Just Ignore Him, page 18
Magazines
One day in the early eighties I went to the toilets at Euston station before boarding a train to an Arsenal away game. I was on my own as usual and I noticed some adult magazines on top of a tiled wall, the only time I’ve seen nudie mags, or dirty books, or whatever you like to call them, in a public convenience. I sidled over to this bounty, a careless pile of glossy periodicals, every cover girl smiling straight at me. They were from the cheaper Razzle and Fiesta end of the market. As I reached out to turn the pages of the top one a man in a grey suit came towards me. He must have been watching. Seized by a familiar shoplifter’s tension, like a schoolboy caught somewhere I shouldn’t be, looking at something I shouldn’t be looking at, I turned to face the man, distancing myself from the magazines. It was the look on his face that I remember, only that, not the day, month or year, not the journey, just his face.
He was perhaps ten or fifteen years older than me and there was something hopeful in his expression, a plea or an appeal, an open look that told me what he was after. He was a predator masquerading as prey. I didn’t know how it was supposed to happen, or how far we would go, but I knew he wanted to have sex and there might be a few quid in it for me.
It was much darker in the cubicles than out in the communal areas, where strip lighting bounced off the floor-to-ceiling white tiles. With no experience, I wasn’t sure how much of the transaction took place before you closed that door behind you. He still wore the look, not hostile, though maybe later he’d be horrible, when he’d finished and he wanted rid of me, but he maintained his disarming eye contact, as if he had a white flag in one hand and a hard cock in the other. Is this what Dad did, teenage rent boys? What would I get? Ten, twenty, thirty pounds? I’d never had thirty pounds before. Not all at once.
Even when a man approached me, having piqued my interest with a few judiciously placed top-shelf magazines, a homosexual liaison in his eyes, I still absolutely did not make any connection between this and my father’s behaviour at home. Even though I’d called him a ‘poof’ in front of my family, even though I knew he was sexually aroused by me, I still didn’t think he was actually gay. It didn’t show in any other part of his life that I saw. I thought it was all just to do with me. That’s how it appeared. His was a thorough, careful repression, and I was caught up in it. He gave no clues to anybody else, going as far as marrying, having three children and then marrying again.
I’m not without sympathy for him. There was no possibility of coming out of that closet when he was a teenager. It was commonly believed (still is in some places) that homosexuality is a condition that can be fought with willpower, medication or punishment. The reality of homosexual life in the nineteen forties and fifties was still a fear of imprisonment for indecency and even chemical castration, as inflicted on Alan Turing. This bewildering intolerance towards a particular sexual orientation ran so deep that the prejudice was as ingrained in British society as the Church of England and the class system. For many people, homosexuality simply didn’t exist, such was the extent it went unseen. People had lifelong friends who kept their sexuality a secret, as my father did.
When I was at public school in the seventies and early eighties, homosexuality was something to be derided. I once joined my peers as they chased a young lad down the corridors. He’d supposedly been seen kissing a boy at a house party, so we went to find him. Once they had him surrounded, his pursuers didn’t know what to do other than taunt and jeer. They wanted him to admit he was ‘a poof’, giving them licence to do who knows what. He looked terrified, cornered as he was at the top of the steps that went down to the room where all our metal lockers were. There would be no escape were he to be followed in there.
I knew him from primary school, where his mum was the kindly art teacher; he was two or three years younger than me. Now he was cast as prey, tall and slender with big frightened eyes and flushed, hollow cheeks. Unexpectedly, some other boys I knew came to his rescue. One of them spat at us. Among his defenders was a friend I sat next to in geography and it shamed me to be seen on the wrong side of this persecution. Shouts rang around the windowless brick and stone landing. There were no teachers to be seen. Presumably they were all sitting in the fog of cigarette smoke that permanently filled the staffroom. Queer-baiting like this was infrequent only because gay boys at my school did not come out, so it appeared there were none. My role as an acolyte to homophobic bullies was reprehensible. That it never occurred to me to seek this boy out and apologise reveals my cowardice.
A key indicator of homosexuality for us was if a boy ‘got a hard-on’ in the changing room after PE. This happened to one tall and effeminate lad who grinned sheepishly in the communal shower while we gathered to mock his thickened cock. On another occasion I thought I’d spotted a swelling among the folds of a boy’s towel. When I sounded the alarm, one of the bullies in the year turned on me and told me that I was ‘the one looking at it’. The boy I’d tried to humiliate looked at me with pity.
Ironically, I’d been attracted to that particular bully in my first year. He was blond and pretty. I remember showing him some pictures I’d drawn during maths of footballers scoring goals. I was ten, he was twelve, and he looked at me as if I was a time-wasting idiot. Subsequently I incurred his wrath on two separate occasions, both of which finished with him punching me repeatedly in the face. Perhaps he was flirting, but he was too late, I’d moved on. Apart from jumping around my bedroom in the nude with Luke when we were about nine, that was the limit of my homosexual exploration.
The most commonly expressed fear of the homophobe is that a homosexual will pounce on him, most likely when he’s bending over in the shower. We knew all the comic lines of the time: ‘Backs to the wall, lads’ and, ‘Don’t drop the soap’.
Perhaps the fear had some legitimacy. Many men are rapists after all, ninety per cent of them unreported, but it was the idea that a gay man would inevitably constitute a sexual threat that we casually perpetuated.
We pointed out suspected ‘benders’ to one another by holding up an index finger, like a cricket umpire giving a batsman out, and then folding the middle knuckle so the finger was bent, as in: ‘You are bent.’ This took hold at primary school, our learned prejudice establishing itself like a virus. Apart from my father’s behaviour, which I somehow never lumped in with my burgeoning awareness of homosexuality, the only experience I had of predatory behaviour came in joining in the pursuit of a gay boy, never the other way round.
When I smuggled Dad’s home-printed twink pictures out of his house in 2017 it was the second time I’d stolen his porn collection, forty years on from the raids on his bedside cupboard. It is impossible to believe that he underwent a personality change brought about by sitting at a home computer, going from an interest in images of young women when in his forties to a collector’s obsession with gay teen porn in his seventies. If he’d ever liked any of those Mayfair or Men Only girls, Meg or Madeline or Elspeth, wouldn’t he have looked for them later in life, online? Instead, with doubtless the cheapest equipment he could find, he embarked on the type of printing programme not anticipated by Gutenberg.
The time it must have taken, amid the cacophonous din of whirring inkjets, skating back and forth across sheets of A4 laying down line after line of skin, while the motor jerked the page onwards. What combination of the four cartridges creates a blotchy Caucasian (all the boys were white), and at what cost? A huge quantity of ink went on the hundreds of pictures that were destroyed in the inferno on the lawn. Among those that survived, in Dad’s secret folder, I had found a piece of paper from one of the notepads he always had at home. There were two words pencilled on it in his familiar handwriting:
teen boys
Did he have to remind himself what to Ask Jeeves?
Prior to his road-to-Damascus conversion in The New Testament, Saul is on his way to arrest Christians so that they may be persecuted, when he is stopped by a light so bright it leaves him sightless. This lasts for three days, until Jesus, who was dead but arisen so therefore invisible (like an imaginary friend), sends Ananias to heal Saul, which he does even though he doesn’t like him.
Something like fish scales fall from Saul’s eyes and he can see again.
Ananias subsequently baptises Saul, who then becomes the apostle Paul, supposedly writes half the Bible, and is made the patron saint of London with St Paul’s Cathedral named after him, which goes to show you shouldn’t be discouraged if you’ve had a bad start in life.
I mention Saul/Paul in passing only because it was as if the scales fell from my eyes when my stepmother revealed the truth about my dad by handing me a folder of hardcore pornography. Not quite a divine intervention. As I write this so many scales are falling and piling up I suspect if I stop typing and look down I won’t be able to see my feet.
How could it never have occurred to me that his behaviour in my room at night revealed his true sexual identity? He molested me frequently, he tried to watch me masturbate, he used to shout ‘take your shirt off’ when I was in the garden, and he passed no comment on Victoria Principal in Dallas, who was so beautiful I became static and silent at the sight of her. He also appeared not to notice Diana Dors or Felicity Kendal or Suzi Quatro or Debbie Harry or Marti Caine or Patti Boulaye or Dana or Pan’s People or Legs & Co, or even Selina Scott and Anna Ford on the news, but he couldn’t watch Liverpool play on television without referring to their centre half as Alan ‘handsome’ Hansen, and he could watch Steve McQueen driving in Bullitt ALL DAY.
When my stepmother gave me those photographs the realisation came that I had colluded with a child molester over what he did to a little boy four decades ago, when he ran his hands all over his naked body, like a blind man taking in the contours of a living sculpture. If I wasn’t going to stick up for that child then I felt sure no one else was.
As the scales fell from my eyes I felt foolish. Of course Dad liked other boys, not just me. It smacks of egomania not to see beyond my own experience and put myself in the context of the wider world.
But then there was no wider world for me; one man decided right and wrong, and used a range of techniques to keep me in place. We almost never had visitors to the house, my brother and I taunted each other in arguments about who had fewer friends, so I struggled to relate to people, to converse, to relax in company, and was convinced no one liked me, perhaps inevitably when living in a house where it appeared no one did. I couldn’t put my feelings into words and had no one to talk to anyway. My life folded inwards and I could not see beyond myself. I could only think of a room full of people in terms of what I had to do to prevent them from not liking me, leading to attempts to win favour by bragging about how good I was at something, or relishing being called Brainbox at primary school without realising that no one would really want that nickname, carrying as it does a note of contempt.
Any unlikeable attempts to curry favour made my situation worse. I was off-putting, with a habit of making assertive statements about myself, without noticing anyone else’s feelings until it was too late. During one school PE lesson we played basketball for the first and only time. It’s a non-contact sport, and being younger didn’t matter so much. I passed, caught and dribbled well, able to find space and be constantly involved. I was among the best on the court and it felt great. A couple of my classmates complimented me and asked if I’d played before. So I told them that I was a member of a basketball club, which I wasn’t. Their smiles dropped: ‘No wonder you’re good then,’ they said, as if I had an unfair advantage. I had their attention at last and lost it by overplaying my hand. They walked off as I tried to formulate some jokey retraction about beginner’s luck.
Being disliked prompted a calming wave of familiarity each time it happened. My psyche determined that I should be isolated in a peer group, never an integral part of it and frequently left out altogether. It was as if I was stuck in egomania, defined as a feeling of personal greatness combined with a lack of recognition, but perhaps it was perpetual bereavement. I had once felt great when I was with my mum, but now her appreciation was long gone and I was penned in a one-man sty. Denied the normal to-and-fro of conversation and of ideas, my formative years were spent in a perverted dictatorship and an intellectual void. I had six years with a loving mother, and after that lived in a dysfunctional environment, with further emotional development coming in fits and starts, if at all.
I’d been naïve, and the realisation that Dad was a despotic predator, not a confused parent, was my Damascene conversion, in that every part of my life can be seen differently now. Of course he fantasised about other boys. I was just the one he could get to and the one he wanted to control. In the meantime, he left out copies of Men Only magazine as a heterosexual smokescreen. He ensured that my siblings and relatives were in no doubt that I, and I alone, was the root of all our troubles, a habitual liar and a thief who was so badly behaved he appeared to be using the death of his own mother as an opportunity to make mischief, for reasons no rational person could penetrate.
Now I find myself returning to the Cub and Scout camps Dad went on, and whether he had sexual experiences, either consensual and pleasurable or manipulative and criminal. If he had only been a voyeur, he was noticeably unfazed the night my erection appeared between us. He didn’t recoil or even flinch. He was calm and practised in the presence of a hard little penis and carried on caressing me, with a noticeable shortness of breath, before an abrupt exit.
Perhaps he knew I was so embarrassed that I would never tell my siblings. He stood by as my relationships with them first flared up and then rotted, making no attempt to encourage us to get on. The discord suited him since they could be kept on his side, and if I ever piped up that he’d been abusing me, they would be as conditioned to cover for him as I was.
I went from lying in his bed after Mum died, leaving confused love notes in his cupboard, to crawling down to the bottom of my own bed and telling him to go away, and now, when memories of those nights swim back into my mind, as they do every day, I know he won’t ever go away, not until I’m dead.
And there’d better not be an Afterlife, with him swanning around and no one any the wiser. That would be hell. But if Mum was there and I went straight over to tell her all about it and she believed me, then that would be heaven, which would be ironic since that’s where she was said to have gone and I never quite accepted it.
When my mum died, Dad was no longer in a marriage to a woman evidently his superior in everything but parking the car. Two years later, his own mum died, freeing him from her brand of midget tyranny. It was after both these women were gone, not just from my life but crucially from his, that his abuse of me began. Perhaps his enactment of fantasies was triggered by the grief he felt.
I knew what the man in the toilets at Euston wanted. There was a familiarity in the expression, the angle of approach, the hesitancy combined with a singularity of purpose. But he stopped, his face changed, I wasn’t wearing the same look as him, more of a frown that said, I’m just leaving actually and I’ll do anything for love but I won’t do that.
Maybe it was a mistake, he was young-ish, good-looking-ish, I may have denied myself the best blowjob of my life, or him the worst of his. Now he looked a little afraid and awkward. I walked past him, through the turnstiles and up into the station.
I knew he wasn’t coming over to join me in looking at the men’s magazines. It was clear those were both an enticement and a camouflage, a necessary heterosexual front in that place, but only now do I consider my father’s bedside magazine collection to be similarly both a lure and a deception. Only now I know the truth of his lust for boys do I realise that my abuse wasn’t about me, no more than it would be about me if I disturbed a wasp nest and they attacked. I was in the wrong place (desirable suburb of a great city in the first world) at the wrong time (just after the invention of Angel Delight).
Those were jokes. I meant the wrong place (my bedroom) at the wrong time (the night).
Jokes
I was in an aisle seat so there was a chance I’d be noticed, but we were quite far back. I was practised at putting my hand up: ‘Me, me, pick me, I’ll get it right, somebody praise me!’ But this wasn’t school; it wasn’t Mrs Thorogood I was signalling to. The cute little girl in front of me also had her hand up. Was I looming over her like Donald Trump behind Hillary Clinton in a TV debate? It was obvious they’d choose this replica Shirley Temple ahead of me. I looked around, every child in the place was volunteering. I tried to find another centimetre of fingertip. A man from the show had come down into the audience and was approaching us; who would he choose? Hillary or Donald?
He picked us both! We were rushed up to the promised land of the stage. There we turned to face the audience, the lights were bright, I couldn’t see anything or hear what was going on, it was hot and my instinct was to find cover like exposed prey. Instead, I faked a smile and hid my fear. There were about eight boys and girls and none of us knew what was happening: ‘Who cares? I’m on stage!’ Maybe it was a pantomime, I can’t remember: ‘Who cares? I’m on stage!’ But I think it was an old-fashioned Scout Gang Show, an amateur revue: ‘Who cares? I’m on STAGE!’
The man who chose us asked the first boy a question. I couldn’t hear his answer but the audience laughed. Was he funny? Would they like him more than me? I could just make out that each kid in the line was being asked to say:
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
I could hardly believe my luck, that’s from Mary Poppins. She’s the motherless child’s ideal woman. I knew all the songs. I was infused with the confidence of someone certain they’re about to excel. When it was my turn, almost before being asked, I said:
‘SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS!’
I awaited my applause. The man was looking at my face but it was as if he couldn’t see me. The audience murmured and clapped a bit. I’d played the Brainbox card, what an idiot. Was I that smart-arse no one likes? ‘Who cares? I’m on stage!’ The man had moved on to Temple, and she said: ‘Thooperfwabadosh …’ and then gave up, didn’t even get to the end, useless, missed out several syllables and messed up the ones she tried. I smiled pityingly. It wasn’t her fault, she was only little, like my sister. The man should have said: ‘That was rubbish, do it again!’ But the people were laughing. He did ask her to do it again and she didn’t say it right once, if anything she got worse, but the applause, and the laughter! The audience appeared to be unanimous: girls are just wonderful, they’re hopeless and stupid but so pretty and adorable it doesn’t matter. We love them for their unthreatening vulnerability and their willingness to smile when the world finds their efforts laughable. Unlike that boy over there with the fake smile who got it right, what’s he so happy about? Prick.
