Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints

by Simon Doonan

  (Wee remains an important word to this day. On a recent trip, I dragged a reluctant Terry, now a widower, to the Belfast branch of Marks & Spencer to replenish his socks and undies. It was a bitterly cold but sunny day. I was wearing a belted trench coat, a fur hat, and dark glasses. I was channeling Betty in both the bossiness of my behavior and the drama of my attire.

  As I waited on line at the checkout, a large, red-faced Irish lady tried to push in front of me. “Let the wee lady go first!” said the checkout gal, indicating me. Terry said nothing. I did, however, notice a wry smile curling the corners of his lips.)

  Having established that I was a “wee boy” with money-earning potential, D.C. lost no time in educating Betty about the most effective ways to stunt my growth.

  “A little nip of gin in his milk will do the trick,” he said, causing everyone to guffaw with laughter as if he was joking, which of course he wasn’t.

  With a twanging of springs, D.C. plonked himself down on his battered two-seater leather couch. Placing a massive paw on each armrest, he began to drum out a tattoo with his fingers. He stared into the middle distance. I could tell he was having a wildly premature fantasy about me. I was toying with the same fantasy.

  I’m racing in the Grand National. I’m wearing a fetching ensemble of yellow and red satin. D.C. is cheering me on.

  It’s a dramatic race. At the very last moment I surge into the lead and win by a hair.

  I’m borne aloft by D.C.

  It’s time to accept my trophy.

  D.C. inserts his dentures in preparation to meet the queen. (The queen is already wearing hers.) Now he’s lifting me onto a box so that Her Majesty can present me with a large silver cup. I hand the trophy back to D.C. for safekeeping.

  D.C. starts to snore. The fantasy comes to an abrupt halt.

  * * *

  I managed to dodge my grandfather’s various schemes, equestrian and otherwise. When I reached five feet, three inches, he gave up on the jockey scenario. His goals for me became more modest. He wanted to live long enough to see me reach the age when he could drag me to the pub and teach me to drink.

  Maybe it was fortunate for us both that he did not live long enough to accompany me to a pub and watch me ordering a crème de menthe or a pink lady.

  When he finally popped his clogs, we decamped to Northern Ireland to sort through his things. While Terry wheeled barrow loads of empty bottles back to the liquor store, Betty sifted through a shoe box of papers and assessed the financial situation. An early proponent of the concept of “spending down,” D.C. had skillfully managed to die with a zero bank balance. In my mother’s family, most people had the decency to die with enough money in the bank to pay for their own interment. Gramps was more laissez-faire.

  After a couple of Woodbines and an epiphany of lateral thinking, Betty painted her lips, picked up her handbag, threw on her leather trench, and caught the bus into town. Shielding her complex coiffure from the gusting Belfast Lough winds with the aid of her purse, she strode up the high street to the Woodman’s Arms, the pub into which her father had hemorrhaged his pension. Ensconcing herself in the “snug”—the anteroom designated for females while the men drank in the main saloon—she ordered a gin and tonic. When the proprietor came to pay his respects, Betty calmly went in for the kill. She pulled the undertaker’s bill out of her purse and hit him up for the money to bury her father. And she got it.

  I hope she never paid it back, but knowing her, I’m sure she did.

  CHAPTER 8

  GIFTS

  I have an auntie Marigold and an uncle Vivian.

  She is a redhead. He is not a woman.

  During the early part of the last century, it was not uncommon for male children to be named Vivian. Boys were also named Evelyn and Jocelyn, Lyndsey, or even Beverly. I can offer no explanation. It’s a weird Brit thing.

  But Uncle Vivian is not weird. Despite the fact that he came from a family of certified lunatics, my dad’s brother is quite abnormally normal. He even belongs to a golf club. Vivian is a traditionalist. Having spent a grueling childhood contending with Narg, his poor deranged mother—hauling her out of the gas oven was among his regular chores—Vivian worked hard to achieve a life of prosperity and stability.

  Uncle Vivian and Auntie Marigold were always big on Christmas. Their philosophy was as follows: every child in the family, no matter how vile or bratty, was eligible for a holiday gift right up until the magical moment when he or she got married. Marriage signified the passing of the Xmas baton, when the responsibilities of gift giving mystically transferred themselves to the firm young shoulders of the newlyweds. Marriage confirmed one’s status as an adult and disqualified one, in a totally positive kind of way, from a place on Marigold’s gift list.

  This system worked well, until my sister and I came along. Let me rephrase that. This system worked well until my lesbian sister and I came along.

  Between us, Shelagh Doonan and I managed not only to deconstruct this system but also to place a lingering strain on the yuletide budgets of our well-meaning aunt and uncle. We threw a spanner in the works. We buggered up the system. We refused to play ball. Neither of us got married until we reached middle age, and then it was to people of our own gender.

  In fairness to all concerned, my sister and I have never been what you’d call easy to buy for.

  It started when we were tiny tots.

  * * *

  One frosty Saturday in December, handsome Uncle Vivian appeared bearing gifts. He opened his manly traveling valise and, with a grand voilà! presented my sister with a doll named Sally Anne.

  Sally Anne was special. Sally Anne wore a crunchy frock of flower-printed tulle. When you rocked her, she gurgled. Her eyelids then lowered, giving her a strange, blissed-out expression.

  Shelagh reacted violently but not unreasonably. She did what any self-respecting, four-year-old lesbian in the making would have done, she attempted to murder Sally Anne.

  Sally Anne hit the baseboard with a sickening crunching sound, skidded about four feet, and disappeared under a bed. Uncle Vivian was too engrossed in conversation to notice Shelagh hurling Sally Anne across the room with all her might. Betty and Terry were preoccupied with being festive and yuletidy. Nobody saw. Nobody cared.

  But I saw, and I cared. I cared a lot.

  Deeply moved by the plight of this unwanted innocent, I crawled in under the bed and retrieved her. The damage was significant. Her head was cracked. One dislocated arm dangled two inches lower than the other.

  I pulled her frock down off her head and made her decent again. Cradling her and stroking her marcel-waved rayon hair, I attempted to make the pain go away. I vowed to nurse Sally Anne back to health. Under my care she would learn to gurgle again.

  Eventually, once she was back on her feet, I would effect an entente cordiale between Sally Anne and Shelagh.

  “She was just playing. She didn’t mean to hurt you,” I said, kissing her linoleum-grazed cheek, “she loves you. Really she does.”

  But I knew in my heart that it was a lie. Shelagh loathed Sally Anne. Like any right-thinkin’ tomboy, my sister had homicidal feelings toward this doll and all dolls. Dolls were girlie and stupid and contemptible. Shelagh was far more interested in my toys, in particular the butch little toy truck which Uncle Vivian had just assigned to me. And as far as I was concerned, she was welcome to it. I hated that truck as much as she hated Sally Anne.

  The Sally Anne debacle was a watershed incident. From this moment on, neither one of us exhibited any of the conventional tastes of our gender. We were gender-confused, but happily so.

  Our unorthodox tastes formed the basis of a strange symbiosis. We traded gifts like baseball cards.

  Me: I’ll give you this toy airplane if you’ll give me your plastic lacy parasol.

  Shelagh: I’ll give you my golliwog, the one in the gingham dress with the two rows of rickrack on the hem, if you’ll give me your toy shovel.

  What did our parents
make of this transgender trend? Please remember, dear reader, that these incidents occurred long before the contemporary hysteria surrounding childhood. Back in the 1950s, parents were infinitely less focused on their children’s development. As long as we did not exhibit signs of schizophrenia, Betty and Terry were quite happy.

  As I grew older and the gifts got more butch, my motivation to get rid of them increased, as did Shelagh’s motivation to tear them from my limp grasp. What a relief it was to offload all those dreary toy airplanes, especially the annoying plastic ones which I was supposed to enjoy assembling myself! I can still recall the dizziness and euphoria caused by the highly intoxicating adhesive which came with each kit. The glue high was, in fact, the only thing that made assembling these airplanes bearable. How many poor gay boys have become glue sniffers in order to withstand the tedium of building those bloody airplanes?

  Though we enjoyed a happy and unique arrangement, it was not always smooth sailing. For example, when we played Cowboys and Indians we were not quite sure how to divvy up the roles. Somehow my sister, being older and more conniving, persuaded me that the Indian braves, with their long hair, shift dresses, and penchant for beads, were actually women. This changed my entire outlook. I happily became an Indian. This set her free to become a gun-wielding Bonanza type. Little Joe was her favorite.

  And then there were the fairies. I know it sounds preposterous, but we actually played fairies. This was not some idiosyncrasy born of my nelly ways. We, along with all the other uncorrupted innocents of our generation, believed in Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. In our house, where many of the adults seemed to occupy an alternative reality, what was a fairy or two? We—even Shelagh, who at about this time developed a strange habit of referring to herself as Jim—were always trying to claw our way through the wardrobe into Narnia.

  Paradoxically, playing fairies turned out, for our little gang, to be far more contentious than playing Cowboys and Indians. The three of us, Shelagh, a neighbor called Gloria, and I, fought relentlessly for the key roles. We all, even Jim/Shelagh, desperately wanted to play Titania. This was not a gender issue. It had more to do with power and with the languid nature of the role. Titania lay around all day in her bower doing basically nothing, while the other fairies had to flit about providing lifestyle services for their queen.

  “Bring me buttercups and wine!”

  “Comb out my tresses, you worthless pixie!”

  “Fashion me a neck pillow from yonder moss clump!”

  Most of the time we were not competing for roles. Most of the time it all worked like a dream. Instinctively and without much discussion, we switched and swapped the tastes and proclivities normally associated with our respective genders. Shelagh was Robin Hood, and I was Maid Marian.

  I was delighted to have a sister so ready and willing to pick up the slack in the butch department, and she was happy to butch it up. This symbiotic arrangement allowed our individual eccentricities and proclivities to blossom and intensify. Shelagh/Jim became very, very blokey, and I became more nelly with each passing year.

  And everything was lovely.

  And then it wasn’t.

  Being a year older, Shelagh went off to Caversham primary school, leaving me to while away another year of diarrhea, violence, and vomit at the orphanage.

  Shelagh was assimilated without too many problems. Her tomboy persona was considered unremarkable. Lots of girls hated needlework and cookery and preferred to climb trees. Nobody questioned her Huckleberry Finn–ish ways. Nobody said, “Hey, you up there in that oak tree. You needn’t think we’re going to stand idly by while you lay the foundation for a life of lesbianism. Get down here and finish your bloody needlework!”

  Languishing in the mayhem of the orphanage, I had no idea what was in store for me. Sisterless, I whiled away the time learning to skip. No, I don’t mean jump-roping. I mean skipping as in skipping through fields of daisies. Skipping was good exercise and, given the considerable speed which was possible, enabled me to elude the insanity around me. But most important, skipping felt extraordinarily pleasurable. The sensations of freedom, euphoria, and speed acted like an anti-depressant.

  A year later I followed Shelagh to primary school and found out the horrid truth. While Shelagh’s tomboy persona was a source of indifference, my nelly ways had the opposite effect. Everyone loves a tomboy, but an effeminate boy is reviled and doomed. Especially if he skips.

  Don’t fret. This is not going to turn into a gruesome sob story where I end up trying to hang myself with a pair of Betty’s seamed nylons. British schools are not like American schools, where pansies are hounded until they either kill themselves or are forced to go on national TV and denounce their persecutors to Diane Sawyer.

  England circa 1958 was a lot more forgiving.

  I saw what I needed to do. I formed a salon des refusés, comprising naughty girls and other girlie boys, like Biddie Biddlecombe. I ducked under the radar and found a way to survive.

  And I learned to suppress the impulse to skip. This was a hard one for me, but somehow I managed it. I knew instinctively that learning not to skip was an important component of those legendary skills of concealment which have enabled homosexuals to survive for centuries. These are, so they say, the same skills which have enabled so many limp wristers to become excellent government spies.

  Chez moi, it was becoming apparent that I was not going to grow up to be like my tough Irish grandfather. Terry would throw a ball at me, and it would thud into my stomach. He did not make a big deal out of it. Nonetheless, I could not help noticing the look of disappointment.

  Another Christmas was looming. What in God’s name, would I ask for? I could not go back to building airplanes. I decided to throw everyone off my scent.

  “I simply must have a subscription to Boy’s Own Paper,” I declared, thinking how ardent and masculine I must sound.

  Terry’s face lit up as if to say, “Maybe you won’t grow up to be an Eartha Kitt impersonator after all.” In Terry’s defense, Miss Kitt was already looming large in my life. We now had a telly. Every week we watched Sunday Night at the London Palladium, a variety show on which leopard-clad Eartha was a frequent guest. I was barely able to contain my skippy enthusiasm for her outrageous purring performances.

  Terry could not fill out that Boy’s Own Paper subscription form quickly enough.

  A month later, my very first issue popped through the letter box and thudded onto the carpet. With Oscar-winning enthusiasm, I tore it from its envelope and immersed myself in boy culture.

  There are no words to describe the superhuman effort which it took for me to appear even remotely excited by this dreadful periodical. Each issue of Boy’s Own Paper was more puritanically dreary and stultifyingly uninteresting than the last, especially the fiction. The B.O.P. stories consisted of endless permutations of the Lassie theme: i.e., young boys prevailing in perilous situations with the help of devoted canines. Heaven forbid boys should have friends of either gender! These stories alternated with articles about repairing your own bicycle tires, pet care, and knot tying. With its unwavering commitment to the avoidance of anything remotely sassy or hedonistic, Boy’s Own Paper was the magazine equivalent of a Taliban training camp.

  I rehearsed a little speech: “Dad, I must reluctantly bring to your attention the fact that Boy’s Own Paper is lacking any editorial punch whatsoever. Besides, I now know all there is to know about tying knots, hamster care, and how not to get struck by lightning, so I have decided I would rather have a subscription to Vogue instead.”

  Who was I kidding? Canceling the subscription was out of the question. This would have been a dead giveaway. The folks at B.O.P. would have forwarded the information about my cancellation to the authorities, and I would have ended up on some international database for sissies.

  And so, every month for years and years and years, the Boy’s Own Paper plopped, turdlike, through our letter box, and everyone watched me pretend to care.

  Ev
entually my self-imposed burka started to slip.

  When I was twelve, and Betty asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I had half a mind to say, “I want to park a truck-load of explosives outside the offices of Boy’s Own Paper.” But I didn’t. Instead I dragged her to the local department store—the same store that would eventually employ me to flick a feather duster over the clocks and watches—pointed at the window, and declared, “One of those!”

  Strangely phallic but also wildly feminine, the object in question had haunted me for months. I would fabricate all kinds of reasons to pass by the store and stare at it. Standing about two feet high, this gorgeous object was made of red, hand-blown glass. The overall shape recalled the spire of a fantasy mosque from a camp Vincente Minnelli movie. The attenuated minaret was actually a removable stopper, suggesting that this object was some kind of decanter. But it was far too tall and unwieldy and insane to hold anything as pedestrian as sherry or olive oil. My decanter was fabulously and impudently nonfunctional. I did not know it at the time, but this gift was historic: it was my very first decorative accessory.

  Betty seemed pleasantly surprised. Having grown up in an environment where überbutch hellions and sociopaths were the male norm, she was no doubt intrigued and amused by my burgeoning aestheticism. Her comfort level about this purchase was much higher than mine.

  I knew it was weird and that I was a freak and that only a pansy would want such a gift. But I couldn’t help myself. Screw Boy’s Own Paper and everything it stood for! This decorative accessory was completely and utterly fabulous, and soon it would be mine, all mine!

  “I’m giving it to my son for Christmas. He picked it out himself!” said Betty with pride to the working-class saleslady with the auburn bouffant and the pursed lips.

  The saleslady’s eyes narrowed. “Oooh! It’s for ’im, is it?” she said with the air of one who would have liked to turn me over to the authorities and have me tried for crimes against humanity but instead decided she would torture and denounce me herself.