I love shop talk. Writing is, by its nature, a pretty solitary task, at least on the business end, and so I always find those anecdotes where writers spill their work routines or trade secrets tremendously illuminating. They reveal a lot, not just about how successful authors write, but about the conditions of their writing. You see some recurring themes; stop while you’re in full flow (Hemingway and Miller); write at night (Susan Barker and Peter James) or at dawn (Kingsolver and Angelou); exercise daily (Murakami and Vonnegut); work daily, even when your work is bad, just keep writing (everybody). Often they’re the routines of successful writers who are knocking out lucrative books as their only job (I note Ian Fleming’s daily routine on his Jamaica estate included time for spear fishing and pink gins,) and when they’re not, they’re often about stealing time from responsibilities like steady work and parenting. For those without independent income, without wealth, becoming a writer is a bit like trying to reach orbit: an enormous amount of exertion is expelled in the hope of reaching a self-sustained weightless, an income from one’s writing that makes it sustainable.

Enough money buys enough time. There’s a very funny essay by Ursula K. Le Guin for the New Yorker from 2012 in which she discusses her early problems with publishing science fiction as a woman. The academic establishment, she wrote, were struck by a bias which allowed them to “remain both superior and ignorant” of science fiction, while places like Playboy, which would sometimes publish interesting science fiction, were scared of publishing women. In the end, she compromised with the pen name “U.K. Le Guin” in order to not scare the poor little darlings who actually did read it for the articles, and got the bag.

At the end of the article, however, there is a short denouement which is just as indicative of that bygone world as a literary canon or a literary Playboy. “Game to the last, Playboy printed that. And my husband and I bought a red VW bus, cash down, with the check.”

Goddamn. A short story by an unknown author, even one as remarkable as Le Guin, for a non-literary magazine, and it pays enough to buy an entire VW van? In 1968, you’re talking $3000 for that van, perhaps $30,000 in today’s money. It’s inconceivable today, as shocking as when I learnt that Carrie Bradshaw supposedly received $4.50 a word writing for Vogue back in 2002. She’d have made the best part of $2k already if she were writing this substack, which she wouldn’t have been, of course.

I couldn’t help but think that perhaps this sort of shop talk is less inspiring for writers than the exciting routines of Henry Miller or Maya Angelou. To put it another way, it’s harder to make a living as a writer than it used to be, especially on the lower rungs of the ladder. That’s why I started this substack, some seven years ago. I felt like the newsletter model they were developing offered real potential to help writers early in their career get an audience for their writing where editors might be more cautious, and to receive financial compensation that would allow them to write more, and more adventurously, which is what all those writers’ routine anecdotes suggest is the only way to make it as a writer.

For a while, for me, it worked. I was an early adopter, as my URL suggests, and in the first couple of years on substack I was regularly high in their leaderboard of most read articles. That gave me a huge boost of confidence, and it was matched by seeing that Substack’s prediction - that about 10% of free subscribers would end up converting to paid - was about right. The extra income was enough to feel like I was being rewarded for my work, while the extra reach meant that I was receiving more commissions from more interesting outlets for paid work. In the earliest days I even received a small grant from Substack itself to help support Huw Lemmey’s Utopian Drivel, and presumably to allow them to demonstrate the viability of their product.

I don’t want to get too much into the politics of Substack. I have my own opinions, sometimes strong, about how it transformed itself into a major outlet, about its position on free speech, and about the, to my mind, overemphasis on demands put on cultural producers in political discourse—a sort of strike-by-proxy cultural politics that seems to dominate social media. But for me, the turning point for the platform came when Substack began courting and poaching writers with huge established audiences, given to them from mainstream outlets, in order to challenge those outlets. It seemed a little lopsided that having had the resources, training and editors to build their reputation, they could then take the audiences those outlets had given them and go it alone. Their audiences, often attracted by their own culture war bugbears, followed them, and I’ve been led to believe those former columnists could make serious bank by offering their juice straight from the source, as well as through the Substack Pro program that existed at the time. The growth of the platform meant that there were a lot more writers going after a paid market that didn’t grow at the same rate.

Around the start of the pandemic, my conversion rate dropped. Taking into account churn, it hasn’t grown since. Is this sour grapes? Very well then, it’s sour grapes. There are a lot of factors at play here. For a start, I noticed very early on that shorter form content and political writing that engaged with the culture war simply did much better, as a result of it being more widely shared on social media. Yet this coincided with a change in how I wrote; that stuff was much less interesting to me compared to cultural criticism and essays, and once I’d deleted my Twitter, I wasn’t subject to the daily stream of rage-inducing content that would have triggered those pieces.

Another thing; much better writers than me joined the platform, and wrote more consistently. Much worse writers too; it was interesting to see which mainstream commentators, many who had been writing for broadsheets for decades, actually couldn’t write very well without an editor wrangling their prose into something legible. But with the increase in traffic, it became clear that holding attention on substack was much more akin to Youtube than anything else. The only thing that allowed enough growth to outpace the churn was consistency, and if you couldn’t post an essay a week, it would be hard to reach a new audience at all. This was compounded by the fact that people no longer share anywhere near as much as they did a decade ago on social media, unless it’s ragebait.

An essay a week? I’m not that interesting. In fact, I’m not sure anybody is that interesting. I don’t think I have a new idea every week, at least not anymore, and certainly not one worth sharing. A number of years ago there was the whiff of an offer of a columnist role for a newspaper waved under my nose, and I pushed it away without much thought, because I know what most columnists write, and I have aspirations to be a better writer than that. Even the best writers inevitably end up producing filler under those pressures to produce, and you end up drawing yourself into caricature, into ragebaiting, into asking ‘so, what is up with airplane food?’ Only one writer I know can pull that off, and the King is already on his throne.

Algorithms, churn, reach, conversion rates: I actually, quite simply, do not give a shite about these things. It’s not that I think I’m above them: they’re clearly important parts of the modern publishing world, and I have friends who do understand and care and are very good at it. But they don’t interest me as a motivation for writing. I felt my own soul corroding when I found myself wondering what I could write that would make readers enraged or disgusted enough to reach a 4% growth target. You’ll see even in the title of this piece, which is not about “cancel culture,” the hustling instinct to drive traffic and bump my open rate has become habit. I can see how for some writers—especially those producing news, commentary, or covering niche topics, insider baseball stuff—it’s an ideal model, but that’s not my work. What was more dispiriting, and I know other writers feel the same about this, is seeing something you’ve really worked on, really thought about, that you regard as good, receive a like and two shares, while the punchy culture war screeds, knocked off in a pique of rage, go viral. I just don’t have the hustle in me.

This is nobody’s fault, least of all the readers’. As Jay Springett has written, your attention is sovereign, and nobody is obliged to read or enjoy or share anything. It’s the nature of the cultural system that we have, both collectively and under the material conditions of late capitalism, somehow produced. But, at the risk of sounding like a snob, a bore, a conservative: I don’t actually think it’s good. All those writers who talked about the importance of writing to a schedule didn’t talk about publishing to a schedule; creative work, art and literature, needs failure to work. Don’t ask me how, but it does.

In one way, being a writer is hard work. Not coalface hard work, not care worker hard work, of course. But when you’re trying to reach orbit, it takes a lot of words to pay the rent. Taking into account a new novel, film treatments and screenplays, book reviews, Bad Gays episodes, catalogue essays and more, last year I wrote over 190,000 published (or soon to be published, or hopefully soon to be published) words. That’s the equivalent wordcount of two PhDs, and in terms of compensation amounted to a little more than an entry level graduate salary for the year. So a strong writing routine isn’t just a matter of finally finishing the novel inside you; it’s also absolutely necessary to get by. On the other hand, being a writer offers incredible rewards; being the administrator of your own time and director of your own work is really a most thrilling double-edged sword to wield, and for every late night trying to meet a deadline, there’s an afternoon taken off work to sit alone in a cinema. But you must make it work, even with all the privileges I’m thankful to have.

So, whether as a good Marxist or a good businessman, the ultimate determiner must be economic. Substack as a paid model doesn’t work for me anymore, and I think the deal I made with you, the reader, seven years ago, I have reneged on once too often. There is no direct “this amount of money in exchange for this amount of essays” relationship I can offer, and my inability as a writer to reach that golden ratio that makes such essays and stories financially viable means I shouldn’t continue. I feel shame when another week passes and I’ve written for a magazine, but not for you. And I haven’t changed the subscription rate in line with inflation, meaning it pays less. The balance is all off.

As such, I’ve cancelled everyone’s subscriptions, and I’ve made all the essays and short stories that were subscriber-only open to everyone. In the coming weeks I’ll do a new post signposting some of what I felt were the better ones. If there are any that you particularly liked, please do share in the comments.

Don’t worry, if worried you were: I will still be writing here. In fact, with the anxiety and guilt of wanting to produce decent essays for paid subscribers lifted, I imagine there might be even more. I love writing here, and love the responses you get from an audience following you specifically. There’s also the fact that having you all in one place is an economic and cultural value all of its own. As the old joke goes, “it might not pay, but it’s great exposure. And nobody even died of exposure.” But I didn’t think it was fair to continue under the old agreement.

What other models are there? Well I am a paid subscriber to a number of different writers, film and audio makers etc, and ironically, it never really occurs to me to think of that relationship as a transactional cultural one. Plenty post inconsistently, and it’s fine by me, because I understand that the creative process is not one of content creation but much more complex. Even if a writer writes every day, there can be gaps between work; some stuff stinks, and publishing for the hell of it just to provide some content doesn’t help anyone.

And some work takes time. In fact, the term “micro-patronage” is really fitting; if a writer I support doesn’t give me anything for a year, then delivers a really stonking novel, that support was, to my mind, well worth it. What’s more, I know from my own experience just how important that support can be; taking the time needed to write my next novel simply wouldn’t have been possible without readers and listeners like you dropping $5 a month, and, over the past 7 years, I don’t think I’d have got to the position where I can make a living from writing—orbit, let’s say—without the financial bridge substack offered.

So although I’ve cancelled your paid subscription (if you had one) I’m going to leave the paid subscriber option open for people to become micro-patrons of my work if they so wish. Just resubscribe! If for some reason you haven’t had your paid subscription cancelled (the backend of Substack is unwieldy with these things, and although I was diligent in going through them, I pay have missed one of you), and you’d like to, please, feel free. If you have some other bone to pick, drop me an email.

So, please do pay for a subscription if you want to support my work. You won’t get anything extra (well, I’ll see your name, and I’ll regard you as a better class of cultural consumer, and perhaps a better, sexier, more empathetic human, but that’s it). I suspect many of you already conceived of your paid subscription as a patronage model, rather than a cash-for-content one. But I think it’ll be a fairer expression of the relationship between writer and reader that we have here, and fairer relations are surely what we should be looking for right now.

What lamentable wretch am I, watching? A sinner, aye for sure. I hold myself to account, but with this cramped madness the fear of God leaves me. Man seems a good deal more fearsome, although I am not faithless. Yet. Each footstep upon the stair has become a fine wire fuse set to light me up like a petard at the city walls. I inspect the creak for familiarity; the lady of the house? The master? Those conscientious young maids, trustable and sturdy, yet not light of foot? The rougher footmen? Yet, thank God, not pursuivants and their men. Not yet.

In Rome, to perform my examen felt like a rich addition of routine to wrangle my disordered life. I was just a young man when I gave myself to the Jesuits, subject to all the sins of young men, and in Rome, where sin is but a quick currency. The streets were fast and busy, the yelling hawkers and vendors rising to the windows of the Collegium Romanum, where I took my study. Once down the stairs and passing among them, I felt opportunity pulling at the cuffs of my cassock. The teachings of our Father General, Ignatius Loyola, were like a balm placed over a furious rash of sin that spread across my mind. It made that rough sea tranquil. But now I ache for a spiritual storm, trapped here in this cold old cage, the north wind beating against its stone walls for now my third winter here.

My hide is a dank and dissolute hole, and it tests me. These brick walls sweat through the summer and freeze in the winter, but in no season betray a chink of light. There are no windows, and the air gets thick with dust and smoke. Yet it is a gift from the Lord to protect me, my armour. I can enter from a small bench built beside the inglenook fireplace. A wedge of wood can be removed from the arm, allowing the seat to be lifted. From there, I can squeeze myself in, dropping a few feet onto the bench on which I sleep. The seat is replaced, and I am gone, like a ghost into the walls. There is a desk, a bucket, a candlestick, and precious little else. It is not bright enough even to read my Exercitia spiritualia, but no matter, for I know it by heart. Above my head the steps lead from the hall to the chambers of my master’s family. It is not safe enough to take my own bedroom; if I am not offering Mass, or talking with them in their private rooms, here I am, in the dark, waiting, praying. Listening.

In Rome, I saw sin, I smelt it, I touched it in the streets, I tasted it in the taverns. But it is only here, in the dark, listening, that I finally got to know sin.

I am a priest, a true servant of our Lord, and there is a bounty upon my pelt. I know my name is written in their books, just as it is written in His. Across North Yorkshire, I am told, these schismatic brigands pace, with writ and warrant, although it might just as well be with dogs and horses. They had heard I, their renegade priest, had made landfall in Sussex. They had word I was travelling north. Their spies say Yorkshire. Well, so much is true, but as I enter my third year with this family, I remain undetained. My liberty is this prison, lodged between chimney and staircase.

That first winter I was awoken one night by footsteps overhead. I know not the time, but it must have been in the middle of the night. The whole house was asleep. The soft padding of the toes against the oak. Creaking. A door latch opening. The master’s chamber. His wife? Surely they are too old to share a marriage bed still. And yet? I stood on my bed and held my ear to the roof. Dust dropped down from between the floorboards, and I could make out the faintest illusion in candlelight. Not the master’s wife, but her maid, Sarah, followed by his lascivious noises. I am a priest, not a fool: you cannot make me doubt what I heard. First kissing, his old mouth against her young breasts. The wanton fool. And the sound, the sound she made when he sank his fat fingers into her cunt. To know sin.

I am here on account of his wife, not him. Does he love her, or humour her? Certainly they seem to live a happy life. Too happy. I can hear the raucous feasting they do on their high days, with guests drunk on wines from Spain and Italy, and music and laughing, and the smell of roasting beef filling my dark room. Too risky for me to come out. Christmas was a miserable time. They all come, my lord, my lady, their children, for every mass and service I lay out on the small altar in the attic room. They do all they are expected to, and take advantage of their regular confessions by filling their copybooks with their own exercises of sin in the gaps between. How can I tell her ladyship, after all they have given me? Our job, I remind myself, is to serve the sinful, and bring them closer to God. So I wait, ear to the floorboards, for him to defile his sacrament, week in and week out. He grunts when he finishes, and I return to sleep.

Some days, when it is quiet, when no guests are expected, my little door to the world is open, and me and my lady converse a while in her chambers. I hold my head to the window, and beyond those little diamonds of glass I see a cavalcade of the creation. Pinks, greens, reds, the world outside so fresh and fine with the spring. From my room I can hear the birds up the chimney. Birdsong, sweet perfumed blossom, and the bleating of lambs, all pass muted through the brickwork. I wish to taste their sweetness on my tongue. I return to my spiritual exercises.

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I am glad I didn’t tell her. Spring is the sinner’s season. His Lordship had left for a new Parliament. Desperate to reconnect this dread chamber to the world, I used my knife to bore a hole. A small hole, into the riser of the stair. From it I could peep straight down the hallway on the second floor. Suddenly, a world opened up to me. Before, I had no appreciation of the workings of a house. Like a seminary, it has its rituals and routines, an opening up and a closing down, and from this tiny aperture opened up before me a whole theatre of family life. With her husband gone, the lady of the house turned it over. Footmen and maids and figures from the village I had never seen before were coming and going, sweeping out rooms, restuffing mattresses, fixing chairs and whitewashing walls. It was too risky for me to venture outside; each night, Sarah would bring me a jug of water and a jug of wine, a little food, some meat if I was lucky, and a new candle.

That night I hadn’t even gotten to sleep. Some minor transgression from my past gnawed at my soul, and I was accounting for it. The spring sunshine had released the smell of the oak from the floorboards, I remember that much. I lay there, shirtless, as I heard the unmistakable gait of her ladyship upon the stairs. As I went to my hole, and peered, I saw John, the second footman, waiting at the end of the corridor. I watched her approach to tell him his nightly duties. I watched him stuff his hands between her legs and begin to frig. I watched her drop to her knees and remove from his breeches a fine, stiff prick. I didn’t know it was possible to do as she did, less still that she seemed in thrall to it, bewitched even. He drops his britches and pulls loose his shirt, and stands there like a colossus looking down upon here as she slurps and laps in worship at his rod. His skin is firm and changed by the sun. Mine is white and cold to the touch in the dark. He whispers his secret liturgy to the stars beyond the window. Like an anchoress, I looked upon this black mass, but still, I knelt, I prayed.

They love God, not me. I merely remind them of him. Through a glass, darkly. At least that is my job. But perhaps my presence is as intermittent as his. I wonder if the good Lord took me in my sleep, whether they would ever remember me. Perhaps I am an anchoress. Perhaps this priesthole is my bed and my tomb. But they love God enough to love me, and hide me here, whispering in advance for the eternal repose of their soul, which they say they want, and for the return of a Catholic to the throne of England, which I know they want. That is a love to the point of death: theirs and mine. There is no authority to whom I can report their iniquity except the Lord himself, and as I have said, they are already his lovers.

What could I do? What can I do? I can only stay, and preach, and hope. And listen. And now, look. John again. Mid autumn. The harvest collected, new smells in the chimney, and an apple dropped with my food into my little cell. I am the heart of this home. I know of the sin before I hear the confession. The house beats and the heart feels it. John is addressing my Lordship. I can tell his tone is impertinent. Yet no flash of anger on my Lordship’s face. Perhaps improper? Does my Lord know? Is an adulterer confessing to an adulterer, like I, the confessor, confessed to my own confessor? Forgive me, my Lord, for fornicating with your wife? What is that curl of the lips? The laugh from my Lord. His hand on John’s ribs. John’s hips. John’s cock. I see. So it is; a home containing all the sins of the Decameron. And on the staircase, my Lordship bends himself, his breeches dropped to the floor, and right before my own little hole, a detestable sin of sodomy, the leering face of the lord, a hand gripping his cock, the sweat pouring across his fat belly, between his legs John’s barbarian balls, and through my hole a single shaft of light that illuminates my face as I hear the grunts and smell the sodomy and see the seed spilled on the ground.

But I too am a fugitive from God. A single shaft of light has penetrated this room, so unexpected, and something I tried to evade has found me in the darkness. So here, after mass, after the last fires have been raked out, after the windows are shuttered and the doors barred, in this house of good and faithful Catholic penitents, I lie, and I listen, and I taste, and I sin with myself.

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If you’d like to read more of my work, please do subscribe to this newsletter. It’s been going for five years, so there are hundreds of essays to read. Paid subscribers get access to the whole archive, and subscribing to independent substacks helps writers like me not just produce essays like this one, but realise larger projects like new books (*cough cough*). Why not start with this one, about the hit gay media phenomenon, Heartstopper?

“Let me make this loud and clear,” Tate states, “If you’re a straight man with a girlfriend in 2025, you’re gay.” On its face, it is, of course, an absurd articulation: a man having a girlfriend is probably one of the most reliable indicators of heterosexuality we have, although by no means foolproof. But to people who aren’t poisoned by the manosphere, or who aren’t also terminally online, its absurdity is almost funny, and absolutely tragic. Having a girlfriend makes you gay? Ok bro. I sleep in a big bed with my wife.

Yet this absurd formulation of what makes a man gay or not is pretty instructive of Tate’s ideology, and the poisonous appeal it has upon a small but significant number of mostly young men. It also says a lot about how society often uses homosexuality as a shorthand for talking about gender, and perhaps to avoid asking the more difficult questions.

A common response to Tate’s twin obsessions of cartoonish masculinity and violent misogyny is to claim he’s a closet-case. In fact, that’s a common response to a lot of men when they express homophobic opinions, or a disgust with femininity or womanhood: they’re overcompensating, because they secretly nurture their own homosexual desires that they can’t handle. I just don’t think that’s true, however. To homosexuals and to women, the idea that hating gays and women is somehow mutually exclusive with male heterosexuality is almost as absurd as Tate’s tweet. I sometimes think it’s passing the buck, as though homophobia wasn’t in the realm of straight society at all, but rather a gay-on-gay crime.

But it’s not. It’s very much a product of straight fears and preoccupations, one of which is a fear of the transgression of norms of gender expression. That’s a destabilising thing if you live in a culture where those norms seem to be working pretty much ok for you, and where you can see there’s still a long way to fall. Likewise, I think it would be absurd to suggest that the primary driver of transphobia is closeted trans people. These are heterosexual and cis gender anxieties, and nothing new: straight anxiety around shifting sex-gender norms is very much the history of homosexuality. In her book ‘A Short History of Trans Misogyny’, the historian Jules Gill-Peterson writes how, at the turn of the 20th century “in burgeoning cities of Western Europe and the United States, sexuality and gender had no major distinction from each other.” She quotes the contemporary trans writer Jennie June, who wrote that “Androgynes are murdered every few months in New York merely because of intense hatred of effeminacy instilled by education in the breasts of full-fledged males.” The relationship between trans misogyny and gay bashing is an intimate one without always having clearly delineated borders. The course of that long century that has followed has seen many changes around our readings of sexuality and gender, but the relation between the gay man and his proximity to femininity, both socially and in terms of identity, still lingers in both homophobic and transphobic attitudes.

An anxiety around what the presence of trans and gay people mean for your own sex-gender system, however, is not the same as being closeted. Of course, those anxieties can include a fear of identification. My personal feelings are that sexual desire is much more complicated, changeable and fluid than the identities we might adopt for social recognition. I imagine the number of people, both straight and gay, who have felt sometimes significant erotic or emotional drives that might more accurately be described as “bisexual” or “biromantic” are probably very high. I don’t think being a heterosexual who has considered fucking your own sex, and fantasised about doing it, makes you closeted. There’s no reason to think that Andrew Tate isn’t human like the rest of us, and may have reacted badly to the confusing recurrence of one of his gym bros in his midnight reveries. I just don’t think it follows that this makes him any more closeted than the rest of us, or explains how deeply he has invested in the anxiety as the centre of his ideology.

So what does he mean, then, when he says having a girlfriend in 2025 makes you “gay”? I’m sure Tate hates gay guys quite sincerely, but I think he hates women more, and his use of “gay” is a shorthand for something, to him, much worse than sodomy: proximity to womanhood. When he says that having a girlfriend makes you gay, what he means, at its heart, is that you’re a traitor to masculinity. In this ideology, the liberation of women has reached such an extent that, if you are able to attract and form a lasting relationship with a modern woman, you have fatally compromised in yourself what it means to be a real man. A real man simply would not be able to tolerate the damage that a 2025 relationship with a woman does to one’s psyche. And if you are not a real man, then what are you? Gay, so the theory goes. “Gay” here means exactly what it did in the school playgrounds of mine and Tate’s youth. “Gay” means bad, pathetic, exterior, failed, dissolute, and “gay” means “nearly woman,” too.

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The idea that women are sources of contamination for a solid masculinity has a long, noxious history. Perhaps some of the most similar ideological currents with which we might compare Tate’s belief are to be found in the fascist masculinities that emerged in Europe in the wake of the First World War, where a toxic combination of misogyny, trench-bound camaraderie, PTSD, post-war poverty, antisemitism and anti-communism led to new forms of intense masculinist ideology thriving in the rise of reactionary paramilitary movements, across Europe and especially in Weimar Germany. While this masculinism could trace some of its roots into the Wandervögel culture, a youth group movement that stressed nationalist, martial virtues and a return to nature, it found its most murderous expression in the Freikorps, the reactionary, fascist and neo-monarchist paramilitary organisations that emerged in the aftermath of the war. Within such organisations, women were often seen as at best distractions to the male warrior, and at worst contaminants, whose very presence might destroy the solidarity and brotherhood on which their war against modernity was founded. Hans Blüher, an early Wandervogel pioneer, would later write that “a Wandervogel seen with a girl would have been considered a decline in style, which would have spoiled the entire vagabond spirit in one fell swoop. It was as if the female sex did not exist for this youth; it was not even mentioned.”

The German sociologist Klaus Theweleit, whose book ‘Male Fantasies’ critically explores the sexual and gender attitudes of the Freikorps through their fiction and literature, traces the same currents into the Freikorps, many of whose troops had been Wandervögel. In his examination of how the potentially lethal, choking mud of the trenches became a metaphor for the contaminating, destabilising influence of communists, miscegenists, and modernity, Theweleit writes how, for the nationalist author, soldier and former Wandervogel Ernst Jünger, “representing interests, making compromises, negotiating, reaching goals in roundabout ways, planning for the long run, or taking both sides into account: all these methods are contaminated, at once male and female, in short, mire.” That sounds like a mire, a sloppy, filthy mud bath, but it also sounds like the vital qualities of a healthy adult heterosexual relationship: exactly the thing Tate warns his boys of. Theweleit perhaps put their ideology more succinctly a little later in the book when he stated that, for the men of the Freikorp, “Real men lack nothing when women are lacking.”

Tate’s tweet may lack the punch of Theweleit’s prose, but the meaning is essentially the same. An attitude more similar in tone and temperament to Tate is that of Ernst Röhm, the co-founder and leader of the Nazi Party’s S.A., the Brownshirts, a paramilitary group who became the notorious footsoldiers of streetfighting fascism and antisemitism. In a (perhaps apocryphal) comment on the sexuality of Adolf Hitler, he mocked his boss by saying “when they stand in the fields and bend down at their work so you can see their behinds, that’s what he likes, especially when they’ve got big round ones. That’s Hitler’s sex life.” So Hitler loved women with big asses, and compared to the men-only barrack rooms of his shock troops, you have to admit that’s pretty gay. It’s a joke with a long half-life: in 2011, stand-up comedian Steven Hughes took exception to the idea that gay men aren’t real men, aren’t tough. “They fuck men. That’s hardly gay… ‘yeah, you go and play with your girly tits, you fucking gaylord.’”

I should mention here, as chance would have it, both Blüher and Röhm were homosexuals, although neither would claim such a medicalised identity. But masculinism as an ideology isn’t limited to any sexuality, really. Women can be regarded as degraded sexual subjects, or degraded contaminants of a sexual subject. The point is, for masculinists like Röhm and Tate, women degrade men’s ability to be real men. Tate hates women, and he encourages his boys to hate women, to treat and regard them as not human. But whereas Tate might come from a lineage of fascist masculinists, he has developed and altered the ideological programme.

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For the fascist masculinists, male-only association and the hatred and disgust of women served to strengthen the bond of the male as a soldier, a defender of European and national identity, and build a brotherhood capable of massive, eventually genocidal, violence. For Tate, hatred and disgust of women serves to isolate the young man away from any sense of community or shared bond. Tate’s model man is not the soldier, but the hustler, the entrepreneur. Where Röhm’s men were only to trust their comrades, Tate’s boys must trust no-one but themselves (and him). He is a pioneer of a new, neoliberal form of masculinist identity in which the only value is financial value, and it is through the stripping of communal bonds that power can be won. Fascist masculinists encouraged brotherhood, even a ‘Sacred Band of Thebes’ sexual brotherhood, using womanhood as one of many enemies over which to bond. Tate demands his boys form a brotherhood of one, a lone wolf Freikorps, with the whole world as his enemy, and women as the seductress and contaminator who will ruin his historical mission.

The reason is obvious. Lonely, isolated, fragile males are his customers. One could look deeper into his motivations, but I think the obvious one is the correct one. He doesn’t want his subscribers to form lasting, meaningful, mutual relationships with women, because men in those relationships have no need to subscribe to his schemes and scams. Sometimes more apologetic writers regard Andrew Tate as merely a symptom of a male loneliness epidemic. Perhaps, but more than a symptom, he’s a cause of it. He needs young men to struggle in isolation, and destroying ties of mutual trust and dependence keeps them coming back. That’s where the money is, and Tate is nothing if not a groomer. He knows young straight men want to have sex with women: so he needs to figure out a way they can do that without the dreaded outcome of regarding women as humans. That’s why it makes perfect sense, in his ideology, to depict having a girlfriend as gay, but to use women transactionally as sex objects is hyper-masculine.

Having dragged you all here with a provocative piece of clickbait for a title, I would feel remiss for not at least attempting to answer it. But I can’t. Is Andrew Tate gay? I don’t know, and I don’t care. What’s significant, I think, is that, from a historical perspective, it would be possible for him to be gay and a violent masculinist without contradiction, and we gay people should bear that in mind. What matters is that, to quote Forster, we connect, only connect. “Live in fragments no longer. Only connect and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”

But the more significant question is “what is to be done?” Whenever I hear Tate’s name, it’s usually accompanied by a whole host of well-meaning questions about which models of masculinity are positive ones for the sort of young men Tate is currently grooming. I know the sort of men I would want — for me, John Berger has long embodied a way of being a man in the world, as well as a thinker and writer, whom I would hope to emulate — and the sort of men other people suggest that seem to work to me — Anthony Bourdain gets mentioned a lot. But I am a faggot, a gay man, the sort of man these boys are actively trying to not become, so my opinion is worse than meaningless. But perhaps if we look at the attributes Tate is trying to suppress in his boys when he says “having a girlfriend is gay,” we might find some answers. Tate thrives when his boys don’t experience the opportunity for mutuality, for responsibility, for obligations towards others, for sitting with the discomfort of being different or disagreed with, for taking the world as it comes. Are those actually essentially “masculine” or male traits? Absolutely not, but at this stage, I’m OK with pretending they are if it encourages young men to adopt them and aspire to them. I know I should aspire to them more, and sometimes I am found lacking.

Tate has only found such fertile ground because his ideology shares a huge chunk of its worldview with a wider neoliberal worldview in which obligations towards others are seen as oppressive, and maximising and asserting your rights to individual self-realisation, even at the expense of others, is seen as a real virtue. That’s one reason why today we have a manosphere, but not a Freikorps. Tate can slot his own masculinist, violent, women-hating ideology into this landscape because the ground has already been prepared for it with young men. If we are honest, this is a worldview that exists across society, regardless of political persuasion, and seeps into our brain with every algorithmic scroll. We are in the mire, without any easy answers, which I think makes it all the more important not to trust those who claim they exist.

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Alain Delon as Tom Ripley in “Plein Soleil”, the first adaptation of “The Talented Mr Ripley”

There’s a rich vein of trash culture that gives you a sick old thrill from looking directly at the grotesque and the horrifying, and having a little laugh at it. It gets called, sometimes, “bad taste” - stuff like the films of John Waters, where we get to watch Divine chow down on dog shite, or many of the genres of exploitation movies from the 70s on, such as “Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS,” in which a Nazi concentration camp serves as the scene for a gory BDSM orgy. ‘Bad taste’ suggests it’s an issue merely of breaching social etiquette for shock value, and while that’s fine (at least for me, a fan of Waters), it doesn’t quite cover it. There’s a perverse pleasure in seeing others disturbed, but there’s a separate form of horror in being disturbed oneself, a form of horror which often evades the censors because it needs to walk a fine line that schlock can boldly stamp over, one that puts the emphasis not on visual shock, but on the quiet, quotidian discomfort of looking at the world as it really is. It’s the difference, crudely put, between, say, witnessing a public hanging, and choosing to lift a coffin lid in a funeral home. The splash of blood from the scaffold might, in the end, be less disturbing than the creak of the floorboard as you get caught in the act.

I suppose this sensation of nascent horror is a combination of suspense and thrill, and the American writer Patricia Highsmith was an aficionado of it. There are few car chases or axe murderers in her novels (although not none), and action takes a back seat to a sense that it might happen, carefully laid out until you’re certain it will but what it is is unclear. In the process, space emerges in which really disturbing things emerge, disturbing because, unlike the deranged axe murderer, these are things you will recognise from your own life. Those possessed of an amoral and indefatigable self-esteem, willing to seduce you then steamroll you without compunction; those willing to cheat, or lie, or plot; or even situations, such as being accused of acts you didn’t commit, but perhaps considered, and have no alibi for. I wonder, when people read “The Talented Mr Ripley”, whether they identify more with Dicky Greenleaf, someone whose graceless generosity is exploited by a sociopath, or with the sociopath, Tom Ripley, always feeling like an unwelcome outsider yet desperate to achieve a lifestyle he has briefly tasted.

Personally, I’m a Tom, not a Dicky, although I have never beaten anyone to death, as of yet. But I recognise that sense of being an unwelcome guest, someone for whom luxuries and hospitality, offered as a formality, are too gratefully received, and who outstays his welcome. I suspect that Patricia was a Tom too, although for different reasons: she, rather, was an outsider who understood the power of passing and the dangers of being exposed. What we’re talking about here is an anxiety about belonging, and that strange sensation of being a cuckoo in someone else’s nest.

When I was twenty, I spent a summer working in the south of France. The idea of a twenty year old lad taking a summer in a foreign country might conjure real Greenleaf vibes; after all, at that age young men can be so full of bravado, yet so clueless to consequences, that adventure is almost inevitable. That wasn’t me; I was, in retrospect, locked in a debilitating depression. Knowing I could neither go home nor stay in the student flat I shared, I volunteered to work on a farm as part of the WWOOF scheme. I emailed somewhere that looked likely, booked my train, and headed off with my backpack. I landed into the middle of somebody else’s trauma. The woman I was staying with wasn’t unkind per se, but was unpredictable and, at times, a little scary. The “farm” was really the garden of her newly finished straw-bale house, and the work was less farmwork than landscaping, digging holes, building walls and moving earth. I was a long way from anywhere, physically and emotionally, and didn’t really realise the nature of the situation I was in. She, meanwhile, resented my presence, and for a difficult month or so I tried to navigate her temper while sustaining a decent relationship with her, my only source of food or shelter. Eventually I met a guy in a pizza restaurant one night who needed help mucking out his horses on his summer break. I stayed in his childhood bedroom, fitting in with the discipline of his parents home, his father a former gendarme who had served in French Indochina and still ran his home like a colonial barracks. Breakfast was on the table at 6:30am. If you weren’t sitting down at that time exactly, you weren’t fed.

Me, aged 20, pre-twink death

It was bliss after the tempestuous home of my original host. You knew the rules, and if you obeyed them, the dining room table was draped with fillets of beef, confit duck, braised vegetables, litres of homemade wine, and friendly, welcoming smiles. There was no anxiety, because there was no unpredictability; you rose early, worked hard, and had a cold beer when you came through the door. The strictness of the routine matched, and allowed for, a genuine hospitality, freely given. My host, Eric, treated me like a kid brother, keeping labour to the minimum and teaching me how to ride a horse. One Sunday morning we rose early and took out two horses; reaching the high-rises of the banlieue on the outskirts of a nearby town, we found a long, straight road, devoid of cars, its residents only just awakening and opening their windows. He asked me if I wanted to race; without a chance to answer, he slapped the back of my horse, sending her into a canter. He was soon level with me, laughing at my response: a terror giving way to pure exhilaration. I can still remember it, two decades later, as though it were yesterday, the sound of clattering hooves ricocheting from the surrounding high-rise apartments, their inhabitants watching bleary-eyed as two men on their horses bound through the town in the first morning sun. When we returned to his parent’s home at lunchtime, his father, the commandant, was waiting on the doorstep with a glass of wine which he handed to me still in the saddle. Refreshed, we took off again into the woods. Come to think of it, that summer wasn’t all bad.

I was reminded of that strange, touching, impotent summer recently when I read “The Talented Ms. Highsmith,” a wonderfully evocative essay in the Yale Review by Elena Gosalvez Blanco about a few months in her life when, also aged twenty, she lived in the home of Patricia Highsmith as she worked on her final novel, “Small g: A Summer Idyll”. In her telling, which fits with almost everything else I’ve read about the author, it sounds absolutely awful. “Christ,” I thought, reading her account of Highsmith’s unpleasant little idiosyncrasies, her tight-fisted penny-pinching, her refusal to be kind when there was an opportunity to be rude, “what an asshole!”

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‘I tell ya, if it’s sex you’re after, get a load of the stuff I’m wearing.’ In a 1994 episode of the BBC teen drama Byker Grove, Gary Hendrix is talking about getting girls. He invites his fresh-faced friend Noddy Fishwick to smell his aftershave as they sit in a cinema, waiting for the film to begin. ‘Well, go on then,’ Noddy says. He leans in, pauses for a second, then kisses Gary on the cheek. A slow-dawning horror spreads across Gary’s face; the kiss, the intimacy, the arm around his shoulder – it’s not what he had in mind at all. There’s a moment where it seems he might just brush it under the carpet, but soon a panic sets in. He quickly gets to his feet and heads for the aisle. ‘You just stay away from us yer hear?’ he warns Noddy. ‘Yer sick man, sick. Sick! Sick I tell yer!’ His words reverberated around the cinema and, for young gay viewers, around the head: in the general atmosphere of homophobia in the UK in the early 1990s, such a response seemed almost inevitable.

Heartstopper, originally a graphic novel written and illustrated by Alice Oseman and now a popular Netflix series, couldn’t be further from the Northern working-class realism of Byker Grove. Set among a group of middle-class grammar school pupils in the Home Counties, the book and show have won plaudits for representing young gay love without the drama – no tortured self-doubt, no violent rejection of advances, no social ostracism. Charlie Spring (played in the Netflix adaptation by Joe Locke) is a boy in Year 10 who was accidentally outed the year before. His life revolves mainly around his friendship group of other artsy teenagers – misfits, but not outcasts – including Tao, a cinephile; Tara and Darcy, a bright and easy-going lesbian couple; and Elle, an emotionally intelligent painter who has recently moved to the local girls’ grammar school following her transition.

By chance, Charlie is assigned a seat next to Nick Nelson (Kit Connor), an athletic boy in Year 11 who encapsulates everything Charlie is not. While Charlie eats his lunch in the art block to avoid bullies, Nick is the boisterous, charming star of the rugby team. Charlie is slim and dark-haired, Nick is muscular and fair. And yet, wouldn’t you know it, between this unlikely pair the spark of romance ignites. What little drama there is comes early on. Charlie already has a sort-of boyfriend, Ben (Sebastian Croft), who is dating a girl yet keeps trying to kiss him in quiet library corners, by force if necessary. In public, however, Ben distances himself from Charlie. Charlie begins to fall for Nick when, catching Ben attempting to kiss him without his consent, Nick intervenes. As they become closer, Nick realises that his feelings for Charlie are more than friendly, and eventually they kiss at a 16th birthday party.

Charlie as represented by Joe Locke in the Netflix adaptation, and in the original novel

After some brief googling, Nick comes out as bisexual. He and Charlie get together; their friends are cool, their parents are supportive, and some of their teachers are also gay. Drama safely navigated by the end of Volume Two (2019), the subsequent books trace the quotidian delights of their relationship: reassuring each other, hugging a lot and kissing occasionally, negotiating trauma, discussing their mental health, listening to each other’s needs, validating each other’s self-worth and never, ever masturbating. You know, the stuff teenage boys do.

In fact, actual sex, sloppy and scary, is almost totally absent. When it does appear, it exists exclusively as a function of romance, a thing you finally do to ‘take your love to the next level.’ This omission might be the key to understanding the make-up of Heartstopper’s audience, for whom the absence of realistic teenage male sexuality is precisely what makes it so attractive. It originated as a webtoon, a serialised online comic designed to be read on a phone, and still premieres for free on Oseman’s Tumblr and webtoon pages. The many tens of thousands of comments on the webtoon give some insight into just what attracts fans to the story. ‘As a sex repulsed asexual person I love how this is shown, it’s not sexualising them for the audience, this is just for them,’ a commenter writes under a scene where, in Volume Five (2023), Charlie and Nick finally have sex, depicted through clasped hands, stars and a cut scene to photos of the boys on the bedroom wall. ‘This scene is so beautiful to me,’ reads another comment. ‘They aren’t fetishised and nothing is shown, just a simple hand squeeze to reflect such an intimate moment of love between two young boys.’

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Yet even this discreet sex scene, built after years of romance and rehearsed affirmations of consent, is too much for some. One reader thinks that ‘something has just felt off for awhile now since they’ve started going further with their relationship. everyone’s like “AYY IT HAPPENED” but it feels off to me.’ Another comment hints at a sense of betrayal: “no cuz this is one of the very few comics that i dont spend the entire time waitinb for the smut. i dont feel like i need to see them have sex lol. i dont even know if i wang to see them have sex. they r my adorable wholesome little guys and i love them.” For a book about two homosexuals, a vague sense of disgust for actual homosex – smut! heaven forfend! – lingers both among its fans and in the text itself. ‘I just wanna say I appreciate the author so much for not fetishising gay men,’ another reader writes. What does fetishing mean in this context? Acknowledging that homosexuality is built primarily on man-on-man sexual desire? Sorry, but it is: the clue is in the name.

Kit Connor and Joe Locke as Nick and Charlie

Clearly for some fans the ‘sex’ part of ‘homosexual’ is the problem, and this echoes within the books themselves. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that Ben, the only male character who is attracted to men because he finds them sexually desirable rather than lovable, is also depicted as a manipulative predator who sexually assaults Charlie. Nor is it insignificant that the assault is interrupted by Nick, who at this point is still outwardly straight. Sex gets a bad rap in Heartstopper, but romance – and a particularly gendered form of romance, based on old-fashioned models of power and care – is everywhere. Charlie and Nick betray a crude homosexual dimorphism, to coin a phrase, that doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to recognise as gendered when read within the frame of more reactionary romance novels. Charlie is frail and weak, a classic English rose, his relationship with his body complicated by an eating disorder and an unwillingness to be seen naked. He suffers from poor mental health and sometimes self-harms. Nick arrives as a white knight, a man to save him from himself; Charlie stands on his tiptoes to kiss him, and steals his sweatshirts, and relies on him as a protector. Nick speaks for Charlie in public and looks after him when he’s drunk too much. It’s only once Charlie is under Nick’s protective shield that his creativity and sensitivity are allowed to flourish. It’s only once Nick encounters Charlie’s gentle, admiring openness that he is able to drop his machismo and embrace his affectionate side. Ideologically speaking, it’s borderline tradwife.

In this respect Charlie bears a more than passing resemblance to the protagonist of another recent bestseller about young gay men that wasn’t written by a gay man, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015). Like Charlie, Jude St Francis is a gay man rescued from abuse at the hands of predatory gay men by the unpushy affections of a newly minted bisexual, Willem, a bisexual unsullied and untroubled by any prior experience of homosexual touch. Like Charlie, all of Jude’s trauma is written into the past of the narrative, a lingering trace of homo-hypersexuality that haunts as self-harm and mental illness and threatens to undermine the idyll of comfort and wealth provided by the masculine bisexual man in the present. (Not only does Heartstopper distance trauma through flashbacks, but even the internal dilemmas and motivations of the here-and-now have their own handy literary device, being shown through the typing then deleting of instagram messages, rather than living implicit in the character’s behaviours and responses.) In her review of A Little Life for Vulture, critic Andrea Long Chu suggests that Yanagihara gives an impression of being “somewhere high above with a magnifying glass, burning her beautiful boys like ants.” The author betrays a touristic interest in gay men, while also treating them as “perfect patients,” recipients of both her virtuosic cruelty and her “maternal posture of excessive protectiveness.” Oseman and her readers seem to nurse Charlie too, and hopefully not let him fuck.

Antoni Porowski, the eating man’s himbo, in his A Little Life/Experimental Jetset mashup t-shirt

Proust, in what Edmund White has identified as the ‘Albertine strategy’, placed a fictional female character in a relationship with his narrator as a way of depicting his own real-life relationship with a man (his chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli). For much of her audience Oseman appears to be doing the reverse, using a loving, consensual gay romance as a stand-in for a dreamed-of heterosexual relationship in which a young female reader might not be objectified, coerced and degraded, but cared for and regarded as an equal. Of course, Oseman could have tried to represent that in a teenage male-female relationship, but some things are just too far out of the realms of believability. For Heartstopper’s readers, gay men are useful avatars for an approachable, unthreatening maleness right up to the point where they display sexual desire detached from love, at which point they become men again, but worse. In its relentless urge to save the ideal of homosexuality from the dreaded hypersexuality of actually-existing homosexuals, Heartstopper might just as easily be titled A Little Life For Teens.

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In theory, young adult fiction is written for readers aged between twelve and eighteen, but studies have found that three quarters are in fact adults, and more than a quarter are over the age of 28. The audience for Heartstopper on Netflix seems to be broadly similar: one study found that 71 per cent of its viewers are female, and a quarter are women aged 18-29. These women have been raised in a world that is often hostile to their desires and aggressive in pursuit of their bodies. They have come of age in the era of sexting, deepfakes, revenge porn and the ascendancy of Andrew Tate and the “manosphere”. One can hardly blame them if, in navigating their own wishes for love and affection, they find comfort in an idealised story in which, for once, they are mercifully not represented. Yet the idealism that makes Heartstopper so attractive to its fans is also what lets it down. It’s heavy on what proper moral behaviour should be, how a Good Queer should behave, and rather light on what to do when messy reality intrudes. How is a young gay man supposed to react when his first bisexual, rugby-playing boyfriend isn’t accommodating of his emotions, or when he finds that other teenagers don’t have deep reservoirs of compassion? Its idealism leaves one with the lingering sense that you’re reading a conduct book, that genre of 18th and 19th century literature that provided young men and women with moral education as to the proper way to behave in society, or perhaps a “mirror for princes,” books that offered young mediaeval aristocrats guidance for proper courtly and kingly conduct. It’s not a reflection of how life is, but how it ought to be, so take note.

Sebastian Croft as Ben Hope

Heartstopper has a very different pedagogical function to Byker Grove, which recognised that teen drama could fulfill the Reithian imperative to educate as well as entertain on issues where schools and parents might fear to tread. Noddy’s kiss, the first gay kiss shown on children’s TV in the UK, was no exception: in addressing both his own sense of confusion and the homophobia he would experience when he confided in his friends, the storyline provided young gay viewers in the Section 28 era with a framework for understanding not only their own sexuality, but the emotions and responses of their peers. It showed teenagers learning, changing their behaviour and maturing into adults.

Of course, depictions of queer life need not be miserable, but the idealism on which Heartstopper is built feels curiously narcissistic. Conflict, unethical behaviour, cruelty and unkindness are things we all do and are all subject to. But Heartstopper belongs to a different political-cultural moment, where a crude concept of ‘representation’ is a moral and aesthetic good in its own right (never mind that literature is one field where white gay men have hardly been underrepresented). When it comes to queerness, “representation” often means “an image of myself I’m comfortable seeing”, and anything else is a compounded oppression. It was described in the Gay Times as “the queer graphic novel we wished we had at high school” and has won its plaudits precisely for its idealistic representation of gay teens. But it’s an idealism that has confused representation for endorsement to the point where even heavily signposting inappropriate behaviour is not enough; good queer characters must remain unblemished innocents who don’t do bad things, and bad characters must remain alien. Despite these signposts towards his innate evil, to my mind Ben remains the most engaging character, despite his abusive treatment of Charlie, because he is the one who feels most intensely the abjection thrust upon teenage boys who desire other teenage boys. He’s driven to cruelty as a way to distance himself from the tarnishing brush of homosexuality. He wants, he desires, but existing in a world that stigmatises those desires makes him cold, anxious and secretive. That’s a real reflection of a complex inner conflict. There’s little empathy in Heartstopper for such a character, only more judgement.

If Heartstopper’s teenage audience require any moral lessons from their literature, it’s surely not that they must emulate these models of queer moral perfection in order to be loved and cared about. It’s hard enough navigating new emotions and desires as a teenager without the fear of perdition for getting something wrong. For its adult readers, it seems to flatter us with a sense that victimhood is a moral good in its own right, regardless of what you do with it. It’s a curiously teenage attitude for adults to take: in reality, while our mistakes and insecurities don’t condemn us forever, neither do our experiences of oppression sanctify us.

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If you’d like to read more of my work, please do subscribe to this newsletter. It’s been going for five years, so there are hundreds of essays to read. Paid subscribers get access to the whole archive, and subscribing to independent substacks helps writers like me not just produce essays like this one, but realise larger projects like new books (*cough cough*). Why not start with this one, about The Funeral of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II as seen from the vantage of a Gay Sauna in London?

I’m waiting on an Amazon package. It said it would be here by 2, but it’s gone 3 and nothing’s come yet, only a flyer for Toni’s Pizza Place and an election leaflet for UKIP. I saw that one come in, some crotchety old sod who rang the doorbell but hardly waited for me to answer it. Not that I would of. Probably saw me through the window. Anyway he scutt…

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“Hello. My name’s Oscar. I’m an accountant in Scranton, Pennsylvania and I’m gay. And I’m here to tell you that yes - it does get better.” What a rush of memories and feelings. It’s 2010 and social media is an exciting possibility, a new force for good. Its opportunities seem endless as we connect to lost friends and new friends across the world. New social networks are emerging, offering novel pathways for self-expression and connection. Obama is president. Aaron Sorkin is writing a film about Facebook. You might be forgiven for asking “how could it possibly get better than this?”

Oscar wasn’t a real person. He was a character in the NBC sitcom The Office, a mockumentary that traced the work lives of an ordinary bunch of middle and working class Americans employed at a paper supply company in Scranton. The show ran from 2005-2013, yet remains popular over a decade later thanks both to its solid performances, its cosy warmth and now, presumably, due to nostalgia, including a nostalgia for a different age of social media. It’s a curious time capsule from an era of online fads, of participation, of instant microcelebrity: planking, group lip dubs, “balloon boy” and baby otter videos all make an appearance, alongside Oscar’s It Gets Better video.

It Gets Better was a viral video campaign that began in 2010 following on the death by suicide of a number of young people who were either LGBTQ, or assumed to be, and were bullied on that basis. Its instigator was the US journalist and pundit Dan Savage, and in his long-running syndicated column Savage Love he encouraged his readers to submit their own videos to YouTube where they offer hope to queer teens by letting them know that while their life in the suburbs, or in homophobic families, or in rural schools full of bullies, might suck right now, hang on in there buddy, because it gets better. Rewatching The Office recently, I recalled how prominent the campaign was, and my own mixed feelings about it at the time. It also occurred to me how much has changed since then: the idea of a popular social media campaign of queer adult strangers reaching out directly to queer youth seems like a paranoid right-wing fever dream today. Fifteen years after the original campaign, we might well ask ourselves: did it even get better?

I mentioned my own mixed feelings to the original campaign. I was in my mid-20s at the time, and so angry, in that confused way where unpicking the personal and political was impossible, and probably unnecessary. It didn’t seem to me like it got better at all; homophobia was deep-baked into society, and, despite having been out for the best part of a decade, I still found my own sexual desires confusing, frustrating, hard to manifest in a way that seemed right or even enjoyable. Add to this coming of age in the midst of a global financial crisis, encumbered by debt and precarious employment, and being on the feeling of smug lectures from well-off liberals seemed like a particularly complacent poke in the eye. What were they trying to say?

The videos produced by supporters of the campaign were designed to offer hope. People appeared on screen to tell their own stories of teenage bullying, isolation and even suicidal ideation, and how much their lives had changed since. I escaped, they said, I moved to a city, I have a gorgeous apartment, a gorgeous boyfriend, gorgeous friends, a gorgeous life, and you will too, if only you can learn to suffer, to endure.

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I felt strongly that they had it all mixed up. Surely young LGBTQ people suffering from abuse, homophobia and ostracisation needed to be told something more than hang on in there, as though it was a tough week at work and still only Wednesday. Homophobia and transphobia was not merely a rite of passage of teen bullying, but a social crisis, a political crisis, and one that we ourselves had lived through. Couldn’t we remember how it felt to be a gay teen? If anything, there was a sense that perhaps, with social media, it was getting worse, with increased visibility for queer people in the media counterintuitively also providing increased exposure for teens. Sometimes, when you’re a queer teen, the last thing you want is to be seen, for who you are to be the subject of attention. Was this all we had to offer our young counterparts -- the deferral of freedom, of self-expression?

What’s more, its focus on teen bullying as a phase to be endured seemed to limit homophobia to other teens. True, you will eventually leave school, but absent some tough and enduring schism, families are often for life, while, as The Office frequently joked, anti-gay bullying and the eternal closet continue to plague us throughout our life. The character of Oscar is closeted for a number of seasons before being outed against his will by Michael, forcibly kissed without his consent, and then the frequent subject of homophobic jokes or remarks from other characters, even if not the butt of the joke for the show’s writers. It Gets Better seemed to me, at the time, the worst of liberal complacency, and one that further alienated queer youth from support. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” it seemed to say, “you’ll grow out of it.”

Anyway, who’s to say it would get better? One of the hallmarks of teen bullying is its persistent legacy throughout life. Its effects can endure long into adulthood. Future low self-esteem, depression and other mental health issues, compulsive and harmful drug use, and poor educational and health outcomes can all result from teenage homophobic bullying. When I think back to my own teenage years, in which homophobic bullying and violence were not just frequent, but my abiding experience of school in general, is that, while it was miserable, I was driven by some sort of internal will to survive it. I laughed off bullies, I punched back occasionally, and I nursed a sense that there was something more for me, even if I had no idea what it was. Just…others. Others like me. It was only when I did escape that the survival mechanisms of that moment started to pile up on me; depression, self-hatred and suicidal ideation were the 20s dividends of my teenage strategies. Of course, these manifestations were multi-causal, but homophobia was high up there in the maladjustment sweepstakes, and I didn’t want to adjust, or expect gay teens to adjust, to their causes.

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Everything in It Gets Better seemed ill-aligned. Not only was there an expectation that the youth simply need to endure their own persecution, but also that queerness possessed some sort of internal logic of exile, of escape. It simply wasn’t possible to imagine that one could flourish where you were, or to imagine that you could make where you were tolerable, welcoming, loving. The hostility of your environment wouldn’t change, but in time you could move to another environment. I’ve long been fascinated by this story, and the more I’ve thought about it, the more it appears as a driving motor of queer culture, almost the original gay fairytale, complete with handsome prince. To discover your true self, good or bad, you must leave the place that made you. It’s there in David, the American protagonist in Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room whose sexuality in New York manifests as a bully, but in Paris as passion. It’s there in Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, where Therese and Carol can only realise their desire on the road (and it’s there in the Ripliad too, in its way). It’s there in City of Night, it’s there in The Beautiful Room is Empty, it’s there in Brokeback Mountain, it’s there in Rubyfruit Jungle. It’s there in the Bronski Beat song Smalltown Boy: “You leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case / Alone on a platform, the wind and the rain on a sad and lonely face / Mother will never understand why you had to leave / But the answers you seek will never be found at home / The love that you need will never be found at home.” Hope and home are incompatible.

This is where we get to the hard nub of the problem, the sort of conversation I wasn’t willing to have with myself in 2010. Exile and escape is a queer trope that never goes out of fashion not just because it makes for a compelling narrative, but also because it is true, and it manifests as a shared cultural, communal experience. We can set as our aim the erasure of bigotry from society, but you might as well be offering the moon on a stick when what people need in the moment is hope. A personal hope, too, the hope of escape. God knows, I should have known that, because the hope of escape was what got me through my teens, even if I wished that the people around me might change.

In reality, the history of homosexuality and queerness and its relationship with a wider society is not the steady accretion of rights and tolerations in which LGBTQ people have asserted their rights and received their rewards, but rather a series of moral panics from within the heart of the sex-gender system. It’s within these moral panics that we’ve come to understand who we might be, and who else might be with us, and in pushing to escape them those ideas have spread across society. By their nature, cycles of moral panics means things might get better, only to get worse again. We can see that in the current moment, as LGBTQ people, and especially trans people, are high-stakes chips in the culture war. Politically speaking, 2010 may well have attained the sheen of the good old days. While Oscar is victim of homophobia, it’s mostly ignorance rather than malice, while it would be impossible to imagine a credible version of The Office made today where Dwight wasn’t, in some shape or form, an explicit alt-right fascist. On a macro scale, It Gets Better simply isn’t true, and anyone who has seen anything must be tired of such a trite, whiggish interpretation of the world.

But perhaps that’s exactly why the promise of hope is so important. When you’re in a moment of crisis, you can’t rely upon changing everything in order to change something, and happiness is still attainable in a cruel world. And when we need hope, we actively think about the kind of environment we do want to live in. Who will we share our lives with? How will we conduct our friendships? Where will we party? Who will we fuck? What will our home look like, and who will it welcome? Personal hope is a world-building exercise, a stimulation not just of the imagination, but of our ethics and values, our political worldview, and our aesthetic sensibilities. As adults we have a responsibility to safeguard and educate the young, whether we are related to them or, perhaps especially, if we are not. But where that is not possible, we can do a lot worse than encouraging them to hope, to build in their mind an idea of who they do want to be.

In my focus on systemic political change, I think I underestimated something very important: that endurance and resilience might be human, queer characteristics worth cultivating, for they bear unexpected fruits even when things get worse. Even when you escape, your problems hound you. You make loving relationships, only to see them breakdown irreparably, in confusion, in pain. You make close friends, eat dinner with them, laugh with them, get drunk with them, and then they die, and you’re without them. You find a beautiful apartment, and you paint the walls and move the furniture, and then you’re evicted. You sober up, then fall off the wagon. You get a new job, and have to come out again, and discover your boss is an arsehole. You write a book, and nobody reads it, play a gig, and nobody comes. But you learned resilience early, and you get back on the horse, and you love again, different this time. So does it get better? Well, it gets different. And sometimes, that’s enough.

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Auca del noi català, antifeixista i humà, an antifascist children’s book written in Catalan, Spanish, English and French, published by the Second Republic during the Civil War.

“Never give the client the raw data” is a golden rule for anyone dealing with customer feedback in marketing. Clients are notoriously touchy — and the same goes for writers. Presented with 100 reviews, 99 of them glowing — “your product changed my life, my world has been improved immeasurably by your words, I only wish you could bear my children and redecorate my home” — the client/writer will head like an exocet for the sole bad review. “Perhaps I wasn’t in the right headspace, but I didn’t enjoy this”. Why? Why didn’t they enjoy this? the client or writer will ask. Before long they’ve redesigned their product, re-edited their piece, or, worst of all, tried to contact the hater. It’s an immutable law, a human characteristic, not to always look for the pattern, but sometimes for the anomaly. I’m as guilty as anyone for this habit, and try to limit my exposure to reviews, particularly on “social cataloging applications” like Goodreads or Letterboxd. That way, madness lies.

Wednesday was St George’s Day, the day of the patron saint of both England, where I was born, and Catalonia, where I live, and where he is known as Sant Jordi. It’s a day beloved by nationalists in both places, although those nationalisms are markedly different in their tones. Personally, neither appeals to me, but I do love Sant Jordi. More a festival than a holiday (it’s still a working day), people celebrate by buying their lovers, spouses and even family or friends roses and books. It’s the most important day of the year for publishers, making up about 10% of their annual turnover on a single day. On the streets, people bring out tables adorned with the Senyera and sell second hand books and roses to raise money for their local associació, ateneu, school trip or trade union. What’s not to love about love, about streets full of people clutching books and roses for their girlfriends and boyfriends, about people clutching books and roses from their girlfriends and boyfriends and beaming from it.

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A postcard from Dreamland, sent to me by a friend, years ago.

Dreamland is not a place for the casual traveller. When I was around 20, I began to have a recurring dream. I was in the English countryside, on a warm summer’s day. The trees were in full leaf, the flowers in full bloom, and only a few soft clouds gathered, not to threaten rain, but as a canvas for the sun to demonstrate its crisp illumination. The landscape was that of my childhood, with fields of gently rolling pasture bordered by drystone walls, and where they met, a little copse of broadleaf deciduous here and there, a farmhouse, a church, a gathering of cattle around a feeder in the middle of the field. Finding myself in Dreamland on such a beautiful day was a joy, an almost cartoonish joy, not least because, at that age, I had rarely dreamed at all for almost five years.

By the time I was 15, I had gotten in the habit of sleeping with the radio on. I lived in a small bungalow and my mother was sleeping in the room next to mine. She was ill, very ill by this point, and from her bedroom came the gurgles and beeps of various machines the doctors had brought to try to extend her life. The sound of them interacting with her body was an ever-present reminder of the fact that, slowly but very surely, she was in the process of dying. The radio blotted it out, but perhaps blotted out the dreams. By the time I was 20 she had been dead four years, and I was still in the habit of blotting it out, and still not dreaming. Dreams were welcome and rare.

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Knock Knock, Who’s There?

The first knock at the door came when he was making a cup of tea. On the little two-ring gas stove that sat wedged, ill-fitting, into the old Victorian fireplace, the whistle of the kettle rattled in the spout, a sure fire sign that it was about to release its ear-splitting roar. The knock gave Robert a start. Not now, he thought. The kettle is about to boil. He turned off the hob and went to the window. Looking out of his flat, everything had the appearance of normality. His street was as still and flat as a tarn on a quiet day. The sky was grey. In the houses across the road, the sparkling white nets were crisp and pressed and unmoving. A gentleman in a battered mac waited patiently for his dog to relieve himself on one of the trees. The belisha beacon blinked. All was well with the world. The urge to draw across his curtains was almost too strong, even though it was only 9:30. Two hours seemed like a long enough day for Robert. Still, he resisted, and peered down to the porch. Strange, nobody at the door, but he could have sworn he had heard the bell ring. Perhaps Mrs Postlethwaite downstairs had got to it. No, it’s Wednesday morning, she’ll be at the WI setting up. He rubbed his eyes. He was expecting something. Back at the stove, he struck another long match and held it to the hob, waiting for the pop.

With the tea brewing, he went to the back of the flat. There was the lovely old mirror that had been left here by the last occupant when he moved in, five years ago. He could afford a nicer place, what with the success he’d enjoyed in the past decade or two, but why bother, he thought? Better to save up a few bob, just in case. He adjusted his tie, then took a good look into his own eyes. Good lord. Had he always looked like this? He put his fingers to his face, and pulled down the sagging skin beneath his eyes. Not even a hangover, really. Yet still, all the regret one might have expected had he been hungover. He noticed in the mirror’s frame the first tell-tale signs of woodworm. It would have to be thrown out too, along with the rest of the stuff left by the previous tenant, Mr Tavener. He had discarded the bed as soon as he’d moved in. It had been in perfect working order. In fact, it was more comfortable than the new one he’d bought, from that little showroom up on the Finchley Road. He could have gotten a better one, the salesman had told him, but it would have taken a week or two to be delivered. That was too long; he didn’t want to spend a single night in a dead man’s bed. A deathbed, in fact. New mattress or not, the thought of Tavener laying in it, a bottle of pills strewn across the floor, choking on his own vomit: that was too much.

Perhaps if it had been a stranger, it would have been different, but he had known Tavener. Not well, but enough. He had first seen him on stage at the Prince of Wales, at some point in the twenties. He had been handsome then, in his way, but off-stage and out-of-character he was the sort of presence that, in a bad mood, would have Robert leave a club he had just walked into. A quean, a sex-case, a pain in the arse. And he hadn’t aged well. He bumped into him once during the Blitz, just after the all-clear had sounded and close to midnight, on Of Alley, just off the Charing Cross. He was skulking out of the lavvies with a grin like the Cheshire Cat, and that lascivious grin, with the cream no doubt, was enough to take the shine off Robert’s plan. They didn’t acknowledge each other. It struck him that to other men, young men perhaps, he might look the same. He paused for a moment at the door and out walked a man buttoning up his flies. It looked enormous, but even that couldn’t put him back in the mood, and with that, he walked straight past the gents and caught the bus home. It was grotesque, and quite right too, Tavener indeed the flat unraised spirit that had dared on this unworthy scaffold to bring forth so great an object. There wasn’t much he could thank his mother for, but he was grateful for the shame at least. Otherwise he too might be a powdered poof on his way to the Crem. Had he turned off the hob? Poor Tavener.

It couldn’t be a hangover. He had had a couple of sherries in the green room last night, and a pint of mild after the show, but nonetheless he felt like death. There was a scratch he couldn’t itch at the back of his mind; almost like he had forgotten something, and the thing he had forgotten was dreadful. Such moods were terrible, much worse than the abject misery he had felt as a younger man. Back in the kitchenette, he poured the tea, added a drop of milk and two teaspoons of sugar. That’s when the knock came - was it a knock? He left his tea and scuttled back into the living room. A red double decker idled at the bus stop a few doors down, but nobody was at his door. A prank, or a visitation? He was expecting a knock, but then, if one could say anything for Robert, it was the extent of his prodigious imagination. That seemed to be the consensus last night, at the small reception following his reading at the Conway Hall. Robert, where do you get your ideas from? Such a prodigious imagination! They would say, and he would nod generously, as though he appreciated adulation. But really, what a question - from where do I get my ideas? Reading! Education! Contemplation of the little iniquities and cruelties of this world, considered and processed and encapsulated in narrative form, as contemporary fables fit for a world still riven and half insane with the modern delusion of collectivism, with stupidity, with conformity, with socialism, national or international or otherwise! An independent spirit lit some fifty years ago and stubbornly refusing to be extinguished by the adoration of you, my audience! But even that, even that, would not be true. My stories, he thought, are little more than earworms, the page simply a good place to kill them.

He wondered whether the knock would be firm or soft. A soft knock might announce the telegram he had been forewarned of, the official invitation to the Palace. A hard knock could be something more fearful, although perhaps just as humiliating and public. The public, he thought, a wretched sphere, crammed within this wooden O, affrighting the air at Marylebone tube. His success was no succour to him. He enjoyed the dark days, before it had arrived. He thought less of his readers for their enjoyment of his little stories, which we far below what his talent might well have delivered. And he thought less still of his stories, knowing they were so enjoyed by the man on the Clapham Omnibus. His imagination brought him little but misery. His fantasies led him to dangerous places, and more dangerous they would become once his name was in the paper, perhaps a small photo of his holding up his gong to the camera. No, he preferred the darker days, before the war, when no-one felt the need to knock upon his door. The war even, when the only alert he need worry for was the air-raid siren, when people were too busy minding their own damned business to care a jot for him and his.

Last night, after the reception, he had stopped off at a small lavatory near the top of Carnaby Street. It was a Tuesday night, quiet but for a rather peculiar looking national serviceman smoking foul smelling hand rolled cigarettes around the entrance, all teeth and ears. He knew it was a silly risk. The soldier, loitering, would attract all the wrong sort of attention. But he wanted to get the taste of his audience out of his mouth, the rather sickly sherry, the compliments, the nudges and winks from the people, from his publishers who had been given the prior warning of his upcoming honour. He didn’t want honour, didn’t want plaudits. What he wanted, he might find against the cool ceramic, in a place dark enough that he could barely make out his hand before his face, two of the three lightbulbs having been broken by his fellow criminals to add a little atmosphere to proceedings, to obscure the facts. That dark heaven would be a kingdom for a stage, complete with both princes to act, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene.

That was a knock. For sure that was a knock, one or two, or even three, a rat-a-tat-tat! Perhaps that was Alfie, that was who it would be. Alfie, or at least, that’s the name he had given him, after the deed had been consummated, as they stood by the doorway smelling the soldier’s fumes blowing down and waiting to climb the stairs. I’m Alfie. What’s your name, cock? He had said, and for some reason, some unknown reason, he had replied with the truth. I’m Robert. It wasn’t an unknown reason to him, of course. A stupid, reckless reason, yes, but he knew all too well what it was. In that moment, he reasoned that he could live a life of pure privacy again, his inner thoughts not known, not put onto paper, and what he did would be his own time, his own thoughts, unencumbered by grief and worry, and if he lived in that world, then Alfie would be there too, smoking a fag in his shirtsleeves and making a pot of tea at dawn and pulling up potatoes in his back garden. Although the back garden wasn’t his, it was Mrs Postlethwaite’s.

It was that moment of utopia that led him to being here, waiting for the knock on the door, because he had given Alfie his address. Written it in his pocketbook, in fact, and ripped out the page. The proof was waiting for him this morning when he opened it, and saw the torn leaf, the stub of a cheque he knew would bounce the moment it was cashed. That rapid little thud, rat-a-tat-tat, would be the police. Or worse, would be Alfie, Alfie and his mates, ready to blackmail or rob or worse, worse, ready to kill. He could see them now, the gang of them, hair brylcreemed to their heads, muscles and sinew and spit, steaming through the nose, chomping at the bit, just ready to push through, past him, over him, to charge into his neat living room, and his story would be the same as Taveners, another sad queer dead in his sad little flat. Why did Mrs Postlethwaite take them in, people would ask. They only repay her kindness in tragedy. He could see his head crushed beneath their feet even now. Think, and he thought, Think when we talk of horses, that you see them, printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth, and he saw them.

And what if it were Alfie, just Alfie, in his shirtsleeves and overcoat, brandishing only a smile and a little paper bag from the bakery at the corner. That might be even worse. His breaths deep, his tie knotted too tight, Robert walked to the window again. Looking down, the path was empty, the porch still, but on the windowsill a little bluetit in spasm. It must have hit the window and broken its wing, he realised. It fluttered and flapped in distress, grazing its beak against the stonework as it tried in vain to right itself. As it rocked back and forth, it seemed to be causing itself more mischief, bending its broken limb until it was about to crack, some little rivulets of red beginning to bloom against its breast. Robert looked upon it, then, in one swift motion, he drew the curtains shut. As he walked back to his bed, the bird’s insistent little knocking continuing, he passed the stove, and checked one more time, to see if the gas was still off.

Thank you to all my subscribers, paid or otherwise. I’m aware I haven’t posted much in recent months. After many years writing this substack, I’m aware there can be an ebb and flow of productivity and sometimes I feel a bit blocked, or busy trying to pay the rent. To those who pay, I can’t thank you enough for sticking with that process, and I hope it’s worth it. I try to think of my own subscriptions less as paying for a regular product, and more as a micro-patronage for writers, musicians and artists whose work I like, because sometimes the downtime is a necessary part of the creative process. One thing I’ve been thinking recently is to make this substack a bit more of a conversation; for example, if someone has a subject they’d like to write about, or a book or film to review, please do let me know.

If you’d like to read more of my work, please do subscribe to this newsletter. It’s been going for five years, so there are hundreds of essays to read. Paid subscribers get access to the whole archive. Why not start with one of the most popular ones, this essay about watching the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II live from a gay sauna under Waterloo Station?

I’ve often marvelled at the inner world of the pigeon. My office, where I’m sat right now, looks out over a pretty square, with tall mature palms and a deep neoclassical colonnade, populated by cafes and bars.Its citizens are tourists, beggars, drunks, performers, and teenagers, all in various states of inebriation. As a locale, the plaza has seen bette…

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Nothing is as unfunny as a joke analysed. Still, I’m going to do it anyway. That’s because, some 31 years after it was told, there’s one joke I find myself returning to again and again, finding new resonances, new power, new humour in it. The more I hear it, the deeper it gets, so to speak. It was a joke so powerful that it derailed the joke-teller’s career, at least for a while. Yet it lingers as a legend, and for good reason.

The joke landed like a stone dropped into a stagnant nation. It was 1993, and Britain was in the doldrums, politically, culturally and socially speaking. The destructive dynamism of Thatcherism had exhausted itself, and the country was left with a Tory party in power that was rapidly ossifying. Thatcher had been toppled in a palace coup in late 1990 over the party’s internal divisions over Europe (plus ça change,) and she was replaced by the uninspiring figure of John Major, who saw out the remainder of her parliament under a spectre of high interest rates, high inflation, and high unemployment. Despite winning a surprise victory in the 1992 General Election, his party never seemed to recapture the popular momentum of the Thatcher era, and pop culture followed suit, perhaps sensing little to push against. The pop charts were dominated by the boyband Take That and M People, while top TV ratings were won by shows like the lighthearted ‘60s cop drama Heartbeat or the home video clip show You’ve Been Framed! It was only really in contemporary art and in comedy that there were stirrings of something interesting happening; the YBAs were beginning to break through into popular consciousness, while 1993 saw the debut of The Mrs Merton Show and The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer.  

Out of ideas, the government nonetheless trundled on, struggling through economic crises of its own making. After Britain dropped out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, Norman Lamont, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, resigned, delivering a bruising blow to the government when he quipped in his resignation speech that the Tory Government "gives the impression of being in office but not in power." It was a punchy little line that resonated precisely because it seemed to distil exactly the sentiment of the country. But the real joke was to come later, at Lamont’s expense.

6 months after Lamont’s resignation, he was presenting an award, for some reason, at the prestigious ceremony for the British Comedy Awards, a black tie dinner affair broadcast live on TV to honour the year’s comedy successes. The list of winners is an impressive overview of the great and good of comedy broadcasting at the time: French and Saunders, Steve Coogan, Richard Curtis, and Rik Mayall had all taken to the stage to collect awards that night, a stage decorated, inexplicably, to look like an abandoned gothic horror graveyard, complete with cemetery gates and creeping ivy. The host, Jonathan Ross, had been compering the event from behind a lectern designed to look like an old tomb. To present the award for Top Television Personality, he welcomed to the stage the stand-up comedian Julian Clary, who had made his name as an outrageous camp stage performer and virtuosic euphemiser, before breaking into TV with his own show, Sticky Moments. He was one of only a handful of openly gay comics on TV at the time, a new brood following on from a nation’s tradition of keeping their gay comedians simultaneously close to their hearts and locked in the closet. Best here to watch the clip, before I precis it for those who can’t watch.

“Very nice of you to recreate Hampstead Heath for me here,” Clary quips, a reference to North London’s notorious gay cruising ground. “As a matter of fact, I’ve just been fisting Norman Lamont.” The audience erupts into something more than laughter: you can see Armando Iannucci breaking up. Mark Lamarr is howling; Martin Clunes is crying. Onstage, Clary struggles to even get the punchline out: “talk about a red box!” (an allusion to the red despatch box which the Chancellor traditionally brandishes to the press to announce a new budget.)

The joke is a good joke, an outrageous pun and visual image against an authority figure wrapped up in a classic format. But there’s an extra power to it, a power that finds its source in how gay men were understood by the wider public at the time, and how the Tory party, of which Lamont was a member, treated them. It wasn’t a good time to be gay. Social attitudes about homosexuality had actually grown increasingly negative through much of the 1980s, as the AIDS crisis hit the UK, and as gay people became more visible in mainstream society and the media. By 1993, some 65% of Britons regarded homosexual relationships as often or mostly wrong, with only 18% regarding them as “not wrong at all”. What’s more, the HIV/AIDS epidemic was hitting the community hardest at this time, with highly active antiretroviral therapy still a number of years away. 1993/94 marked a peak for AIDS diagnoses in the UK, and 1994/95 for AIDS deaths. 

1987 Tory campaign poster. And the answer is “yes.”

The fear of AIDS in a population scared half to death by government messaging on the epidemic — the major 1987 public health awareness campaign on the disease featured a enormous monolith engraved with “AIDS”crashing to the ground, with the tagline “Don’t die of ignorance” —  fuelled a moral panic that the government in turn took advantage of. LGBT rights was seen as part of a “loony left” agenda, and anti-leftist homophobia in the media and government reached a fever pitch, as I discussed in this piece a few years ago, with suggestions that left wing activists, out-of-touch teachers and academics, and sex perverts were not just “shoving it down our throats”, as the old chestnut goes, but conspiring to corrupt our children and silence their legitimate concerns. It all sounds achingly familiar to anyone with half an eye on the most recent British culture wars of the past decade or so. This moral panic resulted in the passing of Section 28, an anti-gay education law that stayed on the books until the early 2000s. The moral panic around sexual deviance, and the implication that gays were after your kids, not only fuelled the idea that gays were abject and disgusting, and the engineers of their own suffering, but also helped prevent exactly the sort of sex education that could have mitigated the epidemic.

Clary was a tonic in this atmosphere. He acted as an alchemist on queer abjection, turning what was regarded as dark and degrading into camp entertainment, and bolstering defiance against this moralism not by disguising his joy in sex, but revelling in it. Walking out to thunderous applause, he would thank his audience, saying “I do enjoy a warm hand on my entrance,” and his gameshow Sticky Moments would bring this very pretty boy with a filthy mouth and a pair of hotpants into the nation’s living rooms. He is, in a word, charming, but in an atmosphere as hostile as the early ‘90s was for gays, that charm was transformative, even magical. 

Clary with Fanny the Wonder Dog in 1989

What is perhaps more astonishing is that, while his star was ascending across the TV skies, he was facing the very sharp end of this gay crisis. In his 2005 autobiography A Young Man’s Passage he provides a non-exhaustive list of guys he’d fucked, including “the boy from Hove youth hostel,” “Sensible Ian,” “Pop-it-in Pat,” “Palma man with one eye,” “Henry with the dirty sheets” and the “former RUC man with real bullet scars and colostomy bag.” Nestled in among the conquests is a love, “Christopher the Dead Boyfriend,” whom Julian had met and fallen for before he disappeared off the scene a while. When he returned into Julian’s life, he told him that he had AIDS, and that he loved him. There is a chapter on Christopher’s illness and death, a deeply moving passage that will be immediately familiar to anyone who has sat with someone through the end stages of a disease that will slowly kill them. He captures the fact that we walk through this unfolding catastrophe in an almost pedestrian fashion; moments of trauma, like the realisation Christopher is near his end whilst on holiday, and having to smuggle him home on a flight, are balanced with the fact that the world around you doesn’t recognise the solemnity and horror of what is happening, and buses still run and TV shows still written and the hospital rooms of the dead are still soon filled with new dying.

Christopher died in 1991, with Julian having cared for him throughout his illness. In the aftermath he understandably struggled, and has talked on occasion about the sense of depression he felt without his lover by his side, and his cocktail of drugs — valium during the day, and rohypnol at night — to try to control the frequent panic attacks he suffered. He had popped a valium as he took to the stage that night, having spotted Norman Lamont in the audience, and feeling pretty sick of the whole damn charade.

“Fancy inviting him, I thought,” he would write later, “How inappropriate.” Still, the man is nothing if not a consummate entertainer, and the show must go, loss and the black dog notwithstanding. Appearing on RTÉ’s The Late Late Show a few years ago, he mused on how it was “a very contradictory thing, being funny for a living, then having all that grief to deal with.” But Lamont’s appearance was inappropriate: prior to being the Chancellor, Lamont had been a junior minister throughout Thatcher’s administration. What’s more, Major had tried to reinvigorate his flagging political remit and win back his backbench support by restoking the culture wars against the social liberalisation of British society. Appearing at the Tory Party conference in October of 1993, he had announced a new campaign, saying “the message from this conference is clear and simple: we must go back to basics.” Back to Basics meant not just a return to classic Conservative principles of free trade, but to social and moral values as well:  “traditional teaching, respect for the family and respect for the law.” It included a thinly veiled attacked on young single mothers, a tabloid moral panic all of its own at the time. 

John Major with fellow Tory MP Edwina Currie, with whom he cheated on his wife.

The speech was Major’s attempt to rebuild a political base by appealing to the same “common sense” Conservatism, and the same culture war rhetoric, as Thatcher. His Back to Basics speech bears a familial resemblance to Thatcher’s 1987 conference speech, where, a bolder and more charismatic politician than Major, she drove home her point more explicitly, declaiming that “children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay. And children who need encouragement—and children do so much need encouragement—so many children—they are being taught that our society offers them no future. All of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life—yes cheated.”

Major was playing the old hits to the party faithful. That’s what made Clary’s joke both so shocking, and so profound: it went to the heart of the political fiction which the Tories were trying to spin, at the expense of gay people, by bringing them down to our level.

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For years Tories had been painting gays as depraved, and homosexuality as dirty; the language of homophobia in the 1980s and ‘90s was so visceral. Filth, shame, and cesspits of their own making: buggery, sodomy and fornication; disease, sickness and endless references to committing acts, as though each incident was a crime. Suddenly, Clary was turning the tables; he was reducing the Tories to purely physical and the sexual beings, just as they had done to gays. In a time when hardcore pornography was much less readily available, the invocation of the act of fisting was much more mysterious. Its connotations were both gross and hilarious (not my personal opinion, of course,) and the image of a red box vivid, even violent, and yet the butt of it, so to speak, was not us, but a Tory grandee.  

The joke flipped power on its head somewhat. He could have been getting a blowjob from Norman Lamont, or jerking him off, or fucking him. But by choosing a sex act like fisting, he somehow brought it onto gay territory, into a gay argot. The next day Britain’s tabloid press, hand-on-glove comrades with the Tories in any culture war, were appalled, despite the fact the live broadcast only received 7 complaints, out of 13 million viewers. The Sun headline read “GAY CLARY’S SICK TV GAG”. Speaking over a decade later with Boy George, he said “The headlines the next day - they kept calling it a “gay sex act”... I think fisting is available to anyone, isn’t it?” Well, yes, but also no. It was, at its heart, a gay joke, and not just because it was between two men, but because it tapped into gay knowledge. Suddenly sexualisation was a two way street, and they were getting a taste of their own medicine.

The years that followed were hard on Clary, by his own admission, as he continued to struggle with panic attacks. It’s sometimes claimed he was banned from TV following the joke. He wasn’t, although it was years before he was trusted again to appear on live TV. But his career faltered, and he took time to process his grief and his anxiety. There’s a pretty astonishing appearance on Ruby Wax’s talk show in 1998 where, appearing alongside Wax, Ivana Trump and Dana International (iconic), he suffers a panic attack live on air. It’s a difficult watch for many reasons — not just Wax’s graphic obsession with Dana International’s transition, but also to see him struggling. 

Things didn’t go much better for the Conservatives. Their Back to Basics campaign for common sense and decency backfired when it turned out that the Tory Party consisted largely of Tory MPs, and they were caught over and again with their pants down, politically and literally, doing what Tory MPs do. Fraud, corruption, and sex scandals galore, including a number of secret gay affairs and pregnancies with secretaries, led to Back to Basics becoming a joke itself, and one that just drew more attention to the moral hypocrisy of conservatives. Perhaps there was a sense in the audience that night that Clary was just saying what we all knew: the Conservatives are all nasty little perverts too.

The degradation of traditional family values ended up happening not at the hands of gays or single mothers, but at those who claimed them as their own, and wanted to use their political power to force them on others. In that context, the frankness of public voices like Julian Clary seemed less obscene than prescient and refreshingly honest. Norman Lamont would lose his seat at the next election when the people spoke, but soon found himself back in politics, ennobled as a Lord in Britain’s second chamber, a neat little trick the British establishment has for speaking back to the people and correcting their mistakes.

Once Clary bounced back, not into the Lords but primetime TV, he found himself riding the wave of changing social attitudes to gay people, as well as personal affection for himself. He rejects the term national treasure, preferring “national trinket”, but I think the way he handled his career downturn and public hounding for his joke probably contributed to the sense of general public warmth that now gilds his profile. He was an underdog who showed his spunk. Today moral panics are back on the horizon. In a recent profile for the Guardian, Clary was prodded to take part in the culture war, asked about whether safe spaces and cancel culture were killing comedy. “I quite understand things like safe spaces and refusing to engage,” he replied “because life’s too short. I get that.” Given his experience with loss, that “life’s too short” packs a punch, so to speak. How much of our lives are we to give our enemies?

Trinket or not, Clary, like his friend, the late lamented Paul O’Grady, will always have pugnacious, gay edge to his humour, because he understands the stakes. When asked whether, by being the man he is, he is contributing to his own persecution at the hands of homophobes, he stated “No, because I don’t ever think of myself as a stereotype. I have the right to be a camp, effeminate homosexual.” That stalwart refusal to dim yourself for others still has far more power to shock and offend than any fisting joke.

Can’t get enough of me? Well who can blame you. This week I had a piece on my mum, grief, and cooking, up on Vittles, which you can read here. I have also written an essay, “Mass Market Masters,” to accompany the new catalogue for the Tom of Finland/Beryl Cook hit exhibition at Studio Voltaire this summer. The catalogue, like the show, is superb; you can buy it here.

If you’d like to read more of my work, please do subscribe to this newsletter. It’s been going for five years, so there are hundreds of essays to read. Paid subscribers get access to the whole archive. Why not start with one of the most popular ones, this essay about watching the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II live from a gay sauna under Waterloo Station?

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It was rich of him to suggest I was spoiled, but then everything of him was rich. So what if he was right? I shuffled my feet against the soft brushed cork of my house shoe. A few weeks after he presented them to me over the breakfast table I had seen them on the feet of a mannequin in the window of Bergdorf Goodman’s. Inside the store, still blasting its hot air despite the positively springlike day outside, I hunted them down in men’s fashion. They cost more than a few months’ rent on my parents house, which I already knew before I looked for them. Knowing wasn’t the point, of course. I knew, he knew. My parents probably didn’t know. But I wanted to see. That’s rich of you, I said, and he lifted his hand in the air in one quick, violent motion, spinning his fork up with it. By the time it clattered down onto the china, flinging egg across the green marble table top and dripping hollandaise sauce onto the jute rug, he was already standing. 

I could hear the click-clack of his little heels stomping up towards the library as I walked the breakfast room with my coffee. Good god, it was ugly. But God had nothing to do with it; this room was Andy’s own creation, his french fancy, and even his decorator couldn’t be held accountable. The walls had been clad with panels of white garden trellis, adorned with white lacquered mirrors and fussy country cottage lamps. The architecture of the room itself, like the whole house, was stunning; a little townhouse, designed and built by McKim, Mead, and White the same year they finished Penn Station, barely twenty feet wide but with seven and a half floors, slotted between two foreign cultural institutes. I ran my fingers across the Victorian sideboard, the only tolerable piece of furniture in the room, and sipped from the pretty Puiforcat porcelain coffee cup, rimmed with oak leaves. I was wearing only a pair of old Nike basketball shorts, and the house shoes. I faked a yawn, lifting my arms high above my head to expose my armpits. I left the coffee cup, without the saucer, atop the Poussin book left open on the coffee table at The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus, watching a drip run down from its rim to the soft, acid free archival paper, and bloom across his ripped abs. I knew in his anger Andy would be upstairs in his library, watching me through the security console on his laptop, his hands tucked down the front of his slacks. Studiously avoiding eye contact with the little camera secreted next to the porcelain plates hanging between the sash windows, I slumped across the long, white sofa. I slipped off my house shoes and rubbed bare my feet against the cushion. He would be furiously pleased all day, so after I’d let him finish, I took a shower and went home.

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View from the Artist's Window, Alice Neel (1978)

A new art teacher arrived for my last few years of school. He was freshly graduated, and his personality was somehow both deeply engaged with the possibilities of art education, and drily detached from the actual students he was teaching. You couldn’t ask for a better mix for a teenager, really, prompting us to delve further into his teaching in the hope we might one day understand his depths, if not emulate them. I recall more from him in those few years than almost anything else from that otherwise exhausted school, but the most enduring lesson was also the simplest: fill your frame.

When he arrived, he found a class, and probably a school, addicted to absence. A white sheet of A3 drawing paper, and in the middle, swimming in absence, a seashell, a toy car, a sheep’s skull. In our second drawing lesson, he made us cut a little viewfinder from the centre of a small piece of paper. The hole was no bigger than an old photographic slide. “Hold that over your object,” he told us. “Now that is what you will draw. Fill your paper to the edges with what’s inside that little rectangle.” From there, all the elements of representation followed, years too late but not too late. Negative space, form, shadow, observation of what really is: all the essential elements of creating an image replaced our nervy, neurotic desires to reproduce a realistic avatar of the thing. You were no longer trying to accurately recreate the sheep’s skull in graphite or ink: instead you saw the texture of bone, the curve of the socket, and so on. The thing you wanted to represent became an afterthought to the shape and space and tone of what you put on the paper.

I thought about him this morning. As I arrived to my office, unable to settle, I looked out of the window at the square below, and decided to sketch the leaves of the tall palm tree that sits at eye level directly from my desk. They are framed by my window, and they frame the windows behind them, and as I sketched, I drew this beautiful and enormous palm right in the centre of my page, a thumbprint, adrift again in the sea of paper. I stared at the window frame, its peeling brown paint in the August morning sun, and I stared at my phone, a rectangle cut out in black, and I stared at square, the tourists taking a morning coffee, the parched, waterless fountain. I wanted to put a frame around my day, to clip this particular view, half sky, ranks of shuttered windows, tops of trees, like the painter Alice Neel, whose windows frame the New York streets just so. Neel cut and clipped the same view again and again as a series of shapes and colours that are somehow different every time. She painted from her home, and the window of the home frames a terse dynamic between the domestic space and the public, filled with both a desire to have both at once, whilst resenting the presence of both.

107th and Broadway, Alice Neel (1976)

Across the square from my office lives another artistic legend, Nazario Luque, a cartoonist, painter and photographer who, time and again, has used the square as his paper and his window as the frame. I’m not going too far when I say I’m becoming obsessed with Nazario. I discovered him on the recommendation of a friend, and bought a copy of one of his comics. When I tell you it was called Ali Baba y Los 40 Maricones — Ali Baba and the 40 Faggots — you’ll begin to understand why. His work is joyously perverse, a cross between Robert Crumb, Tom of Finland, Donelan, John Waters and Giles, featuring queer retellings of tales from antiquity like that of Salomé through to his post-Francoist transvestite detective Anarcoma. 

One of the many things I love about Nazario’s work is its erotic intimacy; his stories, like Ali Baba, are often focused on the locus of the homosexual’s apartment as a place of pleasure and friendship. Recurrent in his work, especially, are the gaps at which the sensuous internal — let’s say, his boudoir theme — meets the possibilities of the external — the cruisy street. Windows, balconies, terraces and doors litter his pages, from where his characters can watch each other posing provocatively, their desire framed discreetly yet broadcast out. They are the fantasies of a voyeur (the artist has described himself as such), and maintain that combination of over-aestheticisation and introversion that all good voyeurs hold within theirselves. Take this wonderful double-page spread (above and below) depicting a siesta across an alleyway. In the first apartment, the artist relaxes with a coffee, a full stomach, and the peelings of his orange at his lunch table. One lover, pants unzipped, takes his siesta. At the window, another seems to expose himself to a tourist in the apartment across the narrow alleyway, framed by the balcony. In the following picture you see the same scene from the tourist’s perspective. He is indeed tugging at his cock, a sort of post-coital disgestif for the tourist whose own lover relaxes in bed smoking a joint. Between these two window frames is both a secret intimacy, whilst also a display for the other neighbours, whose response vary between elation (the three gents upstairs) to intrigued horror (the gawping tourists downstairs). The intimate gay domestic spaces have broken out into the space between them, the heat and the laziness of the siesta momentarily leaking between public and private.

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Yet the presence of a window or a balcony as a frame also forces this distinction between what’s inside, where you, the viewer, implicitly resides with the character, and the outside, onto which you both look. Forcing the outside world into the (window)frame within the (comicbook) frame highlights the domestic intimacy into which you have been allowed. Unlike the double page spread above, in this next little comic, depicting the artist’s naked lover asking if he’d like to listen to the soprano Montserrat Caballé singing Strauss, or the singer Juana Reina, the window of the artist’s apartment out onto the square only heightens the touching intimacy produced by his little creative home. 

Likewise, in his cartoon Helena the balcony onto the square becomes a place that is symbolic of what might lie beyond the woman’s relationship with her lover, whom she is contemplating leaving. As he smokes a cigarette on the balcony, we become aware of what the outside world can see — a man in a vest smoking — and what we can see, his muscular arse, the sexual side of him, the “fucking all the time”, the thing that no longer quite satisfies her. As the cartoon progresses, the square symbolises the fact that outside, beyond, there may be freedom, but there lies little in the way of change. The repetition of the squares neoclassical design, with its rows and rows of identical balconies, suggests that it’s just more of the same, or worse. “In this ochre and grey plaza, of identical windows, of balconies and arcades and lampposts and balustrades and identical pigeons…. Only the palm trees, the lunatics, the alcoholics, and the lost people that come here to find refuge are different.” 

From Helena

This fancy, dilapidated little colonnaded, neoclassical square, always observed through the frames of its own architecture (windows, arches, and openings), reappears in an almost fantastical way in a 1999 drawing by Nazario in which he transforms the plaza into a place of classical allegorical fantasy. In the background, the windows and arches seem to have multiplied, turning it into an enormous field, a forest of palm trees through which centaurs pursue each other and a Chinese dragon descends from the trees. In the foreground, before the framing arches, we sit with beautiful boy archers and Nazario himself, the melancholy philosopher in Adidas. Alluding to the representations of classical antiquity, the arches are the frames before which stand the allegorical (bow, eggs, plants), and behind which are the landscapes of myth (narrative, chimeras). Then, in a particularly characteristic touch, far behind, hiding in the windows, appear the most modern scenes: the residents, including a recurring motif for the artist, two naked men sharing a balcony. The queer domestic always seems to ground his work, ironically giving it its radical touch. Even this very real square, beset with its history of over-tourism, football hooligans, and junkies, can become a place for these fantasies, as the internal frames set apart these different forms of action, splitting them between historical time and conceptual space. 

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Nazario’s comics remind me of another mustachioed and complicated hero, Leo the Last. Finishing work in my office on Friday, I walked the short distance to the cinema to watch a screening of the 1970 John Boorman film of the same name, Leo the Last. In it, Marcello Mastroianni plays Leo, the scion of a long-deposed European monarchy who returns to London to take up the role of pretender to the throne following the death of his father. Leo is unfit for purpose; his majordomo, Laszlo, seems to be deep in a conspiracy to return him to his throne, and his girlfriend is desperate for a marriage he seems unconvinced by. Leo, meanwhile, is more concerned with his real hobby: birdwatching.

Leo leaving his mansion in Leo the Last.

Leo’s mansion, once located in a chichi part of West London, is now the last holdout of the street’s wealthy history. All around him, these large Notting Hill villas have become slums let out in terrible condition to newly arrived migrants. Armed with his ornithological telescope, Leo soon learns about the reality of the lives of his new neighbours. From his window at the end of the cul-de-sac he can see into their windows in the terraces around, and watches their exploitation at the hands of pimps, landlords and pawnbrokers. In Leo the Last, the window is a frame through which we too discover, if we didn’t already know, the inequities of capitalism and racial discrimination. We sit inside with Leo, our surrogate eyes (we quite literally see through his telescope). As Leo recovers from his illness he decides to become more engaged with the local residents, motivated by some sense that, as a wealthy white man, he can become their saviour. 

The film changes in town once he becomes part of the street’s life. Leo the Last was filmed in the location it satirises, around Ladbroke Grove tube station in West London. Most of the action was filmed at the junction of Barandon Street and Testerton Street, at the time of filming slumlands awaiting demolition, with Leo’s mansion being a false facade built by the filmmakers at the end of Testerton Street. Again, windows become heightened lenses for the observation of social difference between public and domestic, between wealth and poverty, power and exploitation. The psychic split in the film comes at the moment when Leo realises the true nature of the political power he holds. The cabinet of nobles Laszlo has assembled are not the politicians of his future Ruritarian monarchy he imagines, but the shareholders of his current fiefdom, for the wealthy landlord who exploits Leo’s neighbours is no less than Leo himself. Through his friendships with the locals, Leo has become a class traitor, and decides to divest himself of his property and give it to his tenants. Laszlo resists such childish utopianism, and with the cabinet holes himself up in the mansion with weaponry to prevent it being seized. Roscoe, the worldly young black street fighter, is unsurprised that the wealthy won’t simply give up their possessions, but Leo organises an attack on his former home, ending in a spectacular finale in which the cache of dynamite in the mansion explodes, destroying it. Lazslo walks out alive, wearing his overcoat and holding his briefcase, ready to continue his task of the thorough administration of capital, while the poor are left with only a pyhrric victory, as the actual mechanics of their oppression remain unchanged. 

The street, smog-stained and run down, is a startling, almost post-apocalyptic set for the cinematographer Peter Suschitsky, whose work is really the strongest part of the film. The film’s politics and representation of London’s black population is complicated at best, perhaps echoing the well-meaning ignorance of its title character. The rows of identical, beaten up windows, faintly lit against the dark and the sooty streets, are contrasted with Leo’s bright, clean mansion. From the windows of one, we see into the windows of all the others; they become almost screens onto which Leo projects his own readings of their lives as moral dramas, rather than lives structured by hard economic truths, like his own structural power coming from his role as the landlord.

The satire is cynical, to my mind: his rebellion is sincere, but little more than superficial, and the wheels of injustice continue to turn as the credits roll, despite his belief that he’s saved his street. He hasn’t. The true life story, however, is an even darker satire. The slumlands in which the film was shot, allowing for such a spectacular ending as the mansion explodes in a fireball, were cleared and demolished soon after filming. They were replaced by the Lancaster West Estate, which intended to provide high quality housing and the end to dangerous, unsanitary housing provided by slum landlords. The streets and the road plan were demolished, and at the end of Testerton Street was built a huge new apartment block in line with these aspirations: Grenfell Tower. In 2017 Grenfell Tower was the site of a catastrophic fire which destroyed the building, killing 70 of its inhabitants. Although the inquiry into this devastating conflagration is still ongoing, it’s known that while the fire began as the result of a faulty washing machine in a flat, its spread was facilitated by the use of a flammable cladding, installed during a refurbishment despite not meeting building standards for England, and in the full knowledge that a terrible fire was possible. The suggestion made by local activist groups and survivors of the fire was that the refurb continued with this cladding in order to save costs for the local council at the expense of the working class residents’ health and, eventually, their lives.

On realising this strange and tragic coincidence, the film made a deeper impact upon me. It had already seemed idealistic, but with the new framing of the fire, that idealism performed the trick of utopianism. The ideal world, with its clear moral divisions between right and wrong, seemed simultaneously so clear, as though it was just beyond the window, whilst also now being so far away, so ludicrously far away. It’s obvious what is right and wrong, but impossible to see a way to shape a world based on that knowledge. Looking out to a utopia that never arrived, like Leo’s old tenants becoming citizens in control of their own streets, it seems ridiculous, even insulting, that we might ever have believed it possible. In reality, even basic justice appears like the limits of a utopian demand; that anyone in England might be held responsible for the consequences of their actions upon the poor strikes one as an unnervingly radical future. 

None of which, to my mind, negates the value of dreaming, of staring out of the window in idleness. It seems frivolous, in the light of the tragic, to lose oneself in the silly, the pretty, the domestic. But at times, it is what matters: to lean over the balcony balustrade onto the square at midnight and wonder what our future might possibly look like, what we might enjoy, whether that’s the big things, like justice, or just as important, the small things, like love, or the lazy siesta, a cigarette beneath the moon, Caballé singing Strauss, and so on. It’s something I love in Nazario’s work: that such daydreaming is a window onto both sadness and ecstasy, like Ernesto in Ali Baba, the young twink who lives on the top floor in a life of half-fantasy, love-struck and in pain whilst still conjuring the men of his dreams into existence, the beautiful and fantastical products of his loneliness. If we look for that window, through it, it’s important not to lose that dream in a sea of absence, but to make it fill the frame.

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Al Pacino in the 1980 William Friedkin film ‘Cruising’

Last week my friend took me to her favourite cruise bar. It was, she told me, “democratic, proletkult.” Such unusual and precise adjectives, I thought, to describe a place where people, mainly men, go to have a beer and meet others, and have sex on the premises. But she’d suggested it while we were having a cocktail in another bar, which she described, pleasingly, not as bougie or even hipster, but quite specifically as bourgeois. I love when people talk like this, with direction and meaning and judgement in their choice of words, and so we went.

She was right. It was distinctly proletkult. The beer was cheap, the barmen friendly, and the decor the kind that isn’t designed but that accretes, the residue of thousands of nights of sociality: a pornographic drawing pinned above the door, some old streamers hanging from a lamp, a disturbingly large and thick dildo affixed to the bar. And democratic, yes. The crowd was a strong mix of ages and types, all looking for a match for a moment or an evening. For those who haven’t been, a cruise bar is a gay bar with space usually set aside for watching, touching, and fucking. Most gay bars aren’t cruise bars, although they can be cruisey; rules around sex on premise vary greatly according to city and nation. In this one, hidden behind a discreet door down a side street, sex is not just permitted, but encouraged.

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Being humiliated is not everyone’s kink, but watching others be humiliated is more popular that we might want to believe. Normally, we’re not comfortable with the sensations it arouses in us, thank god. We would all like to regard ourselves as good people, moved instinctively to find the suffering of others objectionable. Yet there are times when we know. When we know we are enjoying it, and the attempt to present otherwise, to maintain decorum, only fertilises our schadenfreude, especially when we admonish others for it. But in politics, the face can betray things – real, interpersonal truths – that ideology and bluster and years of media training attempt to hide. Our faces speak to each other with human emotions that can’t be denied. And so I studied Liz Truss’ face this morning on the news, waiting to feel something.

A more obvious subject for our epicaricacy would be Jacob Rees Mogg, whose downfall is measurably more pleasurable, objectively speaking. Yet looking for a human emotion on his face is pointless, not because he isn’t human, but because he’s a man bred to hide such emotions. Not just a pure nepo-baby but an Eton boy to his bones, he has adopted the sort of performed confidence characteristic of everyone who succeeds as a life-long public schoolboy who is handed his destiny on a plate in his nursery by Daddy (via Nanny). In reality, Rees Mogg is a man of ruthless, 21st century economic pragmatism, much fonder of the riches of disaster capitalism than the limited returns of a patrician One Nation conservatism of the Shires. His goal in life is money and power, something he’s not as good at as he’d like to make out, but his real talent lies in performing as someone else – a lost Victorian, a traditionalist, a conservative – appealing to the strange class sentimentalities of his electorate, sentimentalities he exploits but doesn’t share. “Jacob’s great for the business,” said Dominic Johnson, his colleague at Somerset Capital Management, “we have a far higher profile than we ever would if we didn’t have him involved.” An eminent performer, at his vote count he maintained a dignified, hail-fellow-well-met Tory persona, as though the loss of his seat wasn’t a personal blow. And no doubt, because it wasn’t: while his constituents might have intended it to sting, it will have little negative effect on the man’s life. He can now leave parliament to spend more time with his wife’s money while waiting for his inevitable ennoblement, a handy British compromise that allows establishment figures to retain political power despite their explicit rejection at the hands of the electorate. There is a type of Englishman who only fails upwards, and our joy rang hollow.

Truss, on the other hand, was staring down the barrel of history. The votes counted, all the candidates appeared on stage, as is tradition in British elections. Truss was notable by her absence, a clear indicator of bad news ahead. In the audience, supporters of her opponents had begun to slow clap. Eventually, Truss herself appeared and slid to the side of the stage, her face drained of blood. The eyes remained fixed at some point in the middle distance. Her lips remained fixed too, pursed in her characteristically uncanny expression that she uses when attempting to disguise a truer expression. In her official portrait as Prime Minister, it looked as those she was holding back a grin from the left side of her mouth; at the vote count, it looked as though, were she to move a single muscle, her bottom lips with begin to quiver and break with grief. Unlike Rees Mogg, Truss hasn’t been trained since childhood to disguise all her internal life behind an exterior of pure confidence. She was a comprehensive school student; indeed, it’s the way that she has navigated her career which explains just why the look in her eyes last night was nudging towards terror.

Being career-focused is hardly unusual in politics. With fewer and fewer MPs having had real jobs outside of politics before being elected, the fact she first stood for Parliament aged 26 isn’t unusual. Yet her political journey has been one marked by shifting ideological positions that emerged, shall we say, with the prevailing wind. An early attachment to the Liberal Democrats and even Republicanism (an almost verboten position within mainstream UK politics) was ditched while at Oxford University (of course) while studying PPE (of fucking course). Once deciding on becoming a Conservative activist her position moved sharply; she supported Michael Portillo’s leadership campaign in 2005, and by 2011 was the co-founder of the Free Enterprise Group, a Thatcherite ginger group aiming at introducing a hard-line neoliberal economic shock to the British economy, and reaping the benefits. When, through the machinations of a collapsing party, she became leader of the Tories and Prime Minister in September 2022, she stuffed her cabinet with loyalists (including Rees Mogg) and began implementing the FEG shock doctrine in an emergency mini-budget. At its core was an ideologically determined gamble: that the £45 billion in unfunded tax cuts would pay for itself in stimulated growth. The market response to her supply-side Trussonomics was instant and devastating, plunging the economy into a crisis and forcing the pound to a historical low against the dollar. By the end of October she was out.

Now it’s the middle of election night and on the stage, her eyes are shifting left to right, rapidly but almost imperceptibly. It looks painful, and my own emotions are jockeying too, thank god, about time, haha! but also christ, the anxiety, what misery, to live your destruction live on TV. I can almost see the swelling in the frontal lobe of her brain as it races at a million miles an hour, firing at her commands and reassurances, don’t cry, soon over, and the smell of the carpets in her office in Downing St suddenly recalled, where once she was Prime Minister, and now, this school gymnasium, and what next? Unlike Rees Mogg, she doesn’t have a finance career or family name or portfolio or that unearned but uncut confidence to fall back upon. A bead of sweat seems to erupt on her forehead, blood draining and skin clammy to the touch. Is it over yet? Or worse – my god, it is over. For a moment, the chaos that she sowed into the lives of working people is delivered back upon herself.

Her name at last. Truss, Liz, the Conservative Party, 11,217. An audible groan of pity rises from the audience, although not loud enough to cover the laughter. It could be a Greek tragedy – the mortal who gave everything for power, but then, to her horror, tasted it, just for a second on her lips – but for its tempo and scale. She was not a giant cut short, but a small person accidentally and temporarily magnified. It is a comedy, her hubris returned with such slapstick speed that we barely had time to register the ladder slipping away beneath her, the piano falling down the stairs, the banana skin sliding across the pavement. The lettuce hadn’t even begun to rot. But now, the camera lingers on her face for us all, stiff as the Great Stone Face, as the rickety house falls down around her. Face forward, Liz, the prefrontal cortex implores, her heart racing. For a moment, she seems overtaken with a sudden weariness too, as her eyelids dip, sweet bedtime, before returns the great realisation, powering forward like a freight train into her consciousness, to history, my whole life story will be a pub quiz footnote, a punchline, a snorted byword for a fuck-up. She shakes the hand of the winning Labour candidate, and exists the stage without a word, her last chance at a photo-op uncharacteristically rebuffed.

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I went back to the beginning again and again, looking at this woman, once the most powerful politician in the country, chauffered to an audience with the Queen, now held to account in front of her constituents. I stared deep into Liz Truss’s eyes, and, to my horror, found only Liz Truss staring back. There was no monster nor genius there, no great plan nor overwhelming will to power, just a very ordinary person, full of humiliation, fear, and complicity.

We could talk about the harm 14 years of Tory rule have done to the lives of British people (and not just British people). We could present any number of indicators of the damage they have done to the country’s economy, the near catastrophe they’ve rolled out in health and social care, the misery they’ve brought into the lives of regular people through their welfare policies, the ongoing inhumanity of their immigration strategy. But I’ll present one concrete indicator I saw recently; the programme of austerity and cuts to the welfare state in Britain have been so bad that children raised under the outgoing government are shorter than they were a decade ago as a result of malnutrition. In 2022, 10,000 people were hospitalised in the UK with malnutrition, with historical diseases like rickets and scurvy reappearing in British hospital wards. It quite simply was that bad.

But anyone who lives in Britain knows it, and has seen it (although some pretend not to), written in the faces of their own families, friends and neighbours. Those are the faces to we should really turn to and read for emotion in their responses to yesterday’s election result. Honestly, I hold out little hope for the actual necessary transformation of Britain occurring under the next Labour government. But thank god they are gone. Today, for a moment at least, we can note our own emotional response at seeing that sometimes, rarely, but sometimes at least, bad things do happen to bad people.

‘Utopian Drivel’ is written by me, Huw Lemmey. If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you so much for your support. Please do forward this to anyone who might enjoy it.

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If you aren’t a paid subscriber, please consider subscribing; paid subscribers also help support pieces for free subscribers!

You also get access to the entire archive of 100+ essays, including posts such as this piece on the idea of a gay audience, my review on Saltburn , this essay on depression through a mirror, darkly, and this report on watching the Queen’s funeral at a gay sauna. Free subscribers get occasional posts, like this guided walking tour around London’s world of queer espionage, or this double-header on the Gay History of Private Eye magazine.

Jacob Elordi as Felix Catton in Saltburn

“Everybody hates a tourist,” whimpers Jarvis Cocker into his microphone, “especially one who thinks it’s all such a laugh.” He releases a tight, sardonic giggle. Yeah. Sure. And “the chip stains and grease will come out in the bath”. The camera pans across the crowd. 100,000 people standing in a field. As he returns to the song’s original tone — a deep, uncompromising sincerity that stares the listener straight in the eye and tells it like it is —the crowd pulsates. They don’t just know every word, they feel it. It’s 1995, at the Glastonbury Festival, and his headlining band, Pulp, are at their zenith. There have been 16 years of Conservative government in Britain, and their policies have further entrenched Britain’s class divisions and difference. Cocker’s song seems to press hard on the exposed nerve of huge numbers of young poor people excluded from the riches of Tory rule, just at the moment that working class culture is becoming cool. One really can’t over-emphasise how deep English people’s identification with this song, “Common People,” still runs. It says something important to us.

“Common People” tells the story of the frontman meeting a rich Greek student at the bar of Saint Martin’s, an art college in Soho, Central London, at the end of the ‘80s. Like most London art colleges were until relatively recently, the school was a strange menagerie of starkly different class and national backgrounds, where working- and middle-class oddballs trying to escape the provinces would mix with the feckless progeny of the global ultra-rich indulging in the most social and transferable of higher education pathways. This knowledge-devouring Greek goddess reads Cocker as a working class Northerner, is attracted to him for that reason, and tells him that she wants to live, and fuck, with common people like him. But what she will never understand is that everybody hates a tourist. The only problem is, I don’t think we do. In fact, I think the English love nothing more than a class tourist, especially one whose fare is paid through sex. If we didn’t, why is this fantasy of passing through someone else’s upstairs or downstairs world one we return to again and again, in music, film and fiction?

A decade on from the song’s release, at least in our own fiction time, and Lady Elspeth Catton, played by Rosamund Pike, is reclining in her rattan armchair outside Saltburn, her country home and husband’s ancestral seat. By the pond her children, Felix and Venetia, drape themselves across the ground in their swimwear. Oliver Quick, Felix’s working class university pal, hugs his knees. Babybird’s 1996 hit single “You’re Gorgeous” plays quietly on the radio, causing her to reminisce. “I used to hang out with them all actually, when I was modelling. Britpop, Blur, Oasis, God, the parties. But then, of course, Common People came out, and everybody thought it was written about me, which was completely mortifying and ridiculous. I mean I barely knew Jarvis.” The two beautiful boys share a conspiratorial smile, the sort of conspiracy you can make when you realise just how ludicrous it is that you’ve found yourself where you are. She continues “but she came Greece. She had a thirst for knowledge. It couldn’t have been me. I’ve never wanted to know anything.” 

It’s a standout line, evocative of the kind of listless, benign neglect embodied by the rich aristocratic family whose country pile, Saltburn, gives the film its name, Saltburn, a black satire written and directed by Emerald Fennell that’s been called “the most divisive film of the year”, with good reason. The family aren’t just rich, of course. They’re what my dad would call poshos, that strange sliver of the upper class who balance their inherited wealth and natural conservatism with a certain louche, even bohemian attitude, the sort of rich people whose jumpers may have holes and whose Volvos may smell of wet dog, but whom any Englishman worth his salt can recognise as wealthy, powerful and ennobled from 100 yards. Their undisciplined children fill the public schools of England, their unfaithful husbands fill the boardrooms of the City, their untalented wives fill the galleries of Mayfair, their unconscious parents fill the House of Lords. They are cunts, utter, reckless, moronic cunts, to the last drop. Yet they retain a stranglehold on Britain’s land, culture and imagination, both literally through their power and possession, but also figuratively through their dominance of education and the arts.

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Hardly surprising, then, that a film set in their milieu of Oxford University and the country estate, a film that claims to highlight their entitlement and stupidity, would generate such divergent opinions, especially coming at the end of another generation of Tory rule. Saltburn is a long way from Common People, however. Other critics have compared the film to Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited, which isn’t an enormous leap to make. After all, the basic plotline is similar, at least to begin; the lower-class protagonist [Oliver Quick/Charles Ryder] arrives at Oxford, ready to study and ignorant to the ways of the ruling elite, but soon finds himself transfixed by the boyish scion of a noble family [Felix Catton/Sebastian Flyte]. Becoming friends, or perhaps more than friends, the rebellious heir invites the young man to his family estate [Saltburn/Brideshead], where he charms the boy’s mother and sister, before finding himself in past his depth. 

Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews and Julia Quick in the 1981 TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisted.

Brideshead is often regarded as Waugh’s masterpiece. Like Saltburn, it has long been a favourite of an English middle class keen to look in on how the other half live, and to pruriently observe their sinning. Similarly, like Saltburn, it’s provided a strangely alluring model for the rich and aspiring rich to live up to. It’s notable that a TV adaptation of Brideshead become a point of obsession for many students arriving at Oxford in the early 1980s, at the start of the Thatcher administration, a generation of students who grew up to become the most recent generation of Tory rulers. David Cameron, now Baron Cameron, recalled that “these were also the years after the ITV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, when quite a few of us were carried away by the fantasy of an Evelyn Waugh-like Oxford existence.”

It’s not just half a plot that Saltburn shares with Brideshead, but a narrative device too. Both employ the technique of using a queer man (in the old-new sense of the word), and specifically a queer man of a lower class status, as a narrator and audience surrogate. Like Brideshead, Saltburn starts with this character, speaking later in life, reminiscing about what had happened at the country house many years before. “I had been there before” says Charles Ryder at the end of the prologue, “I knew all about it”. He knew all about it and he was going to tell you. The queer man moving into a different socio-economic class has become a staple of English literature. He is our man on the inside. On account of his queerness, he is accustomed to passing, to shape-shifting, to moving through, just as Oliver Quick does in Saltburn. Quick, you see. Ryder. 

The queer looks. They learn about the rules, the eccentricities, the hypocrisies with fresh eyes, figuring out what the rich are really like, and as they do, we do, along for the ride. It’s through his queer eyes, motivated at first by lust and then curiousity, his desire muted and hence safe, that we see them living. A straight working class boy chasing a posh girl would never work; the defences would already be up. But to the English upper class queerness is disarming, even charming. In Saltburn, Quick does little else but look; nosying around the family silver, staring from the window as Venetia walks the gardens at night, watching through the crack in the door while Felix wanks in the shared bathroom between their two rooms (an architectural idiosyncracy that Saltburn shares with Brideshead and, indeed, the Perlman’s family villa in Call Me By Your Name). 

The bathroom shared by Elio and Oliver in Call Me By Your Name (2017)

It’s a literary technique employed by another gay, Oxford-educated novelist, Alan Hollinghurst, in his 2004 novel The Line of Beauty. His protagonist Nick, recently graduated, follows his straight boy college crush Toby back to his parents grand West London home where he meets the boy’s beautiful but mentally unstable sister Cat, and his rich but inattentive parents, Gerald and Rachel. Set in the early 1980s, Gerald has recently been elected as a Tory MP in Thatcher’s government, and through this device we get to see through the public image of a happy family into its real workings, only to find that behind the Conservative ideals of family values lies sexual infidelity, cruelty and hypocrisy. This illuminates Nick’s own complicated private life as he navigates how to live in Thatcher’s Britain as a young gay man during the AIDS crisis. Despite the apparent warm welcome, he soon finds out that, like with the Catton’s in Saltburn, the rich only ever make transitory and transactionary attachments to the poor. Oh, I should have told you: the protagonist’s full name name is Nick Guest. Guest. Quick. Ryder. Our boys are always just tourists, always just passing through.

Although Saltburn bears some obvious plot resemblances to Brideshead Revisited, I think this similarity is only skin deep. Brideshead Revisited, after all, is nothing if not a book of deep conviction. It’s a book Waugh wrote in the midst of the Second World War, where he was recovering for a few months from a training accident before heading to Bari, Italy, on an improbable secret mission for the Special Operations Executive to Yugoslavia to aid the communist leader Tito and his partisans. Improbable firstly because Waugh was a committed anti-communist, and secondly because, in 1930, he had converted to Catholicism. Brideshead is a deeply theological novel written with a nostalgia and care for the sort of “ordered” society and tradition it depicts, however imperfect that order was. It was also written out of commitment; that, amidst that society’s destruction under the rationalising, modernising influence of mechanised warfare, something still mattered. In Waugh’s case, what mattered was God’s grace, the ability to be brought back into a happy relation with His creation even after all the chaos and sin and cruelty of both Waugh’s and Ryder’s earlier life. And sin there had been; as well as being divorced before his conversion, later necessitating an annulment from the Church before he could be remarried, he had been, like Ryder and Quick, a queer while at Oxford. Like both characters, he had come from a resolutely middle class background, and likewise he had fallen in love with a posho, Alistair Graham, and would spend his holidays at Graham’s stately home, Barford House, complete with glamorous mother and absent father (dead). Waugh’s own experience being an influence on Brideshead is hardly a secret: in the original manuscript Waugh occasionally slips up and refers to Sebastian as Alistair. Like I said, and unusually for Waugh up to this point in his career, its a deeply committed and sincere novel.

Evelyn Waugh relaxing as an older man

Conviction and sincerity are hardly words one could use to describe Saltburn. In The Guardian critic Adrian Horton suggests, convincingly, that it’s a vibes-based film, and “the vibes are lazy”. There is a visual coherence to the film, a sort of posho-gothic carried in the clash of bold and muted colours and sunshine and darkness; a fitting visual language for an old house in high summer. This vibe is boosted by some truly striking scenes which ride its back, including the red, grief-bottled breakfast, or the gravefucking. These scenes carry a plot that slowly reveals the mildly dissolute, fun-loving lives of young, rich, attractive party animals who reject meaningful connections with outsiders, or even each other. There are relationships, sure, but not really passion, more commitment to the vibe, the party, and when your money runs out, your time is up and you’re off the ride. It’s hardly the stuff of Brideshead, with its emphasis on the importance of lingering affections and the long-term damage of interpersonal cruelty.

A more pertinent comparison for Saltburn in terms of form and ideology might instead be Waugh’s 1930 satire, Vile Bodies. Written on the cusp of his conversion (driven, he claimed, by Olivia Plunkett Greene, a fellow free-wheeling party animal whom he lusted unhappily and who “bullied me into the Church”) and during the breakdown of his marriage to his first wife (also called Evelyn), the novel is a deeply pessimistic, cynical satire on the Bright Young Things, a social set of English aesthetes, aristocrats and artists who, mostly too young to have seen the First World War, threw themselves into the outrageous fun and thrills of modernity in the decade that followed it. It was shocking to those who had seen the horror and slaughter of the trenches that the sacrifice of their generation was for this: hollow, artless, debauched, disgusting fun. For those, like Waugh, who took part in the fun, there was clearly an attempt to escape the unmanageable expectations and resentments that came with victory. 

Vile Bodies is extremely well-observed — virtually a roman à clef of his own social circle, a least in its dramatis personae — and bitingly funny, but at its core is the sense of disgust borne of someone growing out of the vibe, the excitement both of partying and of the thrilling new modernity. “Oh Nina, what a lot of parties” laments Adam, the protagonist, exhausted by Russian parties and naked parties, boring parties and drunk parties, Oxford parties and swimming pool parties and disgusting dances in Paris — “all that succession and repetition of massed humanity … Those vile bodies”. Same with Saltburn: all that period fingering, all that coke and Bolly, cum-slurping, succubus rape, karaoke-wailing, all those vile bodies… but where does it all end? What does it mean? The vibe, the scene and the shock seem only in service of themselves: at what point do any of these scenes break into a meaning beyond the plot? 

Cecil Beaton’s photo of some of the actual Bright Young Things

For Waugh, it ends in destruction, and I can’t blame him. In my own first two books, themselves both satires on London’s late-capitalist (I hope!) faggotry, there seems nowhere for the story to go but the end of the world. It’s a get-out, a trick. The epilogue of Vile Bodies ends on “a splintered tree stump in the biggest battlefield in the history of the world”, stricken with biological weapons. But — and here’s the problem — Waugh’s apocalypse is the moment in which his cynicism is weaponised, where it sharpens to a point. This “circling typhoon” of decadence, of disconnection, of modernity, leads inevitably to a war of the worlds. Yes, it’s crypto-fascist, but it is a point, a value judgement. But here, circling too, is the fatal flaw in Saltburn. The world of Saltburn, its ancestral line, ends. But there is no reason that anything happens. What is the point?

This isn’t an argument for a didactic political lesson (personally, I wouldn’t mind, but that’s not everyone’s vibe). Rather, it’s pointing out that there’s no emotional component that moves the action; whereas Vile Bodies breakdown of weak social bonds drives towards calamity, Saltburn instead dissipates towards nihilism. Waugh’s destruction is the story, Fennell’s is just the plot. Throughout the first two-thirds of the film, enough is left unspoken to allow the viewer to build a universe of potential causes and effects which makes it feel, for a moment, like a very rich film. What makes the bathwater cum so delicious to him? When Oliver finally sticks his dick in the freshly-turned sod in which Felix lies, I gripped my hands into fists with a pure, disgusting pleasure at the weirdness of it all. There appears, for a moment, to be something unplaceably strange driving this man. And yet, from this point on, the film is suddenly lost. Any story is ripped from the viewer. In quick succession the rest of the family are knocked off as mere plot points, sucking the tension from the plot. Perhaps it’s counterintuitive, but one murder is far more unnerving than four murders. And then, in the final act, the protagonist becomes a Scooby-Doo-ass villain, ripping off his mask and explaining just how he did get away with it, despite all the pesky kids. Oh great, I thought, as a montage of sabotage made everything previously unspoken suddenly painfully explicit. This director thinks I’m a fucking moron. 

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So did Quick fuck Venetia to hurt Felix? Did he hope, in imbibing Felix’s salty, cum-laced bathwater, to ingest some of his superior, noble DNA into his own body? Was he, like Highsmith’s Ripley, aroused not by knowing humans, but by defrauding them? Was he disgusted by his own class, or did he desire to wreak revenge upon the rich in the mansions in which they live? Did he start by wanting a simple homosexual love affair, but become entangled in his own lies to the point where murder was inevitable, even just? Feeling Felix slip from his grasp, did he kill him so no-one else could have him, a mirror of the sort of fucked-up patriarchal urge that sees bankrupt men burn down their homes and murder their families? All were delicious possibilities before we were told, in bold print, ass hanging out, that no, this is what he did and he did it because he simply wanted the house. It was a simple murder plot from the first minute of the film. We’ll ignore the plot holes; how suicide seems fundamentally out of character for the rambunctious, easy-going father; possible, of course, but not so likely as to be part of any pre-determined masterplan; or how a person driven by a total, character-eradicating psychopathy is simultaneously driven to wailing grave abuse. 

In the end, we are left with only one feasible place to look for a motive that drives the plot. It can’t be emotion, and desire seems pretty much out of the window considering Quick’s masterplan is in action long before the lingering money shots of Felix’s elongated, erect neck. The only real source is the thing Oliver lies about, runs from, obsesses over: his class. Oliver’s upbringing, far from the life of poverty and addiction that he describes, is actually very comfortably upper middle-class, albeit in an area that suffers from high crime and that ranks as one of the most deprived boroughs in England. Sitting between these two positions, as a well-off scouser, he becomes very specifically the supposed surrogate of an audience of a film who are, in all likelihood, from a similar background: neither powerful nor impoverished. So, who are we supposed to be?

One of the alternative covers for Pulp’s album “Different Class”

What is the attitude towards class in this film whose engine runs on the English obsession with class? The English, as is well known, have a complex attitude to class. We have an ear for it, the way one might have an ear for music. Its signals resonate to us, especially for the middle classes, for whom a constantly regenerating set of signifiers betray a very specific class position; a Waitrose shopping bag, a confused “was” with “were”, a dinner or a tea, a signet ring: all hum a recognisable tune, so much so that the signifiers themselves can be taken on or off almost as a costume. They are what Owen Hatherley describes as the “epiphenomena of class usually obsessed over by marketers, psychologists, and rock musicians”. That fancy dress is especially popular when young people attend university, searching to find an identity that fits and distinguishes them from the dreaded label of being middle class. English universities are full of people using their miner grandfather to offset their stockbroker grandfather, or, less frequently, hiding their humbler origins and accents, which is why Oliver’s lie is such a convincing and engaging plot point for an English audience. Being able to pinpoint or obfuscate exactly where you sit within a shifting class system is a defining characteristic of the English middle classes, and is an characteristic far more enduring than mere shopping loyalties. In the words of David Hoyle, “I am actually from a lower middle-class situation - and they are the most treacherous. You’re walking a very fine line to prove that you are superior to the truly poor… a lot of these middle class people will cut a ha’penny in two.” I, like Hoyle, am from a lower middle class situation; while my parents were frequently broke, we were never poor. An important distinction.

Yet the epiphenomena of class — the accents and shopping habits and dinner times — are not what makes class, even in England. As Pulp demonstrate in Common People, even if you adopt all the signifiers of a different class, “you will never understand / how it feels to live your life / with no meaning or control” because the actual phenomena of class — poverty and opportunity, limitation and reassurance — are its actual meaningful consequences. If you called your dad he could stop it all. The power of Common People, Hatherley astutely notes, is not just in mocking the upper class tourist slumming it with the poor, but in offering hope and speaking to the weird working class kids “who don’t play pool or smoke fags, who don’t talk in Cockney or Manc accents, who might be uninterested in sports or pints, who might not even be heterosexual — to tell them that none of this had anything to do with social class.” It’s not the sportswear that makes you working class, it’s that you’ll always understand, and that your dad couldn’t stop it all.

Saltburn does just the opposite. In its world, there is no meaningful distinction in the way our class influences our relationships with others. We are all willing to treat each other like property, we are all willing to laugh at our friends when their backs are turned, we are all liars. The only real difference between Oliver and the Cattons is envy. We are all just temporarily embarrassed Cattons. What makes Oliver an antihero within the film? It’s that he fills that strange archetype so loved by the English, the class tourist, enabled by his queerness. It’s only the intoxicating and ultimately toxic combination of intelligence and faggotry that has sheared him from his rightful class position and fired him into the echelons of the rich, and he’s here to report back to us that, underneath their clothes, they’re just the same as us. It’s all just epiphenomena, all the way down. And if they’re just the same as us, well, what’s the point in getting rid of them?

‘Utopian Drivel’ is written by me, Huw Lemmey. If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you so much for your support. Please do forward this to anyone who might enjoy it.

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You also get access to the entire archive of 100+ essays, including posts such as this piece on the idea of a gay audience, this short story about breaking glass, , this essay on depression through a mirror, darkly, and this report on watching the Queen’s funeral at a gay sauna. Free subscribers get occasional posts, like this guided walking tour around London’s world of queer espionage, or this double-header on the Gay History of Private Eye magazine.

As I rushed down the stairs from his apartment, I felt I had to make a decisive move. God help me. I wanted to throw my phone and wallet into the river. I wondered whether I should follow them, and which would wash up first. I wanted to burn my clothes. The door to the block of flats slammed shut behind me. Fuck. What had I left behind?

All I have is my good name. Not to others. Standing there in the street, gripping my own thighs in search of keys and wallet, nobody could have named me. Not one of them would even remember my face by the time they returned home to their families. Nobody knows my name, not even the woman who delivers my post. Nobody knows my name, which is why it is good. That is all I have. I am a good person, I told myself, again. I sweated through my shirt as I reached the steps of the church. Had I left my good name behind? Fuck.

Today. At the fountain outside my window, a child howls. Most of the crowd ignore him. I try, but something in his wail, its pitch or depth, suggests to me he is too old to be howling like that. Nothing is broken. I can’t remember howling like that at his age, but perhaps I did. It sounds bad for him, but to me it sounds so good. I wish I could still howl like that. I must have left behind my public howl.

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Almost as solemnly as she arrived, she leaves, accompanied again only by the drum and the wailing drone of a Catalan bagpipe, known as a sac de gemecs — quite literally, a bag of moans. We shuffle out, having survived another warning, the warning itself a prayer to the Virgin Mary to deliver Christ, to deliver us. The basilica of Santa Maria del Mar is 700 years old, a small masterpiece of Catalan Gothic architecture, but the song is older; it had already been sung in this region for probably 400 years when the foundation stone was laid. It is said to have been sung in a handful of churches across Catalonia, the Balearics and Sardinia every Christmas Eve for a millennium. The name for this liturgical drama is El Cant de la Sibil·la, The Song of the Sybil, and now it’s something I attend every Christmas, a feast that, to my mind, requires a dark lining to add depth to the celebrations. 

The antichrist, as depicted in the Rupertsberg codex of Hildegard von Bingen’s Scivias

I have an interest in the prophecies of the end of the world, and especially those of the sibyls, who first appear in the cultures of ancient Greece as women whose prophetic visions were of the gods, channelled through these priestesses. The role was formalised, passed down through successors, and the most famous today is no doubt the sibyl who tended the Oracle at Delphi — remembered in a Western European tradition thanks to the later belief that she prophesied the birth of Christ. A few years ago I published a novel called Unknown Language, based on the mystical visions and cosmology of Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth century German abbess whose extensive writings on her experiences led to her being known as the Sibyl of the Rhine. In my book the protagonist lives through the end of the world that Hildegard prophesied, and in some form survives it. It is this, in fact, that interests me most: not merely the apocalypse, but those who survive the apocalypse. 

Hildegard’s visions of the end of the world weren’t cut from whole cloth. A European imaginary of the apocalypse is something of a tradition, a visual world full of allegories and images that we have inherited from people of the past, and while the meanings and context have changed, the form of the terror is something so deeply ingrained in a European psyche that its descriptive powers seem to still resonate. Our understanding of it as a physical catastrophe, one marked by burning rivers and mountains laid low, for example, is a gift handed down to us by the nightmares of earlier generations. It’s a vision of climate catastrophe, malign governance, sickness and eventual redemption that we amend and alter, but it’s an intangible inheritance of fear nonetheless. Much of the visual and theological imagery for this type of apocalypse comes from Jewish and early Christian sources. These were people living under Roman occupation and in the idea of a final judgement they found a recompense for present sufferings that seemed not just deeply unjust, but almost unending. And, truly, the present suffering didn’t, doesn’t, end. The visions resonated as they spread through the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and finally to this little crescent of the Mediterranean, precisely because they were the fears of everyday life. To take some common interpretations of the four horsemen featured in the Book of Revelations; famine, war, pestilence, social breakdown, the collapse of empires, and death. These were the everyday fears of everyday Christians for millenia. Were we to be paying attention, they still would be.

There is a preterist interpretation of the Book of Revelation, arguing that it was written not as a prophecy of events to come, but as a description of the trials already faced by the early Christians in the first century. Its author was John of Patmos, an elusive historical figure who we know only through his book, but who quite credibly claimed to be living in exile on the island of Patmos, where he had his visions, due to his being persecuted by the Roman authorities.

The Delphic Sibyl, as represented by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

It’s hardly a surprise he was persecuted. The Romans feared prophecy, and especially prophecy with political implications, as only true believers can. They themselves had their own Sibylline oracles: not living prophetesses, but books, the Libri Sibyllini, which they believed had been given to the last king of Rome before the formation of the Republic by a Greek sibyl, and contained oracular visions that the Romans consulted for centuries not just to understand what they were undergoing, but what rites and rituals to perform to assuage the gods and prevent catastrophe. Interestingly, they were one of the reasons why the Roman pantheon of gods came to mirror the Greek. The books were written in Greek hexameter, and the plasticity with which they could be interpreted, especially politically, would eventually be their downfall. They were destroyed around the end of the 4th century, just as the Empire was splitting between Rome and Constantinople. 

Yet the figure of the sibyl survived this end of her world. In the decades and centuries that followed her excision from Roman religion and politics, she re-emerged in a strange, almost parodical form in the books of Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian writers in the eastern Empire, who saw in her cultural legacy and form a mouth to utter new prophecies (indeed, one Greek writer, Celsus, described Christians as “sibyl-mongers” due to their tendency to prophecy). A whole series of books written at this time, aping the Greek hexameter of the Libri Sibyllini came to be known as the Oracula Sibyllina - the Sibylline Oracles. With a rich eschatological imagery describing contemporary events within the context of an unfolding, unravelling world, soon heading for judgement, these books would slowly creep up into Europe where they would foment panic, insurrection and crusades for a thousand years to come, influencing the end-of-the-worldview of not just Hildegard, but also El Cant de la Sibil·la, and many more. Peasants, priests and princes: few were immune from the terrifying charm of the end.

But it was another churchman, a bishop from Hippo named Augustine, who saw in the collapsing Western Roman Empire his own moment to fundamentally change Christian relationships with prophecy. Next week for paid subscribers I’ll talk more about St Augustine’s vision of the end of the world, the influence of the Sibylline Oracles on mediaeval Europe, and about our contemporary visions of the last unravelling of existence. 

‘Utopian Drivel’ is written by me, Huw Lemmey. If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you so much for your support. Please do forward this to anyone who might enjoy it.

Subscribe now

If you aren’t a paid subscriber, please consider subscribing; paid subscribers also help support pieces for free subscribers! You also get access to the entire archive of 100+ essays, including posts such as this piece on the idea of a gay audience, this essay on the quality of phone screentime, , this essay on depression through a mirror, darkly, and this report on watching the Queen’s funeral at a gay sauna. Free subscribers get occasional posts, like this guided walking tour around London’s world of queer espionage, or this double-header on the Gay History of Private Eye magazine.

In his history of Edward Durrell Stone’s design for 2 Columbus Circle, New York City, built in 1964 to house the Gallery of Modern Art (GMA), the architecture critic Herbert Muschamp offers an critical examination of the role a “gay audience” played in establishing an alternative narrative to modernism in the city.

In fractious dialogue with the Museum of Modern Art, the collection housed at the GMA gave new significance and space to the Pre-Raphaelites and the Surrealists, disrupting the Greenbergian hegemony of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the city at the time. The All American Men of Abstract Expressionism produced an All-American Art: “the dominance of Abstract Expressionism over Surrealism looked a lot like the dynamic between high school jocks and the fairies they'd tortured”, he notes. The GMA, in contrast, provided a home for the fairies; a place where the overlooked aesthetic and political nuances of neglected and decorative movements could find their viewer.

2 Columbus Circle then :)

A gay audience, as in the architecture of 2 Columbus Circle as well as the gallery itself, produced not a reactionary yearning for the past, but a complication of the monolithic International Style that dominated New York architecture at the time, recognising that complexities, outliers and deviations tell us as much about our culture as the hegemonic aesthetic regime. Both building and collection, he wrote,

ran counter to the prevailing standards of High Modern taste with which the city asserted its postwar hegemony in the arts.

What these phenomena had in common was audience appeal - an appeal to the varieties of desire and conflict, to show biz, to memory, and above all to the open-ended heterogeneity of city life. You didn't see that in the perpetual reiteration of abstract paintings and glass towers.

These counter-positions to modernism's restrictive codes needed a stage, and a stage requires an audience attuned to the creative logic behind seemingly wanton events and who seizes the opportunity to help shape its own moment in time. That is where gay men came in.

To me, it’s a wonderful piece of criticism; it offers complications to the narrative of the culture of a city, and to New York’s planning specifically, whilst still offering a passionate, potent and witty defence of all that is great about urban life at a time when the trend was to encourage the shrinking of cities. “By the standards of Eisenhower's America,” Muschamp writes,

gay taste was perverse. In hindsight, it seems more like a corrective to the far greater perversity of postwar "progress." What kind of normality was it to imagine that abandoning American cities was a good thing to do? Goodbye, cities! Adiós, civilization! Good riddance to the repository of cultural memory, the incubator of ideas, the heartbeat of humankind.

Upon first reading it, thrilling to its tone, by turns learned and shady, I felt its focus on a gay audience and its relationship with a city’s cultural history illuminated an important division for me in my own writing. It felt natural, when I started writing about the subject of cities and homosexuality, to call it a “queer urbanism”, or “queer psychogeography”. The phrase felt more inclusive, and trendy, like I was taking into account the broad variety positions and subjects that we now know recognise. But perhaps a “gay urbanism” is more accurate, more honest.

Queer to me is not an identity, but an approach to identities. Queer is about undermining a fixed homosexual subject as the production of a heterosexual form of discipline; it is about positionality. Gay, on the other hand, is about the production of that identity within heterosexual discipline. “The elaborating of certain erotic preferences into a “character” – into a kind of erotically determined essence – can never be a disinterested scientific enterprise” wrote Leo Bersani (adopting a voice) in his introduction to Homos – “The attempted stabilizing of identity is inherently a disciplinary project.” But, like Bersani continues, there is nonetheless political and cultural value in that elaboration, and the “discrediting of a specific gay identity...has had the curious but predictable result of eliminating the indispensable grounds for resistance to, precisely, hegemonic regimes of the normal”.

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An urban gayness is the product of a shared history and culture, diverse yet with a specific focus, passed down largely through the oral tradition and through a complex ecosystem of cultural production, through art and theatre, through camp and through political agitation. To me, the queer is a forward-looking and utopian political project aiming to undermine the secure subject position, to disrupt the regime of gender and sexuality categorization that is used to punish the deviant. I’m drawn to that political project, but I have always been someone who can only see the world I live in through the spectres of history. The gay, then – the specific and contingent, the flawed and corrupt, the lost and still living – holds me in its grip when it comes to my approach to the city. It illuminates the city and culture in the explication of its very prejudices.

2 Columbus Circle now :(

A gay urbanism understands the city through an approach that is askew to the mainstream, the heterosexual, the planned, but contingent upon it, existing as a lived experience only in relation to the attempts at control, order, and policing. I think that the historical imagination is ideally suited to the specifics of the gay city, rather than the political projections of the queer city. Please do not read this as a reactionary attitude towards the queer – or, at least, please accept my apologies as I search for the value in the specifics, and try to disrupt me if you will. Bersani continues:

We have erased ourselves in the process of denaturalizing the epistemic and political regimes that have constructed us. The power of those systems is only minimally contested by demonstrations of their “merely” historical character. They don’t need to be natural in order to rule; to demystify them doesn’t render them inoperative. If many gays now reject a homosexual identity as it has been elaborated for gays by others, the dominant heterosexual society doesn’t need our belief in its own naturalness in order to continue exercising and enjoying the privileges of dominance.

In historical specifics we can understand better a gay relation to the city as the city relates to gays. The city and homosexuality are almost coterminous in both history, homosexuality as a category emerging out of bourgeois moral panics of the new sexual conditions created by urbanisation, and physically, with urban centres providing the unique mix of darkness and light needed to generate a resistant sexual subculture. From those temporal and physical specificities emerge the stories necessary to create the contradictions and counter-narratives that offer alternatives, in the same way that the contesting cultures of cities provide counternarratives to the isolation of rural fags who find themselves drawn to urban spaces.

As Muschamp elaborates, those contingent new cultures of cities produce not just artists, or performers, but also new audiences. Audiences are themselves silos of memories and references, and are the catalyst that produces meaning and takes it out, from inside the galleries or clubs or theatres, into the world, in order to change perspectives, to change urban space. “In the 60's, the space of the audience expanded from the theater to the city at large. The energy that flowed into that setting was driven by adolescent hormones. We were eager to attach ourselves not only to one another but to the streets.”

Perhaps in further exploring our relationship with the city as a specifically gay experience, we can understand ourselves as an important receptive and productive audience. The AIDS crisis represented both a massive loss of, and a discontinuity in the oral culture that helped created, a gay audience. Muschamp laments this loss as being under-recognised in its significance:

Early on in the AIDS crisis, the city registered the cultural impact caused by the loss of gay artists. The effect produced by the loss of the gay audience is more insidious, however. An audience retains the memory of a performance. What happens to that memory when the audience is gone?

Those memories were never recounted to younger gays like myself; the skills never transferred, the slow realisation of the impact of urban histories on our senses of self having to be learnt from experience, rather than taught from experience. In picking up the pieces of our specific histories, we can produce challenges to a hegemonic regime which wishes to plaster our city in glass facades, much like they’ve done to 2 Columbus Circle, covering up the distasteful Venetian motifs, the Tiffany lamps, the dirty gay bars, the darkened nooks and crannies, the complex counter-histories to capitalism that don’t sell well but produce lives and loves and meanings and memories. Muschamp understands that “a vibrant city is perpetually recreated from the emotional depths, and from our socialized capacity to empathize with the memories of others”, and in remembering we can recreate our cities too.

‘Utopian Drivel’ is written by me, Huw Lemmey. If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you so much for your support. Please do forward this to anyone who might enjoy it.

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If you aren’t a paid subscriber, please consider subscribing; paid subscribers also help support pieces for free subscribers! You also get access to the entire archive of 100+ essays, including posts such as this essay on the quality of phone screentime, this piece on Orton and Halliwell, this essay on depression through a mirror, darkly, and this report on watching the Queen’s funeral at a gay sauna. Free subscribers get occasional posts, like this guided walking tour around London’s world of queer espionage, or this double-header on the Gay History of Private Eye magazine.