by Blue Blake
I started attending Clarendon College where I was taking ‘A’ levels in English literature and Theater Arts. My parents were divorced and I was living with my mother and sister. It was the time of the “New Romantics,” after the punk era; and I drifted around dressed like Adam Ant, or in various costumes ranging from mad clown to pirate king. My hair was various shades of blue, green, purple and maroon.
To get my Equity card I had taken a job dancing at the local straight workingmen’s club, The Musters Hotel, which was owned by two friends of my mother’s, Sally and Rex Harvey. They had a cabaret room and every night along with the other resident acts we would perform with touring performers, bands with saccharine names like “Summer Rain,” or female singers called “Brandy Delight.” The female singers always closed their acts with Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” It still makes me smile when I hear that song, and I’ve heard it sung a million different ways, mostly badly.
I danced on stage for three pounds every night wearing fake leopard skin trousers and a black silk kimono. I got a perm and was convinced I was the second coming of Christ. The audience was made up of truck drivers who would watch me dumbfounded as I turned cartwheels sometimes in satin shorts wearing no underwear. Each night I slept with a different straight trucker. It was paradise.
After a few months, Rex Harvey insisted I find a girl to dance with so that my act wasn’t so homoerotic. Word had spread and the Musters Hotel cabaret room was now full of truckers and chicken hawks lured by my boyish figure. The atmosphere was unusual to say the least. I was at college with a girl called Angela Kelly. She was blonde and had 36D breasts so I asked her to join my act. She would dance in stockings and high heels and a matching mini black silk kimono. She would be perfect.
We rehearsed together to “Super Nature” by Cerrone. We had decided to make our act a little edgy. The lights would go up on stage and I would be gyrating on the floor in a silver Lycra body stocking. Angela would stride on and proceed to grind her stilettos into my crotch, yanking at my perm. I would pretend to slap her face (we were learning stunt fighting at college at the time) and then we would simulate sex on stage, fully clothed. We called ourselves “Touché—The Touch Dancers.”
The night approached when we were to make our stage debut. I had told my mother and she was bringing one of her best friends; a bricklayers’ wife named Bernice, who always struck me as needing a drastic makeover. She looked like she combed her hair with a towel and had never heard of lipstick.
We had publicity photos taken with both Angela and I growling in faux leopard skin outfits, and they were posted for weeks beforehand on the coming attractions board at the cabaret.
We arrived that night to perform and to our astonishment the place was standing room only. It was wall-to-wall men. Surely, they hadn’t come to see, “Fernando and his Performing Parrots.” It slowly dawned on us that they had come to see us!
The evening started well. Rodica, one of the resident singers, started the show with, “I Will Survive.” What a surprise. After that the band played a collection of show tunes. But the crowd was getting restless and various cries of “BRING ON THE STRIPPERS!” were being yelled. Strippers!? We weren’t strippers. We were both sixteen, I weighed 160 pounds at six feet tall. My body was milk white and I had never even heard the words “bench press.”
Kevin, the compere, raced into our dressing room and announced, “You’re going on early. It’s getting nasty out there.” Angela was fastening up her stockings and we just stared at each other. “Oh, we’ll be fine,” I said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
To get on the stage we had to enter from a flight of stairs behind the bandstand that led to our dressing rooms. The lights dimmed and I went on first to take my position at the foot of the stage. I would be onstage on my own for the first thirty seconds of the song. The lights went up and the music started and I began to writhe around on the floor. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke and testosterone and the pounding beat. Suddenly Angela made her entrance and it was as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. There was a stunned silence, and then the men were screaming, standing on chairs, and grabbing their cocks. The shouting was so loud we couldn’t hear the music, so our carefully rehearsed routine went out the window. Luckily, we were both used to dancing with each other so we improvised. Unluckily, the atmosphere sent us a little crazy and I ended up biting off Angela’s stockings as she spanked me onstage.
The Musters Hotel had never seen anything like it. We ended the number and took our bows and that’s when all hell broke loose. Guys were stomping on the floor shouting, “More, more, more, more!” but we had no more to give them. We ran off up the stairs, passing a scared looking Fernando grasping two of his parrots. That was when we heard the first crash. Someone had thrown a beer bottle at Fernando and his feathered performers. Then the whole place erupted. Chairs were thrown over the bars, fighting broke out, the air was full of parrot feathers and cursing and Angela and I had to barricade ourselves inside our dressing room as the crowd rampaged throughout the club.
We were fired the next day.
My mother was pretty upset by the show after her friend Bernice said it was the most obscene stage show she’d ever seen. What did she know? She didn’t even wear eye makeup. She didn’t speak to my mother for years after that.
I, however—after getting over the shock of nearly being gang-raped by hundreds of truckers—realized I had hit upon an idea that could be lucrative as well as sate my desire to perform and to be involved in something where straight men would view me sexually. We could take “Touché—The Touch Dancers” on the road! But where could we perform such a risqué act, which was only really suitable for sexed-up men?
Of course . . . the troops in Northern Ireland.
Our act was perfect for the troops. We found ourselves an agent who specialized in booking cabaret acts for the army bases and we blew them away. They had never seen an act like ours. We added Sarah Brightman’s song “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper” to our act and, I swear, I would wear a gold lame one-armed cat suit and Angela would wear a gold toga and gold Lurex body stocking. The troops loved it! We were totally out there. Every time we did a show Angela fell in love with someone new. She was a sultry blonde and could have any man she wanted. Her breasts were like creamy pillows and she had a hypnotic effect on all guys within ten feet of her. I always thought she’d become a huge star. Instead, a few years later, she got pregnant, had a baby she named Joe and moved back in with her Mum and Dad.
The troops were very appreciative. They were risking their lives practically every day fighting against the I.R.A. For entertainment, various cabaret acts would come over from England and perform for them, though none as sexually charged as Angela and me. Also, the soldiers were gorgeous! Really handsome, healthy guys who were incredibly grateful and friendly. I had sex with as many as I could persuade . . . which wasn’t very many. So did Angela.
Touché broke up when Angela got a job singing in a Nottingham nightclub called “The Palais de Dance.” She had a great voice, and she wanted to be a singer, so she got a job with the Michael Miller Band covering chart hits of the day. This left me with no income and I was still attending college. Angela owed me one. I had helped her get her Equity card and that was a big deal. So she got me an audition to be a dancer with the Michael Miller Band, the first dancer they had ever had. Michael was a really nice guy—in his forties, going bald with lousy teeth, but a really great guy. I auditioned to a song called “Dance Yourself Dizzy.” It was a number I knew his band covered. He gave me a job three nights a week: Wednesday (grab a granny night), Friday and Saturday. I was now a member of the Michael Miller Band.
The Palais was really famous in Nottingham . . . for being a dive. There were fights every night and they employed a dozen bouncers to keep the trouble down. It was full of women dancing around their handbags, with white stilettos and legs the color of Spam. They wore no stockings. In those days, the
guys didn’t dance. It was considered too “queer.” Instead, they stood around the dance floor, getting drunk on pints of lager and eyeing up the talent. Occasionally, a fight would break out and from my vantage point on the stage I would see bouncers materialize from nowhere to drag off and eject the rowdy youths.
The bouncers were so sexy. Especially one named Mike. He was a huge bodybuilder, and I had never met a real bodybuilder before. I was seventeen and had been dating a local butcher named John Glover. He was forty-four. My mother was freaking out. She didn’t approve of me dating men let alone a middle-aged butcher. John treated me terribly, and he was shagging every gay boy in Nottingham under the age of twenty-one. He was handsome, blond, bearded, drove a Jeep and smoked Gauloises cigarettes. He was building a house and living in a caravan in his garage. I thought that was romantic. I was, of course, incredibly stupid. My mother, in a fit of panic, called the police one day and they warned John to stay away from me or he’d go to prison. The legal age of consent in England to be gay at that time was twenty-one. I was four years away from that.
That night at seven o’clock I waited for John to take me to dinner. Seven came and went and I thought he must have said eight o’clock. Eight came and went and vainly I struggled with the idea that perhaps he had said nine o’clock. I stood in the freezing cold but he never came. In fact, I never heard from him again. Years later he died of a heart attack in bed with his eighteen-year-old Chinese lover. It makes my skin crawl to think of what would have happened to me if I had given up my life to live with John Glover. And although I hated my mother for phoning the police at the time, I now understand completely. I was horribly young and John was trying to fuck me all the time. It hurt too much and I would make him stop. I thought I would never enjoy the feeling. As I write this I can smell his cigarettes and see his blue eyes. It makes me remember again that I was once in love with him. He must have been my first love.
To get over John Glover, I set about seducing Mike, the bodybuilder bouncer. Mike was totally straight and when he bent over I could see he wore briefs. I was madly in lust with him. I would sit on his knee between songs when the Michael Miller Band played something too slow for me to dance to. I would stroke his beard and tell him he was the biggest guy I had ever seen. This always works on bodybuilders. They want to hear how huge they are. Mike was twice my weight and I think if he had been capable of sleeping with me he would have done it. He was really straight unfortunately!
He gave me a ride home from a party one night. It was Christmas. We stopped outside my house and my heart was beating so hard I could hear it in my head and I could barely swallow. “Why don’t you let me suck you off?” I ventured. Mike smiled, folded his hands behind his head and leaned back in his seat.
“I’m straight,” he said.
“I know . . . that’s why I want you so badly.” This was a great revelation to me, and would be a recurring theme for the rest of my life. That he was straight made me want him even more. It was the thrill of the chase, trying to get a straight man into bed, a straight bodybuilder bouncer no less. I had always been sexually forward. I think it came from growing up poor and, in the absence of toys, having only my own genitalia to play with.
“You don’t want me,” Mike teased. “I’m a fat old man.” As he said this, he stroked his eight-pack abs through his shirt.
“Mike, I’m serious,” I said putting my hand on his enormous thigh. “I won’t tell anybody. I promise. I just want to suck your dick.” He looked at me for what seemed like hours and then said gently but firmly, “Go to bed kid. I’ve got to get home and get some sleep.” I never did end up having sex with bodybuilder Mike: the one that got away. Perhaps that’s why I still think about him and how sexy he looked in his bouncer’s tuxedo.
That year I found out I had been accepted to study drama for three years in London. A drama school called Mountview Theatre School. I applied for a grant from the local council and one day a letter arrived. I had a grant. I was off to live in London. I was eighteen years old. My journey had begun.
CHAPTER FOUR
COMPARED TO LIVING IN NOTTINGHAM, London was like living on the moon. It was still the time of the New Romantics and streets like the Kings Road were ablaze with new trends. Bands such as Duran Duran exploded on the music scene and my best friend Keith Burns and I would emulate their pretty boy looks. It’s incredible to think back now and realize that every day we went out wearing eyeliner and lipstick. We were by no means transvestites; just totally in the center of the Eighties fashion explosion. We were good-looking young guys out to have a good time. The fact that we were enrolled at a drama school that encouraged such individualism made us all the more wild.
Mountview Theatre School is situated in a cozy area of North London known as Crouch End. It sits on a little hill and the residents of Crouch End are incredibly bohemian. I think because many are ex-Mountview students. We permeated the area with permissiveness. I was sharing a three-bedroom apartment with two girls, Sam and Jax, who were both fantastically blonde and sexy. Another recurring theme in my life would be my love for the company of glamorous blonde women.
Sam’s real name was Melissa and her father was a wealthy eye surgeon. She was six feet tall and bleached her hair suicide blonde. She had pouting lips, spoke with an upper crust accent and dated every beautiful guy in the school. To this day she is one of the sexiest women I have ever met in my life. Years later she fell in love with a wealthy stockbroker, married, and now has two handsome blond sons.
Jax’s real name was Jacqueline. We had known each other in Nottingham from the nightclubs and I was mad about her looks and infectious personality. I never saw Jax wear anything but mini-skirts. She highlighted her strawberry-blonde hair until it was white. She had been dating a Pakistani called Ashiq. He was a bit of a villain and scared me at the time. He went to prison. Jax went to drama school—amazingly the same one as me. So of course we ended up as flat mates. Jax was a brilliantly talented actress.
One show we performed together at Mountview was the musical Marat/Sade. It’s a hideous show. Set in a mental asylum, the Marquis de Sade gets the crazy inmates of the Clinique de Charenton to perform the murder of Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday. Sam played Charlotte, much to everyone’s dismay, as all the girls wanted the role and another student, Jolyon Baker, played the Marquis. Considering Glenda Jackson played Charlotte Corday in the movie, Sam had a tough act to follow. She certainly looked better than Miss Jackson but the combination of the length of the play and the summer heat left the audience catatonic. It was mid-summer, the play was three hours long, and I was wearing a powdered wig and horsehair dress under the stage lights. I was one of the singers. A great role but it was too hot for me to concentrate. Jax had landed the grotesque role of the daughter of the owner of the clinic. Every night she would have to sit on the stage in wig and gown and watch the play performed. Unfortunately, at the end of the play the inmates would supposedly freak out from too much excitement and grab the owner’s daughter and rip off her clothes and fornicate with her on the stage. We had to sing a song called “What’s the Point of a Revolution without General Copulation.” As we sang it we were expected to pretend to copulate. It was insanely bad.
One night while doing the show, we reached the climax when the owner’s daughter would have her clothes ripped off and would be raped. Jax started crying and screaming, “No . . . no . . . I’m pregnant for God’s sake!” Excellent acting, I thought, as we tore at her petticoats.
“She’s very good, isn’t she?” whispered another actor playing a lunatic with no ears.
“Tremendous,” murmured another. “I especially like the bit about her being pregnant. Very moving.”
Jax was in fact pregnant, by her Pakistani lover who by now had served his jail time. Who knew?
I remember Mountview Theatre School so vividly because I spent two and a half great years there. The first year was spent split into three classes: One-One, the intellectual group, all very serious
, regarding themselves as the most talented; One-Two, the musical theatre group, wild and wacky, they regarded themselves as the ones who would become famous; and One-Three, students who didn’t seem to fit into the other two classes. I was in class One-Two. So was Sam. Jax was in One-One.
Mountview’s main school was based in a huge Victorian building that had once been a private home. Over the years sections had been added on and when the school became too big to accommodate all the students, annexes were rented. Hence, every day Crouch End residents would be treated to a procession of young drama students traipsing through the town center, doing what they do best—being dramatic. I always thought we must have resembled a cartoon drawing of a cloud of dust with various arms and legs flying out as we whizzed by. The movie Fame had just opened at the cinemas and we were possessed. The school played it one night to a sold out audience and for weeks we would try to stop cars in the street to dance on them.
We not only had acting classes but various studies in historical dance, mime, circus performance and the class I hated most—fencing. Don’t get me wrong. I hated historical dance too, all that whirling around in tights and a cape. But the saving grace was that the historical dance teacher had an enormous cock. You could totally see it through his tights. It was obscene, and I loved it. He wasn’t hot looking, but he was my teacher and here I was staring at his huge cock as he danced a minuet around the room. I would have blown him if I’d had the chance.
Fencing, on the other hand, was taught by a grizzled teacher who looked like he smoked a hundred cigarettes a day. His claim to fame was that he had taught the sword fighting to the actors in the movie The Three Musketeers . I didn’t give a shit, as I said, I hated fencing.
We had to wear white fencing masks and white jackets to prevent the foils from hurting us. They always hurt, no matter what. The straight guys in class were great at it . . . and the lesbians. It was strange. Half the guys in my class were gay or bi, but none of the girls. Then I found out years later there were several dykes lurking in the closet—all the girls who didn’t dye their hair, wore sweatshirts and training shoes, and invariably got thrown out of school end of year for not being “colorful” enough.