. It is sometimes hard to accept that what we desire, others might too. Sometimes, and I´ll say it, Í guess I was just a jealous guy. I´m not proud but I´m also not perfect.

Jealous guy, Roxy Music

It was really one of the very first places that offered an ‘alternative’ to the clubs and pubs in central London, where truth be told, it was beginning to feel like you were stuck in some seventies ‘timewarp’. An alternative even, to places like the ‘London Apprentice’, which was to remain a faithful staple for many more years. But sometimes you want, you need, something different: a place to socialise, to talk, converse with all your friends. 

Whilst the music was not exactly ‘new wave’, there was definitely a very different vibe to that which you might experience in a larger club like ‘Bang’ or ‘Heaven’, it was not a druggy scene fulled on poppers or speed and of course these were not mixed places. However, when Icebreakers folded in around 1983 it was to fold too. Rather marvellously however, the pub itself is still there in 2024 at 154, Hemingford Rd, N1, with people still raving about it on Trip Advisor.

On to Sex, love and life (The Rituals) 2.16 Papers, politics and politico’s: Gay Noise & the Carved Red lion

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Another key group that developed in the early to mid 1970s in London was ‘The Counter-Psychiatry Group’, led by a sociologist called Michael (Micky) Burbidge.

The group took its raison d’etre from many of the American groups (particularly in California) which developed to counter the notion of traditional psychological thinking up until then, that gay men & lesbians had some kind of ‘condition’ that could be treated using such techniques as aversion therapy, only a few steps away really from the methods employed in 1950’s Britain that led to Alan Turing’s death. The group split into three different factions in 1972 and one became Icebreakers, with a helpline initially that developed its own gay counselling and befriending group.

On Tuesday 7 March 1972 however, as the first few members of the newly proposed Ice Breaking group gathered in Micky Burbidge’s house in Camden, there was a strong feeling that not enough was being done to help the most isolated gay people across the UK, of which the group rightly believed there were many. Those involved in it felt that they were qualified to counsel other gay people because of the experiences they had had coming out and being gay themselves. In an article in Gay News at the time, Burbidge explained that they consciously rejected social work terminology: clients, counsellors and so on. This was in effect similar to the work of London Gay Switchboard of course, although Switchboard did tend more to refer people on to other groups (including Icebreakers) but this approach was not really welcomed by professional groups at the time such as the Albany Trust.

By mid 1973 the Icebreakers group of 22 people (though only 2 were women) was offering a phone help line every evening between 7.30pm and 10.30pm. The group ethos and raison d’etre is described in much more detail in Lisa Powers book ”No bath but plenty of bubbles, An Oral history of the GLF” 1970/73” available on Amazon et al.

By 1975, its annual report recorded that it had received 4, 417 calls – 1 in 7 were from women; (14%) 1 in 11 were either married or divorced; (9%). 1 in 9 were under 21; (11%) 1 in 20 were transvestites (5%) and 52 calls were from paedophiles (1%). This last figure is relevant only in so far as what was to come for the organisation and to illustrate that a very small percentage of its calls actually came from those who identified as paedophile.

However, unfortunately, the group had unwittingly became involved with Roger Gleaves, a character who ran a number of hostels in London; he had allowed their phoneline to be run from his house and although he was never officially part of ‘Icebreakers’ he was answering the phones and it was discovered that he had been suggesting that some of the young boys he had counselled should come and live in the hostels he ran in London, with sexual assaults then being reported at a later stage by some of its occupants. Whilst there was no suggestion that any one in Icebreakers had known this was occurring, it is probably fair to say that it rather dented the credibility of the organisation for some while. Burbidge also became involved in supporting the PIE (Paedophile Information Exchange) of which several members were prosecuted in 1978 for soliciting indecent images of pre pubescent boys.

For some time in the 70’s and 80’s in fact the concept of sexual relationships with pre- pubescent children was relatively openly discussed within the gay milieu. The suggestion being made in the press at the time was that paedophiles were in need of medical treatment but for Burbidge this conflicted with his belief that the categorisation of paedophilia as a ‘psychiatric disorder’ was as wrong as homosexuality’s categorisation as a ‘psychiatric disorder’ and should be campaigned for alongside homosexuality under the umbrella definition of ‘sexual orientation’. He had argued, in a letter to the Guardian on September 3rd 1975:

“The ‘harm’ which sometimes is associated with paedophilic (sic) relationships is real enough: it stems from the bigoted reactions of adults, from the hounding and interrogation of younger partners by the police and others, and from the intense feelings of guilt and anxiety which distort relationships.”

This was not the first or indeed the last time that issues such as this were to split the gay community. However, it is probably fair to say that such relationships were only ever contested as not ‘being abusive’ by the pro-paedophile activists who were arguing for the abolition of the age of consent and the decriminalisation of sexual activities children had ‘consented’ to. As noted, in an article in Gay News later:

‘Unfortunately those activists or apologists never really got round to explaining how non-verbal or pre-verbal children could consent, or indeed, prove that they hadn’t, without a statutory age of consent to protect them‘. 

The issue was to circle around the lesbian & gay scene for quite some years to come, and even by the early 1980’s was still the cause of much discussion and angst within its associated communities. Interestingly, campaigners often used to quote Hungary as a country that had ‘got it right’, where the age of consent was set at 10, and this fact was quoted in the later award winning documentary Framed Youth, Revenge of the Teenage Perverts. I’m not sure anyone I knew quite believed it. In 1979 though, Icebreakers was thriving and members of the Icebreaker collective made -perhaps- their most obviously lasting contribution to gay life by founding the first ‘lesbian, gay and feminist’ bookshop, established with strong political, socialist principles. It also quickly became a social hub too – there was a coffee area with notice boards advertising accommodation, personal ads and community notices and it was used by a diverse range of groups including the Gay Black Group, Gay Disabled Group, Lesbian Discussion Group and from the early 80s, the Gay Young Socialists. Infamously the Lesbians and Gay Men Support the Miners group often met there in the mid eighties, a group founded by my freind Mark Ashton and playing a large role in its development. In fact Mark was to go on to play a huge role in the development of the gay community and its acceptance of what was to come and indeed a very significant role in my own life as well.     

ON to Sex, love and life (The Rituals) 2.6 1977: I’m coming out, I want the world to know..

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It is hard to remember now, that ‘safer sex’ literature had to be invented.

Having lived with it for so long now, its messages, modes and constructs are ingrained into most gay men of a certain age’s consciousnesses. But at first there was nothing. Just rumours, news articles, and the awful government advertising campaigns, with those tombstones. ‘Don’t die of ignorance’ said John Hurt, compounding the hurt (I still hadn’t completely forgiven him for Quentin Crisp).

It is often fascinating to see how we manage and assess the ‘risks’ we take in our lives. Obesity & smoking are two prime examples, where there is a high risk attached but many people do not perceive this to be the case. Driving, whilst using a mobile phone, is another. For more elderly people, it’s the slips, trips and falls caused by stairs & home furnishings that present a very high risk, that many hardly consider. Risk assessment, when you get down and dirty with it, is a fascinating thing. Moral panics often exacerbate our risk assessment and in the initial stages of HIV/AIDS the government actually created a moral panic about the perceptions of ‘catching HIV’ by airborn transmission, the use of public spaces (bus shelters for example), toilet seats and so on and, arguably, there are elements of a moral panic attached to the public perceptions of coronavirus. Equally, in certain situations of course, there are indeed very real risks attached.

For most of the population, not at high risk, to some extent they exacerbated a sense of  moral panic that was being fuelled and fanned by the ‘red top’ newspapers. Equally, for gay men who were at risk in certain situations, it is pretty safe to say they generally went down like a lead balloon.  Nowadays, so many programmes about those days rake that tombstone up, and to be fair it did have an effect on spreading fear which engaged some caution. But for many gay men rather it stopped discussion, it closed minds and created its own climate of fear. 

On Lesbian and Gay Switchboard, on the night shifts, in the wee small hours however, people opened up to us about those dark fears. The rumours, the pervasive climate of  never really knowing; was oral sex safe? You couldn’t catch it by being coughed on could you? From a drinking glass? By deep kissing? Doubt, fear, worry, unease, concern. These were the prevailing feelings that many gay men encountered, lived with, worried about at night, in those times. Those on such gay switchboards across the country provided moral support, a listening ear, compassion and concern in those troubled times. All sorts of other medical issues became wrapped up as well with worries about the possible relation with HIV. If I’ve had herpes or gonnorhea before am I more at risk? There was only so much known at the time and sometimes we simply had to say we just didn’t know.

What became clear though, as time went on, was that there was a need for information and that it wasn’t right or fair that gay switchboards and sexual health clinics across the UK were shouldering this massive burden. The idea of a need for a national HIV or AIDS helpline became established, but who was going to pay for it?

What had happened however was that the community & community businesses had responded by offering its support in the form of donations and its time in the form of involvement in the creation of places like switchboard where people could be counselled, consoled, supported.  One of the first such organisations was the development of the Terence Higgins Trust named after the first man to die of AIDS in the UK. He had died aged 37, on the 4th July 1982 at St Thomas’ Hospital, London. By naming the trust after Terry, the founder members – his partner and friends – hoped to personalise and humanise AIDS in a very public way. The following year, a public meeting was organised by London’s Gay Switchboard  and the Gay Medical Association (GMA) at Conway Hall in central London followed by a second public meeting held at the London Apprentice in August and the Terrence Higgins Trust was the result from which a small group of very committed volunteers came together. In particular this included Tony Whitehead, who went on to become the first chair of the trust’s steering committee. A leaflet about HIV/AIDS was produced by the Trust in 1983 (and in fact further north, the Scottish Aids Monitor (SAM) was set up in 1983 as a privately funded initiative, to specifically educate gay men about the threat of HIV and AIDS, though soon branched out to offer its services more widely, particularly in relation to drug injection which became endemic in eastern Scotland in 1985). By January 1984 the Trust had gained charitable status and was providing a range of targeted direct services immediately, including buddying/home-help, counselling, drug education and sex education.

They were the first charity in the UK to be set up in response to the HIV epidemic and to their eternal credit have been at the forefront of the fight against HIV and AIDS ever since. In 1985 they received a grant to employ two full time paid members of staff and produced a range of leaflets aimed at gay men (and others high risk groups) discussing what was known about the virus then and encouraging safer sex (and the use of a condom specifically). The Health Education Council (HEC) a health authority with some autonomy from direct government also produced its first literature on AIDS.

Whilst the Gay Mens’ Health Crisis (GMHC) had produced a 50 minute long ‘erotic video’ aimed at gay men in mid 1985 (first screened in October 1985 in New York) this took ‘dedicated’ watching (at home), it was also not available here in the UK and had a very american-centred feel to it. However, there was little else coming from ‘official sources’ that was aimed at gay men and early in 1986 it became clear to the Trust that there was a need for further positive promotional material aimed at encouraging gay men to have safer sex using ‘protective gear’: condoms in particular. Their office manager Nick Partridge, (now Sir Nick Partridge, who went on to become their Chief Executive Officer in 1995) and had also worked on Switchboard, approached us at Cleancut, to ask if we would like to make a short video that encouraged this and from that approach was born a 90 second short called ‘Gearing Up’ (for safer sex) , the first video of its sort actively promoting safer sex to gay & bisexual men. 

The video from the start ran into issues, as we decided we wanted to show it in as many venues as possible, as many times as possible. We had the idea that it would be shown as part of the on screen presentations shown in gay bars and clubs at the time. However the rules on what could and could not be shown publically were very strict at the time and our initial discussions with bar managers suggested they were loathe to show anything too explicit for fear of being prosecuted by the local authorities and that they would also lose their licence.  There was already a palpable fear by bar and club owners that they were viewed by the authorities as places where people met to find sexual partners, which in turn promoted more sexual activity, which was felt to be spreading the virus more rapidly.

Whilst they were not adverse to promoting the basic message of safer sex (some for example already had leaflets in their venues) they said they did not want to be seen to be encouraging it ‘too much’. There was a- genuine- concern that a ‘raunchy video’ would be one step too far. 

So our small production team at Cleancut (myself and business partner Paul Turner) in consultation with my then partner Dennis Gray, as an artistic director who was working for the Millivres publishing empire, run by Alex Mc Kenna, who produced the popular monthly magazine ‘Him Monthly‘ (which by then had become an early incarnation of Gay Times which reached its 500th issue in October 2019) and a veritable string of ‘porn mags’ such as Mister, Zipper & Vulcan. In discussions withNick at the Trust, we decided that we needed to be fairly careful in the approach we used. We wanted to be pro-community, positive in the support that the gay community could offer and upbeat about the message, which we felt needed to be as simple as possible. We soon ruled out having any spoken commentary or voiceover, as the video would usually be played in bars and clubs with loud music ongoing and a lot of background chatter. 

We developed the idea of a rapidly cut piece in the form of a music video, influenced I recall by that (now infamous) laundrette ad with Nick Kamen for stonewashed Levi 501 jeans, cut to’ I heard it through the Grapevine’ by Marvin Gaye. This 51 second commercial was beautifully shot and cut (it still stands up to repeated viewing even today, thirty five years later) and we were especially aware- having heard it through the grapevine -how extremely  popular it had been with a gay audience, whether intentional or otherwise. We envisaged promoting (selling) a concept (safer sex) like a product with a brand. We decided we needed a great track and some great looking -but believable- men. We wanted to find young men that wouldn’t mind being associated with safer sex and that was not an easy task in 1988 when HIV and AIDS was still an extremely negative concept in the popular press and public imagination.

Paul had the idea that we should recruit from ‘normal people’ (as opposed to models like Nick Kamen) who went to gay bars, identified as gay and hence with the target group and above all understood why trying to produce such a positive piece was so important at that time. This was agreed and so begun a quest to go to all central London gay bars on the lookout for our community stars. I think we approached about forty or fifty guys whom we thought might be suitable, over the course of about three evenings, in venues like Brief Encounter  on St Martins Lane and the Black Cap in Camden and gave them a flier with details of the shoot and a contact number. About ten then got back to us as being keen to do it (we were paying expenses only) and we then chose five from that group to represent a reasonable cross section of the young gay community, albeit ones that might stand out in the crowd.

We had to think about concepts that would be easily interpreted by the community and particularly popular at the time was the use of the -then relatively new- fabric: coloured lycra, contour fitted, protective padded gear, which was mainly used then by pro cyclists.  We thought about how the cyclists, though individuals, worked as a team  together in pro races such as the Tour De France, how they built camaraderie and took risks, safely protected by the gear they wore.  We came up with the central notion of the need to use ‘Protective Gear’.  In the script our team of riders then would initiate a novice into their ranks and encourage him that to be part of the team he would need to wear this ‘protective gear’. 

Obviously this story needed to be told in 80 seconds and have some kind of positive conclusion, a reward for becoming part of the team & wearing protective gear. The last shot then should have shown James stripping off his cycling shorts, putting a condom onto his erect dick and having sex using it with Michael, with the take away message coming up being ‘PROTECTIVE GEAR’ followed by the THT helpline number and Gay Switchboard’s number. However it was pretty clear to us, even as we scripted it, that this wasn’t going to happen. We could not be that explicit in 1985 and get away with it being shown in public venues. Interestingly, there was also the view that some -albeit a minority – gay men would find it offensive too, though I am not sure that would have stopped us. 

The compromise (which still blunts its message in my opinion)was to show James taking a condom from a pack and then cutting to the two of them in bed hugging or holding each other, presumably post coitus.  This was eventually what we filmed. We were also worried we would fall foul of the British Board of Film censors if it was too explicit, a very real concern in those days when the board was very much more restrictive than it is nowadays, in its requirement of necessary cuts in publically released film & videos to make them available for public viewing & use.

We also fell foul of the fact that most gay men by then were used to seeing- usually pirated copies- of far more explicit porn created by American studios, much of it featuring the legendary Jeff Striker , a pen name, he was born Charles Casper Peyton  and famed for his language in the shoots: you want my big cock, you like my big cock, yeh, yeh? , which werealmost completely devoted to fantasies around penetrative anal sex, whether passive or active. In 1986 and 1987 his studios released immensely popular titles targeted primarily at gay men such as Powertool and Bigger than Life (both 1986) and The Look, Stryker Force, In Hot Pursuit and Powerful 2 (1987). 

In fact this phrase became so closely associated with British gay men’s concepts of fantasy sex, that it became a gay meme and you could hear it played out in one night stands across the UK; personally I came to dread it happening during sex, as it felt like some awful gay ‘stepford wives’ version of interaction, killing emotion stone dead but undoubtedly it worked for some men in relation to the fantasy concepts it recreated. It was initially another driver of the Cleancut idea behind trying to create our own more nuanced versions of gay men’s sexual encounters. The video porn that was being created then in the UK was very tame indeed by comparison, in order to be acceptable to the UK’s far more restrictive censors. Of concern though at that time, was the fact that most of the American actors were not portrayed as practising safer sex in the shoots. In fact this was to only slowly change in the next decade, although change it did.    

We also decided to shoot it on 16mm film rather than using a video camera, as we felt that the colour saturation or vibrancy of film stock would be better suited to the message and then transferred to broadcast quality video. I was influenced particularly by Derek Jarman’s work at the time that was shot on 16mm film stock, as it possessed a depth of field and ‘image quality’ that wasn’t easily reproducible on video cams (even broadcast quality cams) at the time.

Production was at the relatively spacious Millivres Studio in Camden Town, courtesy of Alex, the owner. There were a lot of people involved who gave their time and resources willingly and often freely to enable the budget of the whole thing to come in at under £4000, the funding from the THT. On the day we had borrowed all the gear and the cycles from Evans Cycles in Camden Town and were under strict instructions that it all had to be returned in perfect condition the following day. On some of the production photos taken on the day I can mainly be seen stomping around moodily looking at paintwork on the bikes to ensure it wasn’t scratched or at least not visible if so. I never dared to enquire what happened to the cycle gear afterwards, when it went back to the shop.   

Gear on, and with some deft sweaty make up, the guys all sat, rode and looked up, centre and left as directed. Chris, a local lad living in Camden, whom we found in the depths of the Black Cap, looked especially convincing I thought, beckoning to the stragglers to get with the pack. We started filming about ten and had wound it up by about six.

The video was cut to ‘Disenchanted’ by the Communards with its lead vocal sung by Jimmy Somerville, and written by Richard Coles & Somerville, which we were given permission to use, again royalty free, by Colin Bell, their manager at London Records at the time. Taken from their debut album, then just released in 1986, and released as a single in May 1986, this very strongly positive track about a lost or disenchanted boy making supportive friend(s) fed into the ideas behind the safer sex video very well we felt:

So boy, now you know what to do,

Hey there boy, don’t be blue

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. 

More importantly, the condom itself also becomes the friend, being everything he needs to keep him safe and the final line that Pride is something that’s good for you and the encouragement to believe in yourself was we felt also perfect for the message. Interestingly there are also strong echoes in the lyrics of the Village People’s hit song ‘YMCA’, from 1978, with its refrain ‘Young Man, there’s no need to feel down’. Now, nearly forty years later I have still never heard a song I believe fits the video as well as the one we used. More importantly, it still sounds as fresh as it ever did and it is, in my opinion, the Communards and Jimmy’s finest output, in what is, all in all, a very fine back catalogue. 

Kudos must also be given to the producer Mike Thorne for this, who had also remixed Soft Cell’s extremely successful version of ‘Tainted Love’ in 1981. Interestingly, their own video for the single release of Disenchanted with Richard playing a slightly unconvincing market spiv in porkpie hat, was partly shot at the much missed ‘First Out’ coffee bar in St Martins Lane, where we would also film a lot more safer sex material in the ‘Sex, Love and Life’ trilogy of videos, which all came a few years later.   

Post production of the final film cut, was at the Four Corners Media Centre on Commercial Rd in Bethnal Green and this was transferred onto a broadcast master from which VHS copies were made and a copy shown to THT board for their final approval  and acceptance and eventually released by THT in November 1986. The day it was released ITV’s News at Ten picked the press release up and showed a short section of it on the News at Ten, again the first time a safer sex video had been broadcast by a national news programme, as far as I’m aware! 

We also got the front cover of Gay Times that month with a fetching shot of the lads in full gear. I received an anxious phone call late at night on the day it came out into the shops, from Bastian, one of the guys though, who worked as a model, worried about the exposure. He hadn’t realised it would be on front cover of magazines he said. It turned out he worked for an agency after all and was concerned about his career taking a potential nosedive. I wondered exactly what he had expected when he had agreed to it all.. in the end I managed to placate him and I didn’t hear any more from him but it was a big deal for the guys then, a different time when just being gay and out at work could have got you fired. The AIDS worries had just exacerbated , enhanced, all the issues. 

One of the first orders we had for the video was from the COI (Central Office of Information) who wanted a file copy for their records. We hoped this was a positive and not a negative sign.  The video is still out there, on You Tube, with about a quarter of a million views now. This is far higher than the figure we would have ever hoped to reach through views in pubs and clubs but social media wasn’t something we even dreamed of then and accessing your specific target market was far more difficult in those days.

In retrospect there are things we should have done that we didn’t. An obvious one would have been to ask the makers of gay porn videos to add it in the front of their titles  and indeed this was something that some companies did do in later years.  The problem is these were nearly all American imports in those days and these were still illegal in the UK at that stage and most American producers would have wanted a more targeted American message. We had at least sent VHS copies out to all the key UK clubs and pubs, this being included in the funding that THT had made to us.

It is all a long time ago now and it is genuinely difficult to imagine or recreate how it felt then to be involved in producing something of this nature; we are all so used to producing our own ‘media’ nowadays and interacting with it and if you were doing something now of this nature you would approach things very differently think. Even when video uploading began decades ago now on a fledgling ‘You Tube’ it was immediately taken down when I uploaded it as ‘not being acceptable’ content. We were however still pretty much at the  beginning in the UK and things would get worse before they got better.  

It is hard to remember now, that ‘safer sex’ literature had to be invented.

Having lived with it for so long now, its messages, modes and constructs are ingrained into most gay men of a certain age’s consciousnesses. But at first there was nothing. Just rumours, news articles, and the awful government advertising campaigns, with those tombstones. ‘Don’t die of ignorance’ said John Hurt, compounding the hurt (I still hadn’t completely forgiven him for Quentin Crisp).

It is often fascinating to see how we manage and assess the ‘risks’ we take in our lives. Obesity & smoking are two prime examples, where there is a high risk attached but many people do not perceive this to be the case. Driving, whilst using a mobile phone, is another. For more elderly people, it’s the slips, trips and falls caused by stairs & home furnishings that present a very high risk, that many hardly consider. Risk assessment, when you get down and dirty with it, is a fascinating thing. Moral panics often exacerbate our risk assessment and in the initial stages of HIV/AIDS the government actually created a moral panic about the perceptions of ‘catching HIV’ by airborn transmission, the use of public spaces (bus shelters for example), toilet seats and so on and, arguably, there are elements of a moral panic attached to the public perceptions of coronavirus. Equally, in certain situations of course, there are indeed very real risks attached.

For most of the population, not at high risk, to some extent they exacerbated a sense of  moral panic that was being fuelled and fanned by the ‘red top’ newspapers. Equally, for gay men who were at risk in certain situations, it is pretty safe to say they generally went down like a lead balloon. Nowadays, so many programmes about those days rake that tombstone up, and to be fair it did have an effect on spreading fear which engaged some caution. But for many gay men rather it stopped discussion, it closed minds and created its own climate of fear. Equally people still remember it all these years later.

On Lesbian and Gay Switchboard, on the night shifts, in the wee small hours however, people opened up to us about those dark fears. The rumours, the pervasive climate of  never really knowing; was oral sex safe? You couldn’t catch it by being coughed on could you? From a drinking glass? By deep kissing? Doubt, fear, worry, unease, concern. These were the prevailing feelings that many gay men encountered, lived with, worried about at night, in those times. Those on such gay switchboards across the country provided moral support, a listening ear, compassion and concern in those troubled times. All sorts of other medical issues became wrapped up as well with worries about the possible relation with HIV. If I’ve had herpes or gonnorhea before am I more at risk? There was only so much known at the time and sometimes we simply had to say we just didn’t know.

What became clear though, as time went on, was that there was a need for information and that it wasn’t right or fair that gay switchboards and sexual health clinics across the UK were shouldering this massive burden. The idea of a need for a national HIV or AIDS helpline became established, but who was going to pay for it?

What had happened however was that the community & community businesses had responded by offering its support in the form of donations and its time in the form of involvement in the creation of places like switchboard where people could be counselled, consoled, supported.  One of the first such organisations was the development of the Terence Higgins Trust named after the first man to die of AIDS in the UK. He had died aged 37, on the 4th July 1982 at St Thomas’ Hospital, London.

By naming the trust after Terry, the founder members – his partner and friends – hoped to personalise and humanise AIDS in a very public way. The following year, a public meeting was organised by London’s Gay Switchboard  and the Gay Medical Association (GMA) at Conway Hall in central London followed by a second public meeting held at the London Apprentice in August and the Terrence Higgins Trust was the result from which a small group of very committed volunteers came together. In particular this included Tony Whitehead, who went on to become the first chair of the trust’s steering committee. 

A leaflet about HIV/AIDS was produced by the Trust in 1983 (and in fact further north, the Scottish Aids Monitor (SAM) was set up in 1983 as a privately funded initiative, to specifically educate gay men about the threat of HIV and AIDS, though soon branched out to offer its services more widely, particularly in relation to drug injection which became endemic in eastern Scotland in 1985). By January 1984 the Trust had gained charitable status and was providing a range of targeted direct services immediately, including buddying/home-help, counselling, drug education and sex education.

They were the first charity in the UK to be set up in response to the HIV epidemic and to their eternal credit have been at the forefront of the fight against HIV and AIDS ever since. In 1985 they received a grant to employ two full time paid members of staff and produced a range of leaflets aimed at gay men (and others high risk groups) discussing what was known about the virus then and encouraging safer sex (and the use of a condom specifically). The Health Education Council (HEC) a health authority with some autonomy from direct government also produced its first literature on AIDS.

Whilst the Gay Mens’ Health Crisis (GMHC) had produced a 50 minute long ‘erotic video’ aimed at gay men in mid 1985 (first screened in October 1985 in New York) this took ‘dedicated’ watching (at home), it was also not available here in the UK and had a very american-centred feel to it. However, there was little else coming from ‘official sources’ that was aimed at gay men and early in 1986 it became clear to the Trust that there was a need for further positive promotional material aimed at encouraging gay men to have safer sex using ‘protective gear’: condoms in particular. Their office manager Nick Partridge, (now Sir Nick Partridge, who went on to become their Chief Executive Officer in 1995) and had also worked on Switchboard, approached us at Cleancut, to ask if we would like to make a short video that encouraged this and from that approach was born a 90 second short called ‘Gearing Up’ (for safer sex) , the first video of its sort actively promoting safer sex to gay & bisexual men. 

The video from the start ran into issues, as we decided we wanted to show it in as many venues as possible, as many times as possible. We had the idea that it would be shown as part of the on screen presentations shown in gay bars and clubs at the time. However the rules on what could and could not be shown publically were very strict at the time and our initial discussions with bar managers suggested they were loathe to show anything too explicit for fear of being prosecuted by the local authorities and that they would also lose their licence.  There was already a palpable fear by bar and club owners that they were viewed by the authorities as places where people met to find sexual partners, which in turn promoted more sexual activity, which was felt to be spreading the virus more rapidly.

Whilst they were not adverse to promoting the basic message of safer sex (some for example already had leaflets in their venues) they said they did not want to be seen to be encouraging it ‘too much’. There was a- genuine- concern that a ‘raunchy video’ would be one step too far. 

So our small production team at Cleancut (myself and business partner Paul Turner) in consultation with my then partner Dennis Gray, as an artistic director who was working for the Millivres publishing empire, run by Alex Mc Kenna, who produced the popular monthly magazine ‘Him Monthly‘ (which by then had become an early incarnation of Gay Times which reached its 500th issue in October 2019) and a veritable string of ‘porn mags’ such as Mister, Zipper & Vulcan. In discussions withNick at the Trust, we decided that we needed to be fairly careful in the approach we used. We wanted to be pro-community, positive in the support that the gay community could offer and upbeat about the message, which we felt needed to be as simple as possible. We soon ruled out having any spoken commentary or voiceover, as the video would usually be played in bars and clubs with loud music ongoing and a lot of background chatter. 

We developed the idea of a rapidly cut piece in the form of a music video, influenced I recall by that (now infamous) laundrette ad with Nick Kamen for stonewashed Levi 501 jeans, cut to’ I heard it through the Grapevine’ by Marvin Gaye. This 51 second commercial was beautifully shot and cut (it still stands up to repeated viewing even today, forty years later) and we were especially aware- having heard it through the grapevine -how extremely  popular it had been with a gay audience, whether intentional or otherwise. We envisaged promoting (selling) a concept (safer sex) like a product with a brand. We decided we needed a great track and some great looking -but believable- men. We wanted to find young men that wouldn’t mind being associated with safer sex and that was not an easy task in 1988 when HIV and AIDS was still an extremely negative concept in the popular press and public imagination.

Paul had the idea that we should recruit from ‘normal people’ (as opposed to models like Nick Kamen) who went to gay bars, identified as gay and hence with the target group and above all understood why trying to produce such a positive piece was so important at that time. This was agreed and so begun a quest to go to all central London gay bars on the lookout for our community stars. I think we approached about forty or fifty guys whom we thought might be suitable, over the course of about three evenings, in venues like Brief Encounter  on St Martins Lane and the Black Cap in Camden and gave them a flier with details of the shoot and a contact number. About ten then got back to us as being keen to do it (we were paying expenses only) and we then chose five from that group to represent a reasonable cross section of the young gay community, albeit ones that might stand out in the crowd.

We had to think about concepts that would be easily interpreted by the community and particularly popular at the time was the use of the -then relatively new- fabric: coloured lycra, contour fitted, protective padded gear, which was mainly used then by pro cyclists.  We thought about how the cyclists, though individuals, worked as a team  together in pro races such as the Tour De France, how they built camaraderie and took risks, safely protected by the gear they wore.  We came up with the central notion of the need to use ‘Protective Gear’.  In the script our team of riders then would initiate a novice into their ranks and encourage him that to be part of the team he would need to wear this ‘protective gear’. 

Obviously this story needed to be told in 80 seconds and have some kind of positive conclusion, a reward for becoming part of the team & wearing protective gear. The last shot then should have shown James stripping off his cycling shorts, putting a condom onto his erect dick and having sex using it with Michael, with the take away message coming up being ‘PROTECTIVE GEAR’ followed by the THT helpline number and Gay Switchboard’s number. However it was pretty clear to us, even as we scripted it, that this wasn’t going to happen. We could not be that explicit in 1985 and get away with it being shown in public venues. Interestingly, there was also the view that some -albeit a minority – gay men would find it offensive too, though I am not sure that would have stopped us. 

The compromise (which still blunts its message in my opinion)was to show James taking a condom from a pack and then cutting to the two of them in bed hugging or holding each other, presumably post coitus.  This was eventually what we filmed. We were also worried we would fall foul of the British Board of Film censors if it was too explicit, a very real concern in those days when the board was very much more restrictive than it is nowadays, in its requirement of necessary cuts in publically released film & videos to make them available for public viewing & use.

We also fell foul of the fact that most gay men by then were used to seeing- usually pirated copies- of far more explicit porn created by American studios, much of it featuring the legendary Jeff Striker, a pen name, he was born Charles Casper Peyton  and famed for his language in the shoots: you want my big cock, you like my big cock, yeh, yeh? , which werealmost completely devoted to fantasies around penetrative anal sex, whether passive or active. In 1986 and 1987 his studios released immensely popular titles targeted primarily at gay men such as Powertool and Bigger than Life (both 1986) and The Look, Stryker Force, In Hot Pursuit and Powerful 2 (1987). 

In fact this phrase became so closely associated with British gay men’s concepts of fantasy sex, that it became a gay meme and you could hear it played out in one night stands across the UK; personally I came to dread it happening during sex, as it felt like some awful gay ‘stepford wives’ version of interaction, killing emotion stone dead but undoubtedly it worked for some men in relation to the fantasy concepts it recreated. It was initially another driver of the Cleancut idea behind trying to create our own more nuanced versions of gay men’s sexual encounters. The video porn that was being created then in the UK was very tame indeed by comparison, in order to be acceptable to the UK’s far more restrictive censors. Of concern though at that time, was the fact that most of the American actors were not portrayed as practising safer sex in the shoots. In fact this was to only slowly change in the next decade, although change it did.    

We also decided to shoot it on 16mm film rather than using a video camera, as we felt that the colour saturation or vibrancy of film stock would be better suited to the message and then transferred to broadcast quality video. I was influenced particularly by Derek Jarman’s work at the time that was shot on 16mm film stock, as it possessed a depth of field and ‘image quality’ that wasn’t easily reproducible on video cams (even broadcast quality cams) at the time.

Production was at the relatively spacious Millivres Studio in Camden Town, courtesy of Alex, the owner. There were a lot of people involved who gave their time and resources willingly and often freely to enable the budget of the whole thing to come in at under £4000, the funding from the THT. On the day we had borrowed all the gear and the cycles from Evans Cycles in Camden Town and were under strict instructions that it all had to be returned in perfect condition the following day. On some of the production photos taken on the day I can mainly be seen stomping around moodily looking at paintwork on the bikes to ensure it wasn’t scratched or at least not visible if so. I never dared to enquire what happened to the cycle gear afterwards, when it went back to the shop.   

Gear on, and with some deft sweaty make up, the guys all sat, rode and looked up, centre and left as directed. Chris, a local lad living in Camden, whom we found in the depths of the Black Cap, looked especially convincing I thought, beckoning to the stragglers to get with the pack. We started filming about ten and had wound it up by about six.

The video was cut to ‘Disenchanted’ by the Communards with its lead vocal sung by Jimmy Somerville, and written by Richard Coles & Somerville, which we were given permission to use, again royalty free, by Colin Bell, their manager at London Records at the time. Taken from their debut album, then just released in 1986, and released as a single in May 1986, this very strongly positive track about a lost or disenchanted boy making supportive friend(s) fed into the ideas behind the safer sex video very well we felt:

So boy, now you know what to do,

Hey there boy, don’t be blue

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. 

More importantly, the condom itself also becomes the friend, being everything he needs to keep him safe and the final line that Pride is something that’s good for you and the encouragement to believe in yourself was we felt also perfect for the message. Interestingly there are also strong echoes in the lyrics of the Village People’s hit song ‘YMCA’, from 1978, with its refrain ‘Young Man, there’s no need to feel down’. Now, nearly forty years later I have still never heard a song I believe fits the video as well as the one we used. More importantly, it still sounds as fresh as it ever did and it is, in my opinion, the Communards and Jimmy’s finest output, in what is, all in all, a very fine back catalogue. 

Kudos must also be given to the producer Mike Thorne for this, who had also remixed Soft Cell’s extremely successful version of ‘Tainted Love’ in 1981. Interestingly, their own video for the single release of Disenchanted with Richard playing a slightly unconvincing market spiv in porkpie hat, was partly shot at the much missed ‘First Out’ coffee bar in St Martins Lane, where we would also film a lot more safer sex material in the ‘Sex, Love and Life’ trilogy of videos, which all came a few years later.   

Post production of the final film cut, was at the Four Corners Media Centre on Commercial Rd in Bethnal Green and this was transferred onto a broadcast master from which VHS copies were made and a copy shown to THT board for their final approval  and acceptance and eventually released by THT in November 1986. The day it was released ITV’s News at Ten picked the press release up and showed a short section of it on the News at Ten, again the first time a safer sex video had been broadcast by a national news programme, as far as I’m aware! 

We also got the front cover of Gay Times that month with a fetching shot of the lads in full gear. I received an anxious phone call late at night on the day it came out into the shops, from Bastian, one of the guys though, who worked as a model, worried about the exposure. He hadn’t realised it would be on front cover of magazines he said. It turned out he worked for an agency after all and was concerned about his career taking a potential nosedive. I wondered exactly what he had expected when he had agreed to it all.. in the end I managed to placate him and I didn’t hear more from him but it was a big deal for the guys then, a different time when just being gay and out at work could have got you fired. The AIDS worries had just exacerbated , enhanced, all the issues. 

One of the first orders we had for the video was from the COI (Central Office of Information) who wanted a file copy for their records. We hoped this was a positive and not a negative sign.  The video is still out there, on You Tube, with about a quarter of a million views now. This is far higher than the figure we would have ever hoped to reach through views in pubs and clubs but social media wasn’t something we even dreamed of then and accessing your specific target market was far more difficult in those days.

In retrospect there are things we should have done that we didn’t. An obvious one would have been to ask the makers of gay porn videos to add it in the front of their titles  and indeed this was something that some companies did do in later years.  The problem is these were nearly all American imports in those days and these were still illegal in the UK at that stage and most American producers would have wanted a more targeted American message.

We had at least sent VHS copies out to all the key UK clubs and pubs, this being included in the funding that THT had made to us. It is all a long time ago now and it is genuinely difficult to imagine or recreate how it felt then to be involved in producing something of this nature; we are all so used to producing our own ‘media’ nowadays and interacting with it and if you were doing something now of this nature you would approach things very differently I think. Even when video uploading began decades ago now, on a fledgling ‘You Tube’ it was immediately taken down when I uploaded it as ‘not being acceptable’ content.

Everything comes full circle. Recently the New Zealand based non-profit organisation Love Your Condom created a video campaign using athletes, to help promote gay mens´ safer sex, calling it Gear Up.

However back then we were still pretty much at the´beginning´in the UK and things would get worse before they got better.  

On to Sex love and life (The Rituals) 2.24 The Big one, Mark Ashton´s funeral

BACK to Sex, love and life: The index

After the THT video Gearing Up… had been out and about for a while we had the idea of adding a bit more to the basic ‘protective gear’ message

The idea was to create a trilogy of messages emphasising other things to do sexually, besides penetrative sex. In retrospect this seems like a slightly condescending idea but it’s important to recognise then that there were no real ‘manuals for safer sex’. Whilst ‘The Joy of Gay Sex‘ had come out in 1977 in the States with a print run of 75,000 copies this really wasn’t bought by a large number of gay men in the UK or even known about by many others. It’s not something that you would have found in bookstores except specialist ones like Gays The Word (and even they were prosecuted by HMRC for selling it at one stage..)  It was reissued and republished in an updated more contemporary form as The New Joy of Gay Sex, edited by the gay American writer & poet Felice Picano (whose poetry had particularly resonated with me years before in 1979) & published by Perennial in August 1993 but that still quite some years away.

Organisations like the THT were discussing options in their leaflets and literature, organisations like London Gay Switchboard would go into some detail if you had a phone call but there was always some reticence about how far it was permissible or appropriate to discuss ‘sexual pleasure’ on a call as opposed to the technical specifics of keeping ‘safe’ by using a condom. I think there was a concern that such conversations could stray into the pornographic in nature. Volunteers were supposed to terminate a call if it was felt the caller was asking questions of a very sexually specific nature that involved them self satisfying themselves on the phone. These were put down as ‘wank calls’ on the shifts log sheet kept by each volunteer. 

As I touched upon earlier, explicit pornographic videos being made in America but also in Denmark, Holland & France) were still technically illegal to watch or purchase in the UK, although some British companies had started to produce some relatively tame material.

In 1989 for the first time, the British born director Kristen Bjorn produced a ‘game changer’ in the gay porn industry, ‘Tropical Heatwave’ which portrayed a more nuanced and sensual style of pornography for gay men than had generally been produced by American studios at the time, which was soon very popular. However, again, it was not technically available in the UK but it was nevertheless widely seen. Certainly most men I knew would have seen it (often through pirated copies) in the few years after its release. Similarly pornographic magazines would mention the need for safer sex then but there was relatively little in the way of recognising that various erotic practices could also provide sexual pleasure. The ‘Millivres empire‘ owned by Alex McKenna in the late 80’s was still struggling to ensure that it kept the content of its stable (Vulcan, Zipper, Mister etc) within guidelines that were laid down by UK authorities and that it didn’t fall foul of the obscene publications act. At one stage the 45 degree rule or ‘angle of the dangle’ was held to be the extent to which an erection could be shown in a magazine.

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The law of desire: the angle of the dangle

´the angle of the dangle is inversely proportional to the heat of the meat,

provided that the maxis of the axis, and the gravity of the cavity, remain constant´.

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Anything more was likely to be seen as unacceptable by the authorities but in truth there were no hard and fast rules. Publishers would sometimes push the boundaries, to see what was acceptable.

All this invariably led to a somewhat mechanical or even clinical portrayal of sex, if it was portrayed at all. We wanted to be more adventurous and suggest that all sorts of sexual activities could be erotically charged.. and to be fair the original manual of gay sex in America had suggested these possibilities as far back as 1977. It came from discussions I’d had with gay men that acknowledged that there were many erogenous zones for men. One key one that came up was the nipples. At that time I’d never seen anything in any literature that acknowledged the huge role these played in relation to sexual pleasure for many men as well as women. We wanted to highlight a range of senses that could offer sensual erotic pleasure. Touch & taste were most frequently mentioned as being important stimulants.

My business partner Paul Turner had flown the nest to San Francisco by then to pursue options there. Luckily an old friend, Neil Mc Callum, was able to step in, to help develop the ideas and assist in the co-production and was to be invaluable in getting things done in the next few years. We decided to produce a number of self funded videos that could be used alongside the original protective gear advert that promoted these qualities. These were shot on broadcast quality steadycams rather than being on 16mm, as Gearing Up had been. We decided to use strong lighting to emphasise the chiaroscuro of light & shade. The Kiss was one which featured the highly erotic quality of kissing in a sexually charged situation.  In our 3 minute video, which we again set to music, a painter is moved to sketch a worker carefully replacing stained glass in a window. Although the setting wasn’t explicitly inside a church we wanted to strongly suggest that the setting for a sexual encounter could be a strong erotic addition to its enjoyment. Our protagonist, rather beautifully played by the actor Matthew Hiscott, starts to draw the semi clothed muscular figure but then is startled as he gets down from the steps, gently places the glass aside, beckons him to be quiet and kisses him. The rest of the 3 minute piece is then taken up by this passion, this one single long kiss (apart from a short break as they draw back to catch their breath). A stirring original soundtrack with its elements of religious music by Craig Snelling (Some Contact) enhanced the imagery. The ‘glass’ itself features two male silhouettes interspersed with a string of X’s. We end with a view of the completed drawing: the workman completing the glasswork repair.

A second video also shot at the original Four Corners film workshop in Bethnal Green Rd, East London, took Taste as its theme. The inspiration for the tableau was a shot by Bruce Weber called ‘On leave in Waikiki’ (Hawaii) shot in 1982. It shows five bare chested sailors on a bed together, engaged in various activities, one reads a book, another lies on the bed half asleep, another knees up to his chest appears deep in some personal thought, two are engaged, watching something off screen, possibly a TV.

 The image was included in  Weber’s first monograph, (Twelvetrees Press, 1983), hailed as his ‘breakthrough collection’ and still considered among his most iconic. The book includes a set called “On Leave in Waikiki,” described in its original publicity as ‘a breathtaking suite of images showing both the macho camaraderie and quiet reflection of Navy men on leave in Hawaii’. The shot on the bed has arguably become the portfolio’s most iconic image. Many of the pictures he took for the monograph were rejected by the magazine he had been asked to shoot them for, L’Uomo Vogue, as being ‘too risky’ for publication and appeared instead in 1982 in the more avant garde magazine ‘Details’ and then in his first monograph portfolio.

Initially however, we had some discussion about whether it was useful to use iconographic american material in this way, especially given the previous concerns I’ve outlined about the way the porn actor Jeff Striker (and others) had become so emblematic in gay sexual culture at the time. It was eventually agreed that we would proceed by trying to subvert the restrictive notions of masculinity, of being either ‘passive’ or ‘active’ that were created in particular by such stateside produced pornography. We had to recognise that fantasy was indeed a strong part of the eroticism of safer sex, indeed sex per se, and that we had already used it in fact in ‘Gearing Up’ and that it was no bad thing.  

Whilst Weber was not the first to understand the lure, the desire that the potentially unobtainable, perfectly shot figure or figures have for some, (perhaps especially some gay men), he was, arguably, the person to most perfectly articulate that desire visually in the last few decades of the previous century. His other photo monographs such as “Lifeguards; “Jeff,” a photo-essay of Jeff Aquilon, championship swimmer, of a young Matt Dillon and his equally iconic ‘Marky’ Mark Wahlberg portfolio are equally visually arresting and attractive in a slightly colder, more detached way. Later, the Pet Shop Boys were also to make use of his iconic visual americanised style in their video for ‘Being Boring‘. However, we felt the particular image ‘On Leave’ actually captured something rather warmer in his ouvre.

 

Whilst there is no sexual contact between them, for many gay men we knew the image was (and still is) charged with erotic meaning. Two of the men are smoking in the published shot but due to the health related element of the film we decided to self-censor this and replace these items in our group with beer, water and oranges and -perhaps oddly in retrospect- liquorice allsorts (though these were simply part of the playful subversion that we wanted to use). The video was cut to another original Craig Snelling track composed for the video & called ‘Taste‘ in a hi-energy style, popular in clubs at that time; it is a fast cut video (in colour) looking at various things happening between the men who are posed more or less similarly to the original Weber image. The word taste is repeated again & again in the lyrics, its double meaning thus hopefully emphasised, as opposed to over emphasised (it’s a matter of..).

A can of beer is thrown, opened and spills out over another soaking him so he removes his top. He pours more beer over his friend, causing him to remove his top too. Shorts are removed, a bottle of water is poured into another’s mouth, allsorts are thrown onto a bare chest, from which they are then eaten, an orange is squeezed onto another jock strap, then the juice sucked from it. This type of imagery is not unusual now but it was quite different from most explicit porn in this period (as mentioned nearly all produced in the States) with its key emphasis on the pleasure gained from penetration (both anal or oral). The video ends with a deck of cards thrown in the air, coming down with the jacks uppermost, the men silent, in tableau, again (with notion of the play on the word ‘jack’, as in to jack off or masturbate, of a playing card bearing a representation of a soldier, page, or knave, normally ranking next below a ‘queen’.

In the United States a ‘Jack’ is an absolutely amazing person with a great sense of humour who will make you laugh until you are crying, (though this meaning is less well known in the UK). It also referenced what was a big gay club hit at the time ‘Jack your Body’ by Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley, the first house song to reach number one in the UK . The title references ‘jacking’, an ecstatic dance style that emerged within the Chicago House scene in the early to mid 1980s. In 2020, The Guardian ranked the song at number 50 in their list of “The 100 greatest UK No 1s” and added 

“It’s hard to imagine now how strange and alien ‘Jack Your Body’ sounded in 1987. Other early house hits had at least come with a song or a hook attached, but this had neither: it may be the most minimal No 1 of all time… as a signal of a vast shift in the way pop music sounded, it’s unbeatable.”  

So, simply, the concept was referencing a new way of thinking, of being, of creating a good time.        

The final video shot ‘Touch’ was the least successful both literally and creatively of the three. In its post production I struggled to cut it together successfully. Unfortunately the montage we used (much of it shot in First Out’s now infamous coffee bar off the Tottenham Court Rd in central London), featuring waiters losing their balance, dancing mask wearing policemen, clergymen all spinning around to another song by Some Contact was not in the end very suggestive of the merits of ‘touch’. Eventually we gave up on it and edited it to use the footage of our lead character showing imagery of him as a baby, meeting friends in ´First Out´cafe and going to the Pride March and Festival in 1988, using a rapidly cut montage of footage we had shot when making the documentary of Pride in 1988 for the Pride committee that year. Hence it became a short video about having ‘Pride’, enjoying yourself and finding your identity by developing friends within a community of people, hence echoing, re-emphasising, the themes Jimmy Somerville sings about in the title track to Gearing Up. In some respects this became the most uplifting of them all.

The group of videos was then packaged together as the ‘Sex, Love and Life trilogy’ and ended with the helpline numbers trail for THT and Gay Switchboard and a relatively  new service, the ‘National AIDS helpline’.  

Interestingly at the same time in New York GMHC had asked a number of directors to produce their own safer sex ‘shorts collection’ too. Its concepts and messages were broadly similar to those we were working with, but they were able to be slightly more explicit than we were at the same (though this decision did in some respects came back to ‘bite’ them) and then again in 1989 where they were able to show naked bodies, with safer sex merssages using soundtracks like ´Jack Your Body´.

In fact, the Trust were to revisit some of these issues again in 1992, when they produced a further safer sex video, this time a fifty minute documentary aimed at gay men, some three years after the ‘Gearing Up’ video, entitled ‘The Gay Mans Guide to safer Sex‘ with, to give it credibility as a ‘health documentary’, the medical adviser, Dr Mike Youle, who as one of the founders of the Kobler Clinic of the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital in London, (the earliest specialist centre combining HIV care and research in the UK) had been the centre’s Clinical Trials Co-ordinator for six years then, looking at the potential for new drugs that might be effectively used against the ravages that HIV has on the immune system. It must have been very hard for such doctors at the time, (in much the same way that the coronavirus has been more recently) to be on wards where so little seemed to be really effective in halting HIV. Certainly his message is fairly sombre in this piece but given the circumstances this is hardly surprising. The documentary was licensed for home use only and produced in association with ‘Basilisk’ and ‘Pride Productions’, Mike Esser’s film company. Due to its intended home use and not public viewing it was at least possible to be more explicit in its nature you could actually show rolling a condom onto an erect cock for example).

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The Gay Mens Guide to Safer Sex (THT, 1992):

https://archive.org/details/Gay_Mans_Guide_2019_Remaster

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I always felt that they struggled with a little with it because it just wasn’t possible to be as explicit as much of the imported American gay porn flicks of the time were and therefore they fell a little flat. This was an issue sex educators in the UK ran up against again and again in this era. The American porn being produced was technically illegal but it was still available over here (VHS tape having made poor quality bootlegged copies widespread). The THT video is notable now particularly for its ‘Coil’ sound track, and, re-watching it after some decades, this documentary is still a nice attempt at producing something more ‘erotic’ for gay men in the safer sex genre but, in retrospect, it’s easier to understand now why this wasn’t universally liked, as I think its creators produced more the piece they wanted to see, rather than thinking about what the audience might actually want or need.

By our standards now, it’s very ‘slow’, many people found the music ‘very odd’ and at the time the video struggled to make an impact with younger men -but was better received by older men. I still feel the shorter ‘sex, love & life’ clips work better in getting a message across but again they were produced for a quite different (semi public club) use. The Trust teamed up with Pride Productions again though and had another go in 1993, producing a video more specifically targeted at younger gay men, which works far better I think. In the next decade, albeit very slowly, the British Board of Film Censor (BBFC) restrictions were to be lifted, to allow directors and producers like Esser and others to go on to create more explicit pornography to be either produced or marketed here in the UK but that was all still quite a way off in the late eighties: for now ‘the angle of the dangle’ ruled. And of course I am getting ahead of myself, yet again. 

On to Sex, love and life The Rituals) 2.28 Section 28 and a question going forwards..

BACK to Sex, love and Life: The index

I was up on the Heath, Hampstead Heath, one early February. 

It was a few years after the infamous ‘Great Storm’ of 1987 but the Heath still bore its scars. Trees half uprooted, some leaning at drunken angles, where the wind that night, clocked at 100mph even right in central London, had torn at them and toppled many. Nature was getting to work on old twisted boughs, some half alive and half dead. Surviving against the odds. Trees are amazing things we now know, with complex mycellullar connections to all the other trees in the woods. Helping each other out when needed, pumping nutrients into the ones that are in need of assistance. The ultimate community network. Another community above ground was using them too, also in some very creative ways.     

Eating my Heart Out

You first stood me up against that bare old oak, Smiling, said ‘I had something to offer’

And, hauled up around your waist, (ever the gymnast), I, responding with a grin said ‘What’?

Later. In your arms, we were entwined, your body taut, spat back at me: direct,

I tensed, said ‘I could conjure up, (Your True Nature)’ But you flashed those hazel eyes: just laughed.

Confiding in my knotted brow, eating, my face revealed

Your taste for adventures, I had no qualms, merely reflected

(State of the art) simple desire, to explore more fully your latex collection.

White board, magazines, tv screen: images, past to present, filtering through.

So enticed by your freeze frame and snapshot images (Fill in the gaps); Imagination in flight again.

Then led along a path, hand in hands, in hand, A vision- and the cue is given;

Revealing such intimacy had never been easy, (but no sinners’ absolution was needed)

Yet the open door led to unfamiliar galleries.

As you rang my body tensed, clutching a paper handkerchief; confirmed

The essence of our suspicions: The nature of the beast was cruel.

(No surprise) A curtailed ending in the second act.

Now I stand alone, Fragile. As that old lone oak in the face of great storm.

Waiting for that final gust to release me, with baited breath; as the curtain closes

To obscure the players, the stage (and our vision) and kill the pain.

Mark; Hampstead Heath, March 1990

Been thinking about ya: I just couldn’t wait to see
 Fling my arms around ya, as we fall in ecstasy

Ooh, sometimes
 The truth is harder than the pain inside,
 Ooh, sometimes
 It’s the broken heart that decides..

Lyrics (part) ‘Sometimes’, Clark/Bell 1986

It’s savage and it’s cruel and it shines like destruction

Comes in like the flood and it seems like religion

It’s noble and it’s brutal, it distorts and deranges

And it wrenches you up and you’re left like a…. zommmmbie

Lyrics (part) Love is a Stranger, Lennox/Stewart 1982

‘Eating my Heart Out’ is a prose poem I wrote, just after I had broken up with a man I had met on Hampstead’s West Heath, one unusually warm late February day in 1990. I had gone up on a whim, as I didn’t normally bother there in the wintertime, far too bare (no cover) and too cold for my liking. I had no great expectations. After wandering around a little, I noticed a guy giving me the eye and after circling a few times and being sure, I had gone up to him. Sexually, we hit it off immediately: there was a certain cockiness to him that I appreciate in men, and that he used sexually. We were doing things there on the Heath (safe things obviously) that I’d hardly have done with someone I’d known quite a while, that I was with at home, indoors. It pretty much blew my mind at the time; he was handsome in a low key way, quietly intelligent but not intensely so. I knew I had to have more. Oh, and did I say he was cocky too?

I want to say that we were on the same wavelength but I’m not entirely sure that’s true. As ever it was complicated: we were both in open relationships at the time but he was a very busy doctor, committed (perhaps too committed) to his patients. His time was very limited.  I wanted to spend more time with him than was really possible and these limitations all served to intensify my feelings. He’d say he was coming round to see me at 6 and not turn up till 9, as he’d been so busy. I’d have been hanging round the window since 6.15 looking to see if he was coming. I had ‘it’ bad. We went for a walk in Kew with our partners.. talked about making it all work; we held hands. We all went to the coast at Rottingdean; fabulously, he stripped off and went sea swimming in mid March. My heart raced then ached. We remember these things very selectively of course, as they fade into time.

In my mind now, I have the sequence of events over the month of March 1990 and onwards  simplified. However, one look at my diary entries at the time, shows I veered from one emotional extreme to another in the matter of days. The day we met, which now sticks in my mind (February 25th) actually carries a pretty short and very factual entry there. ‘Went to the Heath quite late, met a lovely guy called Mark, who is a doctor working on experimental trials. We had a great night after he came here and then onto his house in the East End. I’d like to see him again but he has a boyfriend (who’s away at present). 19C today, so very warm for February!’  And that’s it.

I went up to Newcastle for meetings for a few days and came back. But by the 28th February, I was already writing ‘last night felt quite harrowing. Mark and I went for dinner at Pasta Underground in Camden. Things went quite well but I felt nervous. He’s dyed his hair blond, which took some getting used to. He’d come straight from the sauna too, which I wasn’t so enraptured about ( I knew what went on in saunas from visiting too many myself). We came back and went to bed quite quickly. I don’t know why but after about twenty minutes he started crying, it seemed to change his mood. I started as well, but possibly not for the same reason. After that we had good sex but he seemed more distant. I didn’t know why. He said he had a problem: ‘I’m falling in love with you’ but he couldn’t leave his eight year old relationship with his boyfriend. Which was all very reasonable but it made me feel very ‘flat’. I don’t know where it leaves us’ I wrote, ‘probably I should forget him and be realistic. But the more I think of him, the more I want him; right now. Beside me’. 

By Friday though, a few days later I had changed my tune. I wrote ‘Renaissance! I feel radiant. So happy and full of life, full of warmth and affection for those close to me. And it shows! After another night spent with Mark, I know it may not continue for long and yet the spark has given me the confidence to do so much now, and I’m full of life, energy and happiness. I’m back in love, not necessarily with Mark but with life itself’. (Yes, retrospectively clearly I was in love with Mark). Two days later and by Sunday: ‘it’s an evolving situation’. We went to the LA, my partner ‘Joe met Mark’s partner but Mark wasn’t there with him and Joe has the hots for him. and vice versa. I have the hots and then some for Mark, and vice versa. Strange’.

‘After an afternoon spent at Kew Gardens with them both on Saturday, my feelings for Mark are stronger. I’m in love with him and how long it’ll last I don’t know but it certainly hurts. He’s off to Brussels for a conference from next Wednesday-Sunday, so a long gap to wait to see him again, which feels hard to cope with.

On the Monday though, according to my diary ‘I rang Mark and told him I had to see him before he went away. He agreed to come round. He had thought I was going to tell him I wanted to end it. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He could only stay an hour: a brief hour of chat, cuddles and tears. He’s in love with me, as I am with him. Where do we go from here? He wants to meet Joe but I don’t want to combine these two elements of my life for fear of losing them both. I think my infatuation will fade, wont it?’ 

Then, the following day, Tuesday: ‘Scared shitless of what might happen and what I’m heading towards. It’s either incredibly exciting or a disaster. I’m confused, excited, concerned but very, very scared above all. It’s like coming out, all over again. I want a four way relationship with all of us. That’s what I want .. but. It’s the only way forward for us. Could we all cope with it?  As I’m writing this I realise I feel there’s no other option but to try it. I’d never forgive myself If I didn’t try to make this all work’.

And later in that same diary entry: ‘I don’t want Mark to change the way he feels about me: his looks at me, his caresses, his outrageous kisses in public. Nobody, nobody has ever done that before in my seventeen years of adulthood and it’s so liberating.. It’s why I’m turned inside out and upside down, I’m idolising him almost. So scared, so excited, so scared’.

‘And Joe: suddenly all these warm tender feelings are surfacing for him. Mark has somehow opened that up again. My ability to feel, to let myself be hurt and to feel ok about being hurt because it’s about being real again. In this climate, with the work, I’d drawn a protective barrier around myself, so the things people might say, would bounce off me’.

Sunday March 11th: ‘the last four days have been so eventful that it’s difficult to recall them accurately  now.  Mark is back from Brussels tomorrow, he rang on Friday, sounding a bit flat I thought. We (Joe and I) went to the London Apprentice (LA ) on Friday and I got drunk. We got a taxi home and I felt very down; later blurting all my feelings out for Mark, pretty much unfiltered. Insensitive. I said I didn’t want to continue seeing him (Joe). He was in tears. I was a bastard, it was such a cruel thing to do, The following morning I regretted it bitterly and- luckily for me- we made up again.

Monday March 12th ‘Oh Christ: angst returns again. Mark phoned and he only wants to see me on Tuesday (yes, I know dear reader.. but bear with me). He’d been out on the town in Paris all night on an E and feels blitzed out of his mind. I laugh and joke and secretly hate him for it. Then I put the phone down and want him desperately. Then I decide I never want to see him again. Is love always so full of confusion and misery? I was reduced to pleading for ‘half an hour with him’, soon. Don’t get all angsty he says. Christ! What does he expect, he is nourishing a love/hate complex in me, with added paranoia too. I haven’t slept with Mark for 12 days now, that’s not the action of someone who’s in love, He playing with me like I’m like his dog Buster. Bastard’.

Then in my diary a little later on Monday: ‘He rang and said he loves me still, I told him I loved him and I couldn’t give him up, however hard I tried. Sickening isn’t it??! We talked for a long time about the future, basically it doesn’t look very bright one way or another. He says he doesn’t want to sleep with me alone for fear of getting more involved and more hurt. Or rather, he wants too but won’t let himself’.

Tuesday 14th March had the following: ‘That’s it, I’ve decided to stop progressing my relationship with Mark, to save my relationship with Joe. There’s no room for manoeuvring anymore. It’s 16 days into this thing now.

Thursday 15th March: ‘All change again, feelings are coming flooding back at me, washing over me.. so he’s not an angel but what we have is still there, nevertheless. He’s coming round tonight to see me. He says he could cope if I said I never wanted to see him again though. How do I relate to that?  Midnight: I’ve been waiting hours and hours, he hasn’t turned up yet. What’s he doing? I’m in such a vulnerable position, I don’t know how much more I can cope with this‘.

I had a busy Thursday-Saturday period planned for work at the HEA, at a meeting in Manchester and so I didn’t write anymore until the following Monday,19th March: ‘Back from Manchester meeting, which wasn’t too bad. I contained my emotions quite well and even got engaged enough to forget them completely, for a while. Mark DID come round on Thursday (Friday morning) eventually, at around 12.30am’.

‘On Sunday, Joe and I went down to Brighton, meeting Mark and his boyfreind there. I don’t know why but after a while it all seemed like a bit of nightmare. Mark suddenly seemed to become very aloof after a while. For the journey back, in their car, I just wanted alternately to cry and scream. Mark’s touched some raw part of me, I want to be close to him, feel so strongly about him, that it’s almost unbearable when I’m with him, with other people, I want to do all the things that lovers do, walk along the beach holding hands, laugh, talk, smile, kiss. All these things are being denied to me and it’s making me quite mad with hurt, desire, fear, love and hate. I would seriously contemplate …… The things he does to me are things no one has ever done before to me or that I’ve wanted from anybody. Yet now I realise that despite all his promises, he’ll have to draw himself away- is drawing himself away- from me; the greatest love of my life is drawing himself away from me, disentangling himself from me and the magic he weaves around me: for me he will cease to be‘.

‘It feels like I’m garbling on paper but I have to get it out of me somehow, put it down on paper to preserve  my emotions as they are now. So I can look back, years, maybe even decades on and marvel that this is how I felt about another man once. For poor Joe, it is simply becoming all too much. He is having to cope with me, living in this seriously fucked head space and it must be hard. My problem though, is that like real love, my feelings are growing stronger each time I see Mark, not weaker. On the beach in Rottingdean, he suddenly decided to swim in the water, stripped off and went in. I felt rapturously in awe of him; he represented at that moment everything I’d always wanted in a man and looked so beautiful. Yet in some ways, he paid me so little attention, except to be a tease. ‘I want to go into a little cove with you and have you’, he confided quietly to me on the beach afterwards. I was thrilled to the core that this hero of mine, was being so suggestive with me. I thought of Bowies song ‘Heroes’: ‘we can be heroes just for one day’.  So much so, that I could hardly respond with more than a feeble joke. I was weak in the presence of beauty. It may have been one of the most erotic moments of my life. I knew it was impossible, I knew it was the most fabulous suggestion he could possibly have made to me, I was stunned by the concept of such intimacy, in that situation’.

‘Yet, as I write this, I recall the correspondence and intimacy I once had with a man, who sent me a postcard that simply said ‘Wow’ on the back. I can’t even recall his name now but it was the greatest, most passionate night I’d had up until that time. The next time we met at his house, it just didn’t work between us at all. Why? I remember how Mark had recalled our first meeting up on the Heath, how special it seemed to us both. I can’t write anymore. I’m so scared that I am going to lose everything on this but I don’t think I can stop myself. I don’t think I’m ever going to feel so strongly again towards anyone. But it’s like that Great Storm we had back in October 1987: I watched the huge trees outside shift and creak and bend and it seemed almost unimaginable that they could take so much. And then that one almighty gust that pulled them down, with a huge crack of branches splitting, splintering, a rumble that shook the ground. They had seemed ready: waiting for the gust to release them. I want, I need that gust’.

Waiting for that gust to release me, with baited breath.

The curtain to slide back again, to obscure the stage, our vision and the pain. 

Oh that pain!’ 

Little by little I was rationalising the situation to myself though. On Tuesday March 20th I wrote: ‘as the situation becomes intractable, to survive I must master these feelings, control them, I must finally pull away without hurting myself and others around me too deeply (the first cut is the deepest..). Sometimes I feel he (Mark) still feels something strongly for me but my way of coping with this is to believe that he is a bastard and doesn’t feel anything. That he led me on. The weird thing about it is that I met Mark on the Heath. Weird because it throws into confusion my thoughts about what that situation provides. It’s not just a place where people grab extra casual sex necessarily.  I went up to the Heath over the weekend just to walk, to remember that spot where we had met. To marvel at what had occurred there’. It struck me that the place must be full of memories of those who had fallen in love there, every inch of the ground saturated with emotions. I wondered if the trees had picked up on it at all. I was just having idling thoughts: don’t judge me too much for it.

‘There were two guys together up there who had looked interested as I’d walked about. I had, for the first time in a month, Iooked at them and felt an attraction for someone else. Nothing major, just simple casual attraction. Something had changed, I was letting go of Mark. When I asked how long had they met they said jokingly ‘oh a few weeks’. In fact it was years but they got off on imagining that they had only just met, that their sex was as fresh and uninformed as that first voyage. Something about that seems such a good idea. it’s a brilliant concept and turns upside down all notions of how a long relationship is best or better. It makes me want to explore the idea further, perhaps write a script about these ideas. Now I understand why I like love pains so much, it’s an angst I thrive upon, what I live for, what really make me tick. The angst and intensity of such internal strife.’ 

Saturday 24th March. ‘Haven’t spoke to Mark now since last Wednesday, it appears to be finally all over. It leaves me feeling sad but happy in a way, the pain is growing a little less as well, day on day’.

Friday 30th March. ‘Now a month since we met. So sick of it all I’ve decided to finally finish it all with Mark. I can’t see him without wanting to sleep with him but it’s not on the cards, so the alternative can only be to stop seeing him at all. So tonight was a depressing night out with him, with a very depressing final kiss´. That evening he had said he could not see me more than maybe once in two weeks. I knew I couldn’t cope with waiting that long, without going crazy. So, on Farringdon tube station I said ‘I can’t Mark. This is the end .. I’m saying goodbye’. ‘Brief Encounter’ eat your heart out but It at least felt like taking back some control. He got in the train and was gone. I sat on the platform for an hour stunned at what I had done and the huge empty hole that had opened up inside of me. And that was it. I carried on and covered the hole over. I don’t intend to ever see him again’ I wrote. 

Except, it’s not quite the end of the story. I got on with things, I too had plenty of other stuff happening in my life. Slowly, in a few months the hole filled up, and I healed. Or so I thought. I heard through a friend, that he had gone away to teach medicine in Africa for quite a while. I stopped thinking about him. Then, almost exactly a year later I was in the London Apprentice (the LA). It was an odd time. We were coming to the end of the Gulf War against Iraq, Tony Blair’s war, his one fatal mistake. We had thought we could trust him. We were wrong. If you couldn’t trust a Labour PM anymore who could you trust? But those thoughts were far from my head that night, I was in a good mood, it was a good night, busy as ever, and I was getting around the place, like you did.

Then a friend came up to me. Hey, I’ve just seen your Mark, he’s back. He’s dressed as an Iraqi soldier, you can’t miss him. My heart stopped. It didn’t just miss a beat. I thought: I won’t go and search him out, if I see him well.. I see him.  So, for the next hour, I didn’t see him. And then, just as I was wondering if he really was there, in a corner by the fire door, there he was. Dressed as an Iraqi soldier (sans gun I hasten to add). He saw me, as I saw him.  ‘Hey Dave, how’ve you been, it’s been a long time?’ Suddenly my heart was there again, beating wildly, racing. In front of everybody, somewhat to my surprise and shock, I burst into huge sobs: gut wrenching, body racking sobs. There was no question of stopping them, I’d lost that control. He held me. Slowly, they subsided. He looked at me, said quietly: ‘Wow, you had it really bad, didn’t you’? I could only nod dumbly.

There is a kind of ‘happy ending’ to this story. He said ‘let’s go home and talk’-we walked back to my place in Kings Cross (with him still dressed as an Iraqi soldier but by this time I was like, ‘what the hell’..).  We talked a lot; we had sex again together, and eventually exhausted at 6 or 7 in the morning we slept. When I woke he was looking at me. ‘Dave.. you know this could never work don’t you?’ I nodded, I did, I really did. He left and I felt fine, no hole but (and yes, it’s a cliche I know) maybe ‘whole’ again. That was my closure on Mark. I never met him again. I wonder if he went home dressed as an Iraqi soldier still? It’s only just occurred to me, thirty years later. Boy: did that man eat my heart out. So that’s what comes from going up to the Heath, with ‘low expectations’, late on a February afternoon. Watch out!  

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 The Crying Game, Dave Berry 1964 & re-released by Boy George 1994

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That ‘c’ word: Cruising. I’ve hesitated to bring this up before, as it has so many cliches attached to it and so many opinions. For some, it’s entirely natural thing to do (both with same sex and mixed sex partners, (though it’s more usually called the delightfully downmarket term ‘dogging’ when heterosexuals are having sex en masse al fresco). For many, even quite a lot of gay men, it’s an activity that they cannot possibly fathom how anyone would or could consider doing. There are some similarities to the feelings people have on cottaging. On Switchboard we were not allowed to give out cruising locations, this having more to do with the legal implications of outdoor sexual activity rather than some (but certainly not all) members distaste for it. As I’ve mentioned it did come up as a subject in conversations on the phonelines there. If pushed on the subject, I usually did not pretend ‘it didn’t happen’ but mentioned the reasons why people needed to be careful if engaging in such activity. And certainly in some places it was a dangerous or risky thing to do, for a variety of reasons.  

For myself? Well for years, decades even I didn’t venture onto the Heath to cruise (or anywhere else come to that, the location I mentioned earlier after Traffic spilled out on the Caledonian Rd was about the first time I’d ventured into that world), indeed for many years I didn’t know even where to go, as I would venture up there to the Heath for a simple walk and see nothing remotely salacious going on. Then one day I realised the Heath has many different areas and different ‘sides’ to it as well, it is used for very many purposes by different groups of people.

It started by recognising that many gay men went swimming in the mens’ bathing pond on the East Heath. In summer, on a good day, the paddock outside would be nose to tail with men on their own, in couples or groups having picnics, sunbathing, generally taking the air. It was all pretty obvious. For some time having found that I assumed that was it, what I’d heard all about. Oh, I was so very, very wrong.

One day I realised, looking more carefully at the London A-Z map, that there was a whole area I had never even visited, in the decade I’d been going up to the Health, simply for  recreation. In fact, for a time there were two separate areas that were cruised by men on the Heath, one on the east side, close to a large house and overgrown tennis courts off the main road, which was often quite busy in an afternoon and early evening. But when the house was renovated and restored and a lot of the undergrowth and overgrown vegetation chopped back, around the mid nineties, this mostly ceased.  This was sometimes known as the ‘second secret garden’ (for reasons I’ll now divulge).

There was another area completely, on the west side of Hampstead Heath, which was reached via Jack Straws Castle, a hotel then later renovated to a public house at the very top of Hampstead Village, consisting of an overgrown old hospital with a large pergola, ornamental pools and other ornamentation. This area was also very popular at one stage but again it was renovated by the council in the late 90’s, who actually made a very good job of it. It’s really worth a trip up to the Heath to see it alone.. it’s called the ‘Hill Garden‘ and is basically a raised walkway, with many mature vines and roses, set amidst some wonderfully dramatic gardens and ponds.

I discovered, upon browsing a little, that it actually has quite a history attached to it. In 1904  Lord Leverhulme, who was both a rather wealthy philanthropist and a great lover of landscape gardening, purchased a large house built in 1895, on the West Heath called ‘The Hill’. He bought further land attached to it in the following few years and landscaped it with the pergola; extending it further in 1911 and 1925. He held extravagant Edwardian garden parties with friends, able to spend long summer evenings there in what became quite spectacular gardens. However, it fell into a decline with no one to care for it after his death in 1925. It was then bought and renamed Inverforth House by Andrew Weir, Baron Inverforth and then on his death became a Orthopaedic Society Hospital from 1956 but little was done after this to maintain the pergola area, although the gardens in front and back of the house facade were maintained. It became overgrown and disused, and the hospital itself closed in the mid eighties.

For many years it was possible to access the pergola walkway (and house grounds) from the part of Hampstead West Heath below it, however, and it became known by many as ‘the Secret Garden’ until the House was converted into luxury apartments in the mid 1990’s and the pergola area was bought by the City of London Corporation and (it must be said very beautifully) restored, for all to use, in the mid 1990s. The house was grade II listed in 1988. For all intents and purposes, this was a very popular part of the ‘cruising ground’ at Hampstead for many years as a result, in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s in particular. Not surprisingly, the Wikipedia entry online about the house and gardens makes absolutely no mention of its notoriety for this purpose.

It’s not something I’d done for years, after I finally moved away from London early in 2003, but looking online recently I was surprised to see quite a lot of information about cruising there. There was even a map showing various areas and activities. Well, we certainly didn’t have THAT in my day! One entry was factual and direct. Hampstead Heath, it said.

Hampstead Heath is one of the busiest and most popular cruising areas in London, if not the world. It is also the safest cruising ground of London. The Police knows what goes on and (sic) is happy to close their eyes as long as cruisers don’t annoy the locals too much. The locals also know it and don’t venture on there after dark. The cruising area is located just up the hill from Hampstead Tube Station, which is part of the Northern Line. The Main entrance onto the Gay West Heath is from behind the ‘Jack Straws Castle’.

I am not sure if it is all quite as laissez faire as the entry makes out but I guess it’s broadly accurate. Another article I  found online though, on the Vice UK website by James Greig, from June 2019 was very much more thoughtful, indeed, provocative. Why do people still go Cruising ‘it was headed. The byliner said ‘As cruising spots in London are under threat and apps have made casual hook-ups more convenient, what role does going outside in search of sex play in queer lives today?

So he had decided to go to the Heath and talk with men cruising up there about what they wanted and hoped to find, indeed why they still did it in the age of ‘Grindr’ et al (the gay dating app).

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Cruising spots in London: A Vice news investigation

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Men he met there explained that they found the adrenaline rush better when cruising outside and likened using apps like Grindr to ‘ordering a pizza’. You usually knew what flavours you liked and looked to order the same again. Outside, there was the possibility of experimenting with ‘different flavours’ and being surprised by your expanded boundaries (my analogy, not theirs). He wrote a thought provoking article about their honest responses and finished with this:

‘Cruising isn’t just a response to repression that will disappear if or when that repression does (as I discovered, you’d have to go back pretty far in history for cruising to considered a “necessity”). It offers a fundamentally different sexual experience, which many still find appealing. As George Michael told us 21 years ago, there’s no shame in being done with the sofa, the hall and kitchen table, and going outside in search of sex. In fact, it’s something we should celebrate‘.

This was interesting for me, as it rang true to experiences that I’d had there, decades before. Once I had started exploring this sub culture a little more I realised that it wasn’t seedy in a way I’d expected at all, in fact there were many occasions when it was quite a beautiful experience.

Whilst the place did have its unwritten rules, codes and conduct, that the men there generally understood, as on the canal towpath I had stumbled upon some years earlier, to go there was to experience an entirely transgressive culture: the signs, signals and senses displayed were completely different to those in the ‘other world’. Sometimes, going there was more akin to stepping through the looking glass, into another parallel world. Light and shade became important, thickets and glades had different uses, noises, sounds suddenly became charged, imbued with meaning. Language was less important, gestures held meaning,  the male gaze was imbued with many different perceptions of desire; there were couples, groups, observers, voyeurs, individuals. Of course there were people who just wanted to get there, get off and go.  All of the complexity of human desire was up there though, on display. Some would chat first , some would chat after, some wanted to meet up again, some wanted to have a relationship. In fact, a number of the most intense relationships I’ve ever had in my life started up there, on the Heath.       

The state of mind you went up there with also changed the experience. Feel too needy, look too desperate and people would back away. Feel calm, content, happy and people would want to share some of that with you.

Daytime sex and night time sex there were often quite different experiences. In the light you could make eye contact from a distance, sense what was wanted, what was on offer, clues were given and instincts followed. Night time sex up there was a different matter.  Often it was so dark you couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of you. Really you had no idea who you were walking into. But there were things; sounds: lightly trodden sticks or heavily trodden, heavy breathing or soft, smells: cigarette smoke, a lighter, after shave, sweat? Speed too .. standing silent, moving quickly ? Height.. taller or shorter? Just one person or a couple, or even a crowd? I used to find that dusk was a perfect time, an interim period where you often utilised both daytime & night time senses. Night time was generally more difficult though, sometimes you just had to trust your instincts.

One fairly clear, warm, summer, moonlit night in late June I recall vividly still, decades later. Moonlight was always useful, as it offered up a version of those daytime clues. This was a particularly bright moon too, enabling, when your eyes were completely accustomed, a depth of field far greater than on most nights. But there was still some cloud about, so every so often it would darken.

It had been a gloriously hot day and the ground was still warm. The brick walls of the Hill Garden were still radiating back some heat from the days’ strong sun, as was the earth, even the bark on the trees.  It was still and quiet though, just some birds rustling in their nests, an owl hooting, maybe a vole or field mouse going about its business. You came down a hill from the main road by the pond at Jack Straws Castle, up from Hampstead Village, (it was and remains a famous pub) then to the west side there was a well worn, probably old cart track, you could walk along, paths leading off it, trees overhanging it on either side.

Cruising up on the heath: A users guide https://london.gaycities.com/bars/3228-hampstead-heath

As I came down the hill and forked right on the worn track, the moon went behind a thicker cloud and it suddenly went dark. I had started to walk along the track, reflecting that I could have been blindfolded but still know where to go, ahead I could see little but a few cigarettes being drawn on. Suddenly the full moon came out again and it seemed to grow very bright. I started, almost gasped, astonished for I could see the path ahead was lined with men standing there, watching, waiting. As I walked through them on the track I realised that there must be hundreds of men down here: all quiet, still. The thought went through my head that there must be more men up here on the Heath tonight than at ‘Heaven’, the big megadisco in London’s centre at Charing Cross. 

I could see there were many moonlit silhouettes: figures in all forms of dress, some of partial undress. The scene had an absolute beauty to it, which was many things: erotic, charged with sexual tension, and something primeval about it, even faintly dangerous, yet sublimely reassuring at the same time. All these strangers experiencing, sharing this intimate moment together, in the middle of the cosmopolitan metropolis of London. It was midnight, I was surrounded by strangers and yet I had never felt more intimacy with, never felt more .. well, love is the only word I can come up with that does it justice, for my fellow man. It was very, very special. And we all knew it was special: no one wanted to talk and break the spell. Truly, it was a midsummer night’s dream.  

And if it offered up so many possibilities? And how could it be wrong, when it had offered up an experience like Mark?  Mark: who broke my heart, and then stitched it back together again. 

He´s playing with me, like I’m like his dog Buster. Bastard’.

Buster

1 Stand on the shore for me, back arched, still tall

Kiss me, shake sand in my face: you never tire!

Hold me back down, ’till I choke with desire

Wear me forever, until you tire of this life.

2 You don’t know it but this is the most erotic moment.

You can’t be sure now, yet this is the strongest you will ever feel.

You’ll never understand: this is the perfect deal.

A deal I’ll remember forever, till I tire of my life.

3 You lay down and died for me: gave chase to my sticks

Rolled over and cried for me, closed those bright eyes

Ran away and flew with me: what we had needed no lies

Now: walk away into the sun with me, until we tire of this life!

4 I didn’t expect it to go all the way,

I couldn’t recall this had ever happened before,

I shouldn’t be feeling the way I do, wanting more.

Remembering us forever: till the end of this life.

5 Sit up and beg for me: look at me, hard,

Run away and away from me, until you’re small as fly

Now closer and close to me: so close that I’ll cry

Hug me and hold me: let’s live life this way.

6 We diced with love, gave in to its charms

We both knew the questions but the answers were wrong

We played around hard but we played for too long

I posted you letters. But you didn’t respond.

Wiseman, 19 March

So yes, dear reader, I understand if you find the whole idea of such cruising strange, even a tad repugnant. But it was one of those things I just fell in love with. And those memories, they are the best, still in my mind, taking me to a world away from the here and now, providing a memory within me so deep, so rich, so vivid, that I can close my eyes and still go back there now.

And so I do- and then I sigh a little for things past, and feel a little sad, before remembering I need to be thanking someone for allowing me to be there at all, to experience such magical nights. And to remember that some of us didn’t get to have the luxury of the experience or the memory..  

´No more I love yous´ (Originally recorded by The Lover Speaks, 1986, re-released by Annie Lennox, 1995)

On to Sex, love and life (The Rituals) 2.27 1988 Sex, Love and Life..

BACK to Sex, love and life: An index