Male bonding had hardly begun to work its magic on the culture in those early days of 1978, and a father — son sojourn had an artificial, self-conscious feel even when there were urgent matters of sexual dissidence to be thrashed out. In the aftermath of all those disputes over princes, great-aunts and actresses we were probably both relieved when it was time to go back to London, with a more or less satisfactory deadlock in place. In the car Dad expressed a lowered tension by sucking — then wolfishly crunching — Tunes, his preferred courtroom lozenge and vocal lubricant, rather than the gnawed twin stems of his disused pipe.
It’s standard practice when dealing with people implacably opposed to homosexuality to propose that they are themselves in denial. It always seems a cheap manoeuvre, not just cheap but dull, to insist that homophobes are sitting on top of a volcano of disavowed desire. If Dad had a man-loving component it was easily bought off, with male social company (endlessly on tap in Gray’s Inn) and the ritual worship given to Welsh rugby players, colossal of thigh.
Dad summed up the whole of homosexual life with the phrase ‘wallowing in faeces’, and I wonder what made him think in those terms — what made his disgust take that particular form. I’m not saying Dad had more knowledge of anal intercourse than I did, but he can’t have had less, since I had none.
With Mike I was embarrassed about my defective sexual experience, almost as embarrassed as I was of never having seen The Wizard of Oz. I lived in my body very approximately. Sensuality was one more thing I experienced mainly through books.
My childish body was strangely tuned. I remember soothing myself to sleep (aged four? five?) by playing with my right nipple, an action that transmitted a high feathery tickling to the roof of my mouth, referred pleasure like referred pain, experienced in a different place from where it was generated. This was the high-water mark of my self-awareness before latency dragged me back down into the dark.
As for my awareness of other bodies, I had known from an early age that I was different from my brothers. This wasn’t existential angst but statement of fact. They made wee-wee from a different thing. They did a stream but I did a spray and sometimes I felt sore. My part was different from theirs, looked different, was different. (How I made the comparison I don’t exactly remember, but bathtime was the obvious opportunity for playing spot-the-difference.) When I was transfixed by an infantile erection aged six or seven I went down on my knees, my plump and dimpled knees, to give thanks to the God who had clearly intervened with a miracle to correct the anomaly, but my willy looked no different afterwards.
Our parents hadn’t had a policy about circumcision but asked for professional advice as each son was born. The experts at the Welbeck Nursing Home, where we were all brought into being, gave their opinion. A ‘snip’ was felt to be necessary for Tim and then for Matthew, but not for me. No thought had been given to the possibility that a cavalier among roundheads (to use a jaunty slang I know only from books) might feel disagreeably set apart.
Technically I was intact while they had been wounded, but being the odd man out has in itself some of the quality of a wound. Then persistent infections of the foreskin showed that medical advice wasn’t infallible, and I was circumcised at the age of eight or nine. I got a proper wound of my own, and riding my bicycle was something of a penance for a time. Memory tells me that it was actually a sort of tractor-tricycle with a bucket seat and satisfying deep treads on the tyres, but I’m hoping memory has got it wrong. Poorly co-ordinated or not, I was old enough to be riding a bike and a bike it shall be.
A year or two later I learned the facts of life from a Latin play — a statement that makes me seem even more the tragic casualty of an expensive education than I feel the evidence supports. Westminster School had a tradition (recent, I dare say, and probably emulating another school) of putting on a Latin play in the original, not every year but at regular intervals, usually with one gimmicky touch, such as a character arriving in a car — a Mini driven through the Abbey cloisters. When I was still at the Under School, and so perhaps eleven or twelve, I attended a performance. The transition between the Under School and what we called the Great School was smooth. In Latin lessons at the Under School, Mr Young (pink and white colouring, wet of lip, Bill Haley cowlick innocent of any pop-culture reference) would wince at blunders and say, ‘Don’t let Mr Moylan catch you doing that.’ In turn Mr Moylan, when he took over (a being without moisture, fastidious, invariably making a dog-leg across Little Dean’s Yard to avoid exposing his leather soles to the wear-factor of gravel), would say, ‘I hate to think what Mr Young would say about that.’
The play was Terence’s Eunuchus. I imagine female roles were played by girls borrowed from other schools, Westminster being single-sex then. However backward in such matters, I feel sure I would have noticed if the women were boys cross-dressed.
The plot isn’t what anyone, even Frankie Howerd, could call sophisticated. A young man obsessed with a beautiful woman poses as a eunuch so that he can be taken on as part of her domestic staff, presenting no danger because he lacks the wherewithal to take advantage of her. Once alone with his mistress (though offstage) he brandishes the wherewithal and takes advantage. Coming onstage after the act, he’s exhilarated and grins all over his face. Good heavens, I thought — it’s supposed to be fun! This had not been mentioned in the sex talk given by the headmaster of the Under School, Mr Kelly, whose admirably brisk opening words had been ‘The penis is a splendid dual-purpose instrument.’ I recoiled from such frankness. As far as I was concerned, one purpose was more than enough.
I got my sex education where I could. The later novels of Kurt Vonnegut wouldn’t normally qualify for instructive status in this area, being so droll and sardonic, but my need for education was great. I read his Breakfast of Champions soon after it came out (which was in 1973, so I was nineteen or so), and was intrigued by one of the crude drawings, the author’s own work, which illustrated an ‘asshole’ — the body part rather than the term of abuse. The drawing was essentially of an asterisk. I asked myself if the anus could possibly look like that, and the answer was that I had no idea. I knew my digestive system ended at a certain point, and I was willing to accept as a technicality of physical life that I possessed an anus, or I would have exploded long ago. But I had no visual information on the subject. Did it seem likely that my anus resembled a piece of punctuation? No it didn’t, but I had no counter-theory with which to contest it.
I’m reminded of the very touching moment in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (perhaps it goes back to Stanislaw Lem’s source novel) when the hero is reunited with his dead wife, Hari, on a space station, thanks to the intervention of the sentient planet below him. They start foreplay, and he tries to take her dress off, going round the back to unfasten it. There’s no zip. There are no buttons. The dress is impossible to take off, just as it was impossible to put on. This new Hari has been made directly out of his memories, and though he remembered the dress he didn’t have a specific memory of the back of the dress and how it fastened. He has to get some scissors to help with the task of undressing her. Tenderly he vandalizes the dress he remembered only as a mystical whole.
At the age of around twenty I lived in a thinly imagined replica of my own body, and the orifice Dad took for granted as the central focus of homosexual desire was like the zip on Hari’s dress. It wasn’t on my map. I had to crouch and use a mirror to inform myself of the accuracy of Kurt Vonnegut’s drawing, showing a little more diligence than Dad did when checking the underside of his Audi estate for explosive devices. It did look rather like an asterisk! I couldn’t have been more surprised if the folds of this unimagined tissue had formed an ampersand or a treble clef.