Pagan and her parents

by Michael Arditti

  Those costs, in Max’s rough estimate, will be around £10,000 … £6000 for me and £4000 for your parents. ‘Adding invoice to injury,’ I parry the blow with a quip, but he fails to respond. Or insult to injustice. I keep that one to myself. I feel like the man who received a bill for the gas that escaped in the explosion that blew up his house. It was only when he appeared on my show that they withdrew the final demand.

  ‘It may take a while to raise the cash,’ I warn him. ‘In the past month, I’ve had two personal appearances cancelled. Rent boys and superstores just don’t mix. I guess I’ll have to wait until they build a Soho Sainsbury’s.’ This time I raise a smile.

  ‘What I admire most about you, Leo, is that you never give in. Whatever else you may lose, you keep your sense of humour.’

  It is easier to hide what I feel than to express it. I am bereft even of words. Friends make the appropriate noises and pull compassionate faces; they rally round – or, at least, they expect me to rally – but they cannot begin to comprehend my loss. They require simple shorthand like ‘widow’ and ‘orphan’ to engage their sympathies and ease their minds. They regard my ‘once a fortnight’s as a reasonable allowance. Laura declares that I will have more free time in a holiday weekend than in any two working weeks … as though time can be counted in hours. Edward tells me horror stories of a friend whose ex-wife has remarried and exiled their children to New York as though distance can be measured on maps. Melissa blithely equates banishment with boarding school … as though my sanity can be saved by the bells of Mallory Towers.

  I have not felt so empty since the morning of your miscarriage. I try to black out the image, but it multiplies as on the screens in a studio control room. As I close my eyes, I see you stumble into my bedroom, your hand to your belly, your vagina an open wound … as I open my eyes, I awake to another nightmare; the blood seeping through your night-dress, the clots sticking to your legs. You lie prostrate on the floor. I try to lift you, but my hands slide in the sweat and the slime. Disconnected thoughts rush through me: doctor … no, funeral … no, ambulance. By the time it arrives, you are delirious, imploring me to forgive you and wailing that this is your punishment for aborting our child.

  With blood on my hands, I fear misunderstanding. I want to make it clear to the men that the abortion was Lewis’s, the convalescence mine. I no longer court ambiguity; I could never cause a woman such pain. But they are too busy negotiating the stairs to pay heed to your rambling. When they ask, I admit to being the father to prevent them dismissing me as a friend … Friends do not shiver by your stretcher in a pyjama jacket and corduroy trousers; they are left at home, biting their nails by the phone. Friends are not raced to hospital with sirens blaring like a film chase; they amble in during visiting hours bearing flowers. And yet, as I watch you convulsed by contractions, I wish that I had claimed to be a lodger … a burglar … anything to be anywhere but here.

  At the hospital, we are admitted straight to obstetrics. I can barely keep pace with the trolley and break into a trot. I follow you into the ward, where I stand helpless, while the doctor and midwife jab and scan and attach you to a drip. As you rasp and rave, I plead with the doctor for something to ease your pain; he tells me to take your hand while you push. I feel the force swelling inside you, digging through your nails to my skin. Then, suddenly, it is over; I am aware of a bubble of sound and of moisture. I stare at the wall. I do not want to see what has spilt out of you. I just want to know that you are safe. The midwife jabs you again and asks if you wish to hold your baby; you screech ‘no’ in a voice as raw as your flesh.

  You jerk your head as I stroke your hair. The midwife insists that I leave you to rest and directs me to the quiet room, where I sit flicking aimlessly through a book of remembrance. Five minutes later, she appears with a cloth-covered basket. I presume that she has brought me some fruit and allow myself to feel hungry. ‘Your wife doesn’t want to see him,’ she says, ‘but I was sure that you would. It’s so important to give yourself time to grieve.’ Then, she takes out this perfectly formed … form – I don’t want to think of it as a baby – and slips it into my hand. It is no bigger than my palm; and yet everything is in place except the eyes … the starkly staring swellings of its fused eyes. And, as she spouts her empty homilies, I glimpse an image of my destiny: to stand, the phantom father of a miscarried child.

  THREE

  The Origins of the Specious

  In the first of two articles, the writer and broadcaster Leo Young reflects on his trial by tabloid and the deep-rooted homophobia of our society.

  The English vice is not flagellation or pederasty but hypocrisy. Earlier this year, when researchers from my chat show were looking for survivors of sex scandals willing to discuss their ordeals, they found a positive embarrassment of heterosexuals – adulterous ministers, kerb-crawling colonels and promiscuous priests – eager to receive the ultimate rehabilitation: absolution on air. The homosexuals – I’m sorry, bisexuals – were less forthcoming. None of the MPs caught in cinemas, actors in lavatories or bishops in seminaries would contemplate a public confession; they knew that theirs was the one sin which even a clap-happy studio audience would be unable to forgive.

  I myself have felt the jagged edge of this hypocrisy. It must be common knowledge, even to readers of this august journal, that, in recent months, various tabloids have vied to reveal details of my sexuality. I have been propelled from the listings to the front pages, with my private life a matter of public prurience (how the Editors square their graphic and gratuitous reporting with their commitment to a family readership is not for me to say).

  It may seem disingenuous to be shocked by such attention, but, as the presenter of a chat show, it is easy to forget that you too come under scrutiny. The primary role of the host is to ask questions; he is the audience’s conduit to celebrity … indeed, he is constantly exhorted to efface his own personality and censured should he interject too much. And yet, at the same time, he is expected to be a ‘personality’. It is his programme; he may well be better known than many of those he interviews. And he is subject to that peculiarly contemporary form of iconoclasm: the urge to prove that every public figure has not just feet but genitals of clay.

  One result of my exposure has been requests to appear on several rival chat shows; all of which I have declined, but for reasons of policy rather than funk … no one knows better than I the uncanny ability of a studio audience to turn conversation into performance art. Instead, I have taken the opportunity to quiz myself … with far more rigour than I would dare to apply to any of my guests. And, while it may seem odd for someone who is more familiar as a face than as a by-line to present his personal credo in the pages of a newspaper, the choice does have a certain symmetry.

  Conventional wisdom declares that it is in a crisis that you come to know your friends … personal experience confirms this; and I have been heartened to find that, amongst mine, I can count over five hundred viewers who have been moved to send letters of support. The obverse is that you come to know your enemies; and I have also received razor blades, a noose and excrement. Any old television hand is hardened to hate mail – my secretary has a policy never to show me anything addressed in green ink – but it is rarely specific (I still cherish one envelope with the instruction ‘If undelivered, please direct to Terry Wogan’). This particular batch, however, harps on a single theme (which could not be directed to Terry Wogan): my sexuality. I am no longer a person, nor even a personality, but simply a penis.

  It may be possible to know my enemies, but it is far harder to identify them, since the one – the only – word that almost all such correspondents fight shy of writing is their name. Nevertheless, it is essential to understand them. After eight years of prize-winning broadcasts, I am told that I pollute the airwaves. Is it asking too much to ask why? Am I behaving differently towards my guests? Are actors no longer safe when they sit next to me on the sofa? Is there propaganda in my posture? Or do they fear that I a
m giving off subliminal messages the way that their predecessors found subversion in pop songs played at slow speeds? (As an experiment, try videoing a programme and freeze-framing it to read ‘gay is good’ on my lips.)

  The analogy may be absurd, but it is no more so than their arguments. They bring to mind those of a Texan evangelist whom I interviewed, years ago, for a documentary on Dallas. He deplored the influx of Mexicans with their Catholic faith and Spanish language. If English was good enough for Jesus Christ,’ he said, ‘it’s good enough for us.’ The eccentricity was almost endearing; until one remembered the murder rate among recent immigrants.

  Homophobia is equally ridiculous and equally lethal. The homophobe, like the fundamentalist, finds it impossible to accept that any other history, any other culture, any other viewpoint than his own exists (expedience justifies the pronoun; for the purpose of this article, I focus on men). Of the hundreds of phobias, from arachno-to xeno-, there is a key ingredient which makes homophobia the most insidious. Whereas its fellows are fears of the ‘other’, it is fear of the ‘same’… of the ‘self’. Sufferers hate no one so much as themselves. They are disgusted by their own desires; but, rather than acknowledge or explore them, they yearn to be rid of them. So they seek to be purified by women … a search that is doomed to failure, not least because of the contradictions in their attitude to women (who are seen as both superior for not having men’s desires and inferior for desiring men). It is often said that you can only truly love someone else if you love yourself; I would go further and, at the risk of misinterpretation, say that a man can only truly love a woman if he can love a man.

  The phobia that homophobia most resembles is agoraphobia. The homophobe wants to stay safe – supposedly safe – within the familiar concepts of his closed mind rather than opening himself to new thoughts and larger realities. His symptoms are varied; from the man who bashes you in person to the man who does it by proxy … from the man who sends you shit in the post to the man who does it from a great height and metaphorically. The latter often wears a horsehair wig; like the high court Judge who, in August 1992, gave a child molester a suspended sentence for the rape of a nine-year-old girl, describing it as ‘a breath of fresh air’ since he had previously abused two young boys and was afraid that he might be gay.

  This belief in the homophobe’s self-hatred is what separates me from those who see every queerbasher as a queer at heart (the theory being that he kicks your face in to stop himself kissing it). I maintain that every queerbasher is a queerbasher at heart, who, far from expressing hidden desire for another man, is revealing his deep revulsion from himself, and that gay men who read anything more into it are displaying, at best, naivety and, at worst, dangerous fantasy (the desire to be roughed up by rough trade). Self-hatred also prompts the homophobe’s aversion to the least sign of gay affection, since even he cannot seriously believe that a tentative kiss between two soap-stars will turn little Johnny gay. After all, many thousands of screen kisses from Scarlett’s and Rhett’s to Charles’s and Diana’s have done nothing to reclaim me.

  One thing about gay men that homophobes do find secretly attractive is our imagination. From puberty onwards, we stand at one remove from the world. We have to transform heterosexual myths (whether Scarlett and Rhett or Charles and Diana) in order to create images to sustain ourselves. At street level, this produces ‘camp’, with its unique, double-edged double vision, at once frivolous and hard-hitting … the limp wrist in the iron glove; on a more elevated plane, it creates art (as elevated as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel) and accounts for the disproportionate number of gay men who feature in every list of the world’s cultural giants.

  Another attraction that gay men hold for homophobes is our freedom. In castigating our ‘irresponsibility’, the homophobe attacks that which he most desires. Society trains men from birth to take certain roles. Pinstripes, overalls or uniforms are all variations on the same straitjacket. The captives resent the Houdinis who are able to escape. You need only see a father cradling his baby son to be aware of his capacity for love and then see them again ten years later to be aware of how much has been lost. The former babe in arms is kept firmly at arm’s length.

  And yet even the attractions of imagination and freedom pall besides the homophobe’s perception that the gay man is having more sex than him … to the homophobe, the gay man’s sole identity is sexual, since it is that which sets him apart. The homophobe at once wants sex and denies it. He fears his body as much as he does the darkness of his desires. In this, he is tutored by two thousand years of Christian tradition, which takes as its first commandment not ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God’ but ‘Noli me tangere’; a primacy further discredited by recent discoveries that the phrase itself may well be a mistranslation and what we read as ‘Don’t touch me’ should in fact be ‘Don’t cling to me’ … The Church’s one foundation is condemned.

  In the Christian tradition, sexuality is set at the service of procreation; the charge against homosexuals is that we use it for recreation. Time and again, fundamentalists and their fellow-morallers liken gay men to beasts. But surely the reverse is true? It is gay men who have moved furthest from sex as a biological imperative and hence from the animals. And, if fundamentalists refuse to consider the beams in their own eyes, they should at least look to the motes in their myths. There are as many different sexualities as there are people and there have been since the Garden of Eden … I recall a friend’s reply to a bannered bigot proclaiming that ‘God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve’. ‘Oh Eve,’ he taunted, ‘wasn’t she the world’s first snake act?’

  The ‘Noli me tangere’ tendency constantly yokes sex and violence as the Scylla and Charybdis of contemporary society, when, in fact, the two are polar opposites. Sex is about giving pleasure – however inadequate – not pain. There may be bad sex, but there is no such thing as good violence … and, in the case of sexual violence, the emphasis rests squarely on the noun. Gay men are frequent victims of sexual violence and yet they continue to be regarded as its instigators, both directly and indirectly (‘they bring it on themselves’), along with women who wear short skirts or travel by Tube at night.

  Homophobia, whether latent or blatant, is a sickness which poisons the perpetrator even as it assaults the victim. It remains the one prejudice that dares to shout its name. Thus it is that, far from homosexuality being a social ill, it is the acceptance of homosexuality that marks a society’s health. When I first read Christopher Isherwood’s assertion that he judged every political party and government by its treatment of gay people, I deplored his limited vision. After experiencing the horrors of homophobia, both individual and institutional, I am convinced that he was right.

  Next week: the eternal romance between gay men and straight women and the homosexual as family man.

  The Observer, 6 June 1993

  Exploding the Nuclear Family

  In the second of two articles, the writer and broadcaster Leo Young declares war on heterosexual exclusivity and neo-Victorian values.

  Some of my best friends are heterosexual … so I regret that my article last week should have been taken as a blanket attack on straight men [See Letters Page 22]; it was intended as nothing of the kind. My own experiences of the past few months have, however, convinced me that homophobia is latent even in the most liberal men. And, although I remain grateful for the support of friends and colleagues, I am aware that they have granted me as a favour what they themselves assume by right.

  The one aspect of gay life that all heterosexual men view with suspicion is our relationship with heterosexual women. Wary of any intimacy that is not based on bed, they suppose that the bond between gay men and straight women must be equally sexual, founded not on intercourse but on lust. By claiming that our mutual interest in men is what binds us, their pride – although not their curiosity – is satisfied. Such an attitude is, itself, a prime example of why women turn to gay men. They may sleep with straight men, but they can t
alk to us. Besides, if shared desire is all, how do these men explain their own antipathy to lesbians? Far from making common cause, they regard them as material for pornographic fantasies and sexist jokes.

  It was when I started making friends at university – rather than making the best of those who had been thrown in my path – that I learnt to value my relationships with women. One, in particular, with the photographer Candida Mulliner, became the fulcrum of my life. We first met in Venice, in a chance encounter which, if I had faith, I would call fate. We shared our lives for nearly twenty years; and, although she died eighteen months ago, she remains my prime confidante. I report to her on everything and (I am aware that the admission courts derision) gain strength from her replies.

  While Candida and I were always honest with each other, we were less so in our dealings with the world at large … a deceit which I perpetuated by what I wrote after her death. I should stress that I never lied, but then there was no need. After centuries of ambiguity, the English language offers scope enough for evasion. My assumption that my sexuality was a private concern was not shared by the thugs of the tabloid press, who smeared it all over their front pages. I see now that no one’s sexuality can be private when, by his silence, that of others weaker than himself is threatened. The truth is that Candida and I enjoyed an all-embracing and yet non-sexual love. Hollywood may have eroticised the relationships of Christopher Isherwood and Sally Bowles or Cole and Linda Porter; the rest of us should acknowledge them for what they were.