THEGAYUK

Author: Chris Bridges

  • NOEL COWARD | A Vintage Gay Icon The Original Wordsmith

    I discovered Noël Coward as a teenager and have been besotted ever since.

    Who could fail to love the poignant ‘Brief Encounter’ or the hilarious ‘Hay Fever’? His songs are breathtaking too with the classic ‘Mad about the Boy’ having got me through many a hopeless yearning for one I can’t have. I also love Noël’s wit and bon mot. Three of my favourite quotations are as follows:

    “My philosophy is as simple as ever. I love smoking, drinking, moderate sexual intercourse on a life diminishing scale, reading and writing (not arithmetic)”

    “It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”

    “It’s not that I’m homosexual constantly, it is just that I give them a helping hand from time to time.”

    I also found the following little gem the other day. It’s an extract from his diaries from May 1958 and I love it. The man was pure genius. Not only did he write fantastic plays, look rather dapper, pen sublime films and some corking good poems but he was also a very wise man:

    “It is hard to imagine, considering the inherent silliness, cruelty and superstition of the human race, how it has contrived to last as it has. The witch hunting, the torturing, the gullibility, the massacres, the intolerance, the wild futility of human behaviour over the centuries is hardly credible. And the laws, as they stand today, are almost inconceivably stupid. With all this brilliant scientific knowledge of atom splitting and nuclear physics etc. We are still worshipping at different shrines, imprisoning homosexuals, imposing unnecessary and completely irrelevant restrictions on each other. Hearts can be withdrawn from human breasts, dead hearts, and, after a little neat manipulation, popped back again as good as new. The skies can be conquered. Sputniks can go round and round the globe and be controlled and guided. People are still genuflecting before crucifixes and Virgin Marys, still persecuting other people for being coloured or Jewish or in some way different from what they apparently should be. There are wars raged at the moment in Indonesia, Algeria, the Middle East. Cyprus etc. The Pope will make pronouncements against birth control. The Klu-Klux-Klan is still, if permitted, ready to dash out and do some light lynching. God for millions of people is still secure in his heaven…”

    I think Noël’s words still ring true today and sadly lots of things haven’t changed in over 50 years. A true iconic figure and one of the original and best dapper gay men of the Twentieth Century.

     

    Opinions expressed in this article may not reflect those of THEGAYUK, its management or editorial teams. If you’d like to comment or write a comment, opinion or blog piece, please click here.

  • ELIZABETH TAYLOR: A Vintage Gay Icon Who Defined The Era Of Glamour

    “I’ve only slept with men I’ve been married to. How many women can make that claim?” – Elizabeth Taylor

    I’m generally not too keen on modern celebrity culture and the pointless tales of Z list no brainers with limited talents and bigger publicity budgets. I do however have a minor obsession with Elizabeth Taylor. She’s my role model. A picture of her and the luscious Paul Newman are looking down over me now as I type. In spite of a notorious lifelong battle with prescription drug addictions, alcoholisms and chain smoking, she lived till she was 79. Now that’s an achievement in my books, staying alive through illness and fragility.

    She certainly crammed a lot in: 8 marriages, a few nervous breakdowns, an obesity problem, a couple of trips to rehab centres, over 70 hospitalisations and more than 20 operations. She also worked to raise the profile of AIDS charities and research and wasn’t afraid to stick her neck out and speak her mind in her tireless fundraising campaigns. Amazingly, she also found the time to act and made some of the most corking films of all time. Two of her film performances always take my breath away and I never tire of them: Maggie the Cat in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” If you haven’t seen them then you’re missing out on some classic lines and great acting.
    She wasn’t afraid of being seen as a sexual being in a time when repression was standard in Hollywood. She was one of the first major stars ever to appear unclothed in a film and to be shown naked in Playboy. She loved gay men too, sparking up friendships with the closeted gay male stars of the time, Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson and James Dean. I can see why the paradoxically fragile diva would relate to gay blokes so well.
    She was accident prone and clumsy, yet exuded glamour and style. She was a diva yet managed to be diplomatic enough at times to ensure her demands were always met and was able to lampoon herself too. OK, so the 80’s were a bit ugly, with those shoulder pads and big hair and that friendship with the horribly creepy Michael Jackson, but we all lacked style in that tacky decade and made mistakes, didn’t we?
    She had a lifelong naivety which belied her occasionally brash exterior, and still always believed in everlasting love. Now that was maybe her biggest feat yet, 8 failed marriages and still believed in love? She’s definitely an icon to hold up as a role model in our turbulent modern times.
    She even arranged to be 15 minutes late for her own funeral. That’s class.
    “The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they’re going to have some pretty annoying virtues.” Elizabeth Taylor. I couldn’t agree more, Elizabeth.

    Opinions expressed in this article may not reflect those of THEGAYUK, its management or editorial teams. If you’d like to comment or write a comment, opinion or blog piece, please click here.

  • COLUMN: A Fine Vintage

    People get totally the wrong idea if I tell them that I like the feeling of being restrained. I definitely don’t mean bondage. If anyone tied me up I’d be hysterical. I don’t even like someone blocking the doorway. What I’m actually talking about is vintage menswear.

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  • THEATRE REVIEW | The Kite Runner, Nottingham Playhouse

    ★★★ | The Kite Runner

    Set against the complex backdrop of a 1970s Afghanistan in upheaval and later 1980’s Los Angeles, the story – narrated by an adult Amir who jumps in and out of the action – is of two young boys Amir and Hassan whose friendship is complicated by racial inequality and servitude.

    The boys are united through kite running competitions but a nasty incident and an act of cowardice tear the two apart.

    Wide in scope, heavy in emotion: The Kite Runner’s story is where its strengths lie but with Khaled Hosseini’s bestselling book and the film already available is this the best medium for it? The Kite Runner suffers in translation from text to stage due to its reliance on narration. The story is arguably too unwieldy to be dealt with in any other way but this is a story of human relationships and powerful emotions and too often I wanted to be shown instead of told. As a result the stage regularly appeared empty, lacking dynamism and I felt distanced from a story that had the potential to wrestle me to the ground.

    Credit to Ben Turner though, who was present on stage through the whole piece, switching as he does between the narrative voice and on-stage persona of Amir. Sadly though, I was never blown away; his American accent jarred and when playing the younger Amir I felt he went too young for the role, verging on childish caricature. Turner performed competently but never quite gripped. The supporting cast impressed though, including Farshid Rokey playing the childhood friend Hassan. Rokey again played it too young but was more convincing and I believed his unwavering loyalty. Emilio Doorgasingh as the father doesn’t quite fit the role of domineering patriarch in stature and voice but I felt his conflicted emotions and his frustration and he won my affection. Special mention goes to the on stage percussion – a nice touch that added a layer of energy to the performance and it seemed to me that as the curtain fell it was the percussionist that enjoyed the loudest applause.

    Simple but effective set design – minimal props and projection – allowed for quick and efficient set changes that let the story flow. The animated hand drawings of childhood and misshapen comic book skyline of Los Angeles added a sense of magic and warmth to what was often a heavy story.

    If this is the Playhouse’s centre-piece for the coming season then ultimately I was a little disappointed. It didn’t drag but it didn’t grab. Its strength is in its source material and this was source material I was familiar with; on stage I was hoping for something a little different, a little more dynamic.

    The Kite Runner is on until the 18th of May.

    Book here:http://www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk/whats-on/drama/the-kite-runner

  • COLUMN | I Told You I Was Ill

    My hypochondria is legendary. Actually, I don’t call it hypochondria. I call it being ill but you can make up your own mind on that one.

    have a different ailment for each day of the week and am never too far from a packet of over the counter pain killers, anti-sickness drugs or non-prescription sleeping pills. Nothing herbal though. I prefer a chemical. You know where you are with a chemical. Pills are so pretty at times. They come in such lovely colour palettes. My migraine pills are lilac and pink, which is inspired. I like the names too, such poetry; Tramadol, Temazepam andTrimethoprim sound like strange and lovely holiday resorts to me.

    I have pills in all my bags, my desk drawer, my bedside drawer and in the overflow pill drawer. Not to mention my TENs machine, heat pack and various lotions which I keep a good supply of. I take an extra toilet bag on holiday, just for pills. I never leave the supermarket without 32 Paracetamol. Why only this week I’ve had a small melanoma, a pleural fluid collection and a nasty bout of spondylosis. They’ve cleared up now, luckily but I had the right pills to hand in case they turned nasty.

    I was always a delicate, sickly child, prone to headaches and abdominal pain, plagued by hay fever and recurrent temperatures and a bit of mild asthma. I was fantastic at car sickness and could hurl for England too. I was also rather good at the accidental injury, being a clumsy boy; the fall downstairs, the crash landing on the t.v. after slipping on a discarded novel and famously the swallowed rosary beads and the fishing hook in the back of my head which necessitated trips to Accident and Emergency.

    My mum always seemed to notice us more when we were ill and to give her credit, would have made a superb nurse. She believed in the school of a pill for every ill and would hand out Junior Disprins like they were Smarties. She always had some Buttercup Cough Syrup handy and was a dab hand with a cold compress for the fevered brow. My mum also set a fine example by never leaving the house without a handbag stuffed with prescription drugs. She was generous and shared her stash with me too and doled out vitamins and herbal remedies by the handful. I may not be able to ride a bicycle or drive a car but I can swallow two Paracetamol dry. It’s a handy skill.

    One of my favourite games was playing grownups, with a glass of Dandelion and Burdock as my sherry, a few sweets as my pills and a candy cigarette clamped in the corner of my mouth. I was learning well.

    I have happy memories of the 1970s, propped up on the brown settee, in the brown and orange living room, under a brown and orange duvet. I’d lay down, happy to be off school, with an Enid Blyton, a glass of Lucozade and a single boiled egg for lunch. Lucozade was considered expensive and only allowed to be drunk as medicine during a bad feverish bout. I loved its sickly taste and sugar overload and the crinkle of the orange cellophane coming off would rouse me to prop my pitiful form up on my elbows and let a few drops be placed on my tongue.

    There were down sides to being sickly too, of course. I was often unpopular when a nasty headache meant an abortive day trip or my poor mum had to take time off yet again. The painful headaches weren’t fun and although I got used to vomiting and sweating out fevers, I never really liked it. Who would? I must confess that I did have a toy hospital, though. It had little doctors and nurses and pallid patients in their beds with the alpine temperature charts on the ends. Endless fun.

    During my teenage years I progressed to hideous migraines, vertigo, nervous tension and a lingering bout of glandular fever which left me weak and watery for months on end. I’ve managed to get both Salmonella and Campylobactor and more Norovirus than I care to mention.

    I’ve managed to have most of my organs imaged and investigated, though not through choice really. It just seems to happen. No one would choose the camera up the bladder, believe me. I’ve had MRI scans, ultrasounds, endoscopes and enough blood taken to transfuse a small elderly lady. Naturally, I’m always mostly normal.

    I’ve managed to go temporarily blind for a month, be crippled by a slipped disc, laid up in hospital with a testicle the size of a hearty jacket spud and develop a sinister limp. I’ve been prodded and poked by urologists, ophthalmologists, neurologists and gastroenterologists. I’ve paid good money to physiotherapists, osteopaths and hypnotherapists. Let’s not even mention the mental health professionals’ input. They’re too numerous to list.

    I very briefly had a fling with a G.P. which was terrible for me. Any foreplay always set me wondering. I’d be lying there thinking “Is he caressing my side or palpating my spleen? Why is he looking into my eyes? Has he seen a cataract?” He didn’t help matters by once breaking off during a session to comment on an irregular mole on my abdomen. I finished it not long after that.

    Maybe I’m what they used to call “the creaking gate”. I hope so, as my rusty old hinges have a lot more noise to make yet.

    Visit Chris’s blog at www.ramblingsofagayman.com

  • COLUMN | Meat (and Two Veg) is Murder

    The modern world is all about the ‘foodie’. We’re all supposed to be happily salivating over organic cuts of meat, freshly baked soda bread and imported delicacies. I’m a little out of kilter with this trend.

    I’m actually not very interested in food. It bores me. Eating can be a pain. It interrupts what you’re doing and means you have to cook which in turn means that your nice clean kitchen gets all grubby which is no good at all. Ovens are great places to keep books. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a nice meal out (mainly for the people watching) and if you want to cook for me then that’s fine and dandy but if it was a choice between food or books or cigarettes then the food would always lose. I tend to watch TV whilst I eat. I turn on the TV, start to eat and the minute the meal ends, I turn it back off. It stops me having to think about it. I can happily eat the same food every day without getting too bored. It’s like scratching an itch.

    A friend once told me that she lay in bed and dreamt of food. She said that her first thought on waking was “What can I eat today?” I find this hard to understand. I hate the feeling when you over eat. That sluggish torpor and the feeling of being full to the neck is not my idea of fun. It’s a torture.

    I don’t really like cooking much. It’s tedious. As for baking, they sell cakes in shops. Why waste your time? You could be reading a good book.

    As a child I hated to eat. I hated meat, salad and vegetables. Unluckily for me, I had parents who were as snobbish as Margot and Jerry Leadbetter but with the horticultural skills of Tom and Barbara Good (from the 1970’s sitcom “The Good Life”, if you don’t recognise the allusion). My parents had a huge allotment and grew huge quantities of fresh vegetables which we would have to eat all year round. They sowed, picked, blanched and froze and we had to help. They also loved to cook much more than I hated to eat. I compromised a little and would eat peas and carrots and the occasional runner bean. This wasn’t enough of a compromise and I spent many hours sitting in a chair, not allowed to leave the table or lay down my cutlery until I ate one Brussel sprout or a sprig of broccoli. I was stubborn enough but my mum was the grand mistress of stubborn. Meal times were a tense battle which I usually lost.

    I devised a few tricks. Firstly: the dog-friend. He was my food ally and was a canine dustbin. He’d eat anything. I’d try and lure him into position under the table and artfully flick half my dinner into his waiting jaw. He suffered a lot of wind due to his varied diet. Secondly: the swallowing trick. With enough gravy or sauce applied liberally I soon mastered the technique of swallowing most foods. I worked up from peas and eventually was at the point where I could swallow a sprout without it touching my tongue. I still hate sprouts. They were invented by Satan but I do suspect that this technique may have come in handy in other ways too in later life. Thirdly: the pocket game. With a tissue laid on my lap, I would secrete food under the table and stuff it into my pocket, consigning it to a watery grave down the toilet as soon as the meal ended.

    I ate so little that eventually I was allowed to have a side plate instead of a dinner plate and no one worried about it. I wasn’t anorexic. I just didn’t like eating much. I expect if it had been any later in time than the 70s and 80s I’d have been admitted to a clinic and tube fed whilst being made to talk about my fear of sexual intimacy. Luckily, I evaded that.

    I did like sweets. I’d line up a pile of dolly mixtures and play my favourite game. This was called “Mummy” and involved scoffing a load of sweets which represented my pills. I’d pop them one by one as I held aloft a little glass of dandelion and burdock and a candy cigarette and feel grown up. I would inhale deeply and sigh and pop another “pill” with a swig of my “sherry”.

    It wasn’t too much of a leap for a teenage food hater to become a vegetarian. A love of “The Smiths” gave me a fantastic idea. Not eating meat was cool and trendy and would annoy my parents to the highest degree. Every teenager’s dream, I think. I recall a Christmas dinner as I smugly nibbled a cheese and onion quiche, aged 14, whilst my parents looked on and frowned. I soon got bored of it, though and was back eating meat.

    As I got older, I started to enjoy food a bit more but on leaving home and moving in with my first partner, I experienced real poverty for a time. We often had no money at all. I had a priority list: cigarettes came top. As long as I had cigarettes I could happily live on Happy Shopper biscuits and bread.

    I made a terrible mistake in 2004. I was watching TV and flicked through the channels onto a program on BBC2 about abattoirs. It was repulsive. I cringed as I watched but couldn’t turn it off. The next few days I found eating meat a weird experience. I couldn’t get it out of my mind that it was a corpse I was eating. I felt sick. It rolled around my mouth, sticking there and I couldn’t swallow. I gave up meat. It wasn’t high moral principles that stopped me eating meat but pure over thinking and subsequent disgust.

    I’m still a vegetarian now although I had a brief lapse in 2007. It was alcohol related and involved a plate of chicken nuggets which I fell face first into. There’s no meat in a chicken nugget though, really, so it’s all OK.

    Want some Vegetarian Recipe ideas? Check out www.thegayuk.com/food

  • COLUMN | I Don’t Want To Ride My Bicycle

    I have an oddity to confess. No, not that one. This one is quite sanitary. I can’t ride a bike. If I tell people this they look at me gone out like I’ve just said I’m a hermaphrodite or I can’t write my own name.

    It’s considered, by most people, to be decidedly odd. I personally think that riding a bike is even odder. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I think its witchcraft.

    I’ve always been a bit clumsy. I trip over a lot, am prone to bumping into things and am generally uncoordinated. I have mismatched eyes. Not like David Bowie, a green and a brown one, but I have one very long sighted one and one almost normal eye. The first time an optician noted this when I went for an eye test aged 12, he asked me if I was especially clumsy and accident prone. My mother nodded eagerly, finally latching onto to a diagnosis to explain my bizarre mishaps. Recently an optician asked me if I wore my glasses to drive. When I told her I didn’t drive, I’m sure it wasn’t just my imagination that made me see a look of relief wash over her.

    I also have terrible balance. I’m rubbish at standing on one leg (I practice often), could never master stilt walking or roller skating as a child and the very thought of ice skating or skiing gives me an icy chill and a vision of plaster of Paris and traction. I get terrible travel sickness and have been known to run out of films with wobbly camcorder type shots, green faced. If I try to send text messages in a moving car I start to feel dizzy and throw up. I have to look away when a fast moving train goes by or I start to spin and I never liked roundabouts or fairground rides that spin round. I once spent a whole evening in bed with a bucket beside me after an ill advised go on the Waltzers aged 7.

    These are my excuses for not mastering the art of staying upright on a bicycle. I had the usual sit in and push along cars as a toddler, progressed to the tricycle then onto the little bike with stabilisers. Then the problems began. My father developed a permanent frown and a mouth full of tightly gritted teeth as we repeatedly tried to get me to stay aloft a bike without 4 wheels. He’d push me along, let go and I’d fall off. This went on ad-nauseum, usually until I trooped off home in a strop, abandoning the bicycle with a wobbly bottom lip and a lot of bruises.

    I’m not one for perseverance. “I’ve tried it once and didn’t like it” or “If at first you don’t succeed then give the thing up as a bad job and avoid ever trying again” could well be ideal mottos for me. The shiny bicycle which my dad had bought second hand and lovingly restored stayed in the shed until we sold it and I spent the money on books. You know where you are with books (just don’t ask me to balance one on my head).

    To be honest, I don’t feel the need to justify my inability to balance on a bike. I look at people going past on them and am startled by what a weird thing it is to do. Surely it’s some kind of sorcery? These people must have magic powers. Balancing on two wheels is nonsensical.

    I knew I was on to a loser when attempting to learn to drive my instructor said to me on my first lesson: “It’s much like riding a bike” followed not long after by “You can’t ride a bike? What! How strange”

    I’m happy to walk, thanks.

  • COLUMN | Smokin’

    So, this month, we’re looking at the subject of vice. I can definitely relate to the idea of vice. I have way too many. I’m not sure if the addictive personality is a myth or not but if it does genuinely exist, I have one.

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  • COLUMN: Tell Me Lies

    It seems to me that the world is full of false perceptions. I often sit on the bus and see people walking around in skinny jeans who clearly think that their bottom is a lot smaller than it is. They don’t appear to notice that the denim is strained to breaking point and that they look bulbous in all the wrong places. The same goes for the milky blue-white flesh of an unwisely exposed upper arm or the sportswear on a man who’s likely to pass out running for a bus.

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  • COLUMN | The Hirsute of Happiness

    I’m fairly effete and always have been, so the sight of me with a full beard by age 13 was quite an absurd one for all to see.

    This outward sign of my testosterone fuelled teens seemed like a paradox as I merrily whistled along to Madonna and made up new Shirley Bassey show routines in my head. I always felt that my early puberty was a complete curse and the bane of my life. I wanted to grow up glamorous and fey with a sculpted set of smooth abs, not be a virtual werewolf by 20.
    By the age of 15 I had legs that looked like they’d been carpeted, a fetching golden-red beard and a chest wig worthy of a 1970s porn star. I wouldn’t have minded so much if it had matched. Instead I had blond hair, dark brown chest chair and a ginger beard.

    I was terrible at shaving, always gouging chunks from my face and turning up at sixth-form college covered in plasters and dabbing delicately at my face with blood stained tissues like a Victorian hysteric. Often I’d give up on the whole idea, adopting the ideology that if I continually ignored the hair sprouting from every quarter, then it might go away.

    It didn’t go away. I had to choose: depilation and regular shaving or find another way to carry the look off. As I wasn’t prepared to plait my back hair or adopt a Floella Benjamin beaded look, then painful, irritating hair removal was the only option.

    I’ve endured loss of skin through depilatory creams, nicks and rashes, waxing burns and sprains and strains from contorting myself round to reach the tricky bits. A long term partner preferred the hairless look so I spent hours each month painfully erasing every trace of hair growth on my chest and shoulders.
    I experienced an epiphany in recent years as I realised that at my advanced age (let’s just say I’m over 35) I can choose what I like. My preference on a man is for body hair as long as it’s not beyond the pale. I don’t expect any man to present me with a Mexican style handlebar moustache in his trousers. That’s just absurd. I actually find well tended body hair quite attractive.
    So, I accept my body for what it is now and that’s that it’s hairy. It comes that way. If I’ve got the time, I trim and prune. Otherwise, I don’t actually care. Now, ear hair and my straggly eyebrows: that’s a whole different matter. That may take another 40 years to come to terms with.

  • BOOK REVIEW | Fanny And Stella

    ★★★★★ | Fanny And Stella

    28th April 1870: The flamboyantly dressed Miss Fanny Park and Miss Stella Boulton are causing a stir in the Strand Theatre.

    All eyes are riveted upon the two young ladies as they look down on the stalls, calling out to, flirting with and ogling the fine gentlemen below. Moments later they are led away by the police. What followed was a huge scandal that shocked and titillated Victorian England in equal measure.

    Fanny and Stella – two very alluring ladies-about-town – were not ordinary young women. They were actually young men who liked to dress as women: Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, a bank clerk and solicitor respectively, part-time actresses and part-time prostitutes. Stella was the most beautiful female impersonator of her day, Fanny her sturdier and plainer companion. When the Metropolitan Police launched a secret campaign to bring about their downfall, they were arrested and subjected to a sensational show trial in Westminster Hall and if found guilty, they faced life imprisonment.

    As the trial of ‘the Young Men in Women’s Clothes’ unfolded, Fanny and Stella’s extraordinary lives as wives and daughters, actresses and whores were revealed to an incredulous public. The revelations shocked a nation of Victorians as the seamy underbelly of a hypocritical society was exposed with a cast of prostitutes, brothel keepers and transvestites gaining prominence along with a bevy of respectable aristocrats, businessmen and ambassadors who were implicated in the scandal.

    McKenna has meticulously researched the subject of the two unfortunate young men for this informative but also entertaining and gripping book. The story is both titillating and amusing as the trial unfolds revealing the antics of the two young men and their consorts. The language used by the Victorians in describing homosexuality and various sexual practices is enough to make you choke with laughter on your Earl Grey and have you lurching towards your chaise longue as you frantically reach for your smelling salts.

    Ultimately, the story made me reel in horror too, not because of Fanny and Stella’s behaviour but more because of the way they were treated by society. Imagine being holed up in prison with the threat of life imprisonment, no face powder and having your anus examined repeatedly for signs of sodomy? I’m sure Danny La Rue never had to go through that.

    McKenna presents us with an account that is fast paced and informative but also hugely entertaining to read as the very human story of the two men unfolds in all its grisly detail. Whether you’re a history fanatic intrigued by Victorian double standards or not, this book is sure to amuse, shock and beguile you. Well worth a read.

     

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