‘camp’ can spread quicker than bird flu if not kept at bay. I’ve reduced builders to simpering Danny La Rues in my time. It’s all in the wrist, I guess.
Losing Jason as a friend was a real blow. We’d had a lot of fun times. Every weekend we would go into Northampton Town Centre and wander aimlessly around the Grosvenor Centre or Abington Park, generally mucking about, popping on the wigs in Debenhams or shouting out ‘shoplifter’ and pointing at an old person in BHS. I’m not proud of what we did, but it killed time.
We would usually end up at the ABC Cinema, this gigantic art-deco building that dominates the top of Abington Street. It’s not a cinema any more – it’s now the headquarters for the Jesus Army and, quite frankly, it’s seen better days – but back then in the late Eighties it was the centrepiece of our Saturday afternoons. I saw everything there, ET, Batman, Turner and Hooch. It was during Tango and Cash that one audience member climbed up the curtains and swung daringly in front of Sylvester Stallone’s face and had to be told to get down by the cinema manager.
With Jason doing his own thing, I started to dread the bell ringing for breaktimes and lunchtimes because it would normally mean walking around on my own. In class, you feel a bit like you belong, but time out of those lessons tended to make me feel a bit empty, with the breaks seeming to drag more than the actual lessons.
In my moping, I must be thankful for one blessing: I never went down the ‘goth’ route. Yes, I had been known to write poems expressing my angst, but I had never popped on some mascara and a black leather trench coat and hung around the library looking wistful. I might have been feeling sorry for myself, but I wasn’t tacky.
* * *
It was only when I was on the cusp of adolescence that things started to happen. An identity started to manifest before my eyes, an identity that I wasn’t particularly happy with.
Almost overnight words like blowjob, wank and cum were on everyone’s lips, if you see what I mean. In the corridors you could almost smell the sex, which made a change from the toilets. All of sudden, no one was interested what Liam Gill did in Home Ec, we wanted to know what Tracey did with Darren after school in her back bedroom. Carnal lust swept through breaktime like a tropical breeze. I remember the controversy when one girl, Sharon Bell, had got a boyfriend who didn’t go to school. He had a proper job at Homebase and would turn up in his tight white T-shirt revving his motorbike – how cool was that?
To the girls and me, he was the epitome of cool, but technically he was a paedophile. Soon every girl wanted a man with a proper job – sixteen-year-old boys weren’t good enough any more. They wanted real men, and in that sense, not only were the lads in my class defunct, so was I. Suddenly girly talk and a boy who liked me for me was as cool as New Kids on the Block. As for the boys, they’d be talking about what they did with whom, where, when and how many times.
They’d all laugh with bravado, and I’d laugh along, but on the inside thinking ‘Ugh!’
Then it dawned on me, my role had changed. I wasn’t the class clown any more; no, I was head eunuch in the middle of a debauched orgy. Stop, stop, I want to get off. This wasn’t meant to happen; even Paul Simmons was telling people he’d kissed a girl. I mean, he had a long way to catch up with Steve Templeton. He had been wanked off on the back of the bus on a school trip to the Northampton Boot and Shoe Museum, and Donna Dalton had said it was the biggest one she’d ever seen – she was only fifteen so hopefully she hadn’t seen too many.
Panic gripped my body. I needed to act now, and my body went into what can only be described as a hormonal trolley dash. I needed to fuck a woman now, now, now, or at least to look like I was getting some kind of action, but sadly like the proverbial trolley dash my trolley wheels were buckled and I kept steering it towards the willy aisle. It just wasn’t fair. It riles me when people say being gay is a choice. It really isn’t. Why would anyone choose that? Your pants on the Science block roof – where can I sign up for that? You cannot describe to anyone the sheer terror and isolation you feel when adolescence finally dawns on you, and the path of girlfriend, wife, babies is as distant as Narnia. There is a definite feeling of uselessness and for me a sense of injustice. I remember thinking that it was like a curse, and asking what I had done to deserve this. I really didn’t take it well at all.
I had had my moments. I had at one stage started fancying Maria from the board game ‘Guess Who?’ That long hair, that green beret, that sexy smile – yes, she was a fox. One night in Panache I had kissed a girl called Ruth. A short girl with green eye shadow, yum! It was a retro night and she had drunkenly come up to me during ‘Come on Eileen’. I must admit I was tempted. Girls back then were like those big dippers you get at Alton Towers, terrifying but strangely alluring. The worrying thing was that once you actually got on the bloody ride you didn’t know whether you’d like it or not, all you knew was you were stuck on it for the next five minutes. Ruth approached me drunkenly across the dance-floor, and my body slipped into fight or flight mode. I fought, but with my tongue. Her tongue tasted of Woodpecker Cider, which wasn’t entirely unsatisfying. I lasted about twenty seconds, heard ‘Baggy Trousers’, made my excuses and left the dance-floor. I’d had a go, and you can’t say fairer than that.
I think I was a let-down to my brother in that respect. I remember him asking me conspiratorially in his bedroom, ‘How do you get a girl’s bra off?’
‘How would I know?’ I retorted imperiously. ‘Stanley knife?’
I think he realised there and then that we weren’t going to have one of those laddish relationships, talking about birds and fast cars. So whilst I felt like I was cursed, I wasn’t so self-centred as not to notice it affecting others in my family.
Although my brother and I are now the best of friends, the six-year difference between us made sure when we were growing up that we were never going to be bosom buddies. When I needed a friend to play with, he was a baby and technically useless, and when I reached adolescence the thought of hanging around with a seven-year-old made me go cold.
Like every teenager, the cry of ‘Take your brother with you!’ from your mother as you go to step out the house was the most depressing sound you could ever hear. How uncool was that? Hanging around with a seven-year-old. I would be well moody and offhand with him but he would get his own back in other ways. At fairgrounds I would have to accompany him on the baby rides only for him to start bawling halfway round and get taken off by my mother while I would have to stay on the stupid ride, going round and round looking like a simpleton.
There is a photo of me standing with the ‘real’ He-Man where Gary had chickened out and started bawling at the sight of He-Man’s plastic face. ‘Alan! You’ll have to have your photo taken with He-Man. I’m not queuing for nothing,’ Mum insisted, and there I am, standing next to an out-of-work actor in a He-Man outfit at Weston Favell Shopping Centre, both of us asking ourselves, ‘What did we do to deserve this?’
Just when my self-esteem was at an all-time low, I was dealt a body blow, and it was called ‘reality’. In Drama we had all been filmed on video performing various soliloquies and it was time to watch them back and get constructive criticism from our teacher. I sat down, all giggly, ready to watch myself with everyone, but I cannot tell you the shock that then shook my body.
That person on the screen wasn’t me, there’d been a mistake, it was a grotesquely camp boy with a screeching voice and the most over-the-top mannerisms. He was the gayest boy I’d ever seen. I looked around at my fellow Drama students, hoping they would be just as shocked at this terrible mistake. Nothing. They just smiled back at me. Yes, the boy looked like me, but I wasn’t like that, I didn’t sound like that. This boy was as camp as Christmas.
Why
