It was thirty years ago today that I started to put my life 'in the closet' behind me. I say 'started'. 'The closet' is for gay men what the unconscious is for Freudians; in both it might well be thought that we can clear it out by talking it though, such that we can never be surprises by it again. But whether it is the closet or the unconscious, thinking is what keeps it alive. Processing it is only ever partial. However much we have processed it, it always leaves something to surprise us with in future. Whatever the closet or the unconscious holds, and through thought releases, what remains never comes out quite the same way twice.
But before describing the crunch moment, the pin moment that linked life before to life after as if they were different halves of a hinge, the reader should have the life immediately before. The story starts fifteen months earlier, in the Autumn of 1990. That was when I saw my GP, and I asked for therapy on the NHS and joined the queue for a place in a course of group therapy. Part of the process of being put in that queue was knowing that I could have no idea when I might get an appointment to be processed for a placement on a course. So whilst unemployed I started to do what I could by myself.
From November 1990 I started a daily journal, where every day I forced out of myself, and on to a lined A4 pad, all the words and ideas I felt in my head that I had not share with anyone that day, all the words and ideas that others felt it was okay to not hear; they felt no need to hear them. These were words and feelings that I would normally have had to save for that hour a week with a therapist, had I got the individual therapy I had originally hoped for from my doctor straight away. But I was in this queue of unknown length and I had to find short cut through being so British as to think the queue was the point when I was in it. Filling an A4 pad with the intensity of my feelings was my way of enduring the queue, and refreshing myself so that by the time I was processed and allocated a group to join I could still remember what I had joined the queue for.
I wrote intensely personally, with no censor, such that the paper took the wanting out of the being made to wait. The paper I wrote on became the therapist I could afford and did not have to wait for. The paper I wrote on was true to itself when it reflected my words back to me, and that was all I needed it to be. Up to that time I barely knew how raw my feelings were, or for how long or how deeply I felt utterly dislocated from my surroundings.
The writing worked, after a fashion. After a short time the habit of writing down my feelings made it that I could say to other people what they needed to hear and I could think what I felt by myself with less of a sense of distance between the two. Not that improving how I felt changed my circumstances. I was unemployed, had a piss-poor work record, and if I applied myself in the right way I might get a last-in-first-out-low-pay temporary job, of which there were plenty. But the reason there plenty of such jobs was because everyone knew such work needed to be done, but the instability, short termism, and poor pay of such work made it that they preferred other people do those jobs. I thought the same way as those people, part of the time at least. The difference between me and many of those I knew who thought that way was that I had done two such jobs, if not more on supposedly more reliable government schemes. The people I knew who wanted this lesser employment for others all worked, worried, and had mortgages. I was unemployed, I rented a room in friendly house where the friendliness was a breathing space for me, and I was on benefits. I had been unemployed since the Autumn of 1990 when my last temporary job as a postman had ended.
I was helped by several therapy books. One in particular was 'Dibs; In Search Of The Self' by Virginia Axline (first published in 1964, my copy was a Penguin special paperback from later in the 1960's). It was a precise account of how a child who was totally blocked up by his own anger found release in spit of living in a world where the adult politeness he experienced left him feeling used and dismissed. He was given a course in 'play therapy' where he would be taken to a play pit, where he would play with the toys. As he played the therapist would gently talk to him about this situation or that family member, as she talked so he prompted himself to act out with the toys what he felt, with him being totally unaware of the therapeutic value of how the play pen acted as the space to expiate a lot of feelings of grief, anger, despair and so many other feelings that politeness forbade mention of. As I read the book so I wrote my own account in a parallel process on my own. I did not have a play pen, I had my A4 pad and sufficient space by myself to not have to self sensor my thoughts.
Some of my anger was about what was said about paid work and how people behaved. With work I felt the distance between rhetoric and reality was that vast, that self censoring, and that infuriating that it left me confounded and severely uncomfortable. Sarcasm and suicidal thoughts expressed as dour humour proved to be a weak respite from a life where promises fell apart well before delivery on them was due. Whilst I was officially unemployed I volunteered, serving lunches in dry house, a place where sober alcoholics could get a free meal, three hours a week, serving behind the bar in a Christian coffee bar on Friday night, five hours a week, where I served espressos and other non-alcoholic drinks to whoever appeared. I also undertook for an hour a week to visit an elderly disabled lady with a broad Sheffield accent from my local church who was bright and cheery in church, but who equally transparently expressed a sense of longing that was beyond the bounds of what other church folk thought it was apt for them to entertain. I did not have the fears or boundaries that other church members had, or their respectability.
I would write four or five sides of writing longhand in an A4 pad each day, and having exhausted the words and thoughts unsaid to other people, then I would sleep much better than when I had no exit for the thoughts that went round my head.
Was this life of being unemployed/unwaged, waiting for group therapy, and filling my time as usefully as I could on my own a good life? It was as good a life as I could make for myself, by myself. From the time after my last job had ended I felt as if I could use some free space. I left others to be more anxious on my behalf about my unemployment than I could bring myself to be. My family lived forty miles away. They may as well be in another country as far as my day to day life went. They did not even have a home telephone line. There was a shared phone for use by us all where I living, and if family had any urgent message for me, Mother would ring me from a public call box. Other than that they could write, asking me to visit, or invite themselves to see me. But they disliked leaving the town they lived in, and when any of them did visit they tended to think as if they were still where they had come from. I was now a stranger to the life I once had in that town. The best comment ever given to me about my leaving the town I grew up in was given to me when I returned for a weekend visit, and somebody who knew me closely observed that when I walked I walked with a straighter back than I did when I lived in the town.
In my previous life in the town my family lived in I had cottaged quite intensely, sufficiently intensely for me to be unaware of how habitual and personal to me the habit was. I had anonymous sex with men in public toilets from 1978-87. I left the town in January 1988. I was unaware of why I sought sex with unnamed men in public toilets, beyond that it was the only way of getting any sex at all. I was partially aware that I was not as asexual as other people preferred to see me as being. I knew that it was impossible to expect even the most veiled explanation from anyone who expected me to be asexual, as to why and how, by what sufficiency of grace, I should be confident about who I was whilst being asexual, or as they would rather say, celibate. Every attempt at broaching the subject of not being celibate whilst single would be blocked by the answer to celibacy being seen to be marriage. Any discussion where the path to marriage included the process of courtship was also denied me. Courtship was seen as the temptation towards adultery because the courting couple were not married. And whilst gay sex had been officially de-criminalised-which meant that men could not be blackmailed for money because they had had gay sex-plenty of men still blackmailed each other but the forced barter was for more sex after the initial encounter, rather than money. This happened the way it did because the language to describe homosexuality was frozen, but the desire remained-particularly in an alcohol culture like the one in the town I grew up in. All thought, or action, towards sex outside of marriage had be excluded from being discussed. Nor was sex within marriage ever discussable in realistic and empathetic terms.
Even as I lived forty miles away from that reality, and I had lived away from it for two and a half years, it was a world that still filled my head with itself, leaving no room for what was around me. Like the city I now lived in, where to succeed I had to succeed on my own terms. That old world would not extend or adapt to give me a new life.
End of Pt 1, please find Pt 2 here.
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