Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  Halford thought I was queer because I had put my arm round him. Put my arm round him to support him! The very same Halford who was wandering naked with me around the bathroom not two nights previously. The Halford who taught me how to shut my cock in a door. The Halford who did a backward somersault naked on the floor at me and pushed his finger up his arse, giggling. He thought I was queer? Queer for putting an arm round him when he had a cramp? Jesus.

  I stumbled to a back stairway to try and find a private place to go and weep. I had got no further than the first landing when I walked straight into the hairy tweed jacket of Mr. Bruce, history master and quondam internee of the Japanese Army.

  “Hello, hello, hello! What’s up here?”

  The tears were streaming down my face and it was no good pretending it was hay fever. Racked with sobs, I explained about Halford’s cramp and the disgust I had apparendy caused him when just trying to be helpful. I did not, of course, mention our night-time prowls in the nude, the sheer hypocrisy of Halford’s reaction, the unfairness and injustice and cruelty of which was what had really knocked me for six. Mr. Bruce nodded gravely, gave me a handkerchief and disappeared.

  I crawled my way on up to a bed and lay there weeping until tea, when I decided that I might as well get used to my unpopularity and face the howling mob in the senior refectory.

  As I tried to wedge myself into my place on the bench, an artificially huge gap appeared as the boys either side made a huge show of distancing themselves from the disgusting homo who was polluting their table. Pale but resolute I started to eat my tea.

  Halfway through the meal a gong sounded. Everybody looked up in surprise.

  Mr. Bruce was standing at the end of the room, an arm upraised for silence.

  “Boys,” he said. “I have a special announcement to make. I have just heard of a heroic act of kindness that took place by the swimming pool this afternoon. It seems that Halford got into difficulties with cramp and that Fry helped him to his feet and did exactly the right thing. He walked him about, supporting him carefully all the way. I am awarding Fry five merits for this sensible, cool action.”

  I stared down at my plate, unable to move a single muscle.

  “Oh, by the way,” continued Bruce, as if the thought had just struck him. “It has also come to my ears that some of the younger, sillier boys, who are ignorant about such things, think that someone putting their arm around a friend in distress is a sign of some sort of perversion. I look to you senior boys, who have a rather more sophisticated understanding of sexual matters, to quash this sort of puerile nonsense. I hope, incidentally, that Halford has thanked Fry properly for his promptness and consideration. I should think a hearty handshake and good manly bear-hug would be appropriate. That’s all.”

  A squeak of brogues on floorboards and he was gone. After one and a half seconds of unbearable silence, palms began to rain down congratulatory thumps upon my back, Halford rose sheepishly from his bench to thank me and I was in favour once more.

  Ant Cromie writes me that Jim Bruce died a couple of years ago, God rest, nourish and soothe his immortal soul. He walks now with Montrose, William Wallace and Bonnie Prince Charlie himself. He saved my last term at Stouts Hill and I will honour his memory forever.

  But does that or does that not tell you something of the psychological minefield one trod through in those days, when it came to questions of sexual nature, of sexuality, as we would say now? The difference between sexual play and queering; the blind terror that physical affection inspired, but the easy acceptance of erotic games.

  At Uppingham, much the same views obtained. Those whose morning prongers one brushed as morning fag did not think of themselves or of me as queer in any way at all. I am not sure anyone really knew what queer really, really meant. The very idea of it made everyone so afraid that each created their own meaning, according to their own dread of their own impulses.

  You could openly admire a pretty boy, and all the middle and senior boys did. It was a sign of manliness indeed to do so.

  “Just ten minutes alone, me and that arse …” a sixth former might say as a cute junior walked past. “That’s all I ask,” he would add looking skywards in prayer.

  “Oh no!” One senior would clutch another as they caught sight of a comely new boy, “I’m in love. Save me from myself.”

  I think that the logic of it was that new boys, pretty boys, were the closest approximation Uppingham offered to girls. They were hairless in the right places and sweet and cute and comely like girls, they had fluffy hair and kissable lips like girls, they had cute little bottoms like … well, they had cute little bottoms like boys, but hell, any port in a storm, and there’s no storm like pubescence and no port like a pretty boy’s bum. All that public swooning, however, was no more than macho posture. It proved their heterosexuality.

  Some boys however had the most definite reputation for being queer, in the fully snarled out, spat out sense of the word as it was then used—before, that is to say, its triumphant reclamation by the proud homosexuals of today. I never quite understood how these reputations arose. Perhaps they came about because the accused had been caught looking furtively at someone of their own age in the showers—the furtiveness was more likely to earn you the label queer than open, frank inspection—perhaps they gave off some signal, nothing to do with campness or effeminacy, some signal that the healthy adolescent male responded to with hostility or guilt or desire. Perhaps it was all a dress rehearsal for the tribal tom-tomming of irrational rumour, bigotry and dislike, dressed up and explained as instinct, that today in the wider world decides daily on the nature, character and disposition of the well-known: that asserts this game show host to be unctuous, or that politician to be Machiavellian and sinister.

  I certainly didn’t know. My own view is that most homophobia, if one wants to use that rather crummy word, has almost nothing to do with sex.

  “But have you any idea what these people actually do?”

  Self-righteous members of the House of Commons loved standing to ask that question during our last parliamentary debate on the age of homosexual consent.

  “Shit-stickers, that’s what they are. Let’s be clear about that. We’re talking about sodomy here.”

  Oh no you aren’t. You think you are, but you aren’t, you know.

  Buggery is far less prevalent in the gay world than people suppose. Anal sex is probably not much more common in homosexual encounters than it is in heterosexual.

  Buggery is not at the end of the yellow brick road somewhere over the homosexual rainbow, it is not the prize, the purpose, the goal or the fulfilment of homosexuality. Buggery is not the achievement which sees homosexuality move from becoming into being; buggery is not homosexuality’s realisation or destiny. Buggery is as much a necessary condition of homosexuality as the ownership of a Volvo estate car is a necessary condition of middle class family life, linked irretrievably only in the minds of the witless and the cheap. The performance of buggery is no more inevitable a part of homosexuality than an orange syllabub is an inevitable part of a dinner: some may clamour for it and instantly demand a second helping, some are not interested, some decide they will try it once and then instantly vomit.

  There are plenty of other things to be got up to in the homosexual world outside the orbit of the anal ring, but the concept that really gets the goat of the gay hater, the idea that really spins their melon and sickens their stomach is that most terrible and terrifying of all human notions, love.

  That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand. Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word’s full octave. Love as agape, Eros and philos; love as romance, friendship and adoration; love as infatuation, obsession and lust; love as torture, euphoria, ecstasy and oblivion (this is beginning to read like a Calvin Klein perfume catalogue); love as need, passion and desire.

  All the rest of it, parking your dick up an arse, slurping at a helmet, whipping, frotti
ng, peeing, pooing, squatting like a dog, dressing up in plastic and leather—all these go on in the world of boy and girl too: and let’s be clear about this, they go on more—the numbers make it so. Go into a sex shop, skim through some pornography, browse the internet for a time, talk to someone in the sex industry. You think homosexuality is disgusting? Then, it follows, it follows as the night the day, that you find sex disgusting, for there is nothing done between two men or two women that is, by any objective standard, different from that which is done between a man and a woman.

  What is more, one begs to ask of these prominent homophobes, have the guts to Enquire Within. Ask yourselves what thoughts go through your head when you masturbate. If the physical act and its detail is so much more important to you than love, then see a doctor, but don’t spew out your sickness in column inches; it isn’t nice, it isn’t kind, it isn’t Christian.

  And if the best you can do is quote the Bible in defence of your prejudice, then have the humility to be consistent. The same book that exhorts against the abomination of one man lying with another also contains exhortations against the eating of pork and shellfish and against menstruating women daring to come near holy places. It’s no good functionalistically claiming that kosher diet had its local, meteorological purposes now defunct, or that the prejudice against ovulation can be dispensed with as superstition, the Bible that you bash us with tells you that much of what you do is unclean: don’t pick and choose with a Revealed Text—or if you do, pick and choose the good bits, the bits that say things like “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” or “Love thy neighbour as thyself.”

  And please, whatever you do, don’t tell us that what we do, either in love or lust, is unnatural. For one thing if what you mean by that is that animals don’t do it, then you are quite simply in factual error.

  There are plenty of activities or qualities we could list that are most certainly unnatural if you are so mad as to think that humans are not part of nature, or so dull witted as to believe that “natural” means “all natures but human nature”: mercy, for example, is unnatural, an altruistic, non-selfish care and love for other species is unnatural, charity is unnatural, justice is unnatural, virtue is unnatural, indeed—and this surely is the point—the idea of virtue is unnatural, within such a foolish, useless meaning of the word “natural.” Animals, poor things, eat in order to survive: we, lucky things, do that too, but we also have Abbey Crunch biscuits, Armagnac, selle d’agneau, tortilla chips, sauce bérnaise, Vimto, hot buttered crumpets, Chateau Margaux, gingersnaps, risotto nero and peanut-butter sandwiches—these things have nothing to do with survival and everything to do with pleasure, connoisseurship and plain old greed. Animals, poor things, copulate in order to reproduce: we, lucky things, do that too, but we also have kinky boots, wank mags, leather thongs, peep shows, statuettes by Degas, bedshows, Tom of Finland, escort agencies and the journals of Anaïs Nin—these things have nothing to do with reproduction and everything to do with pleasure, connoisseurship and plain old lust. We humans have opened up a wide choice of literal and metaphorical haute cuisine and junk food in many areas of our lives, and as a punishment, for daring to eat the fruit of every tree in the garden, we were expelled from the Eden the animals still inhabit and we were sent away with the two great Jewish afflictions to bear as our penance: indigestion and guilt.

  I will apologise for many things that I have done, but I will not apologise for the things that should never be apologised for. It is a little theory of mine that has much exercised my mind lately, that most of the problems of this silly and delightful world derive from our apologising for those things which we ought not to apologise for, and failing to apologise for those things for which apology is necessary.

  For example none of the following is shameful or deserves apology, in spite of our suicidal attempts to convince ourselves otherwise:

  • To possess a rectum, a urethra and a bladder and all that pertain thereto.

  • To cry.

  • To find anything or anyone of any gender, age or species sexually attractive.

  • To find anything or anyone of any gender, age or species sexually unattractive.

  • To insert things in one’s mouth, anus or vagina for the purpose of pleasure.

  • To masturbate as often as one wishes. Or not.

  • To swear.

  • To be filled with sexual desires that involve objects, articles or parts of the body irrelevant to procreation.

  • To fart.

  • To be sexually unattractive.

  • To love.

  • To ingest legal or illegal drugs.

  • To smell of oneself and one’s juices.

  • To pick one’s nose.

  I spend a lot of time tying knots in my handkerchief reminding myself that those are things not be ashamed of, so long as they are not performed in sight or sound of those who would be pained—which also holds true of Morris dancing, talking about Tolkien and wearing velour and many other harmless human activities. Politeness is all.

  But I fear I spend far too little time apologising for or feeling ashamed about things which really do merit sincere apology and outright contrition.

  • Failing to imagine what it is like to be someone else.

  • Pissing my life away.

  • Dishonesty with self and others.

  • Neglecting to pick up the phone or write letters.

  • Not connecting made or processed objects with their provenance.

  • Judging without facts.

  • Using influence over others for my own ends.

  • Causing pain.

  I will apologise for faithlessness, neglect, deceit, cruelty, unkindness, vanity and meanness, but I will not apologise for the urgings of my genitals nor, most certainly, will I ever apologise for the urgings of my heart. I may regret those urgings, rue them deeply and occasionally damn, blast and wish them to hell, but apologise—no: not where they do no harm. A culture that demands people apologise for something that is not their fault: that is as good a definition of a tyranny as I can think of. We British are not, praise the Lord, in Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany or Baptist Alabama, but that does not mean, and has never meant, that we must therefore reside in the fields of Elysium.

  Bloody hell, I do rattle on, don’t I? Doth the lady, once again, protest too much? I don’t think so. And if I am protesting, it is not on my own behalf, but on the behalf of my fourteen-year-old self and its confusion.

  I knew then, knew I was queer. I had no idea, no idea at all, what anybody else meant by the word: all that inconsistency, that subtle coding that allowed one both to leer at pretty boys’ bottoms and to sneer at faggots, it confused me and it rattled me, but it never stopped me knowing. I knew I was queer for all kinds of reasons. I knew because I just plain knew, and I knew for that negative reason which is so easy to demonstrate to oneself: my loins never twitched at female bodies or the thought of them, there is simply no escaping such a primitive ineluctable fact and its implications. I knew that I could like and love women as friends, because since childhood I had always found the company of women and girls welcome and easy, but I knew just as strongly that I would never be aroused or excited at the thought of any physical intimacy with a girl, that I would never yearn to share my life with a female.

  There was physical evidence of women at Uppingham only in the two-dimensional shape of the copies of Forum and Penthouse that were self-consciously passed around from boy to boy like joints at a teenage party, or in the three-dimensional shape of the kitchen staff and the girls one saw in the town.

  Lest anyone think such an atmosphere is enough to make any child homosexual, I should say that most of the boys in the same situation as me (my brother included, whose home life, let’s face it, was identical to mine) lived, breathed, ate and drank girls. One boy whom I have already described to you, but whose blushes I shall spare, was in fact expelled for a sexual liaison with one of the kitchen girls. He could no more have b
een made homosexual by his time at Uppingham than I could have been made straight by a stint at Holland Park Comprehensive or Cheltenham Ladies’ College. I think it is certainly true that our circumstances made it very difficult for some of the boys around me to cope with girls, but then you see I believe that all boys find it very difficult to cope with girls, and none of my straight friends who went to mixed state schools has ever told me anything different. I operate a sympathetic and comprehensive listening service for many friends in relationship difficulties (as they do for me when I’m brave enough to let them) and from all I have ever heard (or read in the autobiographies of others) sex is every bit as difficult, awkward, embarrassing and heartrending for the straight as for the bent.

  But knowing I was homosexual was one thing, disentangling its meaning (both its perceived cultural meaning and the real meaning it was to have to me) was very difficult. I was, as I have said, not yet masturbating, I had no definable physical or sexual appetites to assuage. All I had was a void, an ache, a hunger, a hiatus, a lacuna, a gap, a need. There’s pleonasm for you …

  I remember being at the bedside of a boy at prep school, playing with his (as it seemed to me at the time) colossal and strainingly hard penis. I stared at this phenomenon and—I can recall this scene so exactly in my mind in its every detail—I thought to myself: What now? I know this is fun, this has meaning, this is part of something big, but what now? Do I eat it? Do I kiss it? Do I try and merge with it, become one with it? Do I cut it off and take it back to my own bed? Do I try and stuff it into my ear? What is this supposed to lead to? I don’t find this cock attractive or pretty, in fact it’s frankly rather ugly, but I do know this: it is part of something that matters.

  For all my foregoing rant at those who believe homosexuality is simply about buggery, I should make it clear that I was not asserting that homosexuality has nothing to do with sex, I was merely trying to suggest that the sexual element is not what threatens and unhinges the homophobe.