We Can Be Heroes, page 17
I didn’t want to sound as if I was endorsing everything I witnessed, but nor did I want to come across as prudish or preachy. I may have been personally practising safer sex, but I was still prone to putting myself in dangerous situations. Who was I to judge what risks others chose to take? After some discussion, I insisted that my final words in the film should be less condemnatory and more celebratory. ‘If this is lust, it’s the lust for life. Rave on, South Beach!’
I got my way. In doing so, I managed to shoehorn in the title of an Iggy Pop song, recorded with David Bowie two decades earlier. Another of Bowie’s musical associates, Lou Reed, was also connected to the film. A personal friend of Rafi’s, Reed kindly allowed us to use two songs from his classic album Transformer – ‘Make Up’ and ‘Goodnight Ladies’. The closing credits for the documentary included the words ‘Thanks, Lou!’
To say I was thrilled would be putting it mildly. Transformer was produced by none other than Bowie himself. For an obsessive, somewhat fanciful fan like me, it felt as if the film brought us closer together – just two degrees of separation.
When we weren’t busy filming, I took the time to explore South Beach. I’d pass by the Versace mansion on Ocean Drive, and once saw the great man himself heading out to buy his morning newspaper. I was never really a fan of his menswear but I loved the way he dressed iconic women like Princess Diana, Kate Moss and Madonna. A year later he’d be dead, gunned down outside his mansion by gay serial killer Andrew Cunanan.
Madonna was strongly linked to Miami at the time. She owned a mansion of her own near Vizcaya, and some of the images from her Sex book incorporated local landmarks. The famous photo of her rising from the ocean like a modern-day Venus was taken there, as well as the playful pictures of her hitchhiking naked and posing nude in a pizzeria.
In 1996, Madonna had reinvented herself as a musical actress, starring in Alan Parker’s film version of Evita. The dance version of ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ was still big in the gay clubs. One scene in our documentary showed me dancing to the song on a crowded dance floor. What it didn’t show was the copious amount of drug taking that took place before the scene was shot. The quality of cocaine in Miami was far superior to any I’d tried before, and I was determined to make the most of it while I had the chance.
One evening I met up with my old friend Simon, aka Bonnie from the market-research company. He was working as a dance captain on a cruise ship docked in Miami and wanted to know all about the documentary I was making. I told him it was part of a season called Seven Sins, that it focused on lust and was mainly about a group of gay guys in South Beach.
Simon wasn’t a big fan of South Beach. He found it too exclusive and full of ‘body fascist types’. Like me, he was still drinking and smoking. But over cocktails at Palace Bar on Ocean, he expressed concern at how heavy my smoking had become – I was up to forty a day by then – and how frequently I visited the restroom to ‘powder my nose’.
Did I listen? Did I admit to my friend that my addictive behaviour was escalating in more ways than one? Did I hell. Lust wasn’t my only sin. I was also guilty of pride. And we all know that pride comes before a fall.
Chapter 21:
Queen Bitch
My first-ever book tour wasn’t a book tour in the usual sense. I didn’t travel the country in order to promote a book I’d already published. I travelled in order to research and write one.
Queens’ Country was my fourth book – after a slim biography of Marc Almond, published in 1997. It was my first for Little, Brown and the last non-fiction title I would write for many years. The idea came largely from my editor at the time, Andrew Wille. Like me, Andrew was a fan of Edmund White and was looking for someone to write a British counterpart to States Of Desire, in which White explores gay lives across the United States. I was also a fan of Bill Bryson, whose recent Notes On A Small Island had demonstrated that travel writing could also be funny.
Not that White’s book is lacking in humour. He’s a witty and often waspish writer. But States Of Desire was first published in 1980, at a time when ‘the gay community’ was still a relatively new concept. Almost twenty years on, this idea was fracturing – and I was one of the gay writers who’d helped take a wrecking ball to it. There wasn’t one big, happy-clappy gay community but rather lots of smaller communities – sometimes not very happy at all, and often at loggerheads with one another. Or, to put it another way, White came to consolidate the idea of a gay community. I came to question it – and to do so with a smile on my face.
I had a lot to smile about. By the time Queens’ Country was published in 1998, I’d been at Time Out for five years. I’d finally been able to buy my own flat and had a handsome Spanish boyfriend who has asked not to be named here and who I’ll refer to as Javier. I’d presented two television documentaries and published four books. I was out partying most weekends and networking at the Groucho most weeknights. But until recently, there’d been something missing – and that was a major book deal. My previous books had been what might politely be described as ‘cult reads’. I had desperately wanted a mainstream publisher – and thanks to my agent at the time, I now had one in Little, Brown.
For the book, I’d travelled to various destinations across the UK, from Belfast to Edinburgh, Derbyshire to Manchester, Essex to Somerset. I interviewed people I met along the way and explored themes pertinent to the time and place. For example, the chapter on Manchester was called ‘Village People’ and examined the emerging commercial gay scene that would later be immortalised in the groundbreaking TV drama Queer As Folk. The chapter on Essex was called ‘The Great Dark Lad’ and explored internalised homophobia and the gay obsession with straight or ‘straight-acting’ men. The chapter on Somerset was called ‘A Cottage in the Country’ – and I wasn’t referring to the kind of cottage that comes with a thatched roof and roses around the front door.
As someone who’d swapped a small-town, closeted life for that of an out-and-proud metropolitan gay man, I confess I had some preconceptions. I expected to find more people who dreamed of escaping as I once had, or whose lives were hemmed in by homophobia. Nothing could have been further from the truth. For the most part, the men I met were openly gay and far more integrated into their local communities than those living a ghettoised existence in gay London.
Nowhere were my preconceptions shattered more than in rural Derbyshire. For a chapter entitled ‘A Weekend with the Blues Brothers’, I hung out with a group of young gay Conservatives – and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Had you told me this a decade earlier, I would never have believed you. My host in Derbyshire was parliamentary sketch writer for The Times and former Tory MP Matthew Parris. I liked Matthew a lot, though our politics couldn’t have been more different. Like me, he was something of a maverick, albeit one who’d been a great personal supporter of Margaret Thatcher. Still, his own voting record on gay rights had been pretty exemplary, even in the days when he preferred to keep his sexuality private. As MP for West Derbyshire, 1979–1986, Parris was one of the first politicians to call for a change in the law surrounding the specifically ‘gay crime’ of gross indecency and to condemn the use of ‘pretty policemen’ in police entrapment operations. When we first met, he was on the managing committee of GALOP. By the time I went to stay with him in Derbyshire, he was regularly using his column in The Times to raise awareness of gay issues.
In many ways, Britain in 1998 was a very different country to the one it had been over a decade earlier, when my personal gay journey began. After eighteen years of Tory rule, the 1997 general election had seen Tony Blair sweep to power in a Labour landslide. For many people, the mood was summed up by the campaign song by D:Ream, ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. And then Princess Diana died. The country went into shock. Endless newspaper articles were written about how the nation’s spontaneous outpouring of grief heralded a new, kinder, more empathetic society.
I was deeply affected by Diana’s death, as I think many gay men were. The famous photograph of her hugging a skeletal man with AIDS had sent a powerful message at a time when there was very little hope and less public sympathy. I was at London Lighthouse the day she made her last public visit. I remember thinking then how charismatic she was – and how very fragile. The night she died, I was woken by my friend Tim phoning from New York. The following day felt strangely personal, as grieving gay friends gravitated to my flat and we watched the news unfold over bottles upon bottles of wine. And there was Tony Blair, capturing the mood of the country and calling her ‘the people’s princess’ while the Queen totally misjudged the situation and declined to make a public address. It felt as if serious social change was afoot.
But after a year in government, there was still no sign that Blair would make good on his manifesto promises to LGBTQ+ voters. The age of consent for gay men remained at eighteen. Section 28 was still enshrined in law. The armed forces ban was still in place. There were still no employment rights for LGBTQ+ people or partnership rights for same-sex couples. One could be forgiven for thinking that all that talk of gay equality had been a load of hot air.
What had changed – at least in London – was the gay scene. Though still dominated by clubs playing commercial house music for high and horny, usually shirtless men, there were pockets of resistance – alternative scenes within the scene. It started with the mighty indie night Popstarz in 1995 and grew with smaller, quirky clubs like Duckie, Marvellous and Nag Nag Nag. Here the DJs played everything from Britpop to Bowie, glam rock, ’70s disco, ’80s synth-pop and beyond. Many were the times I danced the night away at Duckie or Marvellous, singing along to ‘Starman’ or ‘Queen Bitch’.
But it wasn’t just the music policy that marked a shift away from the gay norm. There was a change in attitude, too. ‘The attitude in a lot of gay clubs is really offensive,’ Popstarz promoter Simon Hobart told me in an interview for Time Out. He was referring specifically to the body fascism and identikit gay Ken dolls found at most of London’s leading gay venues. When he first launched Popstarz, Hobart had set out to offend as many gay sensibilities as possible. Dispensing with the usual style of gay club flyer featuring half-naked hunks, he vented his spleen at the London scene with disparaging remarks about ‘E-heads’ and ‘mindless techno’. Popstarz, the flyer said, was a club for ‘people with hangovers, not hang-ups’, a place where people ‘don’t have to take their shirts off to stay cool’.
This was gay clubbing for people who hated gay clubs. Some promoters described themselves and their club nights as ‘post-gay’ (there’s that controversial term again), while others went further and railed against everything they hated about the gay mainstream.
‘Gay identity has become meaningless,’ Duckie DJ Mark Wood asserted in the same article for Time Out. ‘What we do is anti-gay in the sense that if gay is everything the gay scene offers you, and everything the gay press tells you you’re supposed to like, then everything we do is the complete opposite.’
Radical queer performers like Manchester’s David Hoyle, then better known as the Divine David, openly challenged the gay status quo and were regularly heckled or had bottles thrown at them for daring to speak the truth as they saw it. There are no prizes for guessing where my sympathies lay.
This was all documented in Queens’ Country, together with the heart-warming tale of a gay couple running their own massage parlour in Bristol, stories told at gay youth groups in Belfast, and the dangers faced by men cruising Edinburgh’s Calton Hill. Subtitled A Tour Around the Gay Ghettos, Queer Spots and Camp Sights of Britain, the book offered a portrait of the UK as seen through the eyes of people who’d been historically despised and disenfranchised but were now out of the closet, out on the streets and demanding a better life for themselves. It was also a book about the pitfalls of identity politics and the shameful ways we as gay men sometimes treat one another.
As I wrote in the introduction, ‘These days, adopting a gay identity and lifestyle demands just as much in the way of role-playing as being in the closet, and leaves only a little more space for manoeuvre. Instead of being required to pass successfully as straight by disapproving heterosexuals, one is required to pass successfully as gay by equally disapproving homosexuals . . . In a sense, this book is an attempt to expose some of the lies told by and about gay men in Britain today. It is a book about the kinds of lives gay men lead and the kinds of places in which they lead them; about the injustices of living in a homophobic society and the absurdities of taking your sexuality too seriously.’
Clearly, I was setting out to ruffle a few feathers. Still, the reviews were mostly favourable. The Face called it ‘a cracklingly irreverent snapshot of gay life’. The Big Issue described it as ‘funny, provocative, thoughtful and spiky’, adding ‘Burston is incapable of writing a boring sentence’ – which led to endless ribbing from Deborah Orr and probably came as a surprise to some of the sub-editors I worked with at Time Out. Even the gay press were supportive. The Pink Paper ran a sympathetic profile piece describing me as an ‘accidental gay maverick’ and the book as ‘pistol sharp’ and ‘seriously funny’. Another gay publication repeated the enfant terrible tag in a piece headlined ‘Wild Child’. I was now thirty-three years old.
It was left to Gay Times to publish the only real hatchet job, suggesting that I’d travelled the country in order to remind myself why I hated gay men so much, then wrote a book about it. Not for the first time, I was denounced as ‘bitchy’ – a term only ever applied to women and gay men.
Queens’ Country was serialised in the Daily Express and an extract appeared in the Independent On Sunday. Sales weren’t as strong as expected but the book did well enough for Little, Brown to offer me another deal – one that set my career off in a whole new direction.
‘I think you should write a novel next,’ my editor Andrew told me at our next meeting. At this point I was still known mainly as a columnist, and a controversial one at that. I’d written interviews and longer feature articles but had never once had a work of fiction published. What Andrew saw in Queens’ Country wasn’t the work of a polemicist but someone with an ear for dialogue and the strong sense of character and place required by a novelist. Bridget Jones’s Diary had been a big hit and he was looking for a ‘gay male Bridget’. What did I think?
Truth be told, I was never a great fan of Bridget Jones. Among other things, I hated the way she and her sob sisters always had a gay man’s shoulder to cry on, a gay man to dispense fashion advice, a gay man with no sex life or romantic interests of his own. There’s even a line in the film adaptation where she describes going to a party full of fellow singletons – ‘mainly poofs’. Who were these gay men and why didn’t they have an ounce of self-respect?
But Andrew had given me an idea. What if I took this genre and subverted it? I’d give him his ‘gay male Bridget’ – I already had just the man in mind. His name was Martin and he lived across the hall from me in Oval. One day he arrived home from work to find that his live-in lover had moved out without saying a word. I thought this would make a great premise for the tale of a hapless gay singleton, thrown back on to the gay dating scene and having to adapt to a whole new set of expectations and mating rituals. Martin was happy for me to use elements of his story – and even insisted that I name my protagonist after him.
The novel that eventually became Shameless began life in diary form, with a very different title. Inspired by a cult film by Russ Meyer, which I’d seen at the Scala Cinema in King’s Cross, the contract I signed in 1998 was for a book with the unwieldy working title of Faster, Disco Bunny, Kill, Kill!
No, I don’t know what I was thinking, either. But I certainly wasn’t thinking straight.
Chapter 22:
From New York To LA
It took me two years to complete Shameless. I was busy working on other projects. I had a part-time job at Time Out, plus regular freelance work for a number of newspapers and magazines. I was also doing a fair amount of research for the book, though this mainly consisted of going clubbing and experimenting with the various drugs my protagonist would be exposed to and the effects they would have on him. If researching a novel can be likened to an actor preparing for a role, I was of the method-acting school of thinking and was doing a De Niro.
At one point, a friend took me aside and said, ‘Paul, I think you’ve done quite enough research now. I think it’s time you sat down and wrote the book!’
He was right, and I did. But first I had some business to attend to in New York.
Beneath The Sheets was the title of my third documentary for Channel 4, which purported to go under the covers of the gay press on both sides of the Atlantic. It was a sexy title for a documentary that wasn’t particularly sexy, unless you counted the still shots of magazine covers with half-naked hotties. The ‘sheets’ referred to the gay free-sheets, though other publications were also discussed. Interviewees included the editor of Out magazine, James Collard, who I knew from our days at Attitude. I was cast as a kind of detective dressed in what one friend called my Sam Spade outfit, walking the streets of London and New York in a raincoat and trilby hat, with my voiceover added at a later stage.
These days, whenever I see a documentary with a journalist walking self-consciously past the camera, a little part of me dies inside. It’s one of the oldest clichés in the book. The less said about this particular journalist in this particular documentary, the better. Let’s just say it wasn’t my finest hour. But it did involve a free trip to New York. When filming ended, the producers even flew my boyfriend Javier over and we stayed on to catch up with friends and explore the city.
Our host was the artist Tim Hailand, who I’d first met through our mutual friend Georg Osterman – the same Tim who’d called to inform me of Georg’s illness a few years earlier and the death of Princess Diana the previous August. I don’t mean to make Tim sound like a harbinger of doom. He really isn’t. But he is the kind of person who says exactly what he thinks and will often be the one who breaks the news to you, good or bad. You know where you are with Tim – and right now we were in his one-bedroom apartment on West 17th Street while he slept on a friend’s couch.
