We Can Be Heroes, page 25
Sick of being bullied, and going on the advice given to me in the chat rooms, I decided to fight back by posting a blog revealing the identity of the person hiding behind the screen names and avatars. This proved to be a really big mistake. The blog didn’t silence her. It made her a hundred times worse. There were more blog posts, more emails and even more tweets. She gave interviews to other bloggers, confirming her identity and raging at me for ‘outing’ her. She painted herself as the victim, a champion of free speech who was being unfairly punished for daring to speak the truth. Her behaviour escalated to the point where she started making thinly veiled threats, booking tickets for my events and posting pictures of the booking confirmation on Twitter, saying she couldn’t wait to come and sort me out in person.
By now, I was seriously alarmed. I still had no idea what this person looked like. She could have been anyone sitting in the audience. She might be harmless. Or, for all I knew, she might be planning to rush at me with a knife. I informed staff at the Southbank Centre of the situation and was given added security. I spoke to friends, who were becoming increasingly concerned about the impact the harassment was having on my mental health. I was drinking heavily, sleeping badly and in a state of constant anxiety. Paulo advised me to cut down on my drinking and reduce the amount of time I spent online. My mother doesn’t really understand the internet but she’s known me all my life and was convinced that I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. My friend VG Lee was so worried about my fragile emotional state and personal safety, she urged me to take action before things got any worse. ‘This woman could be dangerous,’ she said. So I finally did what I should have done months before and contacted the police.
What took you so long, the female detective asked. The truth is, I was embarrassed to admit that I was being bullied by a woman. I was bullied a lot as a child – usually by other boys, always on the basis that I was a ‘poof’ – and the shame still lingered. I’ve also been on the receiving end of homophobic abuse as an adult – but that was either verbal or physical and therefore seemed more ‘real’. Waiting to give a statement at Brixton police station, my eyes were drawn to a poster urging people to report domestic violence. The stark image of a woman’s battered, bruised face made my complaint seem petty in comparison. The online nature of the harassment made me question whether the police would take me seriously. Thankfully, they did.
But it took several months before an arrest was made and the accused charged. For weeks I had personal security whenever I appeared at public events. For months I had to keep a record of every unsolicited email and unwanted social media contact, in order to help the police build a case and persuade the CPS to prosecute. Naively, I’d assumed that once I reported the crime, someone else would monitor the accused’s online behaviour. But the police simply don’t have the resources. The detective stressed that a case like mine all depended on the volume of evidence. So I had to keep copies of every email and take screenshots of every abusive, homophobic tweet, print them out, and then give further police statements where I had to relive the abuse and its impact all over again.
The police referred me to Victim Support but I didn’t contact them. Why? I think that word ‘victim’ had a lot to do with it. To my mind, Victim was the title of a 1961 film starring Dirk Bogarde, about a closeted gay barrister who’s threatened with blackmail. It was Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, apologising to his attackers for having offended them in some way. It wasn’t me. I’d been a gay rights activist since the 1980s and had lived through a period of enormous social change. During my ACT UP years, we campaigned against the use of terms like ‘AIDS victims’, which we regarded as disempowering and dehumanising. This was the language of the tabloids. We preferred the term ‘people with AIDS’, which conveyed a sense of personal agency and dignity.
Calling Victim Support would have meant thinking of myself as a victim. It would have felt like a step backwards. In a very real sense, my gay pride got in the way. But I was certainly in need of support. I was hardly sleeping at all, barely managing a few hours a night, drifting through the day in a state of high anxiety. I began to wonder if my mother was right. Maybe I was already having some kind of nervous breakdown.
David Bowie often spoke about mental health and the fear that he might one day ‘go mad’. It’s there in the song titles – ‘All The Madmen,’ ‘Aladdin Sane,’ ‘I’m Deranged’. My dictionary defines ‘derangement’ as ‘the state of being completely unable to think clearly or behave in a controlled way, especially because of mental illness’. This pretty much describes my state of mind in the summer of 2012, when I went to see my GP and practically begged him to prescribe me sleeping tablets. When he asked me why I was having trouble sleeping, I broke down crying in his surgery.
For the past six months, the harassment had been relentless. Even talking about it triggered a mixture of panic and shame. When I told my GP what was happening and how I was feeling, he immediately prescribed antidepressants. I think he was concerned that, without them, I’d crack up before the case got to court. I’d never been on antidepressants in my life and hated the way they made me feel. I became unfocused and found it difficult to write. I lost my libido. I still had trouble sleeping.
The case was one of the first Twitter trials and seemed to take forever to reach court. Had I known just how long it would take, I might never have gone to the police in the first place. At the first hearing, the prosecutor wasn’t properly prepared. He hadn’t even read the bundle. Had he done so, he’d have seen the email where Elly Tams confirmed that she was the author of the book entered for the Polari First Book Prize and that she wrote under the pseudonym linked to the Twitter account responsible for all the homophobic tweets. Because he hadn’t seen the email, the defence was able to argue that there was no proof that she was the person behind the account. The judge came close to throwing the case out. Instead, a new date was set and a new prosecutor found – one who understood social media and was meticulous in her preparations. The date was moved back – and then back again. I suspect that the defence was hoping to keep it dragging on for so long, I’d give up. But I’d come too far to turn back now.
It was the best part of eighteen months from the day the accused was first arrested until the day she finally stood trial. A few weeks before the trial began, I was having dinner with two friends, one of whom comes from an East End family with criminal connections. She told me that if things didn’t go my way in court, there were other ways of ensuring that the woman responsible never harassed me or anyone else ever again. Looking back, I’m pretty sure she was joking in an attempt to lighten the mood. But it’s a measure of my state of mind at the time that for a brief moment I took her seriously.
I first saw the accused long before taking the witness stand. Approaching the court building on the morning of the first hearing, I spotted a slightly dishevelled, skittish-looking woman, accompanied by an older man I took to be her father. Something in my gut immediately told me it was her. She looked rather pathetic and more likely to be afraid of me than I of her. Sure enough, as soon as she saw me, the look on her face turned to one of panic and she scuttled off.
Two things crossed my mind. One, that she was a typical keyboard warrior – brave behind a screen, but not so courageous in real life. Two, that something about her wasn’t quite right. Her appearance and body language suggested that this was someone with problems. I might have felt sorry for her, had she not caused me so much distress.
Testifying in court is a nerve-wracking business. However much the police and prosecution tell you otherwise, it’s hard not to feel that you’re the one on trial. The defence made light of the homophobic nature of the harassment, dismissing it as ‘playful banter’ and suggesting that I was oversensitive. They argued that I was a public figure on a social media platform and should therefore be open to healthy debate. I insisted that healthy debate did not include the right to harass and abuse someone, and that the defendant’s behaviour towards me was homophobic and relentless. The district judge agreed and found her guilty of harassment without violence. Unlike racially or faith-motivated offences, there is no ‘aggravated offence’ legislation in UK law for crimes motivated by homophobia. But in her summing-up, the judge stressed the homophobic nature of the case. Elly Tams was given a two-year suspended sentence and issued with a restraining order.
Having finally seen my tormentor in the flesh, I assumed that the anxiety she provoked in me would quickly dissipate. My biggest fear had been not knowing who I was dealing with. Now I’d seen her – and a pretty sad figure she’d turned out to be. I thought that, now it was all over, I’d simply put the whole thing behind me. But the impact of the harassment lingered. I still had trouble sleeping, waking in the night with feelings of anxiety. I found it hard to concentrate and was easily startled. Sometimes I’d see random women on the Tube and my heart would pound, convinced for a split second that it was her.
On the advice of my GP, I continued taking antidepressants for several months. I also did what I should have done far earlier and sought help from Victim Support. It wasn’t my first experience of counselling. In my mid-twenties, someone I dated survived a suicide attempt and I went to see the Samaritans for advice on how best to support them. I was taken aback when the woman I spoke to asked me how I was feeling. It wasn’t long after Vaughan was first hospitalised and, to be honest, my feelings were rather complicated. But calling Victim Support was the first time I’d made an appointment on my own behalf – and I was every bit as shaken as I had been on that earlier occasion.
The offices were close to the old Elephant and Castle shopping centre. I arrived ten minutes early and sat waiting nervously on a grey plastic chair. The counsellor was a man around my age, who ushered me into a tiny room and asked me why I hadn’t contacted them sooner. I told him I’d been too busy with work. He asked about the impact of the harassment and I described it to him – the sleepless nights, the pangs of anxiety. He told me this wasn’t uncommon with victims of crime. There was that word again. I think I might have bristled. Finally, he told me I was suffering from a form of PTSD. Talking about trauma was a vital part of the recovery process, he said. There was no shame in feeling like a victim, but in order to move forward, first I had to face up to my emotions and put them into words. I felt a flicker of recognition at this but was unable to put a name to it. After a few sessions, I stopped going.
What nobody tells you is that around 40 per cent of people issued with a restraining order breach it within a few months. I read this online and worried about what would happen if the harassment continued. I was already at my wit’s end. Had Tams continued to harass me, what would I have done? I now knew exactly who I was dealing with and where she lived. Might I have been tempted to take the law into my own hands? I’d have liked to think not. But given my state of mind at the time, I couldn’t say for certain. That scared me.
I needn’t have worried. I neither saw nor heard from her ever again. But for a long time afterwards, I kept a photo of her taken by a Court News photographer on both my phone and laptop. I knew how much she hated having her picture taken, how she hid behind stock photos to avoid being identifiable online. If she bothered me again, I’d respond by posting her photo.
Looking back, there are many things I wish I’d done differently. I wish I’d listened to the well-worn advice to ‘keep calm and don’t feed the troll’. I wish I’d sought professional help sooner, instead of letting my pride get in the way.
But one positive thing came out of my experience. It gave me the seed of an idea for a novel.
Chapter 32:
Station To Station
A month after my court case, in December 2013, I was made redundant. I’d been at Time Out for twenty years. A lot had changed in that time. What had once felt like a family business now felt increasingly corporate. In twenty years, I’d rarely taken a day off as sick leave. If I was ill, I swapped my days around so I could still meet my deadlines. Yet when I asked the new HR director for two days’ leave to testify in court against the woman who’d been homophobically harassing me for the past eighteen months – and even using the Time Out website to do so – I was told I’d have to deduct it from my holiday allowance.
The redundancy was handled with an equal degree of sensitivity. One day the editors of all the smaller sections were summoned to a meeting and told how important we were. The phrase ‘heart and soul of the magazine’ was used. Three days later we received our redundancy notices. Christmas was just a few weeks away. Work had already started on the annual Christmas double issue. There was a time when Time Out rewarded staff with a Christmas bonus. Now they marked the season of goodwill by handing out redundancy notices.
Still struggling after the stresses of the trial, I can’t say I was sorry to leave. My only regret was that, after twenty years of loyal service, I wasn’t shown a little more courtesy. Few senior staff attended my leaving drinks. My former editor Dominic Wells turned up and later wrote a piece for the Guardian, expressing his dismay at the direction the magazine was taking. ‘It seems to me extraordinarily short-sighted to axe the LGBT section,’ he wrote. ‘In the words of Oscar Wilde, it’s the act of people who “know the price of everything and the value of nothing”. For decades its recommendations have guided people, perhaps unsure of their sexuality or new to London, to safe spaces in the capital. More than that, it has reassured them that they are as normal and as numerous as lovers of music, dance or grainy subtitled films.’
During my long tenure at Time Out, we won a Stonewall Award for our LGBT coverage. I was also shortlisted for Journalist of the Year at the European Diversity Awards and again by Stonewall. My name regularly appeared in the Independent’s annual Rainbow List of LGBT influencers where I’d recently graduated to the dizzy heights of ‘national treasure’. When the news broke that Time Out was axing my section, I received many messages of support. Among them were emails from singer David McAlmont and screenwriter Russell T. Davies.
People kept telling me I had a lot to feel proud about. But to be honest, I wasn’t feeling very much of anything. Still weaning myself off antidepressants, I was exhausted, demoralised and drinking heavily. Self-medication was second nature to me. It never crossed my mind that binge-drinking might be adding to my problems – or that the urge to numb myself with alcohol might be a sign that something was seriously amiss.
As 2014 dawned, my career prospects were looking grim. For the first time in over twenty years, I had no day job and no publisher. For me, writing is as essential as breathing. It’s how I function in the world. And while I know that writing and publishing are two very different things, they’d gone hand in hand for as long as I could remember. I was paid to write. It’s what I did for a living – or used to.
Suddenly it felt as if I had no reason to get up in the morning. I was an author without a publisher, a journalist without a deadline. By 2014, we were well into the age of free content. Opportunities for freelance journalism were far fewer and further between. During my last few years at Time Out, section editors were often referred to as ‘content providers’ – which felt like an insult to our professionalism. We were experienced journalists, experts in our field. People who left comments on our website could be classed as ‘content providers’ – people like the internet troll I’d recently taken to court.
Now that my two main sources of income had dried up, I had a crisis of confidence. How was I supposed to earn a living when so few media outlets offered regular freelance work and so many younger journalists were willing to write for free? One editor approached me with the offer of unpaid work, insisting that it would be ‘great exposure’. I’d been a professional journalist for twenty-five years. I’d published ten books and written thousands of magazine and newspaper articles. I’d even written and presented television documentaries. I didn’t need exposure. I needed to pay my bills. What if I was never commissioned to write another piece? What if I never published another book? If I wasn’t a professional writer, who was I? It felt as if a vital part of my identity had been stripped away.
Thankfully, I had the support of my husband, who’d been a tower of strength throughout the court case and whose belief in me never faltered. And I had Polari. The salon was the one thing I’d created that nobody else could take away. Events at the Southbank Centre continued to sell out and featured some of the biggest names in LGBTQ+ literature – Paul Bailey, Patrick Gale, Jackie Kay, Ali Smith. The Polari First Book Prize was attracting a growing number of submissions and garnering more media attention. About to enter its fourth year, the prize had previously been awarded to three very different but equally worthy winners – memoirist James Maker, poet John McCullough and crime writer Mari Hannah. We’d attracted a sponsor in the shape of Société Générale and hosted a huge prize-giving event at the Purcell Room, with Sarah Waters heading the bill.
We’d even won a few prizes of our own, including the Co-op Respect Award for Best LGBT Cultural Event of the Year. We’d been reviewed in the New York Times and named one of the world’s top LGBTQ+ events by Art Info. The Huffington Post described Polari as ‘the most exciting literary movement in London’. People raved about us wherever we went. Only we hadn’t gone very far. We’d appeared at literature festivals in Soho and Stoke Newington. We’d popped up at the Metropolitan Archives and the Museum of London. But so far, we hadn’t been north of Watford.
2014 was the year this all changed. If there’s a Bowie song for every occasion – and after years of extensive research, I can confirm that there is – in this case the song would be ‘Station To Station’. The track opens with the sound of a train leaving a station. And just as it marked a change in direction for the singer, from the ‘plastic soul’ of Young Americans towards the European experimentalism of Low, I was also in the process of reinventing myself. To invoke the work of one of Bowie’s own heroes, Christopher Isherwood, it was a case of Mr Burston Changes Trains – and changes careers. No longer employed part-time as a journalist, I began to carve out a new career for myself as a producer.
