I’d hurried home to get ready as soon as I’d finished work and now I was on my way to Soho, to the heart of London’s gay scene.
I wasn’t a frequent visitor, but there were days when I just couldn’t keep away. This was one of them. And I had a special reason for returning rather sooner than usual after my last visit.
As the tube I’d taken from my railway station approached Piccadilly Circus, I began to think about what might lie ahead that evening. It wasn’t straightforward for me. It never had been. I wasn’t just out to get laid, like so many men, straight or gay, of my age.
Or maybe I was. I wasn’t entirely sure about anything connected with my sexuality.
Certainly I was aware of a degree of excitement rising within me as I rode the escalator to street level, followed the shuffling queue of other passengers through the ticket barriers and headed for the exit closest to Leicester Square.
There is something about coming to terms with what you are. And I rarely did. I wasn’t like most gay men I’d encountered. I wasn’t glad to be gay. I didn’t have the slightest desire to be gay.
I didn’t even like the word. I’ve never liked euphemisms, and surely that’s what ‘gay’ is.
When you called yourself a homosexual, it didn’t sound quite so modern and attractive. And what about queer? Is that what I was, queer?
I had a 1969 edition of Pears Cyclopaedia at home that had belonged to my mother. Homosexuality is listed in it as a mental illness. In my blackest moments that was how I thought of myself. I was mentally ill. Irreparably so. And nobody could help me.
It wasn’t about other people’s perception of me, because nobody in my life knew. I hadn’t been given a bad time for it by my parents, or anything like that. Neither my father, my mother, or my stepfather ever had a clue about my secret sexual leanings. Why would they have done? I wasn’t the slightest bit camp in my everyday life. I made damned sure of that. I wore the most conventional of clothes. I joined in with all the usual sexist, and sexual, banter you get among a group of men at work and in the pub. I was one of the lads, wasn’t I?
I had an invented love life. With women, of course. Nothing too extravagant. I left most of it to the conveniently disreputable minds of others. Occasionally, I made sure that I was seen with an appropriately attractive, young woman in a bar or at a party. Indeed, I dated them. That wasn’t difficult for me. I enjoyed female company and women always had liked me. Perhaps because they instinctively knew that I wasn’t really one of the lads. That I was actually as uncomfortable as they were with some of the near-the-knuckle jokes and innuendo. Make no mistake about it, even in this the age of political correctness, such jokes were still the staple conversational diet of the majority of men of all ages when no thought-police are present. Particularly after a drink or two. Usually when women were out of earshot, but not always even that.
I rarely dated a woman twice, and there was never an attempt at anything sexual, of course. I couldn’t cope with that.
I live alone now, so I don’t have to pretend in my own home. But I’m alone deep inside myself, too. That’s the problem. Terribly alone. Sometimes the urge to share what I am, or what I think I am, with another, similar human being becomes too much for me. It’s more than a sexual urge. Human beings are like all animal species, aren’t we? We have a need to be with our own kind. Birds of a feather flock together. Hyenas run with hyenas. Wolves hunt in packs. Rabbits interbreed in their burrows.
So, every so often, I can no longer keep up the pretence of being an uncomplicated, heterosexual man, with little more than one thing on his mind. It’s then that I venture out into the gay world. Even though it frightens me to do so. I seek camouflage. I transform myself, or try to anyway. I have a small separate wardrobe of clothes set aside for these occasions: my favourite clothes.
For my trip to Soho, I’d chosen the pale blue skinny Levis I called my pulling jeans. Also a tight-fitting, light-weight, black leather jacket, with studs on the collar and cuffs, which I always wore with the sleeves rolled up to just below the elbow. On top I had a black T-shirt, with a V-neck that showed off my pecs and my six-pack. I was, after all, pretty fit.
I wasn’t wearing any of those on my journey of course. I couldn’t take the risk of being seen dressed like that as I left my house or anywhere en route. They were tucked away in the rucksack I carried over one shoulder.
Once I’d arrived in Soho, I always felt safe somehow. I believed I could be myself. Indeed, anything I wanted to be. I knew a pub in an alleyway off Leicester Square, where the gents’ toilet was conveniently situated down a flight of stairs right by the door. It was there that I habitually changed out of my straight clothes.
As usual, I scurried in with my head down. I would look totally different when I left. The cubicles were of a generous size and fairly clean. I slipped quickly out of what I was wearing and into what I regarded as my gay-man gear.Then I took the jar of styling gel from my bag and smeared it over my hair, combing it through and pressing it flat to my head — except for a small quiff to one side at the front.
I carried with me a little mirror, which I hung from the hook on the cubicle door so that I could check my appearance.
My pièce de résistance was the snake tattoo, which wound itself around my deliberately exposed right forearm. Only, it wasn’t a real tattoo, of course. Just a clever transfer, which I would be able to remove before returning to work after the weekend.
It always gave me a tremendous sense of forbidden pleasure to apply that fake tattoo. I had done so before I left home and also liberally applied fake tan — almost everywhere except my face, much of which was covered in designer stubble. I’d deliberately missed shaving that morning, so that by the time I arrived in central London my naturally heavy facial hair would provide a certain camouflage.
A close shave before I returned to work would get rid of that, but the fake tan would take a few days to fade away. Until it did, I would have to be careful to keep the sleeves of my shirt down and my cuffs buttoned.
It would not be hard for me, though. I was used to being careful.
I ran up the stairs and left the pub as swiftly as I’d entered it. I hurried back towards Piccadilly Circus again, turned right into Shaftesbury Avenue then left into Greek Street and left again into Old Compton Street. This was it. The heart of gay Soho. I passed The G-A-Y Club and The Admiral Duncan without pausing. The former was too stereotyped for me; the first stop for gay men who had just got off the train from the provinces. The latter held too much history. Unlike many of its clientele, I was old enough to remember the night the place was bombed by anti-gay activists in 1999. Three men were killed and upwards of 70 injured. I’d not long left school and was struggling to come to terms with the nature of my sexual feelings. I had already come to despise myself for them; something that has never really changed. A part of me, in those days, thought the Admiral Duncan atrocity would, in my case, have been justifiable retribution. It was possible that a part of me still did.
I crossed the road to Clone Zone, one of a chain of sex shops, which proudly promoted itself as having ‘the UK’s largest selection of top-quality, gay sex toys, aromas, fashion, underwear and jock straps.’ It also boasted that all its merchandise was ‘processed through our own fulfilment centre.’
I don’t have much of a sense of humour. Neither the gay nor the straight me. But even I couldn’t imagine how anyone could pronounce something like that and keep a straight face. They had to be joking, surely.