(New Statesman (1996))
Adam Mars-Jones, now openly gay,
was once as bigoted as any straight
The argument for an equal age of consent for homosexual acts, on which
members of parliament will shortly (at long last) freely vote, is
unanswerable. Opposition to it is merely a remnant of the desire for
homosexuality not to exist at all, but once homosexuality is given
a toehold of legality there is no logical basis for denying it an
equal footing. If there is any justice or common sense in the chamber,
then a long-rankling wrong will be undone. Hurrah! But having said
all that . . .
There is a self-righteous overtone to the argument, and a contradiction.
In the gay liberationist rhetoric to which I (essentially) subscribe,
it is an act of basic logic and respect to accord me and my kind
our fights. But there is also the implication: you poor pitiful straights
can't know what it's like to be a minority member. You just don't
get it. Walk a mile in my shoes, my stylish shoes, on the path of
radical virtue. Then you'll know. The problematic assumption is: if
I wasn't gay, I would be pro-gay. And that's where I part company,
because in my case I don't think it's true. I remember a state of
prepubescent horror and dismay, in which I anathematised precisely
what I now recommend. Putting it in B-movie terms, I Was A Teenage
Homoprobe. And I wasn't a unique case.
It happened that my puberty was late in arriving. My elder brother
has joked that I was sent to so many expensive specialists to discover
why my testicles weren't doing their testicle thing (and descending
to disseminate excitement and confusion) that it's a wonder I don'
t get mined on by the very words Harley Street, anticipating an immediate
grope. What this means is that for a relatively long time I lived
with ideas about sexuality, rather than the thing itself. It was only
when I was about 16 that I began to connect up with impulses that
would undermine what I thought I knew. Before that time, I knew that
women were meant for men, and that in due course I would marry Audrey
Hepburn.
I was still 12 when I went to Westminster School in 1967 as a scholar,
with the indulgence of "weekly boarding", meaning that I came home
- which was only a mile or so away anyway - at Saturday lunchtime.
Westminster School in the sixties was a liberal school at a time of
liberal upheaval, from which I excluded myself. Peter Brook's production
of A Midsummer Night's Dream was running, instantly perceived as a
landmark cultural moment, and some of my contemporaries went more
than once. In some way I considered myself ineligible for magical
transformation, in art or life.
I took some O-levels at 13, and A-levels in Latin and Greek at 15.
There was sex in classical texts, and we weren't exactly screened
from it, but nothing about it was explained. I remember one desiccated
teacher glossing a particularly vicious Greek adjective as meaning
"having an unusually wide anus, by implication from abuse. You will
translate broad-breeched." Questions were not invited.
My homophobia was a true phobia: it was terror rather than hatred,
but nevertheless the sort of terror that wants its object obliterated.
I had a hysterical need to shun homosexuality, made rather abstract
because there was no homosexuality in plain view. There were two boys
in my house (in different years, which may have rendered an attachment
visible) who were referred to as a couple, with an unrelenting sneering
that nevertheless acknowledged a status quo. I don't think I ever
saw these two together, but I found them individually impossible to
deal with, and when as a punishment I had to give the older boy a
wake-up call, I was in a trance of horror throughout.
I was appalled to discover that each year, at the time of the Challenge,
the scholarship exam, there was a sweepstake, with candidates listed
in a pamphlet with jocular comments. The name Edwards was accompanied
by the word "Bedwards". I hated to think of my own name being sordidly
speculated on in the same way before I had even arrived at the school
(though luckily it lent itself to other forms of mockery).
Looking out of a bathroom window onto College Garden, I saw a popular
English teacher lolling on the grass with some sixth-form pupils.
They all had books in hand, but in my mind I turned an innocent seminar
with overtones of a picnic into a suppressed orgy. I recognised that
there was a gulf fixed between me and the handsome schoolboys in this
academic fete champetre. I was neither creative enough to do English
nor tempting enough to merit corruption.
My attitude was probably anti-sex in general rather than exclusively
antihomosexuality. I remember at one point, when I had some say in
the choice of readings in Evening Abbey - the point in the evening
when scholars trooped in their gowns into St Faith's Chapel, inside
the Abbey itself, for readings not necessarily narrowly religious
- objecting violently to a passage in The Cruel Sea in which a woman
was said to have a man's "stuff" on herdress. Since I was not actually
religious, the tabernacle that I was seeking to protect from defilement
is likely to have been myself rather than the chapel.
Self-defining homosexuals were not in evidence then, at the beginning
of the partial decriminalisation, the half-life, that we have inhabited
since 1967, but there was no shortage of accurate slanders. Tom Driberg
came to address the school at some stage during my Westminster years,
and I watched him rigid with loathing (I can't claim to have listened
to a word he said), with Churchill's stupid joke about him, which
I had just been told, echoing in my mind. Buggers can't be choosers.
I tried to convey an absolute condemnation with my posture, while
also being terrified that he would meet my eye.
What was behind such a marvel of maladjustment? It must have made
a difference that my father, a London lawyer with a Welsh village
background, considered nothing more disgusting than the twisted desire
of one man for another, who could never return it. He referred, in
terms that anticipated by almost 20 years a fatuously vicious sound-
bite of James Anderton's (a sound-gnash), to homosexuals wallowing
in faeces.
It should be said in my father's favour that he wasn't a hypocrite.
The law, at the time he started to practise it, regarded homosexuals
as criminals by definition. He was appointed a High Court judge in
1969, one of the vanishingly small number of judges at that time not
to be a product of a public school, and even before then had tried
to fit in with a judicial establishment that, did he but know it,
was comfortable with a certain amount of duplicity. His brother judges
(the term by which he fondly referred to them) might see no contradiction
between sentencing a bugger for his unspeakable practices and acknowledging
that their wives found such people frightfully amusing, in the right
place, but my father anathematised them as a breed.
Choosing a school for my older brother, he specifically asked if homosexuality
was endemic there - as if such things could exist only by permission.
He wanted in effect to be shown a master copy of the School Rules,
rules which would make it clear that pupils' genitals were definitively
out of bounds, and would be confiscated like drugs or weapons as soon
as a safe technique could be perfected.
A few years later when my own prudishness had somewhat lifted, I gloated
as my father squirmed at the lunch table one Christmas. We had been
invited to the home of an old friend for the occasion, and it was
this host who told a mildly daring joke about a novice judge asking
a senior colleague for advice on a question of sentencing. His question
was: "What should I give a young man for allowing himself to be buggered?"
and the answer he got was, "Oh, 30 bob and a box of Black Magic sounds
about right." My father registered a complex, layered trauma at a
joke that implied the existence of perverted members of the judiciary,
at being embarrassed in front of his sons, above all at the soiling
of Christmas. As a guest at another man's table, he could only squirm
and sit tight.
When he was the host, he might protest. Taking his brother proudly
to his club, the Garrick, he felt shown up by my uncle's telling the
mildest of silly jokes with a lesbian theme (the one whose punchline
has the man approach the woman in the bar with the line, "What part
of Lesbos are you from, then?"). Another man would have felt shown
up by his brother's lack of sophistication - the Garrick, with its
thespian constituency, has presumably witnessed more daring sallies-
but my father's sophistication was yet more modest, and he felt mortified
by his brother's fouling of the air.
I myself never as far as I remember joined in the telling of or laughing
at anti-gay jokes (or "jokes"), but this was not for an elevated reason.
It wasn't that I was above such things: I was below them. I wanted
the entire subject decently buried, and was made uncomfortable by
any reference whatever.
There were people in my father's circle who held different views from
his, and sometimes told him so. One of his "devils" in particular
(a devil being a lawyer informally employed to help backstage on an
important case) told him he had "a bee in his bonnet" on the subject
of homosexuality, and that these people were not as he imagined. It
must have taken courage for a junior colleague to play devil's advocate
in this way but, though my father remembered the incident, it didn'
t do anything to change his ideas. When he was made a judge, the bee
in his bonnet duly became a wasp beneath his wig, and his judgements
on homosexual defendants were severe.
Oddly, my mother seemed not to share her husband's prejudice, though
she took no spontaneous steps to distance herself from it. In my first
year at Westminster she came to visit me in my little box-study, where
homework was to be done in the evening. She saw scratched in the lintel
above the doorway, as she told me only much later, an intense little
message: "Adam is a sex bomb." Other mothers would have thought, "
My child is in moral danger and must be taken immediately to a place
of safety". Not she. Gazing fondly at the tubby little swot she had
raised, she thought instead, "How nice that Adam's friends have such
a dry sense of humour."
I remember one day when I was about 16 that my father told me he had
gone with her to an offensive film, an anti-Semitic film, something
which shocked him very much. He was a pro- Semite himself: he liked
the Jewish stress on family, and also claimed half-seriously that
the Welsh were the lost tribe of Israel.
The film's shock value lay in its portrayal of a Jew as homosexual.
To him this was by definition anti-Semitic. It never occurred to him
that other factors in the film might have been intended to raise the
status of homosexuality. To him that was in defiance of natural law:
homosexuality could only drag down anything that was attached to it.
It was only later that I realised that the anti-Semitic film in question
was Sunday Bloody Sunday, in which the gay character played by Peter
Finch is shown to be well integrated socially. The film set out to
place relationships both gay and straight in a continuum of unsatisfyingness,
but could make no headway with my father. This was my first inkling
that the didactic element in art teaches only those who know.
My own development made slowprogress. The first time I encountered
an image or statement that gave gay desireany legitimacy, it was thanks
to my olderbrother. He was in every way more adven-turous than I was,
and like many another sixties teenager he bought and read underground
magazines. I was terrified of these publications, which he kept in
the chest of drawers in the bedroom which was mine at weekends during
school term and shared by both of us during the holidays. They made
me feel pathetically innocent of sex and drugs, but corrupt in so
far as middle-class and "apolitical". I was both tainted and square,
and all before I had even gone to university.
I was aware in a muffled way of the controversy surrounding Dr David
Reuben's book Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, and
I knew of his dismissal of homosexuals as fixated on the penis and
not the person. I accepted this as the doom passed on what by then
I knew was my kind. No matter that I was for all practical purposes
a virgin.
Then one evening I leafed through one of my brother's magazines. And
there I found a strip cartoon showing two long-haired men in bed together
reading Reuben's book, laughing, throwing the book down, and taking
each other into an embrace that was an aroused refutal of everything
the bigot said.
I wasn't turned on by the cartoon, nor altogether convinced. But I
did now have something to put on the other side of the equation. If
I hadn't been gay, there's no way of knowing how I would have turned
out, but given my lack of adventurousness I can't even guarantee I
would have fallen into the large group of People Many Of Whose Best
Friends Are.
It took me years to go to my first gay meeting, and a good while after
that to go to my first Gay Pride march. Even then I thought that declaring
myself to the world was something I was required to do as a matter
of intellectual honesty rather than something that might improve my
life. It wasn't quite the feeling that it was good manners for lepers
to ring their bells, but it wasn't pride yet either, not by a long
chalk. It didn't occur to me that I was moving towards intimacy, pleasure,
friendship and connection. The first few times I chanted "2-4-6-8
Gay Is just As Good As Straight", my participation was no more authentic
than when I sang hymns in morning assembly at school.
My father's progress was no more headlong than my own. It was 15 years
after my coming out to him before he could accept my life without
an outward flinch. Then when it became too much hard work to maintain
the anathema, he let it drop as if it had never existed. Soon he became
baffled by manifestations of something that had seemed a constitutive
element of his personality. The zealot was revealed as a floating
voter. Part of me, naturally, was relieved that I was no longer the
focus of a powerful magnetic field of disapproval, but part of me
was also outraged that he could so easily shed his hatred when he
found it didn't serve his purposes after all. I almost wanted him
to go on rejecting me, because then in a perverse way I could respect
him, as someone who didn't change his ideas when the going got tough.
Although my father's hostility to homosexuality was fierce, I didn'
t necessarily take the line that someone so threatened was projecting
outward, with loathing, something within himself. But sometimes I
do see something similar happening when gay people denounce homophobia.
We know homophobia, not just because we have a politics, but because
we have a memory, and also with any luck a conscience. Sometimes we
are only pretending to be shocked. I suppose what I am saying is that
the tone I prefer is weary correction rather than foaming rage.
My father was homophobic for upwards of 50 years, while my own case
lasted for less than ten. The mode of his prejudice was disgust, and
mine was fear. He warped me, in a sense, and in a sense I educated
him. But my desires required that I explore my fears, and that is
not actually a heroic enterprise. He only stopped anathematising gay
people when it suited him. But then so did I. I only stood up for
gay rights when they turned out to be mine.
The point of this stridently ecumenical argument is not to rehabilitate
homophobic discourse, merely to suggest that it comes out of the mouths
and pens of people who are not as different from the way we once were
as we would prefer to think. There's nothing I enjoy more than the
high moral ground, and the freshness of the air I breathe there. But
we are all only squatters on that territory. The freehold is not on
offer.
Mars-Jones, Adam, I was a teenage
homophobe.(Cover Story). Vol. 127, New Statesman (1996), 06-19-1998, pp
23(3).