X
I have a very low opinion of art and an even lower opinion of what is accepted as art, put high on a pedestal, high as it is possible to make it without rendering it totally invisible. Incarcerated in bunkers, sold, bartered, and reproduced so that even the most potent images are nullified, ‘art’ is eulogised into something other. Unobtainable, it has a negative function in the education process. Culture begins at school and is completed at university, by which time all aspiration to selfhood is stifled, and the mind is colonised by dead wood. How right Duchamp was to end it all by turning the bottle rack into high art, and how wrongly the message was interpreted! All art is dead, especially modern art. Only when art is demoted to the ranks again, treated as nothing remarkable, will our culture start to breathe. The spurious individualism of the Renaissance, which both engendered and was born of capital, is dying. An art which began by collaborating with the banks of the Medici ends in bankruptcy on Wall St. On the way, it destroyed the sublime anonymity of the Middle Ages and replaced it with stolen goods. Creativity in the future will be measured differently, no longer tied to commodity and worldly success. Then the civilisation now vaunted in the media will be no civilisation at all, its artefacts as alien as Mayan sculpture.
~
28 January 1983 – Psychic Television
Providence in the form of Genesis P. Orridge arrived today at noon. With my bank account closed and the last of the Italian lira spent I’d started selling clothes and books to raise cash to pay the rent. Hearing this Genesis immediately produced £50, which he said was towards the cost of the Super 8 film I used last September recording William Burroughs at the Final Academy.
Psychic TV has been a constant presence in my life during the last three years. Initially I was surprised by their enthusiasm for The Tempest and my Super 8s. I thought they would discount a film like The Tempest – but Gen loved it. Magic bound us together. He produced an extraordinary electronic score for In the Shadow of the Sun. Since then I’ve been videoed for the Psychic TV cassettes as the Temple Spokesperson, with the honeyed voice of their tattooist Mr Sebastian, and filmed the Psychic Rally in Heaven with music from the 2nd Annual Report.
TG was the art of communication erased. Its successor, Psychic Television, conducts an investigation into the dark side.
At the moment we connect through Caravaggio, – a painter who captured the Spirit with blood-stained hands. Caravaggio is very much a TG hero.
At the Temple Gen wishes to make available Crowley’s diaries and recordings of Burroughs and Gysin; to build a room for the Dream Machine where the acolytes will be able to meditate; issue special editions of the last minutes of the Reverend Jack Jones; investigate Control, immortality, and the disruptive cut-ups which are the core of the Burroughs work-method and philosophy.
Many find the Temple disturbing. Initiation is performed at the Hackney Abaton. Genesis is the androgyne spirit guide, conducting the Divine Sickness for the initiates with their krishna haircuts and austere, grey, ‘Chinese’ uniforms, stamped with the triple cross.
~
31 January 1983: Howard Bruckner invited me over to see his Burroughs film for the television Arena. WSB, suitably inscrutable, and looking like the mummy of Rameses II, took us on a journey through his life. ‘I always had nightmares as a child and when I was told opium gave you sweet dreams I knew it was for me.’ And so he spoke, witchdoctor-like, of his marriage, his boyfriends, immortality, and the forgotten art of calling up a toad with a humming noise.
~
Contro I Capelli Lunghi
5 February 1983: Last night at John Maybury’s I watched Agnes De Mille, the choreographer, on TV. She spoke, with the slightly alcoholic voice of old people who’ve suffered a stroke, of the Dance and how much it has changed. The artists are now well paid. But something she described as ‘religious’ had been lost amid the mortgages and life policies. The girls who worked for Martha Graham gave her five hours a day for virtually nothing. They waited on tables for their money each morning; but in the evenings had the consolation that they were performing in a masterpiece. This dedication seems to have been lost in the world of dance. She added that the social injustices of the period she was talking about had to be done away with; so there’s an inevitability about this situation. Nevertheless, this sense of devotion would have to be recaptured if we were to have vital art.
In the same programme there was an extraordinary TV interview at the height of the McCarthy period with her, Simone Signoret, and Hedda Hopper. After Hopper had castigated Blackboard Jungle, Agnes De Mille floored her with an impassioned speech about the right to protest. Hedda Hopper was left speechless, said she had nothing to say. Agnes, sitting on her chair, tapped her stick on the floor, and spoke of her boys as ‘stallions’. As I left I remarked to Alasdair, ‘We could all do with a few of those.’
If you want to see beauty pick up a book of George Platt Lynes photos from the forties. Nearly every aspect of gay art is prefigured in it, including much of Hockney’s work. All the models he used have such clear, strong good looks. Physique Pictorial is another example – the models from the forties look alert and intelligent. In the sixties a marked change comes about. Is it all in the eye of the beholder? Is it because the photos are taken in natural light rather than studio light? Or have the models themselves changed, doped out on acid and television? Anyway, they have an air of neglect.
When Pasolini wrote his piece ‘Contro i Capelli Lunghi’ (Against Long Hair) he probably put his finger on it. He accused the last great binge of capital and consumerism of subverting all the (peasant?) values he held so dear.
At the other end of the political spectrum, Sir Francis Rose once turned up at a gay liberation meeting early in 1970. He waved his corkscrew walking-stick at a gang of boys in ‘liberated’ drag, covered in diamante and make-up – ‘What we need is men, not fairies!’ he declared, loudly and to their disbelief. ‘I’m a Grandee of Spain, off to sign the accession papers next week. In Franco’s Spain you’ll find real men.’ And there hangs the dilemma – the reduction of manhood to the gay macho image. Perhaps the just gods heard Sir Francis, and provided a cheap substitute in the shape of the disco clones a few years later. See them at 4 a.m. pile out of Heaven on a Saturday night, whacked out on nicotine and amyl, and you know you’re still in middle-class fairyland. They’ve got the muscles, but their minds have been locked safely in the closet.
Howard Bruckner told me that when Burroughs received a book called Faggots he absolutely refused to write a jacket-cover comment. He remarked that the freedom to fist-fuck in the Hamptons was no freedom at all. ‘Gay liberation,’ he said, ‘is no liberation.’ It had resulted only in the complete takeover of the homosexual world by dead-end bourgeois values. Something that was only too noticeable, said Howard, in all the gay club circuits. What we need, said William, is a gay state with our own soldiers, who’d kill anyone who attempted to disagree. This could be started by a guerrilla movement which would blackmail rich gays – a form of taxation, said William, and use the funds to eliminate any opposition to gay life.
WSB with his customary wisdom dreams up a dream gang of Wild Boy assassins. Deep down the dream of many of us. Outside it is snowing.
~
Visible Manifestations
The dungeon redoubts of the gay world are its clubs with names like the Asylum, the Catacombs, the Mineshaft. The gay Heaven is also deep underground; though the 9th Circle is above. Exotique foreign names abound – Copacabana, La Douce. Down in the dungeons the inmates shout themselves hoarse against the disco music and lasers, which furthers a delicious alienation. This world eschews the overground reality which rejects it, and seeks perfection in an ideal favoured by low lights, denim, leather and the rest. Signs are important – rings on fingers and limp wrists are replaced by running shorts and vests, work-out muscles and moustaches. These in turn fall to the Haircuts.
The next day, as I look down from my window in the sunlight on Charing X Road, I see these drained, pallid faces of the night on their way to the YMCA; the fetish for ‘health’ the guilty reverse of the night before. Today the gay liberation march winds past. This has an air of festival. Two immaculate pink nuns with moustaches neat as clipped box take the prize. A ‘lady’ in a ball-gown drops out and rests languidly on the City of Westminster salt bin in front of St Martin’s … A pink balloon escapes and circles high in the blue sky …
In the Mineshaft, New York City, the microbes take a Charles Atlas course – and a famous and very old man drifts past quite in the pink and into the shadows. I make a mental note of a ‘decent’ retirement age – but know I won’t bring myself to put myself out to grass. We all know these habits are possibly damaging, but you pays your dues and takes your chances. In Ron Peck’s film Nighthawks I played a very creditable cruiser, so lost in myself I burnt my fingers instead of the cigarette.
Usually self-preservation prevails and I’m home by two. The disastrous late nights are wrought by the unattainable barmen whom the wicked managements spread like jam.
I know the arguments against all this and am certain they have their own fair share of the truth. But I live and work in a single room which I share with some books and large sheets of blank writing-paper; so unless I make some foray into the night I could spend twenty-four hours alone. Though that’s unlikely, and an excuse. The place is usually so crowded. Hardly a day goes past without the doorbell ringing at tea-time. So perhaps it’s just an escape into delicious anonymity. Particularly now when everyone I meet above ground asks me what I’m working on. The price of being a film-maker is that the most visible part of you is your work; you yourself become the shadow. If you say, ‘I’m doing nothing – Oh fuck film! it’s really not important and who cares about it anyway,’ they look discomfited. ‘Surely you must take all of this seriously?’ A negative answer casts a disturbing cloud, ‘You have to believe in something.’
In the dungeons pure anonymity prevails and the opening line is much more likely to be, ‘Can I get you a drink?’ – vodka with ice: much more comforting.
And what else? Well, dressing is Fancy Dress. Down here this COUNTS. It’s the real test of a person’s sexual orientation – the styles forged in the dungeon slip over into the world outside. But here they are a code – the jeans with that exact tear, the leather jacket and white T-shirt. Why not go to Heaven in a suit and tie? In the Mineshaft they turn you away for wearing aftershave. Elsewhere, a dress is OK, but the suit and tie of the real world is for punters with stuffed pockets. The HAIRCUTS buy theirs second-hand.
I consciously adopt the denim/leather look most nights. I’m assured I don’t look like a clone. I have a phobia about moustaches like some people have for spiders – I couldn’t conceive of touching one.
Back in 1965 La Douce opened its doors on Friday evening and closed them early on Monday. We danced through the weekend on purple hearts. Those without a bed slept in the Biograph Cinema before starting out again.
Drugs are never far from the scene. After the hearts came Acid and quaaludes; then amyl, and something called Ecstasy. Someone always managed to roll a joint in a dark corner, and dance away into the small hours. It’s certain that nobody who had taken the steps towards liberation hadn’t used one if not all of them. The equation was inevitable, and part of initiation.
Now, from out of the blue comes the Antidote that has thrown all of this into confusion. AIDS. Everyone has an opinion. It casts a shadow, if even for a moment, across any encounter. Some have retired; others, with uncertain bravado, refuse to change. Some say it’s from Haiti, or the darkest Amazon, and some say the disease has been endemic in North America for centuries, that the Puritans called it the Wrath of God. Others advance conspiracy theories, of mad Anita Bryant, secret viral laboratories and the CIA. All this is fuelled by the Media, who sell copy and make MONEY out of disaster. But whatever the cause and whatever the ultimate outcome the immediate effect has been to clear the bath-houses and visibly thin the boys of the night. In New York, particularly, they are starting to make polite conversation again – a change is as good as a rest. I decide I’m in the firing-line and make an adjustment – prepare myself for the worst – decide on decent caution rather than celibacy, and worry a little about my friends. Times change. I refuse to moralise, as some do, about the past. That plays too easily into the hands of those who wish to eradicate freedom, the jealous and the repressed who are always with us.
~
The Ancient Mariner
16 June 1983: At the Salisbury this afternoon a group of us were discussing sleep – five hours, six or eight – when a stocky young guy in a white T-shirt and close-cropped hair, who had been listening to us, interrupted and said that you could make do with two: ‘We only needed two in the Falklands.’ The words were like a squall in a calm sea. ‘But surely that was a special case, under duress.’ A silence fell over us for half an hour while, half-boastful and half-appalled, he told us his tale, as if to confess was to eradicate the horror. He told us of his two mates who died, of the ‘Argies’, the atrocities, and the Gurkhas – excellent men, who wore suits, were polite and tough as hell, and who cut the throats of their victims, ‘to save lives’, he added. The Argie conscripts were boys with no will to fight, and in the heat of it our boys shot them even as they put their hands in the air to surrender. This was done ‘to save lives’, and also out of anger.
As I looked at him I thought of the picture-book heroism of war, with its rules of good conduct – invented to cover the unhinged horror. I felt immensely depressed. In any other situation I’d have picked this boy up and taken him home to bed. As it was, I slipped away with an excuse and left him propping up the bar alone, waiting to tell his appalling tale of muddled heroism to the next trick.
~
Blow-Job
The guy propping up the bar said he worked for the army, interrogating the SAS who fell into his hands during exercises. There wasn’t one, he claimed, who after half an hour in his hands didn’t accept as reality what before had been only make-believe.
He said rather nonchalantly à propos of the Bulgarian regime, which is doing away with people by means of poison pellets like Beatrice Lillie in ever so modern Millie – that we’d had the stuff for years, and there was one prominent victim, Hugh Gaitskell. When I asked him who fired the dart he changed the subject. Perhaps they were just testing the stuff.
~
June 1978
Anna Piaggi told me of the hot springs at Ischia. I had visions of waterfalls and hot rock pools at the sea’s edge. When Jean Marc and I arrived there yesterday morning these hopes were dashed. The Bagni are housed in a seedy municipal building where the yellow-tiled cubicles are guarded by attendants in crumpled white uniforms. They stand guard in the room with you and turn the taps on and off. Ten minutes only as the water is ‘radioactiva’. This makes for an extremely uncomfortable bath.
Later in the day I passed a group of soldiers lounging outside a cafe. One of them smiled at me when he saw me admiring him, and we commenced an evening of minimal communication at coffee bars and on park benches with his friends. After a couple of hours of this aimless drifting around the town I asked him if he would like to come back to my hotel. He said he couldn’t possibly stay at my hotel as it was far too dangerous, but if I went and got my passport he knew of a place we could go to.
In Enneo’s hotel the old desk porter copied my name into the ledger with studied disinterest. My soldier boy came from a village near Palermo, was doing his national service before returning to work as a farmer and marry his girlfriend. He was a wonderful lover – we exchanged addresses and swore eternal friendship although we both knew we would never meet again. He left to get back to the barracks. As I walked home it occurred to me that the desk porter and my young soldier had probably shared the payment for my room. If they did the whole evening had been arranged with amazing finesse.
~
Rome, 1982
Sexuality colours my politics – I distrust all figures of authority, including the artist. Homosexuals have such a struggle to define themselves against the order of things, an equivocal process involving the desire to be both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ – a source of that dis-ease in the work of Caravaggio and Pasolini. I distrust those with blueprints for our salvation. As a group we have suffered more than most at the hands of the ideologically ‘sound’. One day my Roman driver stopped singing Puccini at the top of his voice, and began talking about modern composers. Berio, he said, was a case of ‘testa di sinistra, stomacho di destra’ – he was progressive in his head but reactionary in his guts.
~
In Italy young men live with their families, have girlfriends and get married. The idea of the family remains intact, and the power of the Church has seen to it. However, most Italian boys lead bisexual lives, particularly in the brief time they are away from their families doing national service. Soldiers give themselves for a good meal or an evening’s drinking. The encounters are brief and forgotten in the morning. Sexuality has a value, and bella figura its price. Italy is in love with outward show. Clothes, cars, the material goods that have overwhelmed a rural society in the last thirty years are consciously exhibited. This is the world that Pasolini so detested, and so accurately mirrored. In Rome the homosexual world is furtive. There are a few clubs in which overdressed boys flaunt themselves. Apart from that there is the sex of the streets – in cinemas, outside railway stations, and in the parks where married men cruise endlessly in their cars.
~
Una Vita Violenta
Encounters in the parks are shadowed with violence. While I was in Rome working on The Rake I was attacked late at night on the Capitoline hill by a gang of youths, out for the kill. I was being kicked and punched senseless on the ground for a 1,000 lira, or was this the motive? Somehow an icy calm took over. I felt nothing as the boots went in and managed to collect myself and soliloquise in broken Italian ‘Amici romani …’ Two of the boys held off as the others rifled my pockets and one carried on the assault. I managed to get up and turn my back. Half-expecting a knife I walked away.
As with rape victims, it’s almost impossible to communicate this after the event. I kept my silence. Next day, the bruises were mostly covered by my clothes. Back in Florence a day later, I told the rehearsal pianist; the next morning he quietly motioned me over and showed me the newspaper. That night a businessman from Turin had been murdered in exactly the same spot.
~
Romans are bad lovers and good fucks – men living together in supportive relationships few.
Pier Paolo, living with his mother and hitting the streets nightly to give blow-jobs to his street boys, illustrates the situation well. Though open, his sexuality was a tortured confusion, made worse by the Communist Party’s adoption of bourgeois restraint. In Salo, his last film, all homosexual relationships are shown as decadent, unpleasant and power-based. At the centre of the film is a significant line of betrayal. Photos of loved ones lead the inquisitors on a hunt to destroy the last vestiges of private and pure relations.
At the end of the line of betrayal Pasolini exhibits a STEREOTYPE, and surely one that was not in his heart. The young soldier and the black serving-girl are found in bed together by the Fascist ‘masters’. Standing naked and defiant, the boy gives a clenched fist salute, before they are both murdered in a hail of bullets.
~
Holland Park, 1976: 11.30, summer evening, cruising. A handsome-looking guy lures me into a dark corner between two buildings and before I know it two of them jump me, flashing their cards – name and addresses, all the usual aggression. ‘What are you doing here?’ It seems the silliest of questions. ‘It’s a beautiful summer night.’ Mind working overtime – ‘I was coming back from my film Sebastiane at the Gate cinema up the road. I live in Earl’s Court. Have you seen the film?’ I get away with this one by the skin of my teeth. It’s obviously OK if you’re a published middle-class queen. On Hampstead Heath different rules apply – hide and seek. They arrive after midnight with searchlight torches and whistles. The quarry scatter and run like gazelles in one of those African wildlife films, and only the foolish are caught. One night they broke the rules and brought dogs; and on another, tried to run people down on their motorbikes. But by dawn, when Michael Foot walks his dog, all is quiet again.
Raids on gay clubs follow different patterns. The last full-scale raid that I was involved with, in the mid-seventies, closed down the Gigolo in the King’s Road. Saturday night, the place is packed to capacity. In the darkness at the far end people are making out. One tall, very handsome boy wades into the throng. He seems oblivious to the attention his presence is causing. He doesn’t have a hard-on. I give up and stand at the bar. Three minutes later, whistles. It’s a police raid. At the back the unreceptive one is in a fist-fight with a couple of leather boys. The panic is so great that I am carried at least ten feet by the surge of the crowd. Quick thinking: I empty my pockets deftly. We wait for hours in silence while each customer is given a body-search. I remember the two ladies in Port Said – oh for a bit of the English fighting spirit! But they know they’ve got you, this riff-raff in uniforms. The Gigolo is closed down for ever after ten years.
The British police have degenerated rapidly in the twenty years I’ve been in London. They watch too many American TV series. They drive through the streets risking life and limb, are surly, rude, and by turns, aggressive when they stop you. One suspects that they lie through their teeth when giving evidence; and that most of them accept bribes and pay-offs. Dealing with them you have a certain unfair advantage with a middle-class accent. Gone for ever are the days of Dixon. ‘Crime’ is now fought with criminal methods. Howard Bruckner says that if an American cop behaved the way they do here he would remain alive for only a few hours: too many of his adversaries pack guns. Christian says that in Moscow you hardly ever see a policeman. Here they are everywhere, protecting the degenerate establishment. A gang of uniformed hoodlums.
~
Visible Manifestations 2
A club, the Subway, has closed its doors after two years of sweaty nights. Neither the Metropolitan Police, nor the iron guards of the Moral Majority, nor yet the semi-detached minds of Gay News (that sister to the Daily Star) will shed a tear. London has lost quite the best gay bar that I remember. It had some of the best music in London, showed the latest videos in rooms quiet enough to have a conversation in, and had the capital’s first back-rooms.
Back-room sex can be the sweetest and most transient. The imagination runs riot. Earthbound minds suddenly take on angelic bodies, and the anonymity is a treasure.
~
At twenty-three I thought my itinerant sexuality would be over by thirty; but at forty it is even easier to meet the young men I desire than when we were the same age. The company of younger men becomes infectious. On the other hand, most of my contemporaries have been pinned out by the media, like butterflies. So few of them took evasive action. Most did the expected and died in a confetti of polaroids around swimming-pools, or lost their way in a snowstorm of drugs in rich living-rooms.
~
His body is hard, like marble, and flawless. His face is tough, utterly non-descript, chipped like an old statue – a lip damaged from a punch. He’s wearing jeans and a black vest. There is a home-made tattoo on his right shoulder. He puts his beer on the space invaders machine and plays it till two, then walks into the back-room, unzips, and produces the biggest, thickest cock I’ve ever seen – it is hard as rock. In the reddish gloom he fucks one figure after another, none lasting long as he brings them to orgasm swiftly and deftly. One after another without a moment’s rest.
~
Until I was in my early thirties I avoided passive sex. Inhibition and social conditioning made it a traumatic and painful experience. This was hard to overcome. But now I know that until I’d begun to enjoy it I had not reached balanced manhood. You must make the sacrifice to bury the centuries. When you overcome yourself you understand that gender is its own prison. When I meet heterosexual men I know they have experienced only half of love.
~
Pilgrim Fathers
Allen Ginsberg describes a family tree which starts with Walt Whitman and ends with himself, along the biblical lines – Walt slept with … who slept with … who slept with me – a chain which spanned the generations. There is nothing exceptional in this apart from the social diversity of these encounters. Subservience to Family and State remains the pattern from here to China – homosexuality can cut across this sad world – sexual encounters lead to knowledge.
~
Andy
27 March 1983: Andy has painted the ceiling of his flat in Wenlake House, but left the walls the faded ochre plaster he found after stripping the wallpaper. On the walls he has drawn the furniture he’s been making to scale in fine pencil sketches. Apart from the furniture the room is bare. There are two armchairs, some stools and a table built from old timber, floorboards and joists. Andy’s furniture is based on carpenters’ tables and workbenches, and looks Victorian in its solidity – Pugin would have approved. It has a sly sense of humour: one of the chairs has two panels from an Argentine corned-beef crate let into its sides.
Andy brews up coffee and sits at the table, his black hat pulled down over his eyes. He produces various prizes for us to admire – a book of thirties’ interiors, photos he took in Japan last December. Michael asks Andy how long he’s lived in Wenlake House. Andy says he’s had the flat since, ‘as yellow as a Swan Vestas packet,’ he turned up daily at the Islington Housing Department at the height of his hepatitis. His presence cleared the packed waiting-room. The other occupants huddled like hamsters in a crush down one end while Andy coughed loudly in a corner.
Andy is allergic to authority. Policemen and council officials are top of the list, then politicians and ticket-collectors. In the Housing Department he threatened to spit like a deadly cobra until he was given a place to live. Worn down, they eventually threw the keys across the room.
Andy has a GBH manner which he wears under a black peaked Japanese schoolboy’s cap and combat jacket, accentuating his black sunken eyes. His moth-eaten haircut, his fingernails, bitten to the bone on scarred hands, suggest menace. Screwed up with concentration, his face instils fear into officialdom – a frown that’s a blow beneath the solar plexus. Aware of this, Andy plays up the aggro. But the look is a weapon and a disguise. The other Andy bubbles up with stories of his adventures related with brilliant timing, full of startling language. To a parting ‘Be good!’ he always responds, ‘I’ll be careful.’
~
May 1978, Hanway Works: I was phoned on Friday evening by a prison visitor who asked me if I’d stand bail for ‘Andy’, who was in Ashford Remand Home for stealing a large American car near the Hilton and crashing it fifty yards further on. At first I wondered who Andy could be; then I remembered meeting a wild-looking boy at a club on two or three occasions, who countered my interest with belligerence; but who in spite of his ‘fuck off’ attitude accepted a couple of drinks and my phone number on the silver paper from a cigarette packet. That was the last time I’d seen him, several weeks ago. I walked around to the police station in Tottenham Court Road and put up the bail with a slight degree of misgiving – but the woman who rang had said I was the only one who could help him.
On Saturday afternoon I took the train to Ashford. The Remand Centre is hidden behind neat thirties’ row houses with gardens, and looks like a military installation or gulag with its twenty-feet-high concrete and wire perimeter fence, searchlights and guard posts – before you reach the drab institutional buildings. In the rain it looked very bleak and depressing. As I walked up the path boys shouted at me from the windows like caged animals. I waited in the hall until Andy was brought down shouting abuse at one of the warders – ‘An’ if you lay a fuckin’ finger on me mate …’ I spirited him away as quickly as possible. I could detect they were quite pleased to be rid of him as he’s immensely strong and quite capable of inflicting damage when his temper’s wild – most of the time he seems tensed for a fight. On the train back Andy spoke with bravado of his Robin Hood exploits, and of his enemies the pigs and the screws. It was a simple conflict between good and evil and a question of who was in control. At Ashford, when a difficult new boy arrived, one of the screws would tell him to fetch something, and then shout at the boy to run. At the end of the corridor a second screw stepped out of a door and intercepted the running boy – shouted at him to stop running, running was forbidden, and sent him back walking. The first screw would shout at him when he returned empty-handed, threaten to beat the living daylights out of him, and send him back at the double. This was repeated, the verbal violence turning into physical violence, until the boy was weeping.
Afterwards, the screws would return home to their families in the thirties’ row houses and tend to the cabbages.
~
At school Andy played truant. He would disappear on summer afternoons and no one could find him. He had a little rowing-boat, and one afternoon his father caught him in it. His secret was discovered and the boat was sold. From that point the trouble started. Andy used to row out to sea in his boat to some sandbanks at low tide; he’d beach the boat and lie in the sun until the tide came in – it was his escape from school and family. Andy’s family were Jehovah’s Witnesses; when he was fifteen they discovered he was gay and threw him out on the streets saying he was the devil’s work and no child of theirs. They refused to communicate with him, even by telephone.
Then he lied about his age and joined a merchant ship in Rotterdam, was arrested for smuggling in New Zealand, and jailed. Back on the streets of London the battle with the authorities was engaged in earnest. His parents had forgotten him: when I contacted them they washed their hands of the whole affair and hung up. At Butlers Wharf we laid plans to break the vicious circle in which he found himself.
~
September 1980, London: In the West End the police know Andy and use every chance to pull him over. There is one PC in particular who has marked him down. They didn’t get him last time, so this time they will. Constant apprehension causes the antagonism to bubble to the surface, which is what they seem to want. If Christopher and I hadn’t seen it ourselves we wouldn’t have believed it. Christopher, who has Andy working with him on his plaster casts, has been pulled over with him on two occasions now. The opposition seem determined to turn Andy into a criminal; and we are just as determined they are not going to win. I told Andy yesterday, he’ll have to avoid them deftly like a bullfighter, who knows that in a head-on collision he’ll lose. He steps aside and lets the beast go charging past. Win with the brain, not the fists.
~
March 1983: Andy bowls in with a wicked grin. He makes himself some coffee and complains that I’ve not been to see his work. I promise to, as soon as I’ve finished the script rewrite of Caravaggio with Stephen Pickles. Meanwhile, he gives me some black and white photos of his furniture, some of which are being sent to a firm in Japan who are interested. Last week he spent the night in the cells again after a long absence. He wrenched the exit-door off its hinges at some North London club, and carried it with him on to the dance floor after the bouncers had tried to throw him out. As he danced with the door the management closed in on him and threw him out the front door. He put his shoulder to that as well, and stove it in. He said the police seemed rather amused by this act of strength – it was the sort of thing they were always up to so they understood. Also they disliked the gay club and thought he was some straight boy who had got into a fight. He put them right on that score. ‘You think all gay boys are limp-wristed, don’t you?’ He said they treated him with respect, and he didn’t seem too worried about the £150 fine either.
~
Andy sits in a room of strangers for half an hour or so, sizing up the situation in silence. When he starts to talk he becomes the centre of attention, for he has a brilliant sense of language and his stories stop all other conversation. He rolls up, stretches out, tilting back on his chair, and he’s away. Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham – Andy and the Metropolitan Police. He pushes the Japanese cap back on his head. He delivers instant judgements with clear precision, his nautical adventures having left him with a tidy, perspicacious mind. Other people mumble – he’s one of the very few who have no fear. His dark moments are kept to himself, otherwise humour prevails. His physical presence, even in silence, dominates a room.
~