Echoes of Innocence: lotta soul version (Wiseman 2024)
Remember! Bluebells underfoot. Crisp leaves, shades- russet gold, brown.
Breathlessly sliding, fast, faster, downhill on top of pure white fresh fallen snow,
Building stones across valley stream;watching damned muddy water break and surge!
Long late summer days spent climbing up amongst a green canopy, making our camps;
Remember! When it seemed the whole world was ours to make, to take?
And bright starry nights, when it seemed the whole universe was close enough to touch.
How long ago now it seems, since we forgot time and played, so innocently,
Amongst those rivulets, now merely trickles in the torrent that is life.
Wiseman, 1978, On timeless innocence..
Although I was born in July 1957, I came, kicking and screaming, at two am one warm summer night, into a western world in which there were the seeds of ‘gay consciousness’ and a fledgling ‘gay scene’, (the term ‘gay’ was -just about- being used by then); seeds that had, albeit slowly, been sprouting shoots for much of the previous half century. In truth though, in 1957, it had been a pretty awful decade so far, for gay rights generally. In Britain at least, there was just a glimpse of a potential new dawn, as the ‘Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution’ (better known as the Wolfenden report, after Lord Wolfenden, who had chaired its committee) was published.
Those hoping for liberation would have their hopes dashed. Although, after decades of discrimination, it finally advised the British Government that private, consensual homosexual acts should be made legal in Britain, they promptly decided that wasn’t what the report should be saying and chose to ignore the advice. In fact, it was to take the first decade of my life, before such change actually occurred.
But, more importantly for me, what I have come to recognise in time, is that throughout the first twenty-one years of my life, before I decided who, what I really was, there were a large number of significant influencers and influences already acting on my development, some of which I understood or had grasped at that time and others which existed for me on a more marginal level: perhaps even in my subconscious. A great deal of which I knew relatively little about, was already influencing my life choices. I was beginning to read about the people who had shaped cultural memes in the First ‘Great War’ years (1914-1918): poets such as Owen and Sassoon, and about the progressive, sometimes transgressive cultural movements of the twenties and thirties, both artistic and social, such as the Bloomsbury set; and recognising that in the Second World War (1939-1945) the set of social values and mores inherent in our western society, temporarily changed for some time, (in fact permanently for some), and that the society I was born into, in the mid to late ’50s had been shaped by a new generation of ‘angry young men’ (and let’s be clear right now, women), whether musicians, writers or playwrights. Equally, to realise that even the history books that I had been exposed to, only told a very limited part of the ‘back story’ about the world I was living in and even less about the many historical aspects that had shaped the rest of the world.
And then later, I became aware of how, in the years after I had been born, rapidly some aspects of society had changed, that moral panics had come and gone, of how I had been sheltered from most of these changes and yet indirectly affected by them. How the decisions I took as a teenager, affected my life, both succinctly and in very specific ways and finally, finally, quite how lucky I had been, to have fallen on my feet, more or less by accident, having arrived in London from Cornwall in the mid seventies, as a young man with a particular set of values that could not possibly have seen me through the next few decades and were inevitably going to change.
So, it is not my intention in this, my very own and personal backstory, to go into any great detail about ‘homosexual culture’ before around the middle of the last century, as so many other authors have now documented, and attempted to do justice to, relevant historical archival records (more especially in Europe) from ancient Rome through the Middle Ages, the Reformation, into the Industrial Revolution and Victorian England, (all of which are now readily available). However, I do at least want to try to document some of the things that happened in the half century leading up to my birth, that produced the changes in society that nurtured, created even, the society that I, in particular, grew up in and moulded the person that I was to become, by the time I was twenty one (at that time the legal age of homosexual consent) and onwards, and how these were changes that were not just affecting me but my generation.
In retrospect, there was a quite specific period; the decades from the twenties to the early fifties, that shaped me as I was discovering myself, and the people I present are those whom I came to identify with: call them my ‘role models’, if you will. Most importantly however, there was no clear trajectory, nothing like what it’s become fashionable to call a ‘road map’ when I was in my teens, to give any real clue in that period, as to how to live my life, if I chose to live it as a ‘homosexual’: a gay man. There were however, plenty of flashing red lights seemingly signalling ‘danger’.
Another relevant question at this point is perhaps why I should have needed specifically gay role models? Why not choose heterosexual role models for example? In fact, why indeed look for role models at all?
Various philosophers have weighed in on this thorny question. Whilst most suggest that looking for role models in our lives can assist us in becoming better ‘more rounded’ individuals there is no strong consensus on this or how best to go about it. Nietzsche famously said ‘Whoever does not have a good father should procure one”. He lost his own father to cancer, before he was even five. He and his sister were brought up by their mother, grandmother, and two aunts. Arguably this experience did him no harm at all, if his later life and works were anything to go by, though it is true he spent much of the latter part of his life living in seclusion. Central to Nietzsche’s philosophy was the quality of Selbstuberwindung, or ‘self-overcoming’, a kind of will power. He felt that to distract ourselves from the discomfort and hardships of life was to miss out on the opportunity to learn, grow and develop, and as a result bring out the best of who we are. He suggested that the person who could learn to deal with the difficulties and challenges of life, and in doing so rise above conventional wisdom, that is to make decisions based on the specifics and needs of their own life and loves, would be an Übermensch, or ‘superman’. For him the key question we should ask ourselves is: Are we growing each day, becoming better, stronger, wiser, smarter, and constantly improving?
Of course Nietzsche was widely discredited in the mid twentieth century, as the Nazis adopted this creed and tainted it with their own notions of racial purity, and the role of the male in championing the superhero. Nevertheless, I think there was much to be said for his central ideology.
In 1988, a decade or so after I’d been looking for guidance whilst I was in my late teens and twenties, Micheal Ruse wrote an interesting book Homosexuality: a philosophical enquiry. (Basil Blackwell, 1988). Whilst critics were somewhat divided in their views about his central treatment of the subject, nevertheless in my opinion he raised some interesting, important points. He agreed with the central premise that we are shaped by our (homo)sexuality, that it is central to our very being. Broadly he accepted Freud’s views on sexuality, was sympathetic towards homosexuality and rejected the notion that it was any kind of sickness or mental disorder. By 2000, Rose recognised that the central tenets of his work had been superseded however by a more recent work entitled ‘Gay Science’ (link with preview pages) by Timothy Murphy in 1997 (Columbia University Press), deliberately named after a published book by Nietzsche in 1882 (which has nothing to do with being gay). Another work, LeVay’s ‘Queer Science'(MIT Press 1996) (currently out of print) was also influential and important, especially as in the concluding chapter, the author noted ‘I attempt to make the case that research into homosexuality is worth pursuing… because this research may indeed … help the larger society recognize what gays and lesbians have generally believed about themselves: that their sexual orientation is a central, defining aspect of their identity.”
Murphy’s own view was perhaps more radical and some might say alarming: that adults should be free to have their sexual orientation changed through biological manipulation and that “mothers would have the right to abort foetuses that tested positive for homosexuality”, if either of these things ever became possible’; many critics found such notions disturbing, whilst being difficult to argue against. Importantly, these works were not to be available for a full seven years after the final year that I cover in this book, 1990. In many respects the complex debates about innate sexuality were still in their infancy in the period I discuss and so were not a great part of my thinking in the decades around which I was working through issues surrounding my own sexuality, though I undoubtedly had views on such subjects then.
However, in terms of developing an ethical position on ones’ life, I would very probably have initially agreed, even then, that one could learn a lot from the heterodoxy: how more traditional men and women chose to develop and live up to various ethical & moral principles in their lives; how indeed there was often much to admire in such peoples’ lives, who ended up, for example, in a traditional marital relationship bringing up children in a loving family environment.
Given that I didn’t expect or imagine this to be the way forward I would take, in my life, I was looking for something which challenged these norms from around my mid to late teens. Almost before I had accepted I was gay (or different at least), I had accepted- at least to some extent- that I did not want to and would not live in this way.
One of the early books I bought from a fledgling ‘Gays the Word’ bookshop in London’s Marchmont Street, in fact that challenged the orthodox heterodoxy, was David Cooper’s rather dramatically titled ‘Death of the Family’ (Pelican, 1971) an influential work, already into its 5th reprint, on my now well worn, copy from 1978. ‘The end of the beginning!’ I have inscribed on its title page, showing by then I was already recognising that change from the heterodoxy was a long, complex process.
Actually, this is still a fascinating little book, very much of its time but carrying some interesting thought provoking concepts within its covers. In some respect it still reads as a pretty radical thesis. This is not too surprising as Cooper was for most of his life a radical marxist. He takes as his starting point though, that we should be free to express whatever form of sexuality we feel comfortable with in our relationships, which in 1971 was still pretty radical thinking. He is also not overly prescriptive in the relationships we should have but his key message to me at the time was that the ‘nuclear family’ was a relatively recent invention and was heavily enmeshed together in the rampant, consumerist culture of ongoing twentieth century capitalism. These ideas certainly affected my thinking in this period, of wanting to reject consumerism per se and was one clear reason why I wanted to try to live within a different model in society; one that was very much more heavily invested in the notion of communal living.
Returning to notions pertaining to understanding my own sexuality however, (as war poet Sassoon, was also writing, when he was twenty five, in 1911) I could not quite understand, as he could not, why I was not attracted sexually to the female form. That whilst I could bond well with women: make positive, long lasting and meaningful friendships, there was no desire to consummate these in any way, sexually. Therapists might suggest I had been damaged in my childhood and developed this desire to confront normalative behaviour as a result. If I had had counselling in this period, maybe it would have led me back to a more ‘normal’ lifestyle? We have to be careful here, as following this path starts to lead us into the damaging kind of thinking that ‘change was necessary by whatever means’, and that the homosexual mathematician, who broke the German Enigma code during the Second War, Alan Turing, was exposed to, in the fifties.
In fact, it was only many decades later, when under the influence of ‘e’ (methylenedioxymethamphetamine) in mixed clubs (like for example Troll at the Soundshaft, Heaven in central London, a club someone once described as having an ´amazing atmosphere of complete abandon, I’d never experienced anything remotely like it´) especially when dancing, that I felt those ‘inhibitions’ (if that is what they indeed were) break. Suddenly I found myself assessing my sexuality in a far less binary way. Equally, for many heterosexual men on ‘e’ there was a uniquely elemental feeling that they could be more emotionally and physically connected with other men, which in mixed clubs in particular often included gay men. ‘He’s all luvved up’ we used to say (interestingly we didn’t use to say ‘she’s all luvved up’, (unless we meant a man anyway). Thus I am now left with an element of doubt, that tends to lead me to believe that it is quite likely that we all exist to some extent on a scale of ‘bisexuality’, with the ability in the some circumstances to be sexually and emotionally attracted to an ‘other’ (although that ‘other’ may be a very complex concept for some of us).
It is also interesting to me, that some people, both heterosexual & homosexual, seem to have an inborn (or inbred?) desire to have and raise kids and others have none at all. All I know is that it felt entirely natural to me to seek out a lifestyle which incorporated elements of same sex partnerships within it and live my life where doing those things were the accepted ‘norms’. Retrospectively, in another world, if I had stayed in Cornwall, got married and had children would I have felt fulfilled? A part of me says and feels ‘no’; a part of me says (perhaps more honestly) ‘I just don’t know’, as I didn’t really try. Certainly a number of the men I had relationships with in my life did eventually choose to have children, outside of the ‘normal’ family structure and strictures.
However we live our lives and whichever creed we are born into or choose to follow, we are all, at least to some extent, making it up and learning as we go along. Fitting life decisions, jobs, love affairs, health concerns, financial obligations into our day to day lives, as we go forwards, ever onwards each year. For me, there was always a need to understand how my sexuality might better mesh with all these things though, and from the conversations I’ve had with hundreds of people now, in my life, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one thinking in this way, at this age, in this period. For this reason, it seemed important to me that I looked for others who had somehow managed to positively fuse their sexuality into their life choices and lifestyles. Going back to the late sixties and early seventies it was nigh impossible for me to have these discussions with others around me though, without feeling that they were imposing their morality or societies morality onto my choices.
In that period of my life, although there were pop icons & idols dabbling with these concepts, you got the feeling (especially retrospectively), that they too were making it up as they went along – and why wouldn’t they have been; some of whom crashed and burned far too early, given the pressures this then put on their lives. It also still took quite a lot of painstaking study to search historical & literary archives then, for reasonably complete biographical details of many of the gay & bisexual people, we now consider icons of the early twentieth century; those people whom might conceivably have been my role models; in comparison with the ease by which such material is available today, (especially as the trustees of such material have slowly accepted that there is nothing to be ashamed about in revealing fuller, more intimate details of lives lived) and how ‘openly’ it is now available.
What there certainly wasn’t in the seventies, to my knowledge, were any clear stories of ‘ordinary men and women’ who grew up as gay men or lesbians, in the two or three decades before my birth. If there were, by their very nature, ordinary probably wouldn’t have been quite the right description anyway. Extraordinary, maybe. So any role model that I might have tried to emulate, would have had to have been someone who had became famous- or infamous -enough to have been written about or who had been writing in that period. And of course they had existed: I just didn’t know at that time, that they had.
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