menu

OPINION: Craig’s Thoughts – My Lesbian Icon

In The Age of Oranges, or The Fruit of Truth. By Craig Hanlon-Smith @craigscontinuum

IT took many years for me to appreciate the game changing LGBT+ artists of my youth. Thirty-five years ago I would have been terrified to associate myself with openly gay popular music performers for fear of a correct assumption that I was leaning that way too. When I think now of Jimmy Somerville, Bronski Beat and their 1984 album Age of Consent, emblazoned with the pink triangle symbol of gay oppression, imprisonment, torture and death, I appreciate how brave and progressive that was for artists at that time.

I would like to think that listening to a collection of songs, including Why?, It Ain’t Necessarily So, I Feel Love, Need a Man Blues, and of course Smalltown Boy, although screamingly obvious to me now was the beginning of a complex, challenging and difficult but ultimately rewarding life journey. But if Bronski Beat’s Age of Consent was a surreptitious and discreet coaxing, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeannette Winterson was both an electric shock and slap around my secretive gay face.

In January 1990 I wasn’t aware of the novel published five years earlier, it was the television adaptation, with the screenplay written by the original author, that grabbed my attention as a hand around the throat.

I watched the unfolding drama of young gay love with an intense curiosity I was unable to speak of for myself. These two young women, nay girls, who writhed naked upon the parlour carpet of an unremarkable house not five miles away from my own family home.

I felt sick with fear at the torturous actions of the Pentecostal community who upon discovery of such wickedness tied the lovers up in ropes and subjected them to religious exorcisms. I hated the pretty girlfriend who ultimately betrays our young protagonist and returns to her expected and acceptable behaviours, but was filled with enthusiasm and quiet cheering support for our hero Jess, Jeanette in the novel renamed for TV, who spat and kicked and screamed at her elders in a bid to simply be who she was.

Growing up in small town east Lancashire, a stone’s throw from where Oranges was set, this television adaption sent a tidal wave of shock, awe and outrage through local communities. At school there were people who claimed to know people who knew people who claimed to know people who knew Jeanette Winterson or her family. There were students and teachers alike gossiply informing all who would listen that it was a true story, and in equal numbers those angrily claiming it nonsense and lies, but I was weeks away from an 18th birthday and quietly becoming a suspicious and clever little s***. I knew it was true.

On the international stage the Eastern European political system was collapsing, the Berlin Wall had been demolished by hand (!) and live on television, and I had a father who sat me down in front of such broadcasts stating, ‘Watch this, it’s history, you’ll never see the like again’. But I was more interested in what was happening locally and close to my heart.

A few years earlier in Burnley where I lived, a gay male drama teacher had been prosecuted for having a sexual encounter with two male teenagers, 16 and 18, at the local youth theatre. Although he denied the claims these were hysterical times for gay people and, as the age of consent was then 21 and he was thought to have abused his position, he was convicted and imprisoned ultimately in solitary confinement for his own safety. Eighteen months into his sentence the conviction was overturned as his accusers admitted they had invented the story. A life ruined and the teenage boys faced limited consequences. This bothered me greatly, and in context I now watched Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit as if a fly on the wall exposé upon the plight of gay people in an increasingly manipulative and dishonest society. They were all at it.

I had also, in naivety, not even considered the existence of lesbians, they were quite simply not in my frame of reference but now saw that like me there were girls who were yearning, wishing, desiring and in some cases doing with their own kind everything I longed to do with another young man just like me.

I longed to read the novel of Oranges and would look at its spine on the library shelves but never have the courage to book it out. I planned to move to London in October to attend university and so promised to myself that I would read it then. I read in my father’s newspaper that the president of the Students’ Union of Goldsmiths College was a militant lesbian and although Goldsmiths wasn’t on my original list of possible choices, it soon was and became the only institution that offered me an interview, and then place to study. It was my ticket out and to the truth.

Craig Hanlon-Smith
Craig Hanlon-Smith

And so Jeanette Winterson is one of my lesbian icons and definitely my first. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a semi-autobiographical novel and does recount some of her own early life experiences at the hands of an East Lancashire Pentecostal community. And, I thank Jeanette Winterson for writing it at a time when it was not cool to be gay, for speaking the truth of love and same-sex desire but also for exposing those who oppress and want hide our ability to become someone.

I want to thank her for her belief in herself, her inner truth and for those dark times persevering and getting up every day, but most of all for sharing with the world these stories. They help and support everyone.

“I have never understood why straight fiction is supposed to be for everyone, but anything with a gay character or that includes gay experience is only for queers.” Jeanette Winterson.

FEATURE: Fistycuffs – Or Gays Box Too 

Craig Hanlon-Smith caught up with two newbie boxers to discuss the benefits and pitfalls of this seemingly feisty sport – Anthony, who is originally from the North East but now lives in Cardiff, and Sue from Essex, who lives in Folkestone and works in London.

Clichéd anecdotes still abound of a gay man’s disinterest in all sports but loving a ‘kit night’ and of lesbians dominating the hockey field or netball court. LGBT+ communities are filled with invitations to engage in a wide range of team sports and exercise clubs, but these often rotate around opportunities to participate in mainframe sport and more automatic and accessible choices; rugby, football and running clubs. However, in recent years there has been an emerging interest in perhaps the less obvious, including boxing.

Sue: “I always loved boxing as a kid – Frank Bruno, Mike Tyson, Nigel Benn, Chris Eubank, all successful female lesbian boxers,” she laughs, she laughs a lot. “Tyson and Bruno were the main ones. I always had a distant interest in it and from about aged eight to 18, I did Ju Jitsu but would have loved to have had a go boxing if it had been available, school sports were very narrow then.” 

I asked Sue, who is 43 and was at school from 1986 to 1991, if school sports were influential in her choices.  “Of course!” (she laughs), “Look I know it’s a cliché but as an overweight lesbian kid, it was the shot-put or nothing! I loved it though, because they didn’t do it on site and so I used to get a day off school for lobbing a shot three times in the Essex County playing fields. It was ace.” 

Sue
Sue

Sue became involved in boxing through the organisation Pride Boxing which has just run its second 10-week training programme and fight night event in the run up to Pride in London. Set up by head coach Jon Durrant, its aim is for boxing (White Collar Boxing) to appeal to everyone. Pride Boxing in particular is designed to create an environment where members of the LGBT+ communities can participate without feeling embarrassed or responsive to any form of stigma, the same group also run Industry Boxing for women only, and the Big Fight UK.

Sue: “It’s been a vertical learning curve trying to learn new skills and a bit like Strictly Come Dancing, there’s a lot of footwork. Getting used to being hit in the face has been interesting, especially when your natural reaction is to burst into tears. So far I’ve only had a fat lip but there’s more to it such as the adrenaline of sparring – concentrating more on being able to hit them!” 

Has there been a social aspect to learning to box? “Yes, but you go there and train. You do chat to people, and it can be a bonding experience, but there’s not a lot of social chat. I mean you have a gum shield in and so just grunt a lot!” She laughs.

Anthony
Anthony

Anthony, aged 31, took up boxing in January of this year. “There is a boxing interest in the family, my brother does kick boxing, and my dad, for want of a better word, was a street fighter. Although I was interested in the sport at university in Newcastle I elected not to. I came out at the same time and discovered gay culture and what I knew then to be the gay world and was concerned with how I fitted in with that. We’re talking 10 to 12 years ago and whilst there were other opportunities I didn’t see boxing or martial arts at that time as an option.  

“Ultimately I felt as though I didn’t really fit in to the Newcastle gay scene, around the gay people and the culture I felt as though I wasn’t being myself. It wasn’t until much later when I realised I can be whatever I want to be and whoever I am I don’t have to fit into that so…

So what specifically about boxing has appealed to you?

Anthony: “There’s fitness and health, both physical and mental, and my diet has changed, it’s much healthier and feels better. The sport has made me a lot calmer as a person and in a way given me a place to vent. It’s reduced my anxiety and my head feels much clearer. My confidence is through the roof both in myself and as an athlete – but also confidence in being a gay man. Before boxing I’d be scared of certain kinds of people, or of public displays of affection, that has changed.” 

How would you describe those changes? “Friends have noticed that I exude a lot more confidence and the way I physically hold myself. In the past I’d go along with what was being said – now I’ll challenge an opinion. I think that as a gay man I viewed myself as a second class man to straight men, I’d move out of their way a little scared of them. I also think that by spending more time with them in this context I understand straight men better too. They’re no different to me and my friends – the only difference is our sexualities.” 

Like Sue, Anthony has been following a 10-week White Collar Boxing programme and when we first spoke was working towards his first fight. Unlike Sue he is not a member of an LGBT+ sports club, his boxing programme is largely populated with ‘straight’ participants.

Are your fellow boxers aware that you’re gay and have there been any issues as a result? 

Anthony: “In my experience people in boxing are more welcoming of your being gay than gay people are at my doing boxing. From gay men I’ve been met with ‘WTF why would you do that?’, or they just laugh or say ‘what are you straight now?’. I recently had a black eye, which is pretty usual when training, and I explained to someone that it was from boxing and his response was ‘Oh I thought you were gay’. Boxing is the most inclusive sport I’ve competed in so far. No-one seems to care who you are, it’s what you can do in the sport.” 

I catch up with Anthony one more time just after his first fight. Although he went the distance he didn’t win this time.

How does that feel?

Anthony: “I’ll admit I was upset, I now understand why football fans cry when their team loses. That said, I’ve grown so much through it. I never thought initially that as a gay man I could do this – that feeling is now long behind me. I competed and that’s that. I’m looking forward to the next time.”

MORE INFO
Photo of Anthony Ash by Sue Venables @suevenables
Photo of Sue Venables by Jamain Gordon @jamaingordon
Craig Hanlon-Smith @craigscontinuum

FEATURE: The Face of You – Madonna at 60

There’s something I’ve just got to say by Craig Hanlon-Smith.

ON July 13, 1987, Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone stood on stage at Madison Square Garden in New York City midway through her Who’s That Girl Tour set to address the audience. The show was an additional date added to the schedule in memory of her friend Martin Burgoyne who had died from AIDS related complications the previous year and it raised $400,000 for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AMFAR).

Madonna’s long association with the gay community was then unchartered territory in comparison to what it would become, but at a time when celebrated gender bending queer courting artists were running for the hills only to return wearing grey suits and a heterosexual partner for fear of any connection with AIDS crisis, Madonna gorged out a line in the concrete and stood up.

Only four years earlier rock legends Queen had all but closed their career down in the US with their I Want to Break Free video (in which they appeared in drag), and here Madonna risked total alienation from a conservative record buying public and stuck her neck out. Whilst celebrated artists adored by their gay audience were calling upon their following to repent and accept either the love of Jesus or the AIDS ridden wrath of God, Madonna’s friends were sick and dying and therefore she knew other people had friends who were sick and dying and so held out a hand when it seemed no one else was interested, to help. It was a brave move.

On June 24, 1990 as part of her celebrated Blond Ambition Tour Madonna again dedicated a show to AMFAR in memory of her friend Keith Haring who had recently died raising an additional $300,000. At every date on her Girlie Show Tour in 1993 she dedicated her song In This Life to two of her friends who had died as a result of AIDS. I stood in the audience at Wembley Stadium as she towered above my head on that huge stage and said “To those of you out there who are suffering, and to those of you out there who know someone who is suffering, don’t give up hope”. These were still the days before effective HIV treatment and combination drug therapies, HIV was a passport to early death. And it is not that Madonna did not know how important those actions and words were at the time, she should be celebrated for exactly knowing how important it was for someone at the height of their fame and influence to speak up for a community that was dazed, desperate and dying. The ’93 London show speech was eventually broadcast on BBC Radio One in December of that year, a speech that other international broadcasters edited out from transmission.

In September 1998 during another surge in her popularity following the release of the multi-million selling Ray of Light album, Madonna attended the 14th Annual Aids Walk in Los Angeles delivering an impassioned speech concerning the US Government money spent on an investigation into President Clinton set against the federal investment into AIDS treatment and research, again I listened to it broadcast on news channels thousands of miles away. She has attended awareness and fundraising dance-a-thons bringing international media attention to the event and issue, and more recently on the U.K leg of her Rebel Heart Tour spoke with kind warmth support of the HIV community at her London show which happened to coincide with World Aids Day. And let us not forget her 15 million selling Like a Prayer album came with a safe sex/AIDS awareness leaflet created and inserted into every copy sold at her personal request. These stories alone would cement her as my hero, but that is not all.

Madonna’s Express Yourself Don’t Repress Yourself career mantra has been picked up by the LGBT+ communities and championed by almost every Drag Queen performer across Pride events the world over for almost thirty years, but the connection with people who are different runs much deeper than an adopted phrase or musical anthem. Madonna has often included homoeroticism in her music videos, implicitly in Open Your Heart, Express Yourself and Vogue more explicitly in Justify My Love and Erotica to name a hand-full, also through her much-maligned Sex book but it was her 1991 tour documentary Truth or Dare/In Bed with Madonna that ripped the lid off any uncertainty and screamed “I’m supporting these people and if you don’t like it, I don’t care”.

There is of course the much talked of gay kiss between dancers Gabriel Trupin and Salim Gauwloos playing out in packed cinema theatres two years before the Hollywood blockbuster Philadelphia, an Oscar-winning film addressing the AIDS crisis and containing multiple examples of male gay relationships without managing to even suggest any form of physical affection whatsoever. In Madonna’s movie, we saw only a kiss but one so electric we knew those gays were fucking, and this gay boy sat and watched that film week after week after week and thought “this is what they mean when they shout ‘fucking queers’ – there they are!” And it was life changing. If those men up there on that massive screen can do it then I can go home and do it in my lonely gay bed. That moment watched again and again gave me hope, belief and determination to stick with it. She showed us prejudice within her own band of brothers when her only straight dancer is filmed saying of his gay colleagues “I don’t have no kind of respect for these people”. We knew it wouldn’t be easy but we didn’t feel alone; Madonna’s got my back and I can do this.

Throughout her career and especially these last fifteen years as she has dared to stick around Madonna has continually been verbally assaulted and attacked in the media and pub alike. Sexist, misogynistic, ageist vitriolic bile centred around her age, sexually provocative imagery, adoption, charity work, fashion choices, veiny hands, forays into musical genres considered too young, and all from journalists, male, female, philosophers, academics, feminists, television presenters, former partners personal and professional and perhaps most unkindly artistic contemporaries.

Both sophisticated and unsophisticated requests for Madonna to go away and be quiet but she who will not be quiet will neither go away and it is this strength and determination to exist that binds her to me as a forty-six year-old gay man and my fellow members of our widening LGBT+ communities. We too are told when we request and expect to be heard that we should be grateful, that we are aggressive for requesting equality and a voice and in simple terms to ‘shut up’. Even now in 2018 when verbally assaulted in the street in broad-daylight rather than get angry I can ask myself “What would Madonna do” and I see her on stage in 2012 as part of her MDNA tour, shirt off and painted onto her skin across her back the statement ‘No Fear’.

Happy Birthday Madonna. This queen salutes you, today and every-day, now and forever. Amen.

@craigscontinuum

MUSIC REVIEW: Everything You’ll Ever Need – Jake Shears’ flies solo

JAKE Shears and his Scissor Sisters were the stealth queens of LGBT+ acceptance and progress upon these island shores now more than a decade ago.

IT WAS almost as if under the cover of darkness their uplifting brand of acceptable queer stage performance dragged the wider heterosexual music buying public unwittingly into the circus and our heterosexual brother in-laws and their mates were proud of their 02 Arena show tickets even though they’re a bunch of gays. And for once we didn’t even roll our eyes. For at the heart of their feathers, leather chaps and muppet show antics was great music and we were all happy to be invited to the party.

Shears’ solo endeavour is no exception and although laden with an individual swagger there’s enough here to feel as though baby came home.

Album opener Good Friends and playlist hit Creep City shake a tail feather as exuberantly as anything from the Sisters’ debut released some fourteen years ago and it can be no accident that the latter’s introduction could easily have been a lively reworking of both Laura and Take Your Mama. Shears’ nod to his UK family is glaringly explicit in the excellent Mississippi Delta (I’m Your Man) with his Londoners are swell and seem like they adore me, and having been in the audience at his November London gig I’d say he’s on the money.

Big Bushy Mustache and S.O.B are as humorous as they are edgy and both suggest sweaty sex. Perhaps. Oh go on then. The album teams with radio friendly rock/country/funk moments of pop music excellence and fourteen years ago in another music industry this would have flown off the shelves in the way the Scissor Sisters first collection did.

This album deserves the same attention and success if only for the double emotional wham of Everything I’ll Ever Need and All For What. Both seem to tackle loneliness, introspection, reflection and the parting of ways with melodies and a vocal that reflect the greater moments of Elton John, to whom incidentally this album is dedicated. Of course you can listen with ease upon a range of digital platforms, but the gatefold vinyl is a thing of true beauty and the library worthy of such an addition, and any collection that includes the phrase I want a pornstar handlebar has got to be worth five stars right?

Jake Shears plays Scala London on Wednesday, Concorde 2 Brighton on Thursday, returns only available. Touring until the end of August.

@craigscontinuum

OPINION: Craig’s Thoughts –  In My Tribe or Everything Changes 

And so at a gently ripe 46 years old, our protagonist is calm and content, a happy homosexual with, hopefully, half his life ahead of him.

IT’S NOW June 28, 2018, exactly 49 years to the date since the Stonewall riots of New York launched the LGBT+ civil rights movement and international Pride events were born.

It’s a dizzily hot summer’s evening in Brighton, the LGBT+ capital of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and he walks the length of the promenade lifted by the setting sunlight reflected from a mill-pond sea. He strides confidently towards the marina where his husband awaits him in a local hotel for a late evening birthday drink, his husband of 12 and partner of 18 years, a relationship that began at Pride in London at the turn of the millennium. A Pride event fertilised by the political fight back which had started exactly 49 years ago this very day.

Hundreds approach, possibly more than a thousand of local residents, day-trippers of every age and generational description. A visiting beach cinema has just released its patrons back into the wild following the final England game in the early group stages of the World Cup, which is an increasingly popular international football tournament. Although the national team had performed, and would go on to continue to do so, extremely well, this wasn’t a game that was won, they in fact lost.

And the hoards approaching our settled 40-something were at best dejected and at their not quite so best kicking the bins, bikes and railings along their route perhaps in frustration or perhaps because this was their normal reaction to two hours in unsheltered and sweltering direct sunlight, decorated with Stella Artois eau de tin can x 6.

He sees them approach but the mood is light, the sun is bright but his T-shirt tight so perhaps it’s this that draws the eyes, or the trousers short and yellow as the sun.

Something is said that’s unclear but unkind and he looks straight at them to let them know the something he has heard and is met not with embarrassment or a sheepish retraction of the eyes but a jeer that comes from a group of young lads imbibed with beer and a sense of ‘pack’. And so it comes as clear as the 6am seagulls that rape your Sunday hangover: “You F***ing Queer C**t”, and how they all laugh. And in that moment at 46 he is 13 again and just as it was in 1985 he looks around at the hundreds about him and they all pretend it hasn’t happened and so in shame, he does the same and walks on.

A mere 36 hours later we find him on his regular walk to work at 9am on a Saturday morning. It’s not late, there’s no sign of drink and the lost game of football is no longer hanging in the air. He strides on with an air of casual weekend confidence and, although not yellow, the shorts are as pink as his wink and colour match the lollipop T-shirt.

He’s not in disguise but thinks nothing of taking the usual underpass towards Paddington Green, it’s quieter than a Tuesday but there are plenty of people about and as the A40 rumbles over his head two young men approach from the opposite direction. And as if retching from the depths of his scrotum, one of them erupts into a volcano of spit and his lava of phlegm brushes the face of our friend so close he can smell it, and slaps the tiled wall beside him with a smack. Again, 46 and unafraid he looks directly at the origins of this instant underground Jackson Pollock and as our spitter grins his companion aggressively shouts “FAGGOT!”.

Perhaps without the added shame of an audience hundreds strong, our homo replies; “Ten points for observation,” and both parties continue in opposite directions and nothing has changed. For him for a moment, two moments within two days, it feels as though for 49 years of protest and Prides nothing has changed. Nothing has changed at all.

He is wrong. I’m wrong. He is no longer 13 nor without his tribe. As he gathers his thoughts and shaken dignity on a sweaty summer’s evening on Brighton beach he reminds himself where he is headed. He’s meeting his husband. His gay, same gender married husband who both bear one another’s names and of their shared life together. He thinks of an earlier part of the evening with two also married gay boys who invited him around for a snatched 40 minutes of his company because they wanted it. He was happy to share it and to receive theirs in return.

He looks up at the apartment block towering above the white cliffs that cradle the marina and thinks of his gay friend who lives there, his friend who was the first member of our communities to truly welcome him to Brighton and who sits next to him still after all these years.

As he steps out from the shady Saturday underpass into the sunlight above he thinks about the talented gay people he is to spend the day working with. Creative folk who saw in him untapped talents and asked him to join in their ventures to belong, together. He thinks of fun times at Pride events past and yet to be, of his year ahead and behind of Instagram poses with horizontal friends on rainbow pedestrian crossings, of owning the New York Easter Parade if just for one day in top hats, feathers and bright pink suits.

He sees the rainbow adorned window dressings of retail outlets and, as he looks up at the rainbow flags flying atop Government buildings, he hears the voice of his friend upon recounting his tale you might be a c**t but you’re my f***ing queer c**t, he thinks of all of these things and he knows.

Everything has changed. Everything has changed forever.
“Be proud. Be proud whatever it is. Because everyone is someone” Jose Gutierez.

By Craig Hanlon-Smith @craigscontinuum

Caplin promises Action Not Words!

Former MP for Hove and Portslade elected Chair of The Jewish Labour Movement.

Photo: @fabhospitality
Photo: @fabhospitality

IVOR Caplin has been elected the new Chair of The Jewish Labour Movement at a key point in the history of both the movement but also The Labour Party itself. The party has recently been beset with accusations of anti-Semitism deep within its ranks, a fact Mr. Caplin did not shy away from in his acceptance speech to the movement at their AGM on June 13.

He said: “There is no place in our Party or our country for anti-Semitism. Across our country this is affecting our electoral performance and Labour’s once fine reputation as a party of fairness. There is no hiding place and we must be prepared to call out anti-Semitism whenever it occurs”.

Born in Brighton into a Jewish Family, Caplin was elected to Hove Borough Council as was in 1991. He helped secure Labour’s control of the council in 1995 and sat as its leader until Brighton and Hove merged.

Elected to the new joint council in 1996 he sat as deputy leader until his resignation in 1998. Elected to parliament in Hove and Portslade as part of the legendary Labour landslide in 1997 under the leadership of Tony Blair, Caplin remained in parliament until he stepped down in 2005 to run his own consultancy company. His time in local politics was not without controversy, he was the subject of much local ire when he refused to take receipt of an anti-war petition from the people of Hove after the invasion of Iraq.

Describing himself as a pragmatic politician and one with a strong voting record with the establishment of The Labour Party when in Government, he has voted favourably with the majority of pro-LGBT+ related legislative changes brought in by the Blair led government including the abolishment of Section 28 and reduction of the age of consent to 16 in line with heterosexual relationships.

Of his role ahead Caplin says: “The Jewish Labour Movement has to be focused on outcomes not processes and ensuring those outcomes are to the benefit of our members and the wider Party. This will make us more electable in both local and national Government”.

FEATURE: My So-Called Chemsex Life

Or When I Met Jack, Seb and James by Craig Hanlon-Smith

I originally tried to write this piece 18 months ago, but rather than an unsophisticated or educated guess along the theme of what has come to be known as ‘ChemSex’, I wanted to hear real and current stories from those who were actually engaged, in some way, with this lifestyle and recreational practice.

I had of course read other articles and at various theatrical fringe festivals seen many (largely dreadful) plays on the subject, but I wanted to hear the facts firsthand and fresh. So, I took to the most notable [dating] apps and websites, openly declaring my intentions.

No-one wanted to talk. The online profile I posted included my face, my writer’s interest in the subject, and a promise of anonymity for anyone who wanted to talk. I received a limited number of responses, but these were either suggestions that I f-off and get a real job, learn to enjoy myself more (what?) and a handful inviting me to join them for some sexual activity which requires no further description here, but trust me, they were not vague about their tastes. However, when it came to research for this article, no takers. Not one. Almost a year later, and thanks in part to twitter, I spoke to Jack (mid 40s), Seb (mid 30s) and James (mid 20s).

Before we hear from them directly, I’d like to thank all three for sharing their experiences, and for being so candid and honest. I also want to be clear, which makes sense to me if not necessarily to anyone else, that I really liked them and am pleased I had the opportunity to talk to them. So, without prejudice, judgement, comment or analysis; ChemSex by those who do or certainly have. Jack, Seb and James.

James: aged 25, from the Brighton area
“I’m not really a regular on the gay scene in Brighton, certainly not weekly. Possibly once a month and occasionally I meet people [for sex] in person, but it’s usually on the apps, Grindr mostly. The interest in taking drugs during and for sex actually came from meeting people on Grindr, although I don’t remember the first time I had sex with ‘chems’ – it was a few years ago now. I reckon I have sex with people on chems once sometimes twice a month, there are usually a few people involved, on average around five, sometimes people I already know but often online meets. I prefer sex with ‘chems’ than without, I feel that there’s more of a buzz that way. Most of the guys I have sex with are older than me but that’s the age range I’d go for anyway and that’s nothing to do with the drugs. My regular drugs are G and Tina, although M-cat and coke do make an appearance and as a result these parties can last between three and four days, although recently more like one or two. I work shifts across the week and usually find that whatever the day or time there are people around. I’ve slammed (injected) but that’s not a regular thing for me.

“Bareback sex is my preferred type of sex, it’s just my preference.”

At this point I ask if James is concerned about HIV or other STIs.

“There’s always that thought in your head but that’s my decision and I get checked out regularly. One of the reasons I go for older guys is that younger guys appear to be more cautious and their preference would be safer sex – older guys are more interested in bareback. This is also a sober decision, it’s how I want sex and it’s my choice. Chemsex is just part of how things are… I know myself and I’ll know when to stop.”

Seb: aged 34, from London
“I should say that I no longer take part [in chemsex], about eight months ago was probably the last time and that was a one-off. It started as a cheaper alternative to booze. It used to be that you could buy Mephedrone (M-Cat) for £20 and it was absolutely not associated with sex – bags of Mephedrone would come out at your friends and a bag would last a few days. At some point the formula changed and then so did its use. It went from being a more more drug to becoming less potent overnight. The problem with that is that the only comparable drug in terms of the high and horniness it gave you is Tina. I absolutely wasn’t interested in Tina until Mephedrone changed. M-Cat was cheap and nasty but you wouldn’t crave it, it gave you the high when you wanted it, and you wanted more as you took it, but when you stop you don’t crave it. The drug use can escalate quickly and you take the drugs on Friday night and you’re still awake on Monday morning.
“It’s difficult to judge or build ‘normal’ relationships when you’re doing those drugs. I can remember lots of occasions being at a friend’s house waiting for the dealer to arrive, there’s a delay and another delay and whilst waiting we have nothing to say to one another other than getting frustrated at the dealer, but we couldn’t talk like adults. One of these friends I met at a chillout, then became really good friends outside the druggy circle, but ultimately we did fall out over drugs. That neither of us was particularly upset about the friendship dissipating is an indication of what kind of relationship it was.

“I have to say though, since stopping the drugs, my sex life has dropped off the earth – which is actually a bigger struggle than giving up drugs. I’d say that since my chemsex experiences, normalising sex is difficult. I became HIV positive during that time. I passed out at a party after someone put G in my drink, although I was aware that I’d unprotected sex sometimes. I had a f**k buddy I trusted and we were both negative and I felt the sex was better [unprotected] and so when I was partying, I started taking risks. I can think of times when I bare-backed more.

“Back then I was in a job that I hated and for a time my professional life wasn’t making sense to me. The chemsex gave me escape. Then I changed my job, the salary doubled, my responsibilities were different. When my life got better – the drugs went. I’d say that for most people engaging in chemsex, there’s usually something going on causing them to do it. Trying to escape and forget something. When all that gets better, the drugs go away.”

Jack: aged 46, from the Midlands
“My drug use started when my relationship ended. He was the love of my life, say no more. I was living alone, no friends, and I just ran into a time of confusing intimacy and making friends with having sex. Someone offered me a line of something and I hit the ‘f***-it’ button and thought OMG this is amazing. What no-one tells you is that the problem with drugs is that they do work. It was a terrible combination for me though; dealing with an HIV positive and personality disorder diagnosis quickly led to self-loathing, abandonment and depression. Mix drugs into all that and… well.

“Predominantly the drug was M-Cat. I didn’t like what I saw of Tina, people who took it quickly turned into twats. On the occasions when I did take it, I become suicidal later. On reflection, the escalation is frightening. Taking one line per night becomes one every couple of hours, one chill session becomes every other week then every week. Sniffing becomes slamming, then one night becomes three days and one gram lasting three weeks becomes five grams a week. You are out of it, it’s fake, it’s chemically induced – once you are out of the door you are blocked on the apps: ‘let’s be bro-friends’ whilst you’re taking drugs and having sex and then you’re just deleted.

“I used to think: ‘I’m middle class, I’m educated, I’ll never become addicted’, but all you need for addiction is a human being with a problem and a slight wobble, then a drug. I felt that what I was doing was wrong – there’s always a little voice reminding you: this isn’t what I want to be. I eventually lost everything. Someone dobbed me in to work, sent information, images, the lot, and I lost the job. I took part in the chemsex more than 50 miles away to avoid anyone finding out, deliberately, but still.”

Craig Hanlon-Smith
Craig Hanlon-Smith

Although I asked, James elected not to tell me the nature of his employment.

“I’m now off all of the apps, they over promise and under deliver. What delivers is the drug. I’ve now changed that from M-Cat, which is psychotropic, to coke. I don’t do it with anyone else, I do it on my own, every so often for a few hours. That may sound sad, but I feel no sexual desire whatsoever without it. It’s sad, isn’t it?

“This can happen to anyone. I’m university trained, I have degrees from two top universities, and yet now I’m working part-time in a minimum wage job because it’s all I can cope with. And you know? No one wants to talk about it, I think because it shames them. I’ve tried, but barely go on any form of social media for that reason. These are not real conversations. This is my story and I’m not saying it’s everyone’s. Some can survive, but some lives go down the tubes.”

OPINION: Craig’s Thoughts 

We all belong. Or the quest for a tribe. Part one. By Craig Hanlon-Smith @craigscontinuum

IS THAT my tribe? Asked the awkward seven- year-old, skirting along the outer perimeter of the all-weather pitch on a 1970s wet spring Lancashire lunchtime. Envying the gaggles of energetic boys and their temporary but automatic friendship. Staring lost at their heptathlon of sports that he was certainly the master of none nor understood the appeal of fast bowls, off-cut plank cricket bats and grazed knees. Instead he prised his way into a group of disinterested but begrudgingly accommodating girls playing a much more accessible ‘horsey on the loose’, but after a time of trying that pleases no one, the boy-shaped cuckoo limps off to another meandering of solitude.

He senses a sadness that he neither comprehends nor has the intellect to analyse, but this passes as thoughts of a television date with Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman lick his wounds. Is she my tribe? He wonders. Perhaps.

“Is that my tribe?” Asks the boy as the summer Saturday night ritual of Seaside Special launches into the family sitting room. He sits agog yet unguarded amongst oblivious relatives, week after week, glued to a white plastic television sprayed green and locked in repeated fascination with the sequinned dresses of The Three Degrees and white feathered headdresses of Boney M. Although unsure why, he has sense enough to know that when returning to class on Monday, he is not to record in the weekend news book that he might have choreographed his own routine to Ra Ra Rasputin, nor that he masking taped homemade Christmas decorations to his head in a now eight-year-old’s attempt to recreate the televised costumes.

“Will this be my tribe?” He wonders aged nine and he joins the cub scouts desperate to be able to claim the tribe for him is out there somewhere. Who knew that Baden Powell’s motto ‘Be Prepared’ was the overture to a more rounded statement of be prepared to be mercilessly bullied like never before nor since and, despite the organisation’s close links to the Church of England and their preaching of Christian love and understanding, everyone present will turn a blind eye or, in the case of one unforgotten but irresponsible adult, even join in with the harassment.

A particularly horrible weekend camping trip sat weeping on the lap of one of the female group leaders named after a Jungle Book character (the adult him would now remove his eyeballs in order to relentlessly roll them) was confirmation enough that this was not to be his tribe and a cue to leave and quickly, no questions asked.

For a short burst, pre-teen aerobics felt as though it may be his tribe. Being the only boy in a group of 12-year old girls did not phase him as he quickly learned he could back-step lunge to Automatic by The Pointer Sisters and Michael Jackson’s Beat It better than the rest of them. The leg-warmers and Kids From Fame sweatshirt might have been a giveaway to a child psychologist, but the 12-year-old boy only wore them for comfort and thankfully, at that time, he remained oblivious to being the focus of gossip in the local bakery “that boy in the leg-warmers is a Mary-Anne”. But it is of course no tribe at all if our protagonist is too embarrassed to tell anyone that aerobics for fun is exactly what he’s up to every Wednesday at 7.

Aged 13 he unexpectedly discovered a tribe of sorts, a tribe of two. Two unknown homosexuals, although the scientific vocabulary remained unspoken, spending their schoolboy lunchtimes running off to a distant field in the shadow of a derelict farmhouse during the summer months, or a patch of concrete behind the garage car-wash as the air became fresher and the ground damper. Sloppy snogging, clumsy penis grabbing and shameful semen shooting days of something sordidly secret. Both taking advantage of the Thatcherite industrial action by teaching staff for extended liaisons that now graduated to the bedroom carpet, which was at least centrally heated.

A happy spell, until one of the boys developed a psychological upper-hand and blackmailed the other. Paper-round money spent on silence – buying chocolate bars, cans of pop, Now That’s What I Call Music 5, Chain Reaction by Diana Ross and How Will I Know? by Whitney Houston. An arrangement which continued for months until oversized Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut and soul divas no longer counted as satiating currency, and one began demanding the other gave him cash. For almost a year, a pound here and a fiver there was stolen from parents, grandparents and the pocket money of a younger brother. His true tribe never to be revealed, whatever the cost.

Although it would take him almost 30 years to appreciate it, there was at that time a sanity saving tribe of three, he just didn’t see it, then. A tribe of three fellow misfit teenagers, all girls who also did not fit the mould of expected cool or sporting triumph. Who neither could, nor would, attend the hockey trials with enthusiasm in the way that he would run away from the football during soccer practice for fear of actually being selected for a team. A group of four who would never be picked, but who also strangely didn’t want to be. A tribe who, between them, were tall, short, gangly, tubby, fantastically awkward and, perhaps without knowing or realising, were a supporting foundation for one another when they needed it most.
And for him, a tribe who never asked that question, or called him those names, which was exactly what he wanted.

To be continued…

Fringe REVIEW: #BeMoreMartyn @The Warren Theatre Box

#BeMoreMartyn (and Everyone Else).

MARTYN Hett unwittingly became the face we all remember in the days following the terrorist attack on Manchester Arena in May 2017. The success of this play, #BeMoreMartyn is not in its staging of the manner of Martyn’s death – it does not, but in its focus on his life and those he impacted closest to him. It is in a way his celebration.

Directed and written by Adam Zane under the banner of Hope Theatre Company, this verbatim theatre piece has resulted from interviews of Hett’s close circle of friends, boyfriends and flatmates, a veritable buffet of personalities who all recount their memories of him, and particularly their time hanging out at The Frig – essentially a bar in the living room of his Stockport flat.

With a cast of eight, this is an unusually crowded stage for a fringe show, but a short insight into Hett’s world suggests the production could have cast twenty times that and still only skimmed his influence upon those around him.

It is tricky for a production to include actual filmed and sometimes televised moments from such a life, as Martyn Hett was clearly such a huge personality, those moments sometimes leave us wanting more of the real deal. But that said, the success of this play and production is not just in its acknowledgement of one individual. Its intelligence is that whilst keeping us engaged in the moment and indeed Martyn, we leave determined to celebrate our own journeys, influences and impact upon others, and marvel at the wonder of those we live with today. So that has to be a winner right?

#BeMoreMartyn continues at The Warren Theatre Box, Wednesday May 30, Thursday May 31 and Friday June 1. Times vary – check website for details.

For more details, click here:

Fringe REVIEW: The Soft Subject (A love story) @The Warren

A Soft Subject. Love. Turns out it ain’t all soft…..

HYPHEN Theatre Company presents Chris Woodley’s autobiographical show which essentially is a love story with all the twists and turns you would expect. Framed within the context of a structured drama lesson, Woodley is an ex-state school drama teacher, our hearts melt as the two protagonists meet and fall into the domestic trials that is the real deal.

It is refreshing to watch the unfolding of a story where the two main characters just happen to be gay – that’s not really the thing. Woodley points out this is not a story of homophobia, this is not a story of loss, this is a love story and our captivation rattles along at the same pace of those first heady months we have all experienced, lived and at times lost.

The success here is Woodley himself, it is a one man show, he has a normality, energy, kindness and yes theatrical camp quality that lures his audience in and is completely disabling for the blows that rain down in the unfolding drama that is love. But this is not simply a tale of two star-crossed lovers and scraping off the woodchips of life, but also of family and the love story we have with our parents and they with us.

The emotional punch of the evening comes not from Woodley himself but from an email read by his father, I am assuming his actual father, an unexpected twist that delivers everything a moment of magic should. It is as wrenching a moment as it is terrific.

The Soft Subject, (A love story) continues at The Warren, St Peter’s Church, North York Place, Brighton, Wednesday, May 30th and Thursday, May 31 at 8:30pm.

For more information, click here:

X