This is part three of a four part memoir. For Part 1 please click here, for Part 2 please click here.
So there I was, in friendly lodgings, the old small town world in my head and a newer world around me that I liked, but I did not know how to feel like I was part of it. I was waiting for my letter from the NHS psychiatrist who I expected would invite me to be part of a group therapy experience. In the meanwhile I was trying to make my life seem useful whilst I found the paradoxical expectations of employers to be corrosive and absurd. I had my A4 pad to absorb the worst emotional blows that other people unwittingly gave me.
It was in this period, between autumn 1990 and winter 1992, that I met the Franciscan monk who lived in a local flat on his own, he was on leave from his monastery and had been 'sent to work in the community'. I had a faith, like I assumed he had a faith. It turned out that he had similar problems to me, problems with putting empathy and appreciation into same sex sexual relations, where neither of us had been taught how to do that. One of his favourite videos was the 1973 Ken Russell film that put the 'grand' into 'grand guiginol', 'The Devils', a film which is still too dangerous today to be put out on home video in the form it's director intended it to be seen. It was both based on a true story, as accounted in English literature for in Aldous Huxely's 'The Devils', and a tale of seventeenth century religious hysteria where sex and religion combined in the greatest level of antipathy towards each other and misuse of power that anyone could conceive. I can't remember how he befriended me and I did not mind wanking him off a few times, in his flat. But I did wish that he was younger and more handsome than he was. In my A4 pad I was happy to file the experiences of meeting him so many times under 'mistaken charity'.
There were surely many other experiences too, both sexual and social, where I grew through the experiences, rather than being shrunk by them. The period 1988-92 is the one period of my adult life that I did not keep an everyday diary. Though as I have discovered looking back on the diaries that I kept, I had learned better than I realised at the time how to repeat the evasions that other people, particularly family, had taught me to live by. But now I was doing my best to correct these evasions, late in life, with the therapeutic journal.
Between 1988 and 1992 I had quite a lot of anonymous sex with other men, who valued anonymity as much as I had been taught to, though the sex happened less often than it had the previous decade. Somehow the need for the sex fell away, though I was slow to realise why; with hindsight it was obvious, I was physically and emotionally increasing my distance from my family. I still sought sex with random men in public toilets but with the new diary I could write about the sex if I wanted to, and also I could write about what was going on in my head that led up to me wanting the sex, and each time, well, the sex felt better because through writing I was learning to recognise why I wanted the sex and what I thought was best and worst about it. I began to recognise triggers for what they were rather than being unobservant of them. There was the experience of being close up with a well endowed body builder that was as overwhelmingly intense as it was brief, where I was happy with the brevity. Given more time I would not have known what to do with it. It was an old fantasy made that vivid in the brief time given to it, that the fantasy abated in my head after being experienced for real that once.
Then there was the experience where after being a comfort to a man in a toilet cubicle that challenged my belief in mutual anonymity. I gave him oral sex and it was such a mutually tender exchange that he thanked me by name afterwards. When said my name at the end of the encounter I was so struck by his utterance that I did not notice that he withheld his name. I still remember enough of the details of the occasion even now, to look back with a certain fondness at the qualified anonymity of that occasion. it must have been between that occasion and the upkeep of the therapeutic diary that I thought to ring, and visit the local gay helpline, as an alternative to writing out my woes and worries when writing them out and keeping the sense of loss and inadequacy to myself seemed inadequate.
So, I am back at the public toilets and it is a cold, dark evening, 9th of February 1992. After several months of not going for anonymous sex I am gripped by the need to seek it and past caring as to why. If I am named by anyone as we have the sex then I have determined that I will sort that out after the event. I will learn afresh how to own the experience of being named when the name for what I was doing was so secret/anonymous.
I go in, it is cold and dark and the lights are out, the bulbs have been smashed or removed. There is a large disabled cubicle, two small regular sized cubicles and three urinals and they are all rather smelly. One of the toilets may be blocked, it is a guess as to which one it is. There is also a queue for the use of each facility with probably five men, including me, waiting in row against the wall, and nobody knows how many men in the cubicles. We knew better than to be surprised if when one man left a cubicle the door closed again, and after a few minutes more another man would come out and then the door would stay open. The men who stood against the wall in the dark were starting to sort out with each other what they came there for; anonymous sex in a public toilet. In the dark nobody can see anything so why wait for a space that is no more private? Only not everyone is sorting themselves out with the others in the queue. Some, well, don't want sex with who is there, and might want sex but in better weather and in natural light, or may they have lost their sexual appetite because of the smell. In the silence and timidity of inaction who knows what the men there want? Not even the men involved can say.
Find the fourth and final part of this short memoir here.
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