Less innocent in humour was the truth universally acknowledged that in any mixed group of adults attending an alcohol based party, the first person to get silly-drunk will always be the nurse or the nursing assistant. I was never invited to parties and whilst I had a few church friends my own age I often found that organising my social life away from the care factory on the limited budget that it allowed me took more than the average amount of discipline. I enjoyed my days off, but to get the maximum best use out of them meant partially accepting vegetating, even as I might have been out and about. When I got two days off together then the first day was always spent resting from the long run of shifts that I had to do to get that much time off in one block.
One way of requiring fewer friends to be sociably antisocial was going to the movies on my own. I have no list of the films I saw in 1989, but the first year I remember exploring the movies on my own I know that I saw both the Bond film 'Licence to Kill' and the Peter Greenaway film that was influenced by Jacobean drama 'The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover'. With both films the cinema house that I saw them in was a commercial movie theatre. With the Bond film the cinema house was full. If something registered with me between the explosions and car cases/escape sequences then it seemed like thin gruel-which was perhaps better for the tired and inattentive movie goer than I expected it to be. Gladys Knight sang the title song, her performance hit home with me. I wanted to personally commiserate with her that her vocal lit up the credits of such an unaccountably unmemorable film. With the Greenaway film I must have been equally tired from work. Both times I watched it I practically alone at the sitting. The first time I saw it I could follow the plot well enough and was wowed by the eye popping set design and lighting. But the spleen vented and the violence, which flowed logically out of the well acted words, were beyond extreme. The logical and clear depiction of a consistently violent and deceitful world was colourful and immersive. I had to see it a second time, to make sure I had seen what I thought I had seen the first time. After I had been the second time I 'joked' with the members of my Christian house group, normally a place of calm and middle class decency, that I had to check that it was as disgusting and overtly sensual as it had seemed the first time I saw it.
But the place I took a more sustained interest in seeing movies at was the Broadway Cinema House in The Lace Market area of Nottingham. It was the first cinema I had found which showed foreign language films with subtitles. From being a teenager onward I'd had a rather squashed interest in art house/subtitled films. It started with being allowed to stay up late on my own aged seventeen to watch 'And Then There Were None' (1945 20th Century Fox) on BBC2, where the film was in English. But what made me want to watch it was that the director was French. For him being French he knew better than an English director did how to extract maximum tension from a complex plot, right down to him directly addressing the viewer in his voiceover to ask them if they have guessed who the real murderer was before putting a sixty second clock up to emphasise that it was their last chance before the explanation for the plot came. I found the upending of how the viewer must have known it was a film, with Rene Clair addressing the audience in the voice over and showing the countdown style clock inspiring. My second start with 'difficult' films came with seeing 'My Beautiful Laundrette' with it's infamous gay kiss, and the elevated post-kitchen sink drama films that Mike Leigh made when Gainsborough Trinity Arts Centre started showing films from 1985 onward.
I mentioned my Christian House Group a couple of paragraphs ago. In Lady Bay I had not only landed on my feet with where to live, but also with where to go to church. West Bridgford had a large Baptist Church just up the road from my place of work which was usually full for evening services. But the church also encouraged the sharing out of responsibility/authority when it 'planted' much smaller community sized satellite churches in the different areas of West Bridgford. I settled well in the Lady Bay church and in the house group that met every Wednesday evening. I enjoyed the Bible studies, and I veered toward the liberal and inclusive side of any theological opinion on which we looked for a consensus with.
With my belief that I was gay, and half knowledge and lack of explanations for it, I had a difficult enough time in church. Telling them that their 'answers' were pat and evasive when homosexuality was the question was not an option. Finding somebody I could be plain and honest with when I waved my willy in the public toilet in the dark would have been my miracle. No such miracle happened, though there were men of responsibility in the church who admitted they were gay. I wanted somebody that explained to me how to stop cottaging and why men did it, because I could not comprehend what propelled me into the circular logic that lay behind my behaviour. The church was caught in a different circularity. In the scrambled shorthand the church often spoke in, every sinful logic-including the logic behind homosexuality-was the same. 'Since the logic is itself sinful, then to discourage the sinful behaviour in the world, we won't talk about the logic amongst ourselves.'. It did make me wish that one of Jesus parables had used the illustration of somebody sticking their head in the sand to avoid understanding themselves.
The most acceptable way of introducing the subject of homosexuality in church was to study 'the clobber passages', six passages where some odd sounding same sex sexual behaviours that were nothing like 20th century homosexuality were condemned. The first and most infamous clobber passage was Genesis 19:1-38. There the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah are accounted for. Even when the consensus from studying those verses was that the besetting sin of the two cities was a spiritual meanness, though the sexual vices were wrong too, I left that Bible study meeting feeling like I was one of one of the less obedient dogs in dog training class run by Barbara Woodhouse. For all that her voice was firm, and The Bible was right, I was a failure because I cold not stop myself acting out what I tired too easily of being shouted about, to be trained to not do it.
Away from my retreating from the feeling of being shouted at and not knowing where to go, I merely felt lost. Never more so than when a Franciscan monk picked me up at the toilets that had become my favourite haunt when I was denying to myself how low and tired I was. He wore ordinary clothes, a Marks and Spencer checked shirt and jumper, and he was in his unsexy sixties. I only discovered that he was a monk when he invited me to his room where I could see him in the light and see from his room how he was 'on mission', living away from the monastery. Rosary beads lay on the dressing table. On the walls were more prayer aids. Beyond that it was a typically untidy bachelor pad with worn and mismatched furniture etc.
What he wanted was somebody to with a sense of natural ease and lack of shame to quietly wank him off. He got that from me that night. After all, discreetly offering such services for free had been part of my youth training in Wilson Carpets ten years earlier. By mutual agreement I saw him several more times. But the more of ourselves we introduced the more we led each other to where our understanding was blocked by the opaque explanations that we had ben taught to live by. Each time this happened an increasing sense of detachment set in. Conversations retreated from the personal to the safer ground.
I did not know what to say when he revealed that one of his favourite films was Ken Russell's 1971 shocker 'The Devils', based on the 1952 Aldous Huxley book 'The Devils of Loudon'. He showed me his battered looking VHS copy of the film, thankfully making no move to play it. From memory the book was a rather ascetic account of disagreements between the French State and Catholic Church where the sub plot that took centre stage was a seemingly spontaneous sexual hysteria at the charismatic Catholic priest who was acting mayor in the castle city of Loudon. He liked the film for how it depicted sexual behaviour.
What I should have said to him was that with video players and recorders now being the norm, more people than ever before had found that they were more likely to develop a porn habit than was predictable in the age before video machines and tapes. I didn't say that. Nor did I say what my preferred televised porn substitute was, underdressed trained up musclemen. Rather weakly, I tried to imply that linking sexual intimacy quite as much as 'The Devils' did, with a legal and militarised contrariness and ultra-violence surely made ordinary sexual happiness difficult. But if he enjoyed the film for how much it portrayed a pre-Marquis de Sade sadism then he was truly a masochist. And masochists will burn through a lot of relationships out with their expectations.
To be directed to Chapter Fifteen please left click here.
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