| The 40 In 40 Days Project. | ||
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32. The Apotheosis of Queer (1997) |
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The Au Pairs |
Let’s
generalise wildly, like those journalists do. If I spent the 1970s in
denial about being gay, and the 1980s getting used to being gay, then I
suppose that looking back, I spent much of the 1990s celebrating being
gay. Indeed, I positively luxuriated in being gay. Gay this, gay
that, gay the other. Gay gay gay gay gay! Gay mates. Gay pubs and clubs virtually
every weekend; in our local venues, I knew half the people there. Boyz,
Attitude, The Pink Paper, Gay Times; I read them cover to cover, and I
never missed an issue. The big gay issue of the day? I had an informed
opinion on it. A new club opening in Birmingham, Manchester, London? I
knew all about it. I was a prolific contributor to the uk-motss mailing
list – a gay discussion group about gay topics. I was a volunteer with
the local Gay Switchboard. And so on, and so on. After the birth pangs
of the 1970s and 1980s, the gay movement had finally come of age, and I
was proud to identify myself as a fully participating member of that
community. It all reached its peak in 1997, when I
was asked to put together the official web site for that year’s Pride
March and Festival in London. I went down for the launch party and the
big fund-raising club night, and was introduced to various members of
the “great and good”. At the festival itself, I was backstage, celeb
spotting for all I was worth (Chris Lowe! Boy George! Holly Johnson!
Loads of faded 1980s pop stars! Eek!). It was the very last of the
“great” Prides, before the Pride Trust went bust and the whole
operation finally went unashamedly commercial. I wouldn’t claim it was
the best (the Brockwell Park Prides will never be beaten), but it was
certainly the biggest. The day climaxed with Holly Johnson onstage,
singing “The Power Of Love” as the fireworks went off, and thousands
of boys and girls snogged each other in the evening light. I looked
around at this beautiful, amazing sight, aware that I too was part of
it, part of this community, part of this success story, and suddenly –
overwhelmed by the feeling of emotional connection – burst into floods
of joyful tears. The Apotheosis Of Queer. When you’ve
had an extraordinary defining moment like this, how do you progress
beyond it? In my case, it was by coming back down the other side. Slowly
– and not before time – disillusionment and cynicism crept in. Maybe
the “great and good” weren’t that great and all that good after
all – the self-congratulatory complacency around Stonewall was
starting to annoy me now. Maybe the commercial scene had become stifling
rather than liberating – after a period of rapid expansion in the
early 1990s, gay pubs and clubs were getting stuck in a serious rut. And
oh, could I really bear to read one more word about Section 28,
“outing”, gays in the military? The whole subject of homosexuality
had started to bore me. Finally, in Autumn 1999, I had a
second, diametrically opposite, defining moment. I was at the Royal
Albert Hall, watching that year’s Stonewall Equality Show – a
miserably lame and clichéd spectacle, which seemed to do nothing more
than smugly celebrate its own under-achieving mediocrity. Is this where
we have ended up, I wondered? Rainbow flags, bad cover versions of
“I’m Coming Out” and “We Are Family”, boys doing ballet in
their underpants, tired comedy routines, feeble speeches from government
ministers stating the bleeding obvious, Elton John prancing round with a
bunch of cub scouts, and those bloody lesbian drummers are here again?
Followed by two separate invitation-only after-parties – one
for the hacks and the other for the real A-list? Is all this now
the Apotheosis Of Queer? Is that all there is to being gay? Oh
sod it, I’m off then. And so, tired of the whole palaver,
bored with the entire subject, I started “de-gaying”. I unsubscribed
from uk-motss, resigned from Switchboard, stopped buying the gay press,
found other things to do at weekends, and started looking round at the
world outside my ghetto. Now, in 2002, with a weblog all of my own, a curious thing is starting to happen. To some extent, I appear to be “re-gaying” myself. But in a new, quite different way. It’s much too soon to analyse, but – you know what? – it feels right. |