We Can Be Heroes, page 14
Sadly, I was. The piece appeared the following week and was mean-spirited, ill-informed and judgemental, with little understanding of safer sex and no compassion for a man who had the courage to live his life so openly at a time when people with HIV were widely demonised.
I feel immensely proud and privileged to have known Derek. I used to visit him at his office on Wardour Street and his flat in Phoenix House on Charing Cross Road. We’d discuss the political issues of the day, swap gossip and go for dinner together at Presto, the small, family-run Italian restaurant he loved so much. After he died, the matriarch, Maria, turned his table into a shrine.
One of the last times I saw him was at a press screening of Blue, his final feature film – about his failing eyesight and the complications of living with AIDS. As the film ended and the lights came on, I turned to find him sitting behind me, crying silently. A month or so later, we met again at a production of The Wasp Factory in King’s Cross. He was practically blind by then and painfully frail. After we parted, I was physically attacked in the street. A man stopped me to ask where Bagley’s nightclub was. I pointed him in the general direction and turned away. Then the homophobic abuse started. I was in no mood for this and began to put up a fight, before realising that he was far stronger than me and clearly in an altered state. When he tore off his football shirt to show that he meant business, I ran for cover at The Bell.
Derek was defiantly queer to the end. His public row with Sir Ian McKellen over his acceptance of a knighthood from John Major’s government made him a controversial figure. But his death on 19 February 1994 affected a lot of people. Derek was such a force of nature, some of us fooled ourselves into thinking that he’d live forever. Had he clung on for another two years, he might have benefited from groundbreaking new drug treatments. He might even be with us now. But it wasn’t to be.
His funeral was held in Dungeness, where he’d grown his famous garden out of shingle and sheer grit – a symbol, some said, of his personal battle to live against all the odds. The service was rather traditional, the mourners anything but. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were there – and so was Maria in her black funeral garb and heavily lacquered helmet of hair. I remember her standing outside the church, consoling a steady stream of grieving gay men. I wept as she held me in her arms, telling me he was at peace now.
Two days after Derek died, I joined a candlelit vigil outside the House of Commons, where MPs were voting on an amendment tabled by Edwina Currie MP to equalise the gay male age of consent. There were an estimated 5,000 lesbians, gay men and their supporters present. The mood was sombre but peaceful.
When word got out that the vote had failed, and that the age of consent for gay men would be reduced to eighteen and not equalised at sixteen, the mood changed. People became angry, and rightly so. Eighteen wasn’t a compromise but an insult. You’re either equal or you’re not. Sir Ian appeared and appealed to everyone to calm down. But it was too late. ‘Shame on you!’ someone shouted back. Then all hell broke loose. People stormed the building. I was one of them.
The following morning’s newspapers talked about ‘gays on the rampage’ and ‘an angry mob’ storming Parliament, hurling missiles, marching through central London and blocking traffic. It was all a far cry from the style of activism embodied by Sir Ian, who’d famously gone for tea with the Prime Minister at Number 10. But if the press were surprised at the levels of anger unleashed that night, they obviously hadn’t been paying attention. There’s only so far you can push people before they fight back. When diplomacy fails, direct action is the only dignified response.
Some sections of the gay press described what happened that night as a riot. It wasn’t. Not quite. No bricks were thrown. No arrests were made. But for a moment there, I felt the true spirit of Stonewall – the civil uprising, not the Downing Street tea party.
Attitude launched three months later, in May 1994. My former character witness and one-time fling Tyler Brûlé wrote a very supportive piece for the Guardian media pages. I appeared on Sky News, where the presenters expressed surprise that there was any demand for a magazine aimed at ‘homosexuals’. I also took part in a late-night discussion programme on Radio 4 about the changing face of modern masculinity. My fellow guests included the editor of Men’s Health magazine and a woman who’d written a book that divided men into seven character types, each of which conveniently began with the letter ‘W’. There were ‘warriors’, ‘wizards’, ‘wankers’ and various others I can’t recall. I do remember thinking that they were all conspicuously heterosexual.
I became increasingly annoyed at the direction the discussion took, which seemed to ignore the pink elephant in the room. It probably didn’t help that I’d snorted a large line of cocaine shortly before going on air and was determined to get my point across as forcibly and as frequently as possible. Coke can do that to you.
At one point, the editor of Men’s Health suggested that modern men were far more in touch with their feminine side and the old homophobic taboos no longer existed. I argued that if this were true, Men’s Health wouldn’t constantly address its readers as if they were all 100 per cent heterosexual – and nor would it hide behind the euphemism of ‘health’ when really it was the male equivalent of a woman’s beauty magazine. That went down well.
But not as well as my next comment, which was directed at the author of the book. ‘There aren’t seven types of men,’ I informed her. ‘There are only two. Those who are comfortable with the idea of being penetrated and those who aren’t.’
At which point, the producer cut off my microphone.
The launch party for Attitude was held at Browns in Covent Garden. Andy Bell was there, as was Julian Clary. At one point, Boy George arrived and word spread that he was threatening to slap my face. I managed to avoid him and survived the night with my dignity more or less intact.
The following week, I received something of a slap when my face appeared on the cover of the gay free weekly bar mag MX (later known as QX) with the cover line ‘Paul Burston – Gay or Git?’ Such was the enthusiasm with which the gay press embraced the competition.
In any case, Attitude launched to great acclaim and quickly became the most talked-about gay magazine in the UK. When Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant decided it was time to throw caution to the wind and finally confirm that he was gay, it was Attitude he turned to. Before long we became the go-to magazine for high-profile celebrities wishing to set the record straight and come out.
My interview with Tennant appeared in our fourth issue, published in August 1994. In his book Good As You: From Prejudice To Pride – 30 Years Of Gay Britain, the journalist Paul Flynn describes it as the first major milestone in the magazine’s history, and such a far cry from the modern, media-managed celebrity coming-out story that parts of it read rather uncomfortably.
In fact, this particular celebrity coming-out story had been slightly media-managed. At the end of our interview, Tennant asked if he could see the piece before it went to print. Foolishly, I agreed. I then received an angry phone call from his publicist, informing me that Neil was very upset at the way he’d been represented. I agreed to speak with Neil on the phone. He rang me shortly afterwards.
‘Hello, Paul. It’s Neil Tennant here. How are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ I replied. ‘But I understand that you’re not.’
He insisted there were just a few points where he felt I’d been unfair. One of these was when he’d uttered the words ‘I’m gay’ and I included all the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ as he built up to it. In fairness, it’s common practice for journalists to ‘tidy up’ quotes so they read better. I agreed to make a few small edits. Otherwise, the piece ran as written.
Shortly after Neil Tennant helped put Attitude on the map, I interviewed Donna Summer. Arguably the greatest gay disco diva of all time, she was in the process of suing New York Magazine over allegations that she’d described AIDS as God’s punishment for homosexuals. Her lawyer was on the line throughout our phone interview, which didn’t go too well. Summer was wary and evasive, refusing to answer some questions and responding to others in monosyllables. Years later, I interviewed Summer again in person, when she was due to perform at G-A-Y at the Astoria. This time, she was far more forthcoming and keen to set the record straight. Despite being a born-again Christian, she insisted that she’d never said those things. I believed her.
Her performance at G-A-Y was memorable for several reasons. One, she was Donna Summer. Two, she was in fine voice. And three, when she sang the medley known as ‘MacArthur Park Suite’, I was so high on Ecstasy I nearly toppled off the balcony. Thankfully, someone grabbed me just in time and I lived to tell the tale.
For my next cover feature for Attitude, I secured an interview with Vivienne Westwood, who I knew socially through a former colleague at GALOP. She’d been to dinner at my flat in Stockwell and I’d attended a bonfire party at her place in Clapham Common, where we danced to Elvis Presley.
In the summer of 1994, I escorted her to the after-party for the Stonewall Equality Show – much to the annoyance of the organisers, who were still angry at my coverage of the age of consent vote in Time Out. I was what you might call the bad fairy at the party.
Vivienne was wearing a skirt with a long, lace train. As we approached the venue, I noticed that the train was no longer in pristine condition but littered with cigarette butts and other detritus from the filthy London streets. I pointed this out to Vivienne, who replied tartly, ‘Fashion isn’t supposed to be hygienic!’
On our arrival, Ian McKellen greeted Vivienne while pointedly ignoring me. Someone brought over Edwina Currie, who was guest of honour but still considered a controversial figure by many in the community. Some of us remembered her earlier comments as junior health minister, when she said that ‘good Christian people’ didn’t get AIDS. But unlike Donna Summer, Edwina was being given a free pass.
Vivienne gave Currie short shrift. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know who you are and I’m too drunk to care.’
I have to say, I liked her attitude.
Plenty of people didn’t like mine, however. While the magazine enjoyed growing popularity, my reputation as a troublemaker brought its fair share of personal criticism. The editor of one gay magazine publicly accused me of ‘making a career out of saying the unsayable’ – which struck me as deeply revealing in a way he probably hadn’t intended. So there really were things we weren’t supposed to say? There was a gay hymn sheet we were all supposed to sing from? I hadn’t just imagined that?
‘Gay press slams Burston after “cheerleading” slur’ ran a headline in the UK Press Gazette, referring to comments I’d recently made during an interview. The gay press was always slamming me. Barely a month went by without someone at Gay Times or the Pink Paper making a statement about me or running a news item decrying something I’d written. I often responded in kind, which was foolish and played into the hands of those who preferred the pettiness of playground politics to mature debate. I guess you could say I had an attitude problem.
Regrets? I have a few. I wish I’d been kinder and less hot-headed. It’s all very well telling yourself ‘the personal is political’, but far too many political disagreements degenerated into personal insults, which is nothing to feel proud about. I was too quick to assume we were out of the woods where the mainstream press was concerned, and too slow to admit when I was wrong. But it’s worth noting that many of the opinions I expressed then are pretty commonplace today. Blaze a trail and you tend to burn a few bridges in the process.
It’s around this time that I was credited – or charged, depending on your point of view – with coining the term ‘post-gay’. This was largely thanks to James Collard, who worked at Attitude and later moved to New York, where he edited Out magazine and in 1998 wrote a piece for Newsweek attributing the term to me. I’ve since heard it discussed by academics and, most recently, by the writer Dustin Lance Black on Radio 4. What I meant by ‘post-gay’ wasn’t that we were living in a world where gay identity no longer mattered. It was that we were living in a world where it shouldn’t be the only thing that mattered. I was talking less about gay politics and more about gay culture – or the homogeneous gay culture of the time. As Collard wrote in Newsweek, ‘post-gay’ was simply a critique of gay politics and gay culture – by gay people, for gay people.
Shortly before the launch of Attitude, I had published a column in Time Out that summed up my position and really set the cat among the pigeons. Despite generations of gay activists’ insistence that ‘gay is good’, I argued that not everything marketed to us as gay was necessarily good. In fact, a lot of it was bad – poor service, second-rate goods, naff pop acts, lousy restaurants, and package holiday companies that ripped off gay consumers. This doesn’t sound particularly controversial now. Back then I might as well have come out as the gay Antichrist. When I met Neil Tennant for our interview, he told me the column had really struck a chord with him, adding in that withering tone of his that gay culture used to be cutting-edge, whereas now it was just ‘nightclubs, music, drugs, shopping, PAs by Bad Boys Inc’.
Others took a very different view. The Fag & Hag comic strip in MX depicted me holding a free drink and saying, ‘I despise gay culture and all it stands for,’ with someone replying, ‘Why do you dress like such an old poof, then?’ Such rapier-sharp wit! The most common accusation was that I was writing from a place of internalised homophobia. I’m not saying I’m a stranger to such feelings. Show me a gay man who isn’t. Unless we’re extremely fortunate, most of us experience homophobia from an early age. That’s bound to leave its mark.
But arguing that we deserve better than much of the rubbish marketed at us is hardly a sign of self-loathing. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s saying we’re worth more, not less. Whenever someone accused me of internalised homophobia I was reminded of one of my favourite quotes from Oscar Wilde, the one where he compares the nineteenth century’s dislike of realism to the rage of Caliban at seeing his own face reflected in the looking glass.
A rare photo of me smiling as a child – before the bullying began.
My first protest – at not winning the fancy dress competition at Butlin’s.
This little Ziggy – Bowie fan, school prefect and unlikely student governor.
Bleach boy at Southerndown Beach in 1984 – the summer I nearly drowned.
Photo taken by Vaughan on a canal boat in Amsterdam, shortly before he died.
‘ACT UP London, lie down!’ Protesting benefit cuts for people with HIV/AIDS.
Chain of love. Blocking traffic and raising awareness on World AIDS Day.
Derek Jarman – activist, artist, film-maker and friend.
Fashion! The night Vivienne Westwood came to dinner.
On stage at Polari In Heaven with my ‘representative on earth’, Alexis Gregory.
Portrait of me as a Bowie fan by artist Mark Wardel, aka TradeMark.
Chapter 18:
Union City Blue
Saturday night and Deborah is speeding. From the speakers high above us, the artist currently known as Deborah Harry sings an old song about power, passion and the desire to rearrange her mind. Down here on the dance floor, another Deborah – my Deborah – is well ahead of her. An hour ago, Deborah and I each took half an E and a few dabs of speed. Now, as the music soars and Deborah Harry sings about ‘union’, we know just what she means. It’s this. Us. Here. Now. On this crowded dance floor. Gay men and straight women, dancing together as we’ve always done. Power. Passion. Union.
I’m writing in the present tense because drugs like Ecstasy do that to you – they put you right there in the moment. You’re lost in music and the beat is inside you, together with the chemicals coursing through your veins and rushing to your brain. You’re at one with the world, or at least the room, and heaven knows we all need to feel that connection sometimes.
I stepped away from queer activism when my friend and fellow AIDS activist Spud died. There’d been too many losses, too many funerals, and his was the most devastating of all. We’d been so close and shared so much. When he died, it felt as if a part of me died, too.
After his first bout of serious illness, when he was out of hospital but hadn’t left his flat in weeks, I persuaded Spud to join me for a drink at Comptons in Soho, which had always been his favourite gay watering hole. It hadn’t crossed my mind that there might be danger lurking there. He’d lost a lot of weight and his clothes hung loosely on him. His face was drawn and his usually thick dark hair had thinned considerably.
As we stood at the bar, waiting to be served, a man approached him and said, ‘What the hell happened to you? You used to be so handsome!’
I wanted to punch his lights out, but Spud held me back. We left quickly, before things escalated and I did something I’d regret. Spud never went to a gay bar again. In the run-up to the launch of Attitude, his health declined sharply. He died on 6 April 1994. He was thirty-three years old.
Something inside me snapped. The anger I’d been carrying around for so long became all-consuming. I found myself picking arguments for no good reason, other than the opportunity to vent. And it was about to get worse. A few months later, I arrived home from work to find a voicemail from a friend in New York, alerting me to the fact that our mutual friend Georg was in hospital.
Georg Osterman was a kind soul and a great talent, who wrote and performed with the Ridiculous Theatre Company. I’d been to stay with Georg and his partner Adam the previous year. It was November 1993, and Kate Bush had just released her album The Red Shoes. Georg and I went to Tower Records to buy the CD and played it over and over again. On the song ‘Moments Of Pleasure’, Bush describes being in New York and an encounter with a man who meets her at the lift waving his walking stick, and doesn’t look well at all. As the song played, I had to stop myself from crying. She could have been describing the man sitting in front of me. In the months since I’d last seen him, the once heavily muscled Georg had lost a lot of weight. When he’d met me at the lift the day before, I was shocked at how frail he looked.
