Kid Gloves Read online

  In time Mike was frustrated by the bureaucratic aspects of realizing his memorial design, particularly when corners were cut. He had specified an infinitesimal gradient for the floor of the memorial, to make sure that water ran off. This was omitted, as a cost-cutting measure, and on the grounds that it never rained in Sacramento (in whose State Capitol Park it was erected). Mike knew better, and realized that in some seasons there would be puddling. He didn’t attend the opening and has never visited, as far as I know, though he does have the consolation of being able to see it in the background of the local TV news every Veterans Day.

  There’s a debate that never seems to die down about whether there’s such a thing as a gay sensibility. If being a veteran presumably affected Mike’s ideas for the memorial, did his being gay also make a contribution? It’s hard to come up with a definite answer. Is there gay input in his memorial? Just possibly. If you reach inside the young soldier’s flak jacket (not that you would), you’ll find that his nipples have been moulded.

  After three years spent very happily in Virginia, and with a book soon to be published, I had the benefit of a new interpretation of my personality by Dad, but I was still living at home. Why not? I was two hundred yards from a Tube station, but Gray’s Inn was quiet in the evenings and more or less deserted at weekends. I could walk to the West End on a Monday evening and get tickets to see a play. What were the advantages of setting up on my own, even if I could afford it on the £600 advance Lantern Lecture brought me? I was ahead of my time. Nowadays it’s standard for people to wait a good long time before they can get established on the property ladder, but in those days the lower rungs were pretty access-ible and it took some fancy rhetorical manoeuvring to make my choices look anything other than lazy and infantilized. Snow might fall on my bed, thanks to the rusty skylight, but I doubt if anyone was really fooled by my charade of starving-writer-in-a-garret. I wasn’t even sure I was a writer. I had convinced a few other people but not myself. Lantern Lecture was ‘well received’ but I had no idea what to do next.

  I had written my first book review, of Edmund White’s States of Desire, while still in Charlottesville, for Craig Raine’s Quarto – I remember sitting in the Howard Johnson’s on West Main Street to write and rewrite my piece. Happy days! It would take me about five years of literary journalism in print and on the radio to start earning a living. My lowly status was partly disguised by my being so conveniently located, only a short walk from the Sunday Times on Gray’s Inn Road, where Claire Tomalin would let me root through the book cupboard for lateral assignments, and from the TLS in Clerkenwell. Physical proximity was much more important in those days before e-mail.

  It was only the anomaly of a new and serious-minded broadsheet newspaper (the Independent) being set up, with an arts editor, Tom Sutcliffe, whose address book was full of radio names rather than hacks as such, that edged me into solvency. It was an unlikely combination of events, a shower of frogs coinciding with a blue moon.

  In the meantime I was an adult with an eccentric portfolio of privileges and restrictions. If Dad had been a bed and breakfast, he would certainly not have advertised himself as gay-friendly. Limits to behaviour weren’t spelled out, and of course there was more potential leeway when Dad was on circuit. Even so, it was clear that a new face wouldn’t be welcome at breakfast, unless possibly it belonged to Camilla Parker-Bowles. Now there’s a lady who can wear a hyphen!

  However little time Dad and I actually spent in the flat together, it’s perfectly obvious that one of us (at least) was compromising his principles, and naturally I’d rather think it was him.

  Did I want to invite someone into the flat for the purposes of pleasure, someone who might murder my mother or make off with the Investiture chairs? Well of course I did. Yet the situation suited me well, even in the aspects that seemed to chafe the most. I imagined I was looking for a relationship but didn’t actually establish one. Certainly the partners I pursued were self-disqualifying by reason of unavailability. If they weren’t ruled out by reason of a previous commitment then it was a matter of distance, whether geographically or emotionally expressed.

  I wasn’t a fully paid-up non-committer. I was really just stringing committophobia along. I kept it dangling, never quite saying in so many words that I didn’t see us having a future.

  As far as I could see, my brothers weren’t in any great rush to settle down either, and perhaps I can hide my particular pathology behind wider patterns in the family.

  I remember one idyllic picnic on the flat roof of the Gray’s Inn flat, where Mum used to sunbathe. I hauled food, plates and cutlery for a romantic lunch up the vertical metal ladder which provided access, using the carrier-bag-on-a-rope system she had devised to convey her sun cream and chosen book. From this distance it seems jarring to be calling her ‘Mum’, but it can’t really be avoided, Mum being what I called her at the time.

  At the end of our rooftop meal, my date delivered what may have been the tenderest, warmest speech of romantic severance ever made. He had been having a very nice time, he said, and there were many ways in which I was wonderful, but he was looking for a lover of his own age.

  It took a moment for this to sink in. ‘Tony,’ I asked, ‘how old do you think I am?’ The age difference between us was about eighteen months. Even in a highly competitive gay market I didn’t qualify as a dinosaur or even a coelacanth, the ‘living fossil’ that turned up to everyone’s surprise in a fisherman’s net in 1938.

  I told myself that being a Published Author conferred a gravitas which might be mistaken for seniority of the flesh, and so this comment wasn’t the vote of no confidence in my grooming regime it might seem to be. I’ve never tired of reminding Tony of his micro-gaffe, not when Keith and I attended the party to celebrate his civil ceremony with George, nor when the two of them came to celebrate ours in 2008.

  I suppose it was forgiving of me to use this new-fangled legal procedure, since I had declared in the London Review of Books in the mid-1990s that marriage was too central an institution of heterosexuality, too well defended, to be made to yield even a junior mechanism for the benefit of same-sex couples. I suggested instead, following up a remark of Foucault’s, a modification of the adoption process as the most practical way of securing legal rights for loved ones. Since then a Labour administration had introduced new legislation, as if determined to show me up as a poor prophet of social developments, but there was no sense in bearing a grudge.

  The dynamics between homophobic judge and publicly gay writer son, tolerating each other at least to the extent of sharing a roof, are probably not standard. I dare say each of us tried to avoid confrontation while also steeling ourselves against compromise. It was my impression that the slow, slow melting came from his side of the glaciated valley, but perhaps he would have said the same thing.

  Along the way there was a series of small breakthroughs and setbacks. A timeline of sorts can be established.

  Even before I left for the States in 1978, when I was still based in Cambridge, there was a postscript to the protracted New Year seaside debate about sexual identity. Dad sent me a letter in which he told me that remarkable results had been obtained from testosterone treatment on homosexuals. There were references to medical journals.

  I found this fairly insulting even before I consulted the journals. The articles concerned testosterone levels rather than treatment, and the homosexuals on whom the tests had been carried out were female. I wrote Dad a curt note pointing this out, saying sourly that he should do more homework before accusing his sons of lesbianism.

  The most painful thing about the epis
ode, though, was that the references to medical journals were not in Dad’s handwriting, but his clerk John Cant’s. There had been delegation. Dad couldn’t be bothered to do his own skimpy bigoted research. I felt very let down. We’d had our difficulties in the past, but I had always been able to rely on the stamina of his prejudice, and I missed the personal touch.

  Back in residence after my time in the States, I didn’t willingly expose Dad to details of my ‘private life’, but that didn’t make me culpably discreet. Sometime in late 1981 an estranged sexual partner stuck a wounding letter through the letterbox of the flat. Seeing me flinch as I opened the envelope, Dad said hoarsely, ‘Is it … blackmail?’ He was playing a very straight bat to the googlies that the queered pitch of life with a gay son was going to send his way. Even so, it wasn’t clear in his scenario quite how the proposed extortion was to be managed. Presumably the blackmailer was threatening to expose my secret life. But to whom?

  Dad and I were basing our assumptions on different historical periods, or perhaps different trends in the theatre. He was giving a performance of pained dignity out of Rattigan, while I had overshot even the kitchen sink brigade, ending up on the far fringe, where the Lord Chamberlain would hardly have dared to tread. For those few hours my personal drama edged into Orton territory, black farce rather than liberal-leaning problem play.

  In 1983 Dad asked me if I was responsible for editing The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, which had recently been published. I was offended that he could ask such a question. Wasn’t it perfectly obvious that if I took on a project of such a sort I would do it under my own name? If I did decide to use a pseudonym, I would try to do better than the name on the book’s cover, Stephen Coote.

  I did on the other hand edit Mae West Is Dead that same year, an anthology of gay fiction published by Faber, providing a mildly militant introduction, and I don’t remember anything being said about that. I imagine Mum kept the peace between us to a considerable extent, and warned Dad off unsafe subjects. It was kid gloves all round, some of them elbow-length, in the debutante or drag-queen manner.

  In the introduction to the anthology I made passing reference to Aids, which was just beginning to make headlines in this country, as a domestic threat rather than an exotic catastrophe. Of course I hedged my bets, in the journalistic manner, trying to come up with a politically robust statement that nevertheless wouldn’t embarrass me if a cure was found by the time the book was published – a sort of rhetorical ice sculpture designed to melt discreetly away if conditions improved.

  There was no thaw. The Terrence Higgins Trust, the UK’s pioneer Aids organization, held its first meeting in 1983, at Conway Hall, just round the corner from Gray’s Inn. I wasn’t based in London at the time, since I had a little temporary post as a creative writing teacher attached to the University of East Anglia, but the event seemed important enough for me to return to London that weekend.

  I don’t know what I wanted from the meeting, some sort of action plan, I suppose. There was a guest appearance by Mel Rosen, a member of the New York organization Gay Men’s Health Crisis, whose emotive style of public speaking grated on me. When he said that he had cried more in the last six months than he had in his whole life, I’m afraid I thought, so what? The link between epidemic and emotional growth seemed so tenuous and uninteresting. What were we going to do?

  Mel Rosen died in 1992, aged forty-one. I’m ashamed that I was so unresponsive when he spoke about the changes in his life. At the time the consensus was that only a small proportion of people exposed to what we assumed must be a virus (the organism was years away from being identified) would go on to develop symptoms, and that not all of those would progress to the full diagnosis, fatal in those days, but that’s no excuse. I had made a decision to be disappointed by the Trust’s lack of dynamism. Volunteering at this point would be a waste of energy. I probably wanted an excuse not to give my time to committee meetings. I was big on gestures of solidarity and points of principle (train fare from Norwich be damned), not so hot on personal involvement. I felt about Aids activism, at least in its disorganized state then, what Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said on the subject of socialism. About it taking too many evenings.

  Two years of headlines and editorials eroded my sense of entitlement to distance. I volunteered to be a Buddy for the Trust, doing chores for sick men and providing a basic level of companionship. The training was rudimentary, no more than a one-day course made up of medical generalities and counselling tips. We were packed in a dark and airless room, with many of us sitting on the floor. I remember one fellow inductee seeming unable to take his eyes off my trousers, which sounds flattering until I explain that he was gazing at ankle rather than groin level. The trousers had been bought in a sale and had unfinished hems. They weren’t quite long enough to be taken up for neatness.

  As if to drive home the point that Aids was not an issue I could legitimately dodge, the headquarters of the Terrence Higgins Trust at the time was in Panther House, light industrial premises with an address in Mount Pleasant but geographically closer to Gray’s Inn Road. I was the nearest volunteer by some way, in what was not much of a residential district. From my parents’ front door to the Trust’s front line was a three-minute walk.

  Or a ninety-second dash in an emergency. On one occasion, there was an executive panic about what was going on with the phone line at Panther House. News was coming in that an Aids patient had tried to discharge himself from hospital against medical advice, and had been arrested to stop him leaving the premises. This was obviously an alarming precedent and there was intensive interest from the press. The Trust hadn’t had time to come up with any kind of official statement. The fear was that a volunteer whose job was only to provide basic medical advice to the worried, to refer them to more expert sources, might be reacting off the cuff from Panther House. It seemed ominous that the number had been engaged for hours.

  Someone was needed to get there fast, to pass on the required message: Say nothing – tell them to call the press officer. I must have been at the top of the list. From Gray’s Inn Square I could have shouted out of the window and had a fair chance of being heard.

  I raced to Panther House and shouted incoherently through the entryphone. It took a little while to persuade those within the fortress that I wasn’t some hectoring anti-gay passer-by, and when I was let in everyone was rather nonplussed. Arrest? What arrest? Phone calls, what phone calls? Eventually someone thought to check the phone. It turned out that the last person to hang up had returned the receiver to its cradle on the slant, putting the line out of service. People had been sitting around with cups of tea, making the most of the opportunity for undisturbed workplace smoking (in those bad old days), wondering vaguely why everything had gone so quiet.

  When the Trust changed address, it was to come even closer, not letting me off the hook. The new premises on Gray’s Inn Road were barely a hundred yards from where I lived. If there was another emergency of the same type – providing I was at home and the Gray’s Inn Road gate from the Square was open, as was normal during business hours – reaction time could significantly be whittled down.

  I had no thought, when I volunteered as a Buddy, that I would be gaining experience exploitable in writing. It was partly that I hadn’t written fiction for quite a few years at that point – I was generally assumed to be suffering from writer’s block, something I only fully realized when I was tactfully asked to review a book on the subject for the Independent on Sunday, as Susan Sontag might have been assigned a book on cancer or Gorbachev one on birthmarks.

  In any case I didn’t see how Aids could be
adequately fictionalized. Over time I changed my mind, and began to feel that the word itself, with its then conventional ‘full caps’, was the main obstacle, a visual shout that was likely to drown out with its repetitions any story in which it featured. Once I had realized it was possible to write an arresting opening sentence while re-placing the syndrome with the euphemism ‘Slim’, in a character’s plausible register, the rest of the story more or less wrote itself.

  I showed my story to the person I was buddying at the time, Philip Lloyd-Bostock, wanting his blessing although as far as I knew I hadn’t used any of his personal details. It was still somehow an abstract invasion of privacy. He raised no objection, though it must have been disheartening to read an outsider’s recasting of his desperate situation, when he himself was trying to finish an autobiographical novel. It was published after his death as The Centre of the Labyrinth.

  I thought the story (‘Slim’) would be effective on radio, where the withholding of the trigger-word might even ensnare listeners with no desire to empathize. Radio 4 took an interest, Martin Jarvis recorded it, and it was scheduled for broadcast late on a weekday evening.

  I became restless several days in advance. I certainly didn’t want to listen to my story while it was broadcast, but it seemed silly to stay in and not listen to it. The logic was, then, that I would go out and be in some sanctioned public place when my story went out on its mission to galvanize lazy perceptions of illness.

  I was in need of that quaint commodity ‘gay space’. When I looked at Time Out’s gay listings for that evening, the only possible venue was the Market Tavern in Vauxhall, where there was a Body Positive evening. (It had to be a club rather than a pub because of the restrictions then in force about opening hours.) Body Positive was the support group for people who were HIV-positive. The ironical appropriateness of the venue was surplus to my requirements, but it was that or nothing. I would be in a room with a bunch of gay men who knew a lot more than I did about the reality of being unwell at the time my momentous little story was transmitted.