Going to the gig in the October was definitely not 'a long strange trip' for me, though going into the unknown on public transport held a fair number of small surprises for me. I had grown up unemployed in the midlands, a place that discourages travel, social mobility, and even the slightest belief in other places. It was natural for me see London as a place that I thought of as being another country, But a train journey is a train journey. The journey from Nottingham to London St Pancras was surprisingly short but otherwise predictable. In advance of my journey I had checked for where to go on the underground when I got off the train. But I need not have bothered. The deadheads were everywhere on the underground when I got there, they were distinct for being casually dressed and untidily coiffed in a vast variety of styles. They stood out quite a lot from the commuters who were the usual customers. My journey became a simple matter of following them through the underground. The nearer we got, stop by stop, to going above ground the more we formed the majority of passengers in the underground carriages, until we formed even bigger majorities above ground to join the queue to get into Wembley Arena, which had a definite buzz about it, which came from more than the smell of cannabis being smoked in the open air. The Grateful Dead had played there when it was called The Empire Pool Wembley in 1972 and everyone knew how good that was from the live album 'Europe '72' and memory means a lot in that 'community'.
I was one of over 12,000 fans of the band present that night. From the distance of my seat, high up to the right of the band playing at one end of the venue I was at a great distance from the band. They were more like well lit matchstick figures than anything else. But the sound in the venue was good, it was rich in detail. The keyboard playing of Bruce Hornsby cut clear through the cheers and requests for different songs that the audience did not realise that it was useless to ask for. They simply got off on shouting the name of the song they wanted the band to play. I know how the fans behaved because I was one of them. I shouted 'Terrapin Station' until I was hoarse. They did not play it. If you have ever seen the footage of Beatlemania, where the audience are too busy screaming to hear themselves or the band, then that night was my experience of the same thing but with a much better sound system than The Beatles ever had.
Would I have enjoyed the music more if I had listened more attentively if I had shouted less? Probably. But that night I embraced being part of that audience and that is what we all did, for most of three hours. In the midst of a major catharsis such as a gig on this scale the last thing attendees do is think and evaluate the catharsis when it is in full flow. I bought some merchandise, the European tour programme which obliquely excoriated the now deceased Brent Mydland for his absence on the tour whilst celebrating his contributions to the band and two T shirts. One of them from the official stall, the other was unofficial and from a seller somewhere down one of the many corridors connecting stations of the tube to St Pancras after I left. I was still very much caught up in the buzz from the gig on the train home, It would not be the last time I would hear their music live and catch that buzz again.
After an epiphany like that I felt permanently changed, though the change may have been less permanent than it appeared to be. In the comfort of my room in Lady Bay I played their albums all the more. I must have mentioned having been to the gig to more people than I realised needed to know. But funny highs are like that. If a similar high had come about from an encounter that had happened in church then they would have understood it more. But equally something else was happening. I started sleeping less well, and feeling, well, disconnected from the people I previously felt at ease with. I could cover the disconnectedness when I felt it but I decided to to go to my doctor and ask him about this sense of a gap opening up between me and the people I had previously assumed to connect with. He listened, and asked me a few questions. He commended me for getting the best I could out of the first lot of therapy that had ended in January of that year. Then he put me on a list for for a consultation for another round of therapy, group therapy this time. He did not suggest I go onto anti-depressants.
The phrase 'Baker days' was common in England circa 1986-90. Everyone knew what they were. 'Training days' was their official title and they were mini-conferences for the teachers in individual schools. They were part of the emerging managerial culture. Kenneth Baker was the Tory government education secretary 1986-89. He changed how schools ran to the point where he felt he needed to explain the changes at a macro level through local mini-conferences what his changes were. The conferences were usually one or two days long. There was even an enduringly funny Radio 4 sketch about them, listen it it here. Many of the members of the Lady Bay church were teachers. So it was natural that autumn for them to suggest that as a congregation we have a mini-conference, a church weekend. An event where as many of us willing stayed in each other's company in a large house for one night and most of two days and do different exercises to get know each other better.
I attended the November church weekend and enjoyed the event when I was not half hiding from and half exposing my acute sense of personal discomfort. The labour market might have cured me of wanting to be a trained nurse. I had learned enough to know that to be that useful and skilled took a better family than mine, and a lot more support and training than would ever be directed in my direction. By now my inner do-gooder and putter of other people on a pedestal said it wanted to be a social worker, without me ever linking that ambition with it being the profession of my landlady. There was a mask making session where the masks we made was part of what we wanted to be where my discomfort disguised as ambition was at it's most acute.
But the worst part was the 'cabaret' at the end of the weekend where many put on some nice, genuinely entertaining acts where I would have loved to be straight man/feed to another church member being funny. But nobody recognised my wanting to be included in a way that felt safe for me.
At another level my mind turned at complete right angles to the event in front of me, where I wanted to be with the other two gay men I knew in church and in front of the Lady Bay congregation getting ourselves up in drag as The Supremes and mime to 'Stop in the Name of Love' doing the hand signals for traffic directions. That what I imagined was an outright fantasy and would have been very much against the spirit of feather-light entertainment was obvious enough to me. But wanting the drag act as if I wanted to be at a different event and imagining that different event is something that I was unable to shake off. But in partial justification I will add that such fantasies are more common for young, partially closeted, gay men than the heterosexual world can admit, as this video for 'I Say a Little Prayer' shows. The worst point for me was my sinuses being so completely bunged up over the whole weekend that I was sometimes unsure of where I was, and was relieved when the event was over.
You might think that I had had enough of church for one weekend. But I went to the evening service and tried to join in with the sincere enthusiasm of the service in the central building when all the congregations met and mingled. My sinuses were bunged and I was in pain, God only knew why I went. The service ended, as many do, with an altar call. The only limit set on responding was the sense of need. I heeded that call. I went up to the stage and sat in one of half a dozen chairs. Two men stood, one either side, of me, and asked me what I wanted prayer for. I said 'My sinuses, I want them to be clear.'. I wanted relief. Hands were laid on my head. Prayers were said and the sinuses cleared instantly. It felt wonderful. Then, prompted by who knows what, there were further prayers over me and I was given a phrase to take away, and remember God's promise by. The phrase I was given was 'The Lord will restore the years the locusts have eaten.'. The phrase is from the minor prophet, Joel Chapter 2 Verse 25. I did not know what to make of being given that phrase. My sense of camp remained quite strong. When I spoke from the stage, though to others it was a platform, I said 'Thank you I feel like I have won a beauty contest.'.
The evening ended with me meeting one person who would be a part of my life for a long time after, far longer than I dare imagine. Jerry is his name, and he was jubilant at being healed of crippling back pain that night, like my sinuses, instantly. He was the first person in church that I confided to that I was gay. I had chosen better than I could have guessed. He could have been openly distant from me in that moment. He was positive and accepting, though I doubt either of us knew what it was that he was accepting of.
Beneath the surface churches, like other organisations, became more aware than I realised about social diversity. They had a headline ideas of recognising racial and social minorities that was well meant but rather unyielding. But individuals could be more yielding at a personal level where the church stance was their insurance/cover when they took risks. In my minority status, being gay, I now felt more at home than before. I still felt the gap in church between the official non-recognition of homosexuality and the acceptance by some individuals that the world was more accepting of being gay narrow. But individual Christians I began to partially know showed how Jesus accepted gay men as individuals in the hierarchy that was the church. I felt a clear change in myself, for my now knowing better than to try to live up to other people's assumptions that I was heterosexual, and bind myself according to their projections of a heterosexual monoculture.
To be directed to Chapter Twenty Three please left click here.
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