by Simon Doonan
I was about to challenge this idea. Then thought better of it. There was not a lot of point in trying to make sense of the mystical, magical realm of sexual identity. Shelagh was a lesbian and I was a poofter. As Hattie McDaniel5 once said, “It’s jess somethin’ de Angels dun plan.”
* * *
I remember well the last time my sister received a gift from Vivian and Marigold. It was a small mauve, enameled powder compact. By this time Jim/Slag/Shelagh had long since stopped wearing makeup. I, meanwhile, had been experimenting with it for several years.
We asked Betty to intercede and let Marigold and Vivian off the hook.
“Call them up and tell them we’re both gay. Do them a big favor!” said Shelagh, clipping on her fanny pack in preparation for a morning constitutional.
Betty had a word with our kindly redheaded aunt, and the gifts stopped. When asked if she had mentioned our proclivities, Betty replied, “No, of course not. Are these shoes too high for a woman my age?”
I guess it is not the easiest thing in the world to tell your in-laws—whose three children are all straight—that both your kids turned out queer. Nonetheless, my sister and I were disappointed. Betty had missed an opportunity to strike a blow for gay equality. (We were also terrified that, without sufficient deterrent, the gifts might start up again.)
I was determined to find out what our mother had actually said to Aunt Marigold. I waited until we were alone, and then I pursued the matter with her. Had she, for example, said something like “Simon and Shelagh are both horribly ungrateful and don’t deserve any gifts, so please stop now!”
Or maybe she’d been more creative: “Marigold, I regret to inform you that they have joined a cult and are not allowed to have any possessions, so everything you give them is sold and goes to fund the needs of the cult.”
I had to know.
Betty lit a ciggie and glared at me. Mater did not like to be backed into a corner. A triumphant twinkle appeared in her eye, indicating that she was ready to respond, with confidence and verve, to my probing.
I braced myself.
“When I was in the Air Force,” she began, sounding not unlike her actress namesake, the Academy Award-winning Miss Davis, “there were men in the cookhouse who plucked their eyebrows”—puff, pause, exhale—“and they wore Max Factor midnight blue eye shadow”—puff—“and I stuck up for them!”
Pause. Puff.
“So don’t you talk to me about gay rights. If you want someone to march in your parade, I’m your man!”
CHAPTER 9
VERMIN
The first time I got arrested I was wearing a Mickey Mouse printed shirt. The background was Easter yellow, and the Mickey Mouses were, as per usual, black and white with red and yellow clothing and accessories. The oversize collar of this shirt was cut with boldly rounded, cartoonish tips instead of points. It was purchased with trembling excitement from a trendy shop on Kensington Church Street called Mr. Freedom, which specialized in garish, infantile-themed apparel for glamrock devotees. There was a café adjacent to the store called Mr. Feed’em.
I was embarrassingly proud of this purchase, funded as it was by long hours of summer holiday toil at the Reading department store whose motto was “Never knowingly undersold.”
“Wait till the girls get a load of this little number,” I mused as I carefully folded it in preparation for my return to Manchester University for the start of the fall 1971 semester.
The females in question—my college roommates—were named Angela, Joy, and Rose. Angela was a pink-cheeked, brown-eyed cutie from the Isle of Man. Joy was a local girl with long, straight hair and high cheekbones whose celebrity look-alike might have been a young Judy Collins. Last but not least, there was Rose. This tall East Yorkshire brunette played the organ at the church in her tiny village. Rose was not quite as worldly as the rest of us, but she was catching up fast.
Together we rented a run-down row house in a part of Manchester called Whalley Range, pronounced “Wolleh Rrrrrange” by the locals. The decor was visionary. Designed and furnished by our Pakistani landlord with random wallpapers and sticks of furniture from the Salvation Army, our house resembled a crack den a full fifteen years before the advent of crack.
The adjacent neighborhoods were all in the process of being demolished. Everywhere you looked the sordid hovels of the Industrial Revolution, with their backyard toilets and smoking chimneys, were being leveled. This was all fine and dandy. However, anytime the wrecking balls started to swing, a river of displaced vermin surged out from under the rubble, down the street, and into our living room. Mice ran across our pillows while we slept. They scampered atop the gas meter while watched by us from the safety of our scrungy couch.
It was an urban calamity of biblical proportions. If the bubonic plague had still been active, we would all have died.
We were ambivalent about our new friends. On the one hand, they were disgusting, never failing to leave a trail of horrid little turds wherever they went. On the other hand, they provided us with hours of light entertainment, something which, on our overly earnest college campus, was in short supply. University life had fallen short of our collective expectations. The year was 1971: there was no lack of countercultural rhetoric and radical ideals. But where was the glamour? Where was the fun?
It was around this time that Margaret Thatcher elected to eliminate the tradition of free school milk. This angered our fellow students far beyond our comprehension. Most came from upper-middle-class backgrounds. None of them had ever been at risk for calcium deficiency. Nevertheless, there were endless demonstrations at which Thatcher was vilified as if she was on a one-woman crusade to bring back rickets. The soundtrack to our college years consisted of thousands of raised students’ voices shouting, “Milk-snatcher Thatcher! Milk-snatcher Thatcher!”
Angela, Joy, Rose, and I were significantly absent from the throng. We were pathetically apolitical. Me and the girls were far more concerned with alcohol than with milk. We were, to put it bluntly, drunks. While our fellow students got high on pot, we drank ourselves stupid on beer and highly intoxicating Devonshire cider.
Having grown up in the Doonan winery, I had come to think of myself as a fairly experienced boozer. Then I met Angela, Joy, and Rose, and immediately felt like a lightweight. Angela and Joy were seasoned drinkers, and Rose was making up for her church-playing years.
Joy, being a Manchester native, knew all the best bars. She loved to drag us all to a Dickensian, proletariat watering hole called Yates’ Wine Lodge in the center of town. Here we spent the evening ingesting lethal concoctions called “blobs.” These hot, sugary, wine-based drinks tasted like cold remedies and, based on the frightening condition of the Yates’ regulars, were guaranteed to rot both your teeth and your brain.
Like many pub habitués, Joy was a serious darts player. Her team even won the occasional tournament. Their winning strategy consisted of one part skill and nine parts blobs. It was amazing to watch Joy—fag in one hand, dart in the other—wobble and sway, throw a bull’s-eye, and then collapse on the floor.
Angela, Joy, and Rose were instant converts to Château Doonan. At the beginning of every semester, I would transport as much of Terry’s homemade wine to Manchester as I could carry on the train. The girls and I were so glad to see each other—and the free hooch—we would usually knock it all back in one evening.
Joy and I were probably the most enthusiastic imbibers. We medicated our anxiety with booze. In addition to sharing my obsession with the losing of one’s marbles, Joy was terrified she would one day end up a bag lady. Any time she encountered a homeless person—there was no shortage in Whalley Range—she would shiver and reach for the cider.
One night Rose and Angela went out on the town with their men-friends, leaving Joy and me to our own devices. We spent the evening knocking back drinks, smoking furiously, talking incoherently, and listening to Lou Reed’s album Transformer over and over again.
By 9.30 P.M. we were already
past the point of any restraint. Soon we had drunk everything in the house. There we were, slumped on the couch watching the mice running up the tattered curtains, with no money to go out and no more hooch on the premises.
Or was there?
With a sudden burst of optimistic energy, we both leapt off the couch and began searching every nook and cranny of the kitchen. Finding nothing but a half-empty bottle of vinegar only seemed to fuel that raging there-must-be-some-booze-somewhere conviction.
Like Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick in Days of Wine and Roses, we went into a ransacking frenzy.
After tearing through every room in the house, we eventually hit the jackpot. Lurking under Rose’s dressing table was a bottle of Terry’s wine. How sneaky of her to hide it there!
“Maybe Rose has one of those drinking problems. Whaddya callit?” slurred Joy unsympathetically as I glugged the entire contents of her stash into two pint-size beer glasses which we had recently stolen from the pub around the corner.
The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur. More Lou Reed. More incoherent but heartfelt babbling regarding our respective insecurities. I have a vague recollection of staggering across the street and unsuccessfully trying to get credit at the fish and chip shop.
I woke the next morning feeling very strange. My stomach ached, and my breath and clothes stank of witch hazel.
“Who used all my homemade rose-petal astringent? Were you having one of your evenings of beauty?” demanded Rose as she waved the empty bottle accusingly in my blotchy face.
Joy and I should have expected as much. It was so very typical of Rose to be making her own beauty products.
Rose was very proto–Martha Stewart, but on a tight budget. Her insane brand of creative self-sufficiency knew no bounds. Rose was the kind of girl who, given a bit of encouragement, would have pulped and perforated her own toilet paper. Sunday mornings usually found her straining sour milk through an old pair of panty hose in a valiant attempt to make her own cottage cheese. It was hardly surprising that she made her own astringent.
* * *
What, you may well ask, had become of my quest to find the Beautiful People? Well, in our own feckless way, we were doing our level best. Joy, Angela, Rose, and I were trying hard to live a gracious and glamorous existence.
Though negligent on all aspects of housecleaning and homemaking, we put a gargantuan amount of effort and creativity into what the English call “getting tarted up.” We might not have been the Beautiful People, but we were definitely the Tarted Up People, the Tarted Up People of Whalley Range.
From the very moment we moved in together, we turned our living room into a bustling atelier of haute couture. Angela’s bright blue sewing machine was parked permanently in the middle of the room. There were paper patterns everywhere and a hissing iron atop a permanently erected ironing board.
The girls made mostly sassy blouses and party frocks, and I made shirts for myself out of “novelty” vintage fabrics. When her boyfriend proposed to her, Angela ran out, bought ten yards of cream crepe, and whipped up her own wedding dress. For the next two weeks we all pinned and primped around her like the Disney tweetie birds in Cinderella.
We augmented our homemade garments with secondhand trouves acquired at church jumble sales. On Saturdays, while our fellow students charged into the town center for more anti-Thatcher demos, we headed in the opposite direction, to the suburban church halls.
There is nothing like the prospect of a good jumble sale to take your mind off a pounding hangover. Once inside we would hurl ourselves into piles of smelly and discarded clothing in search of vintage gems culled by church ladies from the houses of the Manchester bourgeoisie.
Occasionally I would find a hand-knit Fair Isle sweater or a Clarice Cliff teapot for myself, but most of my energy went toward ferreting out glamorous looks for the girls. Like a pimp who wanted his protégés to look extra-foxy, I trawled for bias-cut silk gowns, floral crepe tea dresses, forties platforms, shoulder-padded Joan Crawford suits, exotic 1950s plate-shaped hats, and fox stoles.
For us Tarted-Up People, fashion, and the wearing and flaunting thereof to pubs and discos, provided a nice antidote to dreary academic obligations. The girls and I were all psychology majors, and none of us was enjoying it very much. We were all horrified by the scientific rigor of our chosen subject. It was agonizingly boring. I vividly remember experiencing actual physical pain during our lectures.
None of us had read the prospectus very carefully before applying to Manchester University. We naïvely thought we would spend days interpreting each other’s dreams and comparing Jung and Freud. I had additional expectations: I anticipated finding out why my family was insane and how to avoid a similar fate. Much to my annoyance, we hardly even touched on personality disorders, never mind mental illness.
We spent our days measuring and analyzing instinctive behavior as if it was a complicated disease like lupus. Human foibles were regarded with suspicion, so most of our studies centered on vermin. Instead of studying people, we studied rats—pretty white ones with pink eyes—and then we applied advanced statistics to our observations. Our team of all-male professors and teachers actively discouraged us from reading or discussing anything philosophical or amusing or insane or camp.
One day Rose found at a jumble sale a textbook on the origins of psychosis. A quirky, riveting tome like this would never have found its way onto one of our reading lists. It was much too interesting, and there were photographs! Of people. Mad people. This was more like it! We pored over it as if it was illicit pornography.
As I leafed excitedly through this book, I came upon a picture of a tubby, catatonic schizophrenic lady sitting on her bed with her head wreathed in dish towels.
“How you is she? You’re always doing that!” said Angela with a chuckle, sending a chill of panic down my spine.
Instantly I had a raging anxiety attack.
Angela was right. I had developed an unconscious habit, while lounging chez nous, of wrapping stuff, like towels and scarves and even cushions, round my head. Even in warm weather.
Rose’s book said that people went bonkers in their late teens or early twenties. Maybe my one-way ticket to Narg-ville had finally arrived, but with a difference. I had never before considered the possibility that I might become a catatonic schizophrenic. I had always thought that, when I eventually went gaga, I would be upholding the fine family tradition of paranoid schizophrenia.
My anxieties quadrupled when I found out that our entire psychology class was scheduled to make a field trip to a mental hospital.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” said Angela as she stitched a new frock for the occasion. “Finally we’re going to study people instead of bloody rats!” But I was suspicious. The trip was very unexpected and clearly at odds with our curriculum. Maybe they were planning to drop me off.
I attempted to defray my anxiety by getting tarted up. I donned a pair of extra-wide Oxford bags, a navy and white satin jockey jacket (homemade and copied from a Mr. Freedom design), and ladies’ cartoonish sandals. These shoes were styled like kiddies’ footwear but sized up and fabricated in metallic blue leather. Very Elton John.
* * *
The lunatic asylum was everything I might have imagined. The grim Victorian Gothic façade soared ominously against the leaden sky. Narg-like women cowered under windblown trees, while Ken-like men and their uniformed attendants shuffled along tarmac paths looking like something out of Night of the Living Dead. Angela, Joy, Rose, and I started eyeballing the more attractive males.
Our professor then broke the news that we had not come to hobnob with the inmates. Our destination was a clinic where doctors treated their patients with aversive conditioning. We had been studying the effects of aversive conditioning on rats. Would they still go for the food pellet even if they got an electric shock? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Me and the girls had also been studying the effects of aversive conditioning at home on our own rodents. We
allowed them to nibble at morsels of Rose’s cheese and then whacked them with a jumble sale badminton racket. Many of them seemed willing to brave the badminton racket for the possibility of a nibble of Rose’s cheese, a testament to the flavor and quality of her dairy products if nothing else.
“We treat everything from phobias to homosexuality,” announced the doctor once we were inside the grim Orwellian clinic, causing me to wince slightly. We were then shown slides of bare-chested California surfer types with tousled locks. I instantly fell in love. Not only were they beautiful and tanned but they seemed so shockingly carefree and happy, happy, happy.
Not wishing to appear sleazy, I redirected my gaze. There, illuminated by the glow of the slide show, were the chairs into which the patients were strapped while electricity was applied to their various parts. It was all very Clockwork Orange.
I couldn’t help wondering why any gay personage would opt to come to a grim loony bin and submit to this kind of torture, as opposed to, for example, going to one of the fab local discos, drinking a lot, and then picking up a hairdresser or even an insurance salesman.
Since moving to Manchester, I had achieved some modest success in the dating department. Upon first arriving, I met a part-time circus acrobat who sold bags of Dolly Mixtures (Brit candy) off a barrow in the open-air market for extra cash. It did not amount to anything, but I took it as proof positive that there were pleasant, interesting young men to be dated. One just had to be patient. The life of a poofter, though not without its emotional whoopee cushions and discriminatory aspects, was certainly not dire enough to throw in the towel and get yourself electrocuted.
The doctor explained that it was not possible to embark upon a course of aversive conditioning without first identifying the criteria for successful treatment. Without these benchmarks it was impossible to tell if the electric shocks were working.