No. 39 - In The Sunken Garden

I must confess that to me, the Pride flag is a horrible looking thing, but I have bought one anyway to display on the weekend of the London march. Its meaning transcends any aesthetic objections I may have. Also, seeing as it's Pride month, I’ve chosen to share the story of how in 1982, I went to read in the park and left it changed forever, having failed to absorb a single paragraph.

Me in a 1980 photobooth snap.

In the spring of 1981, without consulting anyone, I dropped out of my post-graduate teacher training course in Manchester. I hadn't made many major decisions in my life, so it was uncharacteristically brave of me. I have many regrets, but abandoning that particular path towards certain failure is not one of them. I’d have made an unhappy, and almost certainly useless teacher, because it was a vocation that I did not have, undertaken only because I had no idea what else to do. I was never comfortable standing at the front of a class, and even less so sitting in the staff room. Besides, teaching practice at two secondary schools in Manchester had made it clear to me that Goodbye Mr Chips was not a reliable guide to life as a teacher in 1981. I joined over three million unemployed in Margaret Thatcher's Britain, a significant number of them graduates with little prospect of a job.

My mother took it far better than I expected. She was kind, not only in sending me unsolicited cash every now and again, but for putting on a brave face about having a 'dropout' for a son. She desperately wanted to be proud of me, and I could see her struggling to build a narrative that would give my actions a veneer of respectability.

Fear is the Disease

At first, I enjoyed the free time. As a student I had never had much money and Supplementary Benefit proved little meaner than my grant had been. After a few weeks of languishing in bed until lunchtime, I started to get up early, listened to Radio 4, read extensively, and because I had the time and solitude a writer needs, I began to write. I was happy in my own company and well used to being skint. But the growing fear of becoming unemployable, undermined my otherwise tranquil existence. I applied for jobs, but not just any job, because I’d made enough wrong turns already.

December 1980 in Spain

Fear was my disease, fear not of ghosts or monsters, but of life. I needed to be braver, rather than behaving as though it was a game of musical chairs, where any seat would do once the music stopped. I'd gone to the first college that accepted me. I'd wandered into teacher training because I didn't know what else to do. I’d had girlfriends because I was grateful to find anyone prepared to put up with me. There were things I never applied for because I was afraid of rejection. I couldn’t even wallow in being a failure, because in order to fail, first you have to try.

I loathed signing on every fortnight at the smoky Unemployment Benefit Office in Aytoun Street. This was where the football match buses had lined up when my father first took me to Maine Road, and I resented that happy memory being sullied by a grim ritual that routinely reminded me of how useless I was. In the desolate benefit office I was nothing. After each time I signed on, I'd go to the café in Debenham’s for a pot of tea and a scone with black cherry jam, so that I could feel human again, a desperate comfort I could barely afford. I did not believe that everything would necessarily be all right, and I had no-one to tell me it would be.

And then there was football. Throughout my period of unemployment I watched every Manchester City home game. Standing on the Kippax to support John Bond's blue and white army cost only £1.30 a time, so it could be budgeted for by skipping meals and walking everywhere rather than getting the bus. At times it seemed as though City was all I had to fill the void.

Shrine to Manchester City FC in my bedsit, 1982.

The Sunken Garden

Many gay men maintain that they knew about their inclinations from an early age, but really, I had little idea. Raised as a church-going Anglican with a little too much respect for authority, being gay was unthinkable, so I didn't think it. The world had been short on temptation anyway, because in the seventies, long hair and ugly fashions successfully hid most of what might have been beautiful.

I had the luxuries of time and solitude to challenge my own beliefs about what was ‘normal’ and this included politics and my views on sexuality. I bought The Charioteer by Mary Renault from a basement bookshop in Newton Street, and what I read in it smouldered within me like a faulty incendiary bomb in an attic. I didn't understand why being gay was anyone's business other than that of the individuals concerned. I couldn't imagine doing anything of that sort myself of course, but then again, everything I'd done up to that point had been confusing, disconcerting and hadn’t felt right. I thought I was just waiting for 'the right girl' to come along to help me make sense of it all.

On the unseasonably warm afternoon of Tuesday, 27th April 1982, she did - or to be more accurate, he did.

In Platt Fields, within sight of the floodlights of Maine Road, lay an enclosed, sunken ornamental park, known as the Shakespearean Garden. I went there to read in the sun, but the white pages of my novel blinded me, so I just lay and dosed. Even though it was still April, it was warm enough for shirts to be removed, and mine was duly cast aside. And then suddenly, lying nearby, there he was.

The Shakespearean Garden, Platt Fields, in May 2022

He was good-looking, and his blond hair was smartly cut. He certainly had no dirty mac - his clothes suited him well, when he was wearing them. He looked clean, ‘normal’, respectable. I do not know his name, or nationality. He did not touch me, nor did I touch him. We did not even speak.

I remember every detail of the encounter, but I’ll save those for a novel. To cut a long story short, at considerable risk to himself, he put on a show for me in the sunken garden. The chances of discovery were high, for only yards away there were office girls having an alfresco lunch, but he positioned himself in my line of vision, and off he went. I found myself mesmerised, unable to turn away, paralysed like a scorpion's prey.

Some would consider it a sordid little episode, and according to the law, this man had committed an obscene act in a public park in broad daylight. But it wasn't obscene, it was beautiful, and far from being offended, I had been electrified. Once he was done, he slipped away into the dusty streets of Rusholme, probably unaware that he had changed the life of a complete stranger, forever. I hurried back to my bedsit in Fallowfield, relieved and a little disappointed that I wasn’t followed. Within hours of his performance, my entire life made more sense. Feelings that had never added up before suddenly fell into place, as though they had been locked in a safe and this man had the combination.

So it seemed that I was ‘gay’. It had been dramatic, it had been emphatic, and I was strangely fine with it. It was as though Mother Nature, having protected me thus far, saw I was ready to know this about myself. I had just turned twenty-four and frankly, I was embarrassed it had taken me so long to realise. I may have reason to be thankful for that too, because had I known any younger, thanks to the spread of AIDS I might have been dead by now. As it was, I knew the risks and I am by nature, cautious.

I realise that 'coming out' is meant to be when you reveal yourself to friends and family, but the significant date for me will always be 27th April, 1982, when I came out to myself. A few days later I began telling a few friends, because once cannot suppress an earthquake. Among the first to hear my news was a lad I'd done some volunteer work with. He was a Catholic from Burnage, so I didn’t know how it would go, but he just said:

"So long as you don't start wearing flowery shirts and bangles, I don't care."

Of course, thanks to The Smiths, a year later even straight boys were wearing flowery shirts and bangles.

A Long Road Ahead

So, there I was, alone in the city with no prospect of a job, having suddenly realised that I was gay. My solitude in Manchester had never been absolute. I had a handful of friends and my landlady was a kind woman. My brother and sister-in-law lived an hour away and were a great source of love and support. It could have been far worse.

Late night conversations.

But if I thought this was me all sorted, I was to be disappointed. After the initial euphoria of self-discovery, doubts and insecurities began to surface. It was the beginning of a time of great frustration, because while I knew that I wasn't the only gay man on the planet, I was pretty sure that none of the lads who appealed to me would be gay.

Being gay wasn’t the problem anyway, being me was. Despite all the soul-searching, I was still uptight and conventional, with set notions of what was and wasn’t ‘normal’. The encounter in the sunken garden had given me a chance to find out who I was, but it was only a beginning. Waiting for the right boy to come along, would prove no more fruitful than waiting for the right girl. It took me a long time to appreciate that you cannot wait for someone else to come along and make you happy, and you can never be happy while pretending to be someone you are not.

As for the ‘gay community’, at first rather than providing a refuge, it seemed to me an uneasy alliance of the damaged, and not a community at all. It did not help me to ‘be myself’, but offered an alternative set of pigeonholes into which I did not fit, with different judgements, which were judgement nevertheless.

The End of Solitude

The fear of becoming unemployable compelled me to leave Manchester, return to North Wales and find seasonal employment in Butlin’s. The money wasn’t great, but it proved to be another good decision, because in some ways my time there taught me more than college did. Most importantly, it taught me how to get along with people, and see the value in them, however different from me they might be. In college I had felt that everyone was trying to score points off me, to build themselves up at my expense. Butlin's staff was full of working class youngsters from Liverpool and Manchester - they were not saints, but I could scarcely believe how much kindness I found amongst them. Seeing myself through their eyes, made me like myself a bit more.

‘Just be yourself’ is such a cliché. It is good advice, but it isn’t nearly as easy to do as it sounds. How can you be yourself if you aren’t even sure of who you are in the first place? And who you are may not be who you'd like to be. I may have feared I might never get a proper job and that no-one would ever love me, but those bedsit days gave me a precious opportunity to begin working out who I was – not just the gay thing, but everything.