I was slow to appreciate how I had 'landed on my feet' when I settled into being unemployed and living in Lady Bay. The comfortable middle class character of the area masked a lot my prior experience. There I had seen myself as being awkwardly passive and working class. I was a people pleaser when I crossed the T's on my thanks and dotted the I's on my praise for certain things. That was seen as expected with my coming from a bruised background of forced deference. But that spring and summer of 1990 my life opened up on three fronts, all three of which fed into each other and changed how I saw myself.
The first event was that the independent/art house cinema put on it's first season of 'gay themed' films. The British Film Institute had aligned itself with Channel 4 television who were having a season of late night gay-themed broadcasts which included reactions against the passing of 'section 28' where the Tory government limited what could be said about homosexuality and lesbianism in school classrooms. The BFI sent a package of vintage gay themed films to independent movie houses across the country. I went to see one of them. If, as Alan Bennett put it, 'homosexuality came off the ration book' for many English gay men in 1967, then gay men in London were always the first to grasp the opportunities first. The television programmes followed the claims for a London gay heritage, and were meant to be the spur for gay men in the provinces to start from where they were in living out more fully what they thought they believed, however critical the locals might be. I was still officially closeted but 'half out' depending on the circumstances and the company. It was a young and nerdy Woody Allen who said 'I am not afraid of death. I just don't want to be there when it happens.'. I surely paraphrased Woody Allen's quote in my head when ever I was in company in which I could not talk as freely as I thought 'I am not afraid of my sexuality, I just don't want to re-experience the shame in the language I am given to describe it.'.
My way around what made the unsayable automatically unpleasant was to see a 1971 film called 'Pink Narcissus'. It was a unique gay fantasy film in which there was no dialogue and the character seemed to live in some perpetual reverie as he explored different fantasies as if all fantasy was sexual. Only some fantasies became more explicitly gay and directly sexual than others. The film certainly forced my closet door to be more open, and jammed half-open. The film certainly lowered the levels of guilt that I felt when I went places so secret I did not have words to describe them. I admitted to seeing the film to the one person in church who I thought might understand why I wanted to see it. His mix of disapproval whilst being nonplussed was more humorous to me than it seemed to him.
I still had a long way to go to even half-get my head around why I cottaged. I seemed to not know how or why to stop. Christianity Barbara Woodhouse style, with all of it's tut-tutting about 'the gay lifestyle' in church seemed utterly resistant to engaging with something that was more substantial than the 'lifestyle choice' they said it was. And worse, the lack of humour made the church seem defensive. So from time to time I still waved my willy in the dark in front of strangers like me who did the same. But I felt more comfortable with it, partly from thinking how in our own way we were all descendants of the young man in 'Pink Narcissus', all fantasists. If what we did was 'a phase', as many of us might have been told by our parents when we were teenagers, then as a phase it was both real and something definitively out of phase with how the rest of our lives were described and conducted-which is what forced what we did in the toilets into being a fantasy. In it's unspoken way the film's depiction of escalating sexual fantasy gave me a framework for recognising sexual fantasy as being real, if only as the unmet expectations of an unlived life.
I had been at the top of the list for moving to Agape House for some time when a room in the house became available, later that spring. Adelaide's shared house was a three storey semi-detached house, four storeys if the extensive brick floored cellar was included, with a phone, a big ground floor kitchen diner, a shared living room, an upstairs bathroom and four comfortable well furnished rooms upstairs. There was a fair sized low maintenance but smart garden to the rear of the house with a large willow tree in it. I resided there for a relatively short length of time. But from the time of my departure from Pierrepoint Rd to my departure from Agape House, the difference the move made to my life was astonishing. The Pierrepoint Rd house did have a sense of loose family about it, but often it was much more 'loose' than it was 'family', and the place was pleasantly run down. To go from the looseness and neglect of the old household to being part of a proper substitute family in the new house was astonishing. One odd point was how similar they were as houses. But the big point to note is how all the personal changes that I had been stymied and put of from exploring at every address I had lived at prior to 'Agape House' I felt more safe exploring there.
But first a word about Jed, who moved there around the same time as me. He was a gardener, a church attendee, happily heterosexual and not at all homophobic, and 70 % deaf. His favourite television programme was 'Star Trek; The Next Generation' because he found it easy to follow. He spoke quite clearly. As had happened to me, his life had been mangled and misshapen by institutions. But he had one thing I did not have; a profession. He was a professional gardener. The church always had a problem with single young men who were attracted to the image the church projected, but whose early lives have been disrupted. The church always wanted the men to marry and settle, but the young men would not settle easily where they could not be honest about how they had survived the substitutes for family that made the idea of family life seem difficult and unattractive. Adelaide's individual solution to the presenting problems that the church shied away from accepting, the disrupted early life, was to have a substitute family set up that allowed people like Jed and me to evolve improved approaches to becoming adults in their own way.
The third area of life that changed was work, well nearly. After thirteen weeks of being registered unemployed and not looking very hard for work every claimant got the offer they could not refuse; to join a job club. The only way to leave this club alive was to get a job and hope that you could do the job, and live with the management the job came with. Most of the jobs looked for from job clubs were generic, low-skilled, and basic. If you disliked the job, then exchanging it for a better job situation whilst continuing with job you disliked was difficult. One solution to expect less money and look instead for the jobs with no-fault exits from them, though this often meant a rather indifferent acceptance if you go the job.
The job club met Monday to Friday, mid morning to late afternoon, in an undecorated half- furnished city council office room with tables in a group in the middle of the room, and twenty to thirty chairs all around the outside of the tables. There was no clocking on or clocking off, but members did sign a contract to be there a set amount of time. Our names and attendance times were noted, and the notes kept for promised 'review' interviews that never happened. Attendees agreed to be there the length of a part time job, two to three days a week, to look through the latest local newspapers and council lists of vacancies to be filled etc and update their CVs etc. There was a row of high windows along one long wall that let light into the room, but gave no view out worth seeing. They remained closed. If they were opened then the dust and noise pollution from Maid Marion Way would have been a distraction. There was a kettle, milk tea and coffee for us all to get hot drinks with when we wanted. The set up made Pierrepoint Rd seem attentive and homely. The manager was a friendly enough disabled man who walked with a stick who mostly sat away from the tables. His presence suggested that if the civil service thought he was fit to be 'our manager' then we should think ourselves fit for work, and fit enough to find it unaided. At one level attending job club felt like being in a class of mostly well behaved children on an infinitely extended indoors break where the teacher was absent. At another level we were all there by contract. This meant that there was no cohesion between us, and mutual support was rare. With the pens and stationery at the table we more or less managed ourselves whilst we scanned the city newspapers and vacancy lists for something to apply for, making notes of our efforts, whilst some openly looked instead at all the other sections of the newspaper to fill out their time there.
Some of us were more adept than others at knowing what to put on application forms. The most adept of us knew how to fill in a job application form to make it look like they wanted the job whilst making sure that the management looking at the form would not choose them. Sharing that presentational balance tip on was the subtlest point to share. Make the point but make it wrongly to somebody and the applicant would get the job they neither expected nor wanted.
The goal I set myself was that if I was to work then I needed my distance from how I was managed and I had to have work where mostly where I was left to do the work. This criteria ended with me getting a part time job as a postman.
To be directed to Chapter Twenty please left click here.
I r ss that and most difficult thing to conveyrs. What we all found most difficult was hiding our collective cynicism about work and our lack of enthusiasm for being there. I don't know how many time I wished I were reading a book on my own, rather than looking to describe myself to employers who did not want to know what the rabbit hole of unemployment looked and felt like.
And then to disbelief and lack of expectation I got a job.
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