Oh great, another pic of Matt looking ridiculous...

1988 was really when it all started happening for me, homosexually-speaking. My involvement with Gay Young London, sketchily described elsewhere, opened up a whole new world -- a world that had been there all along, of course, and which I ultimately outgrew, but at the time it seemed dense and glittering with excitement and adventure.

The person who had succeeded Peter Cummings in charge of the group was a guy called Andy, who shared a flat in Exmouth Market (just around the corner from where I now live) with Tim, a shifty and entertaining queen of the old school, and a young medical student called Paul. (The first time I went to GYL, Paul took quite a shine to me and walked me to the bus stop at the end of the night. He was the first man I ever gave my phone number to, though he had to ask for it -- I was far too timid and inexperienced even to realize that might be something one did. It didn't lead to us sleeping together, though -- that had to wait until many years later.)

The flat in Exmouth Market was something of a nexus for certain strands of homo culture at the time, and as the years pass I still occasionally encounter people I didn't know who remember it and what it represented -- even, once in the mid-1990s, someone who was then living in it. Tim and Andy were great devotees of John Waters-style "trash" culture, and the place was a temple to that: furniture dragged from skips, rouched red satin ceiling drapes, a constant soundtrack of pumping Bobby Orlando mixes.

At this time I was working at the Scala cinema in Kings Cross, a fiercely independent repertory fleapit that was the London home to all manner of movies that got no airing anywhere else, including some basically hardcore porn flicks that could never have been certificated at the time. The programme changed every day and varied wildly from Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! to Kiss Me, Stupid!, from La Grande Bouffe to La Grande Illusion; eventually the place was destroyed by a copyright-infringement lawsuit for an unlicensed screening of A Clockwork Orange, which for more than twenty years -- until Kubrick's death -- could not be legally shown in the UK. The venue was later taken over by an evangelical church, but happily that didn't last and it is currently the fitting home of queer trash haven Popstarz.

Every Saturday, the Scala would show movie all-nighters, linked quadruple or quintuple bills starting at 11pm and going until 6 or 7 in the morning. This was the shift I started on, initially just as cover for a fellow LCP student (film students constituted quite a lot of the flunky staff in London's arthouse cinemas -- probably still do, just as half the theatre ushers in the West End are drama students). Each Saturday night I'd be there in the box office, admitting the rush of cineastes, cultists and homeless junkies who wanted to spend the night in front of, say, Can't Stop The Music, Thank God It's Friday, Abba: The Movie, Un chant d'amour and Todd Haynes's masterpiece Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (a biopic performed by Barbie and Ken dolls).

To coincide with the release of Hairspray, the Scala showed a John Waters/Divine all-nighter (these films were a Scala staple anyway; the cinema's cache of scratch-n-sniff Odorama cards for Polyester was jealously guarded). Andy couldn't resist dressing up for the occasion, and I was happy to be dragged along in the slipstream.

Another result of my attendance at Gay Young London was the acquisition of my first boyfriend, Martin. I pretty much fell for him on sight during my very first visit (in late 87), but it wasn't until probably March 88 that we actually got together.

In another of these photo album entries I said that only 2 of my exes matter, and in those terms Martin would be the one that doesn't. That's not entirely fair -- I loved him with a naïve intensity that, though specious in comparison to the dense and complex and treacherous feelings I've had for subsequent lovers, was nevertheless a revelation at the time. When we broke up sometime in June I was heartbroken in a way that only someone who has never experienced heartbreak can ever be. There were some embarrassing scenes.

Not long before that, I turned 21, which at the time was the age of consent for gay men in the UK -- most of the period I was having sex with Martin we were breaking the law. I am still offended by the stupidity of that, but there was something vaguely exciting about it too, to the extent that it occurred to us at all. Martin was 26, so if it had come to a prosecution -- which would have required a quite inconceivable chain of events, even in those unenlightened times (prosecutions did occur, but were rare, and usually the result of complaints made by homophobic parents) -- Martin would have been in the worse position, ostensibly the corrupter of someone too young to know his own desires. If anything, of course, the reverse was true -- I was much surer about what I wanted sexually than Martin ever was.

This is him, on the occasion of my 21st birthday:

The blurriness seems altogether in character.

Also on the guest list that night was a woman named Ros, another LCP film student and Scala employee. Of all the people I was at college with, she was just about the only one I remained in contact with for a significant amount of time. Still, we gradually drifted apart, and eventually lost touch.

Walking through the deserted streets of Moorgate one Sunday night a few weeks ago, I ran into Ros waiting at a bus stop, and we arranged to meet up for a drink. Reunions with long lost old friends can seem forced and awkward, but this was just comfortably nostalgic, lots of college talk, lots of Scala talk. Whatever happened to...? Do you ever see...? We sat in a quiet bar in St John Street unpicking forgotten threads of continuity until closing time.

She still looks exactly the same. I'm happy to say, on the basis of the pics above, that I don't.
Posted by matt at February 18, 2004 02:03 AM