Families And How To Escape Them Chapter Thirty

By the autumn of 1991 I was going nowhere slowly, and enjoying the journey whilst being uncertain about the destination. I had done short term paid work, and I was still contracted by the Job Centre to apply for jobs. My schooling and work experience streamed me into a place I did not want to be. I did not want the jobs I could apply for and wanted the jobs I could not apply for. My way out of being pressured this way was to apply for the jobs I could apply for, but put too little effort into making myself seem vital to the employer. I then told the Job Centre 'I did my best'. When the reply came back and I did not get the job they said 'Better luck next time', forgetting how often they had said that to me before. I drew the best choices I could get out of a stalemate situation. A year after applying I was left alone to wait for the group therapy placement that was due to me. Whilst waiting I continued to write my thoughts down every night, to get a better night's sleep. My days were full enough making the little money I got each fortnight stretch as far as it needed to.

Another tactic with the Job Centre was to do the maths with the jobs on their boards. When a job was one I could apply for but when I did the maths I could prove I would be worse off than my simply being left on benefits, then I pointed the financial disadvantage out to the adviser, who would let me off from seriously looking any further. Amid the economic shrinkage neither I nor they felt any great need to apply ourselves, or get other unemployed applicants, to engage with the idea of employment with any rigour.    

With all the media talk of the next downturn in the economy being closer at hand than anyone wanted to predict I was preparing myself for enjoying being long term unemployed. There I did my best, socially, to hide how much I enjoyed being at the bottom of the heap. Though perhaps I was more transparent about how I did not esteem myself than I intended to be, as this image shows.

The shirt I understood to be East German army  surplus.                                                       

They were strong, warm, and light.  As far as my choice in clothing went, they were my aesthetic, my way to dress. I first found the shirts in my twenties. They replaced my mother's way of dressing me, in ill matching and ill assorted clothing from the local Cancer Research Charity Shop that she made me wear even when it no longer fitted me. The clothing had to wear out, the trousers split, before it might be replaced by clothing that by faint chance I might like more. 

With discovering the army surplus market stall and shop I allowed myself to wear clothing, the caps and light coats that were comfortable, that were durable, and cheap. As far as I was concerned the shirt gave me a style, that had my signature to it. 

I took the colours of the flag on the left shoulder the black, red and yellow to mean 'Through the night and the blood come the light', a phrase I connected the phrase to the East German Communist government.

Having now checked the origins of the choice of colour on the flag I was right about the phrase but wrong about it's origins. The phrase went back much further than WW2, to the war that France declared on Prussia in 1870, which resulted in the first united Germany.

Germany was recently reunited when I was wearing these red army shirts I liked. The wall between East and West Germany had been dismantled, and East Germany was exposed as the poorer half of the new, larger, country. But being in the poorer half of society was something I could identify with. 

There were frequent debates on television about who was going to be worse off in the next UK recession, and when it would kick in. Most of the debate skirted around accusations of betrayal, before the argument collapsed into a lack of conclusion. I knew that the next recession would go through the bank accounts, credit cards, and pockets, of people who were far richer than I was before it hit me in any way. 

This new role of agreeable under-performer was also reflected in my commitment to church. I attended all the usual meetings, twice on Sunday and Bible study/house group mid-week. At the end of the Sunday morning service there was often time to ask the preacher questions about the sources for their sermon. They answered me as well, I liked that. The midweek Bible Study group I was part of was far more difficult terrain. Particularly when we studied the more fundamentalist texts-including 'the clobber verses' where homosexuality was thought to be both the subject of the text and the reason for rhetorical moral censure. Then I zoned out as my heart went AWOL from the topic in hand. The more in The Bible God threatened and smote his most errant followers, and similar fates were promised for those identifying with their error, the more I identified with the errors of those threatened, with a hidden glee. Where there was an obvious mechanical sense of sin and punishment we never probed the text with enough rigour for the mechanisms and triggers of it all to be apparent. The backgrounds to the situations Biblical characters get themselves into always seemed to be poorly sketched in and the oldest Old Testament male figures were alarmingly uncaring of their female dependents. But like the loss leader jobs I weakly applied for, there was no point in me applying myself too hard to pointing out the flaws and gaps in the original texts. I did not want to be on another hiding to nothing. 

It did not help that the two closest friends I had made in church had both moved away. Celia had moved house with her adoptive family, and now went to another Bible study/house group. Jerry, who was the first person I had shared that I was gay to, had moved to another part of England where he had started a different job. He gave me his home brew white wine when he moved. It was kept in my landlady's cellar in demijohns. I forget who rang who first each week, of a midweek evening. But sometimes when we talked I was on the sociable side of being drunk from drinking his wine. 

During the time that the nights started darkening earlier I came up with a plan for a change. The idea came to me in the nightly writing I was still doing every night. For years I had known of the weak dad joke about the bearded man who went to the barber to have his beard shaved off and his school cap had been found in the shorn off undergrowth. In the night writing I tore the joke apart, and wrote to myself to say why I found the joke numbly unfunny and illogical at so many levels that I did not care if I never heard it again. I recognised the point in the joke that pleased families, where the cap being re-found symbolised a man rediscovering his childhood. Families found it funny because they sentimentalised children. My letting my beard grow was one of the ways I separated myself as an adult from a childhood I intensely disliked. But with me being on my own, and with no family close by to personally care enough to reinforce a past I disliked, I thought about how my image might change.

Before I asked the local church leaders to help me with the change of image I looked like a cleaned up biker, or late period Jim Morrison on a bad day. 

                                                                                                                                                  

My hair and beard remained clean, and were never cause for  complaint  from  my  fellow middle class Christians, the  people  whose company I kept with the most. But I rarely shaped and trimmed the beard, I had nobody else to trim it for and with the indifferent childhood lacked the imagination to see myself differently. 

In my nightly journal, after dealing with the weak dad joke, I debated with myself in my indirect way coincidence vs causation with mental health, Question;  if I was depressed, which I was sure I was, then how much was my low level hair care regime a symptom of my depression? How much did the low level hair care add to my feeling depressed. How much was my depression about a lot more than how little interest I had in how I presented myself? My hands surely ached from such prolonged writing every night. But it was the only way I had of turning myself inside out until what stopped me from sleeping could be calmed down for that night.

So, I asked my local church leaders if they would cut off my beard and trim my hair very short. Pauline and David were people who treated me as an adult. They seemed to understand how I was, well, unsupported by my family, by the standards of most church members. They said 'Yes'. We agreed an early evening mid-week for them to come around to the shared house I lived in with others, with the kit for the hair cut and clean shave. With very little talk required they understood that I was looking for a change I could make. The change was about spiritual matter and mental health issues, combined.    

As you can see, the hair cut and beard shave make a big difference to my appearance, even to my posture. From this distance of time I don't know what was directly removed with the beard trim and haircut, beyond the previous loathing of the old 'Oh that is where your school cap went' joke. I think what the change of appearance gave me was a relative lightness with how much I disagreed my family, compared with the former suppressed anger that it seemed impossible to dissipate.

With the change in appearance, the positive recognition from other people was welcome even if some of the recognition had hints of being backhanded about me being so slow attached to it. However good it felt I still had to maintain the nightly diary writing to help me sleep well, in lieu of the promised, but distant, therapy. 

And the new, more socially acceptable, appearance did nothing to change the church member's consistent and evasive side stepping around what 'being gay' might mean to those who were gay. That issue was carefully swept under the carpet. They would argue their rhetorical proofs of why homosexuality 'did not exist' because 'families don't create gay men or lesbians', as if families created everything and everyone. Whilst they ignored all the non-parenting of care homes, and the fragile parenting of foster care and adoption, for instance. They could parade their Biblical clobber clauses, but the one thing none of them would so was bear witness to the gospel by simply listening and letting the needy define their needs for themselves.