Nostalgia on a Cold Tuesday

Tuesday this week I was working in Camden and thanks to the scheduling of the session I had over two hours free in the middle of the day. I was at the south end of Camden High Street, so I took myself off for a walk along it. I walked right up to Camden Lock, passed Camden Market and the eclectic mixture of shops there.

In the 80s and early 90s I spent a lot of time in that area of Camden. I’d often buy clothes from Camden Market and the collection of shops around there. At Camden Lock I’d regularly search through the second-hand book stalls looking for an “interesting read”. When I first came to London, back in the 80’s, Camden was this wonderful and exciting place. The market was full of all the different clothes I’d longed the wear and at prices I could afford (very important because I was doing low paid care jobs). There was also a buzzing gay life there, long before the rise of gay Soho. There were gay clubs and pubs, and even gay shops. Especially the old Zipper Store at the top of Camden High Street, this was more than just a sex shop (though not everything it sold was squeaky clean) and I brought many different novels there.

Moving to London was a great liberation for me, not just being to explore what it was to be a gay man but I was also able to live my life without anyone looking over my shoulder. I was my parents’ youngest child and while I lived with them they always wanted to know where I was going and when I’d be back. They also cast their opinions over all I bought. They weren’t cruel but they were over-protective. Leaving that was such a liberation and finding Camden, and all that went with it, was part of that.

In the mid 90s I moved to West London and less and less I went to Camden, also this time saw the rise in Gay Soho, an alternative place to go, and my meeting Martin. Things change and Camden wasn’t a place I visited regularly.

What was most surprising about walking through Camden this week was how little had changed. The pavements were new, wide and even, and some of the shops had different names, but it seemed so familiar. The Zipper Store had gone but so many things on sale were the same as when I was shopping there. The Arabic scarves, the same pre faded and pre ripped jeans, the same bright tee-shirts emblazoned with slogans. My taste in clothes has changed but it was strange to be confronted by my old taste on sale, on mass. 80s fashions are making a big comeback, so of course they’d be on sale in there, but it still felt as if Camden Market hadn’t changed at all over the years. That gave it a slightly unreal feeling.

The 80s and 90s have been very much been in my mind recently. I’m writing a series of linked short stories, set between 1984 and 1994, about the events in a young gay man’s life as he leaves before the Evangelical Christianity he grow-up in. It’s a theme that does crop up in my writing. So there I was, walking up Camden High Street, confronted by all that 80s revival, as my mind is going over the stories I’m writing set in the 80s. Hey, my life’s like that.

Drew.

One of Those Moments.

While growing up the images of gay men I had were limited, at best. They basically came in two types, the sexless effeminate men (you couldn’t call them queens because they were so pathetic) or the self-hating and constantly apologising “hom-o-sexuals” (“oh please forgive me for being such a pervert”), and neither of them were remotely sexual. It was the 1970’s and it was no climate to try and develop a gay identity.

As I slipped into my teens I was desperate for any kind of gay images, anything that didn’t tell me gay was bad and unnatural. I couldn’t find it anywhere on television, if it was on radio it was hidden to me, and growing up in suburban Liverpool I had no access to the first shoots of British gay publishing – the newspapers I saw, if they ever mentioned it, only ran gays as “dirty pervert” stories.

On a cold Friday night in 1981 it all finally changed. My parents were out and I had the house to myself, so I sat down to watch the television the whole night – as a teenager I was practically addicted to it. I was watching Channel 4 (back then it was still new and still broadcasting programs aimed at “minorities”, programs aimed at groups no other channel would bother with; it hadn’t turned into the Reality TV and imported programs channel it is now), it was broadcasting the first Secret Policeman’s Ball that night. In the middle of all that Oxbridge humour Tom Robinson came on and, accompanying himself on a guitar, sang Glad To Be Gay. It was like a new world opening up for me.

Gay To Be Gay was never an anthem of pride, it was always a protest song against homophobia, yet it was the first time I ever heard someone publicly stand-up for being gay, it was the first positive image of being gay I had seen and it was wonderful. Here was a gay man who was unapologetically standing up for being gay, who was saying the problem was with society’s homophobia and not with his sexuality, and he was attractive.

For two minutes I watched almost breathlessly, this wonderful moment of basking it such a positive gay image, then it was over and the Oxbridge comedy continued.

At the time I never told anyone else about what I’d seen that night. I could barely accept that I was gay, back then, I could never have admitted to seeing and let alone enjoying Tom Robinson’s performance; but I never ever forgot it.

Several years later I saw Tom Robinson live, on a very wet Sunday evening in Southport’s Floral Hall (Southport is God’s Waiting Room on the Irish Sea). Live his performance was even better, he sang all the sang of his I’d grown to love in those few years (that moment on television had made me a life long fan), and when he sang Glad To Be Gay I happily sang along too – as did the rest of the audience.

Many years later I actually met Tom Robinson. It was in Trafalgar Square, London, for a World Aids rally. He was comparing and singing at it, I was a volunteer there. I physically met him and shuck his hand, he was handsome and charming as I remember from seeing him on stage. But I never told him about seeing him television, back in 1981, and what it had meant to me; well you don’t, do you…

Drew.