In 1983 Dad asked me if I was responsible for editing The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, which had recently been published. I was offended that he could ask such a question. Wasn’t it perfectly obvious that if I took on a project of such a sort I would do it under my own name? If I did decide to use a pseudonym, I would try to do better than the name on the book’s cover, Stephen Coote.
I did on the other hand edit Mae West Is Dead that same year, an anthology of gay fiction published by Faber, providing a mildly militant introduction, and I don’t remember anything being said about that. I imagine Mum kept the peace between us to a considerable extent, and warned Dad off unsafe subjects. It was kid gloves all round, some of them elbow-length, in the debutante or drag-queen manner.
In the introduction to the anthology I made passing reference to Aids, which was just beginning to make headlines in this country, as a domestic threat rather than an exotic catastrophe. Of course I hedged my bets, in the journalistic manner, trying to come up with a politically robust statement that nevertheless wouldn’t embarrass me if a cure was found by the time the book was published — a sort of rhetorical ice sculpture designed to melt discreetly away if conditions improved.
There was no thaw. The Terrence Higgins Trust, the UK’s pioneer Aids organization, held its first meeting in 1983, at Conway Hall, just round the corner from Gray’s Inn. I wasn’t based in London at the time, since I had a little temporary post as a creative writing teacher attached to the University of East Anglia, but the event seemed important enough for me to return to London that weekend.
I don’t know what I wanted from the meeting, some sort of action plan, I suppose. There was a guest appearance by Mel Rosen, a member of the New York organization Gay Men’s Health Crisis, whose emotive style of public speaking grated on me. When he said that he had cried more in the last six months than he had in his whole life, I’m afraid I thought, so what? The link between epidemic and emotional growth seemed so tenuous and uninteresting. What were we going to do?
Mel Rosen died in 1992, aged forty-one. I’m ashamed that I was so unresponsive when he spoke about the changes in his life. At the time the consensus was that only a small proportion of people exposed to what we assumed must be a virus (the organism was years away from being identified) would go on to develop symptoms, and that not all of those would progress to the full diagnosis, fatal in those days, but that’s no excuse. I had made a decision to be disappointed by the Trust’s lack of dynamism. Volunteering at this point would be a waste of energy. I probably wanted an excuse not to give my time to committee meetings. I was big on gestures of solidarity and points of principle (train fare from Norwich be damned), not so hot on personal involvement. I felt about Aids activism, at least in its disorganized state then, what Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said on the subject of socialism. About it taking too many evenings.
Two years of headlines and editorials eroded my sense of entitlement to distance. I volunteered to be a Buddy for the Trust, doing chores for sick men and providing a basic level of companionship. The training was rudimentary, no more than a one-day course made up of medical generalities and counselling tips. We were packed in a dark and airless room, with many of us sitting on the floor. I remember one fellow inductee seeming unable to take his eyes off my trousers, which sounds flattering until I explain that he was gazing at ankle rather than groin level. The trousers had been bought in a sale and had unfinished hems. They weren’t quite long enough to be taken up for neatness.
As if to drive home the point that Aids was not an issue I could legitimately dodge, the headquarters of the Terrence Higgins Trust at the time was in Panther House, light industrial premises with an address in Mount Pleasant but geographically closer to Gray’s Inn Road. I was the nearest volunteer by some way, in what was not much of a residential district. From my parents’ front door to the Trust’s front line was a three-minute walk.
Or a ninety-second dash in an emergency. On one occasion, there was an executive panic about what was going on with the phone line at Panther House. News was coming in that an Aids patient had tried to discharge himself from hospital against medical advice, and had been arrested to stop him leaving the premises. This was obviously an alarming precedent and there was intensive interest from the press. The Trust hadn’t had time to come up with any kind of official statement. The fear was that a volunteer whose job was only to provide basic medical advice to the worried, to refer them to more expert sources, might be reacting off the cuff from Panther House. It seemed ominous that the number had been engaged for hours.
Someone was needed to get there fast, to pass on the required message: Say nothing — tell them to call the press officer. I must have been at the top of the list. From Gray’s Inn Square I could have shouted out of the window and had a fair chance of being heard.
I raced to Panther House and shouted incoherently through the entryphone. It took a little while to persuade those within the fortress that I wasn’t some hectoring anti-gay passer-by, and when I was let in everyone was rather nonplussed. Arrest? What arrest? Phone calls, what phone calls? Eventually someone thought to check the phone. It turned out that the last person to hang up had returned the receiver to its cradle on the slant, putting the line out of service. People had been sitting around with cups of tea, making the most of the opportunity for undisturbed workplace smoking (in those bad old days), wondering vaguely why everything had gone so quiet.
When the Trust changed address, it was to come even closer, not letting me off the hook. The new premises on Gray’s Inn Road were barely a hundred yards from where I lived. If there was another emergency of the same type — providing I was at home and the Gray’s Inn Road gate from the Square was open, as was normal during business hours — reaction time could significantly be whittled down.
I had no thought, when I volunteered as a Buddy, that I would be gaining experience exploitable in writing. It was partly that I hadn’t written fiction for quite a few years at that point — I was generally assumed to be suffering from writer’s block, something I only fully realized when I was tactfully asked to review a book on the subject for the Independent on Sunday, as Susan Sontag might have been assigned a book on cancer or Gorbachev one on birthmarks.
In any case I didn’t see how Aids could be adequately fictionalized. Over time I changed my mind, and began to feel that the word itself, with its then conventional ‘full caps’, was the main obstacle, a visual shout that was likely to drown out with its repetitions any story in which it featured. Once I had realized it was possible to write an arresting opening sentence while re-placing the syndrome with the euphemism ‘Slim’, in a character’s plausible register, the rest of the story more or less wrote itself.
I showed my story to the person I was buddying at the time, Philip Lloyd-Bostock, wanting his blessing although as far as I knew I hadn’t used any of his personal details. It was still somehow an abstract invasion of privacy. He raised no objection, though it must have been disheartening to read an outsider’s recasting of his desperate situation, when he himself was trying to finish an autobiographical novel. It was published after his death as The Centre of the Labyrinth.