Because there was such a thing as drunkenness, I aspired to it. I took it, it was there. Moderate friends would wince and even suggest I was ‘self-destructive’ but that didn’t sound right to me. Things would happen, that’s all.
—Eileen Myles, 2008
It nearly escaped our notice, but the United Kingdom implemented civil partnerships for same-sex couples at the end of 2005. This allowed me, as the foreign partner of a British citizen, to settle in the UK. A year and a half later, Famous and I completed the paperwork, packed two of the largest suitcases allowed on the plane and migrated. We wound up in London, renting a one-bedroom, third-floor flat on an estate that backed onto Hoxton Square, skirting the district of Shoreditch. The territory was no longer the East End, a pejorative invoked from the Victorian pulpit and in the halfpenny press to indicate slums, vice-ridden and seeping with cholera. It was simply, authoritatively East. By the time we moved there, the working-class area was on the cusp of extreme upscaling. The bland intersection above Old Street station would come to be nicknamed the Silicon Roundabout, epicenter of the nation’s tech industry. A penthouse residence would cost over four million pounds. The private members’ club Shoreditch House, with rooftop pool, opened in 2007. A Versace store would follow. A generic inn was taken over by the American boutique chain Ace Hotel, its restaurant given the name Hoi Polloi. Gentrification was an unabashed part of the branding—a joke.
In Shoreditch, the narrow passages we took were lined in the brickwork of former furniture warehouses and small factories converted into nightclubs and boutiques. Waves of immigration had settled over three centuries—Huguenot weavers, who brought with them the word refugee, Irish Catholics, Ashkenazi Jews, Sylheti-Bangladeshis. In the nineties, many of the hyped Young British Artists had studios in the area. (Much of their output revalued white working-class taste.) By the aughts, a noncitizenry proliferated, youthful and hungry, displaced by persecution of a subtle yet acute kind, misunderstood elsewhere, infidels, individualists, whose only allegiance was to the vague federation of fashion, and who saw East London as the place to land because it too was constantly on the move.
This arriviste was unlike bohemian or slacker. They created corporate content, conceived pop-ups, fired off emails. They networked in a bar that went by an amalgam of the two wholesalers previously occupying the adjoining spaces it knocked through: Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes. They were evidently made of considerable gumption, and were to most observers frankly annoying. Some mimicked the laboring roots of the area, donning flat caps, blue work jackets and fingerless gloves. But the dominant style was more obstreperous, and began with bottle blond hair. Neon plastic was big, as was unnatural animal print: dalmatian on purple, zebra on lime yellow. When Famous’s father came to visit, he informed us that everyone he’d passed on our street looked like Boy George. In fact, Boy George did own a flat in Shoreditch. But we’d heard he’d chained a male escort to a radiator there, so was for the time being incarcerated. I exhaled cigarette smoke out our window, squinting at passersby to determine who was a post-electroclash pop star (M.I.A., La Roux, the XX) and who just dressed like them.
The media loved to deride the frippery. (The whole nation seemed to use the masculinist slur Shoreditch twat as a metonym for pretentiousness.) But I found it refreshing. The sartorial pizzazz amounted to a kind of dazzle camouflage for androgynous gay kids who would have once felt vulnerable on these streets. Gender and sexual transgression were decreed universally hip by hetero-oriented media like Vice, who took up its UK offices in the area. Now that the conventions had been upended, it was sometimes unclear if public displays of same-sex affection were homos enjoying the new tolerance, or straights getting up to homo shenanigans as mischief and shock value. Was gay the new cocaine? When Famous glimpsed two lads dressed in what appeared to be school uniforms kissing passionately in the men’s bathroom of a straight pub, he returned to me astonished. I don’t know what I’ve just seen. To us, that brazen act was not something young homosexuals would ever do in a heterosexual establishment. Were they gay boys liberated by the new permissiveness, or straight boys free to experiment when the mood struck? Either way, I regretted I hadn’t seen it myself.
There were a few gay bars in the area, too, and they happened to be the best in town. In 2007, the New York Times ran a story called ‘Where the Club Boys Are.’ It was illustrated by a photograph of Hoxton Square, our de facto backyard. In the picture, young people sit on the short grass in small groups, forearms idling on knees. The high-profile White Cube art gallery makes a stately backdrop; on the horizon, new skyscrapers encroach. The article proclaimed that, in contrast to the Soho and Vauxhall muscle scenes, Shoreditch ‘has emerged as a grittier, fashion-forward and often outrageous hotbed of gay nightlife.’ Such hype hinged on three bars we called the Triangle, with each point indicating a different disposition or time of night: jolly George and Dragon, sordid Joiners Arms and laid-back Nelsons Head—a respective five-, ten- and fifteen-minute walk from our building.
We first chanced upon the George and Dragon on a late afternoon shortly after our arrival. It jutted into an alley, looking scuzzy compared with the Palladian architecture of St. Leonard’s Church opposite. The pub was closed but made the right impression on us with the DIY posters in its windows, so we returned at opening time. Inside, all available space was stuffed with zany bric-a-brac: plastic fruit, animal masks, unfolded fans, an alligator carcass escaping from the heap. There were cut-out cardboard figures of Cher, Elvira and Divine—the type once displayed in video stores or cinema lobbies—and one I thought was Kim Basinger from Batman but turned out to be Kim Wilde, singer of ‘Kids in America.’ A massive animatronic mule head chewed on a carrot hypnotically. The cellar could be seen through the slots between the thick floorboards. With our half-pints of Murphy’s, drawn for us by a skinny young bartender, we sat gazing at the motes of dust in the few shafts of sunlight penetrating the room. I realized it wasn’t a gay bar but a gay pub. I lived in London now, and hung out at a place with a name like George and Dragon, very Byzantine. The pub’s musty cheer would have been unfathomable in the London of the nineties that Famous left behind. It was unlike the slick Soho gay bars, with their look of the penthouse suite, but neither did it retreat to the seedy basement; it was more like an overstuffed attic. But somehow in the new London, its existence was unsurprising. It was totally of its moment by giving the impression of having been there all along.
Within a week, we returned at night, and it was crowded then. The boys looked like sailors, in matelots and kerchiefs, with tattoos of galleons and anchors revealed by the deep v of their tees. Some were more like swashbucklers—but hungover ones, in baggy pirate pyjamas and battered Vivienne Westwood buckle boots. More than a few had the gaunt, mocking faces of an Isherwood fop, updated with sinople-red hair plastered around their pale skin. Late enough in the night, a few club kids would be in the mix, towering above the rest in fright wigs or gimp hoods or both.
I learned that the G&D had only opened in 2002, its barrage of cluttered decor not so much accumulated as installed readymade. In fact, despite its creaky, dusty ambience, the premises had most recently been occupied by a shoe wholesaler. Going further back, the pub dates to at least the mid-nineteenth century. One of the new owners moved to London from somewhere up north, and imported a homely sensibility by way of the tchotchkes and the unpretentious lagers. In 2005, the bar’s interior was reconstructed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts—the replica of a simulacrum. The pub then opened its own gallery in the fetid toilets—the White Cubicle. Even Wolfgang Tillmans exhibited in the White Cubicle, hanging a huge, glossy framed portrait of Richard Branson over the toilet. The only time I’ve wielded power over that tycoon is when he looked on as I flushed at the G&D.
I came to recognize the regular DJs. Svelte, unencumbered Cozette, wearing a tuxedo jacket, was said to be of Freud lineage. She DJed with an angular male counterpart, and eventually a twink joined in their sets like an adopted son, donning mesh tops, poised and serious-faced at the decks. An ageless milliner, looking like someone’s auntie, placidly selected tunes from Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band. Princess Julia wiggled in wearing a tidy forties dress and jet-black hair. It was rumored she had gone out every night since the Blitz Kids days of the early eighties. She spoke like a Cockney sparrow—born, as the saying goes, within the sound of Bow bells (more precisely, in transit in an ambulance somewhere along the street of the George and Dragon). The handsome Prince Nelly, new gay bar royalty, lip-synced along to his power ballad selections with a crooner’s passion, both his fists at his sternum. He announced the next song into a microphone, imparting copious factoids. In general, the music was eighties pop—Dead or Alive, Bananarama, Belinda Carlisle, the Human League—and stuff irresistible after imbibing cheap beer: ‘Fantasy’ by Mariah Carey. ‘9 to 5.’ Crystal Castles. CSS. Janet Jackson’s ‘When I Think of You.’ ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ by Depeche Mode. ‘That’s Not My Name.’ MGMT. ‘D.A.N.C.E.’ ‘Last Dance.’ I recognized the Lovely Jonjo from his appearance on the cover of Butt magazine. In that image, he was nude and cherubic, looking over his shoulder, blond curls licking his forehead. I used a mutual friend as an excuse to introduce myself. He put his headphones down and ‘Ready for the Floor’ began to play. He grinned broadly. The Lovely Jonjo was another Londoner born and raised, but dressed like a California teenager in sea-foam blue and hot pink. I could easily summon his bare bum to mind. One by one my images of London were materializing. Famous plucked up the nerve to say hello to Konstantin just as he was leaving. Konstantin, villainously handsome, was a star on Flickr, the photo-sharing website through which the two were linked along with dozens of international fags who admired one another’s intimate snapshots obsessively. Soon enough, we appeared in Konstantin’s pictures ourselves. We are naked and supine on rumpled sheets, photographed from above. Between our shoulders you can spot Konstantin’s socked feet.
Famous and I began to travel with the crew I met at my new job for a fashion designer—especially with Robbie, who had a square jaw and long brown hair and had been brought out from New York City with the company. As our group entered the G&D, I was aware we were acceptable, even afforded a certain status. I’d been branded by my association with the label. The fashion industry regulars clocked us like cats raising their brows then dropping back into a snooze, assured of familiar company. We became a different kind of wallflower—not shrinking violets but judgmental pansies. In this way, we contributed to the worst element at the G&D: an insiderness wherein anonymity could not be sustained—a place for networking. London’s fashion scene thrived on a provincial urbanity: people surveyed the room the way they do at art openings, fully aware of one another’s currency.
Gays have nine lives, I thought, and I was on maybe four or five. Having decided we would finally behave like grown-ups upon moving to London, we instead regressed as soon as we figured out we still scanned as young enough to play the new boys in town. For the first time, I had an accent. Early on, I brashly quizzed the skinny bartender at the G&D where we should go out dancing when the pub closed. Sundays meant a club kid night called Boombox, but he warned us that it got so crowded it was hard to get in. Otherwise, everyone just decamped down the road to the Joiners Arms, but he advised us not to expect too much—it was just the sort of place people would end up because it was there and open late. We bore that in mind, little suspecting it would become our routine.
We’d hang out at the G&D until around a half hour before closing, then traipse down Hackney Road to the Joiners. This was timed to narrowly avoid the masses as they were ejected from the G&D, when the pub staff pulled down noisy metal shutters and barked at punters to finish up their drinks. The bartenders wanted to go to the Joiners, too. Between the venues, we slipped into a cramped off-license and bought Polish beers, ten cigarettes and Buzz Fizzy Mix, and then sucked it all down in the cold yellow light cast by a lonely cyber café. En route to the Joiners, we’d pass a few club kids huddled under a tree; an epicene with one dangling earring rushing back to the G&D for whatever or whoever they’d left behind; someone vomiting onto a wall.
The Joiners Arms, an unprepossessing shack across from an office furniture wholesaler slash parking lot, is said to have existed in some form since at least 1869. The proprietor was a disheveled dandy wearing a soiled jacket and neckerchief, leaning on a cane, cigarette between teeth, his lips curled into a sly smile. David Pollard had taken over the place in 1997, hoisting a rainbow flag without apology, a dyed-in-the-wool leftie catering to working-class gay men who lived locally. People said there used to be a dark room upstairs. Something of the ribald atmosphere remained under Pollard’s laissez-faire stewardship. He brought to mind a haggard innkeeper catering to smugglers and ship wreckers. It was said he was unconcerned with money, just effortless at hosting. The cachet of the place was not the result of a brand strategy, but down to its shambolic character. Everyone wanted to be a part of that. We gossiped about the latest celebrity to arrive by chauffeured car and dash in.
Any restraint maintained at the G&D was abandoned at the Joiners. Let go, Famous demanded of a cheeky boy at the bar who immediately cupped my groin with his palm. We’d watch it fill up within the hour. It looked better with bodies. Empty, it could be any forlorn gay bar on the edge of any town. At the same time, perversely, it might pass for a preschool, with its yellow walls, low ceiling and world map. Visitors marked their place of origin: San Francisco, Tokyo, Melbourne. That was the map of our cosmopolitan London—in those days, we were always being introduced to a hunk called Rafael from São Paulo, or bonding over a cigarette with a comely Andalusian rabble-rouser named Paz.
If Wolfgang Tillmans was there taking pictures, it made everything doubly exciting, as if he were a satellite beaming us to the rest of the world. I once watched him photograph a crumpled napkin on the bar. He caught my eye and grinned. Then there was the time a few rough-looking old geezers took their semierect cocks out on the dance floor. The British call them willies, and that seemed exactly the right word for their pale uncut meat. They smirked and laughed, having asserted this was still their territory. A good-looking teenager prowled around collecting glasses or playing games of pool, so that I was never sure if he was employed there. He was always topless, a hoop through one nipple. His sweaty thick skin would nearly make contact as he squeezed past. It was as though the humidity of his flesh generated the ambience of the whole place.
We danced to whatever—Rihanna, Lady Gaga, ‘Finally’ by CeCe Peniston. On Thursdays, a DJ collective played esoteric house, which Famous complained was too serious. Our ongoing joke was how miserable it would be if we ended up dying there: the Joiners Harms, we called it, as Robbie passed around shots of sambuca, the syrup coating my tobacco-stained fingertips. The dingy unisex bathroom was the bar’s climax, so habitually commandeered for drugs and sex it was eventually assigned its own bouncer. Apparently, it used to be worse, permanently flooded, and when the toilets were remodeled, some regulars took home the cubicle dividing walls as souvenirs. Now the line snaked halfway through the bar. When I finally got to the front, I’d make a beeline for the next vacated toilet, where I’d squint as I pissed, trying not to see what floated near my feet. Once, a man came from behind like vapor and barricaded the stall door. I was only liberated when the guard knocked furiously. The next time this happened, it was in the disabled stall, and by two men. I was backing into the corner when once again saved by security, though I was spared no harsh words, presumed to be in on it. On other occasions, I was. The Joiners Harms sobriquet was less amusing the morning after we took home a handsome daddy who topped me so recklessly we ended up in the emergency room, where both Famous and I were prescribed a course of PEP once the nurse heard tell of how events had played out in our bedroom.
After a few years, the novelty of the neighborhood wore off, but it was loud out the window so I’d use my old line on Famous—can’t beat ’em, join ’em—and we’d go out into the night. With time, we took to approaching the Joiners from the opposite direction—farther east, from the Nelsons Head. Maybe we’d outgrown the overaccessorized and colorful G&D, what young Londoners called try-hard. At the Nelsons, we tried hard not to try hard. The men were plain and attractive. They’d once modeled for Prada or acted in porn or played in indie bands or some combination thereof. The style was understated: five o’clock shadow, spritz of sandalwood, A.P.C. jeans. The Nelsons Head has been around since the 1820s. In the early aughts, it was run by an elusive character, said to be a legless queer man nicknamed Peggy—as in pegleg. The Nelsons was reopened by Farika and Patrick in July 2007, the weekend the ban on smoking inside bars went into effect. This may explain the message on the chalkboard just outside the door: No Screeching.
Farika and Patrick didn’t will the place into being any more gay than it already was. The East End, as Farika surmises, has just always been that way inclined. (In London, drag has been as much working class as gay. It’s said that around the corner at the flower market pub the Royal Oak, for instance, a cross-dressing couple named Lil and Maisie performed while bombs fell in the Second World War.) Anyway, once Farika and Patrick hired an especially cute bartender, that did it: the Nelsons was a gay bar. (Guy Strait once described the conversion of a struggling venue into a gay bar by way of hiring the right staff as turning it on.)
Tucked away between a cobbled street leading to the flower market and a towering Soviet-style public housing estate, the Nelsons was well appointed as a low-key option for those in the know. Upon entering, we’d scan the row of antique cinema seats against the wall; each seemed to be occupied by a dishy young man. Those wanting to avoid ending up at the Joiners brought along their terrier or greyhound as an excuse to get back home. Like the G&D, the Nelsons was filled with objects, but the scheme seemed more cerebral: vintage white ceramic vessels lined the high shelves running around the room in elegant counterpoint to the teal paneling. An impressive panoply of flea-market painted portraits gazed back at us. None was more iconic than the blond nurse with the haunted stare. On occasion, the walls would be rehung—all flower paintings, all nudes. The carpet was florid and untattered. The jukebox routinely returned to ‘Tusk’ by Fleetwood Mac. With friends, we ordered house red wine by the bottle in rounds. We’d egg one another on to the Joiners—for just one dance. Once, as we gathered ourselves to get over there, a bartender gamely poured our remaining wine into large waxed Coca-Cola cups. We sloshed our way across the grounds of the forbidding eleven-story apartment block, managing to spill with nearly every step. The cold night was a sea—and as much a part of the revelry as the ports. That was our Triangle. I didn’t realize then that some people called it the Bermuda Triangle, but of course they did.
* * *
In one knock-on effect of the smoking ban, large numbers of gays were now visible on the street in front of gay bars. On balmy nights at the George and Dragon, the babbling crowd spilled into the alley between the pub and the church graveyard opposite, a fragrance bomb of lager, unisex Comme des Garçons perfume and cigarette smoke. The boys boasted the very signifiers that would have been disdained in clean-cut Soho: hairy chests, scrappy beards, hoop earrings. Black jeans were as tight as leggings, and once white plimsolls were fashionably grayed from basement dance floors and gutters. Singly and in pairs we nipped behind dumpsters to pee.
If this was an attempt at marking territory, we were surely too late. We took the same routes already trodden by local Bengali lads. Some were intimidating, seemed a little too interested in our presence, a curiosity I saw as menacing. Some were developing an allegiance to Islam more scriptural and political than the contemplative faith of their fathers. In 2006, The Telegraph, a right-leaning British newspaper, wielded a poll showing that four out of ten British Muslims would prefer sharia law to prevail in areas they considered their terrain, fueling the image of the demographic as unintegrated. It was more complex than that, but from a fag’s perspective it could seem that, despised just for being there, we were guilty of not merely sin, but the one that made them most squeamish.
In retrospect, of course it was going to escalate. When populations that have been marginalized for very different reasons intersect in the same location, everyone walks on an edge. Some on the bar scene griped about South Asian men spitting on the streets. To the minds of some local youth, the gays pranced around in repellent attire, not acting our age. We may have concluded these local boys, who lived on council estates yet purchased flashy cars, were driving themselves into dead ends. But our aims to be global visionaries—the next Alexander McQueen—must have made it seem to them like we were only ever visiting. They drove those cars down their streets. We posed on that same concrete for international magazines. Maybe we appeared to be an abomination not so much because we were disbelievers, but because we were so full of belief in ourselves.
From what I understand, in 2008, a twenty-one-year-old fashion student named Oliver, his hair dyed copper red, was walking with a female friend toward the George and Dragon. It was early in the evening toward the end of summer. Oliver had moved to London two years before, and was making the most of the long days before graduating from Central Saint Martins. A friend later described it as one of those periods when they went out every night. This time, though, they did not make it past St. Leonard’s churchyard. The group of juveniles who attacked Oliver did so over a period of four and a half minutes. The knife was first stabbed through Oliver’s back and into his lung. Then they went for his neck, chest and heart. According to a report in The Independent, as he lay motionless, one of the assailants returned and jumped on his head. Oliver arrived at the hospital clinically dead. His chest was cut open, ribs lifted and lungs parted. A doctor took Oliver’s heart from his body, held it in his hands and resuscitated it on a tray. Oliver had only a small chance of surviving and did. He’s been in a wheelchair since. I am loath to tell Oliver’s story because it’s the narrative that gets told time and again about him. But it was important to us who went out locally. Word spread. Before I learned the details, I pictured the incident occurring at a late hour—on the way home, drunk, four a.m.—not at dusk, when the night was still a vague plan.
From his hospital bed, Oliver helped his friends plan a fund-raiser in which fellow students would sell their art. This grew into something much bigger. Their new charity, Art Against Knives, held an auction at Shoreditch House, with work by Tracey Emin and Antony Gormley on the block. Daniel Radcliffe reportedly bid seven thousand pounds on a Banksy. It’s difficult to fathom how the Independent headline got signed off on: ‘A Brush with Death: Why Britain’s Coolest Art and Fashion Names Have Rallied Around a Victim of Random Knife Crime.’ The ‘brush with death’ pun. The ‘coolest’ superlative. What finally gnaws at my mind is the word random. This may be so, but it was also possible that the attack was a hate crime. It did not seem to be an isolated incident. After one of Oliver’s assailants, a fifteen-year-old, was sentenced to ten years in prison for harm with intent, the George and Dragon was stormed by a band of some thirty youths; it was reported they struck out at customers and left the doorman beaten. Sometime around then the windows were smashed, incising a brittle, sharp spiderweb. Again, we couldn’t be sure whether it was coincidental—random—but when we smoked outside, we took it personally to glance over and see the pub cracked. I was sure that more cars had begun to take the alley where we clustered, and at high speed—parting us like a bully in a high school corridor. In at least one case, the driver obviously swerved toward the crowd on purpose. The differences between locals suddenly felt mighty. My naive take on the neighborhood as a melting pot ignored its potential to reach a boiling point.
Awareness posters were put up in the bars. The messages were about community safety and vigilance. A dedicated Facebook page posted descriptions of harassment by groups of ‘Asian guys.’ Sides were being delineated, leaving me more than a little conflicted. I wanted to understand the local teenagers; to know how they were seen by their families, one another, their mosque, the police; to make sense of how they saw me. When chatter about the string of incidents started up, I’d anticipate someone might say something racist, so I’d change the subject. Yet my own posture was defensive on local streets. I knew that gays were often blamed for gentrification. We always seem to be on the scene just before the Swedish bakeries or Japanese bicycle shops, followed by the glass high rises and oligarchs. This was nothing new. In Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up, one sighting of a male couple in a London neighborhood prompts a tip to buy quick: ‘The area’s already crawling with queers and their poodles.’
A few years later, posters and stickers appeared in the vicinal district of Whitechapel. They read ‘Gay Free Zone’ and were, almost comically, illustrated with a slash through a rainbow. ‘Arise and Warn. And Fear Allah. Verily Allah Is Severe in Punishment.’ The BBC reported that the Metropolitan Police was out to find the culprits who were distributing this blight. Not so long ago, it was the sodomites who were the culprits they pursued. A nineteen-year-old boy was fined one hundred pounds for stickering lampposts. The next year he was jailed for possessing Al Qaeda literature. The powerful East London Mosque was held to task. Word spread that a speaker at the venue had given a lecture including a ‘Spot the Fag’ split-screen slide show (an example: ‘Spot the Fag—Elton John, or 2-Pac?’). Community organizers solicited statements against gay bashing from the East London Mosque, which were duly given.
An opinion piece about Muslim homophobia was published in Attitude: ‘East London has seen the highest increase in homophobic attacks anywhere in Britain. Everybody knows why, and nobody wants to say it,’ the journalist Johann Hari proposed. ‘It is because East London has the highest Muslim population in Britain, and we have allowed a fanatically intolerant attitude towards gay people to incubate among them, in the name of “tolerance.”’ Hari put forth valid points against bigotry, and expressed solidarity with an intersectional identity at especially high risk—Muslim gay kids—but elsewhere his logic seemed rash. ‘When gay people were cruelly oppressed in Britain,’ he wrote, ‘we didn’t form gangs to beat up other minorities.’ This isn’t strictly true; it just exempts homosexual perpetrators, repressed or otherwise, whose attacks are not carried out under a gay banner. Hari argued, ‘Where people choose to behave in a bigoted way towards gay people, we need to act. We need to require them to change this aspect of their culture.’ (It would seem that when the article was republished by the Huffington Post, that condescending ‘require them’ line was deleted.)
Others contended this was not a strictly Muslim issue, but spoke to economic inequality more broadly. British people of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin are something like three times more likely to live in poverty. And all kinds of disenfranchised young men hang around giving the impression of being up to no good. That’s down to a jumble of factors, not least of which how they’ve been preconceived. Disenfranchisement moves across populations and mutates. A couple of decades back, factions of local white skinheads made very clear their hatred of both Pakis and poofs. In 2011, just as the ‘Gay Free Zone’ campaign proliferated, an event called East End Gay Pride was cancelled because one of its organizers was accused of past ties with the far-right English Defence League. We were forced to confront the uncomfortable reality of Islamophobia eliding with gay pride.
Still now, when people say of East London It’s not like it used to be…, I think: It was never one thing. It’s possible that as often as it was about distinct identities colliding, it’s been about the slippages within each identity—and mistaken identity. Amid the stacks of local hate crimes that I’ve forced myself to look through, an incident from 1980 stands out to me: on the tube under East London, a Pakistani mechanic in his forties named Kavumarz Anklesaria was beaten to death for his smile. Anklesaria’s perpetual grin had resulted from an accident when the rickshaw he was riding crashed into a tram. On the Bromley-by-Bow station platform and then on the tube carriage, a twenty-year-old named John Till thought that Anklesaria was smiling at him ‘like a homosexual.’ So Till delivered a fatal karate-style kick. ‘Even if this unfortunate man who was killed was a homosexual he hadn’t done anything more than smile—and smiling is not a capital offence,’ stated the judge in the case. ‘There are some people whose features show a perpetual smile, and there are those who smile innocently at passengers in a train.’ Still now, when people say of East London It’s not like it used to be…, I think: One could never really know what that means.
* * *
We rented our place from a friend of a friend of a friend who’d moved to New York City. It had been steadily stripped back by a succession of tenants with Donald Judd taste, leaving concrete floors splattered with paint stains. There was no heat. The street was noisy. We were happy to be there, in the center of things. We’d lived there some five years before Famous lugged out the artifact. We knew it was there all along—the previous tenant had mentioned it—buried in a storage cupboard along with other stuff the landlord hadn’t gotten around to moving out: his Macintosh Classic, the locked filing cabinet without its key. Now I arrived home to see, as Famous apprised me by text, that it was resplendent: the London Apprentice pub sign, leaning on its wrought-iron bracket.
Famous had removed the cobwebs from the filigree, and the sign instantly took pride of place. An illustration is crudely but evocatively hand-painted on the metal, depicting a young carpenter in a sleeveless t-shirt laying down tools and wiping his hands on a lavender-crimson ombré hankie. He looks westward at a vespertine skyline. His skin is only slightly less pale than his top, which is as white as photocopier paper. His biceps are butch, but the tone is wistful. The image of the young man turned toward the city is a potent one: there’s a hopefulness to it—if only the trifling kind that accompanies the start of the evening. He looks ready to unwind, willing to take his chances—horny. A series of horizontal strokes among the clouds are like adumbrations of the night’s possibilities.
The venue that the sign was wrenched from was a few minutes’ walk away at 333 Old Street. In the eighties and nineties, the London Apprentice earned a reputation as a rough but convivial gay bar for skinheads and leathermen. As the clientele expanded, art fags made a dash from Old Street station through what was then a notoriously sketchy terrain. Supposedly Freddie Mercury once arrived at the London Apprentice by landing a helicopter on its roof. When I mentioned the sign to the historian Adrian Rifkin, he said he’d been wondering where it was all that time. He remembers basically running from the tube into the fuggy embrace of the hi-NRG. On one occasion, he brought along a prominent gallerist. To inspect the fauna, Rifkin clucked, momentarily transported back to the snarling skinhead in tight jeans who leaned against the wall as they entered. I told a curator friend we had the sign. That’s the holy grail of Shoreditch, he affirmed. (On holiday in distant Cornwall, a former Londoner in a rustic pub used that same phrase; the straight salesman regaled us with a fruitless tale of his one night as a sleaze tourist there.) Sam Ashby, who published the film journal Little Joe at the time, stood before it in awe, looking not unlike the lad depicted on the sign—with his Roman profile and mouth downturned at the corners. Too young to remember the place himself, his was a borrowed nostalgia. He pointed out the apprentice’s sartorial eccentricity of looping his jeans with two thin belts. The septuagenarian artist David Medalla wound up at our flat one evening and stood in front of the sign attentively. Somebody painted this…, he muttered. He drew attention to the dots and zigzags of the handkerchief. Not just a sign painter. An artist. Somebody.…
The sign took over from our undated world map as the room’s conversation starter, as guests tried to ascertain when it would have been painted. In its cityscape, the dome of St. Paul’s dominates. A hastily drawn Post Office Tower dates the sign to after 1964, when that cylindrical beacon was constructed. The apprentice’s hair is combed up and back, a lilt of Americana perhaps indicative of the rockabilly revival favored by some British gay men in the early eighties. (Gay Times called them ‘clone-a-billies.’) In general, London club fashion had truculently turned from the frills of the new romantic look to faded t-shirts and torn jeans, an antistyle dubbed ‘hard times’ by Robert Elms in the September 1982 issue of The Face: ‘Somehow the atmosphere when you walk into a club today is different; gay abandon has evolved into a clenched teeth determination where precious lager cans are cradled to stop them disappearing and sweat has replaced cool as the mark of a face.’ I’d date the sign to sometime around 1983—when it was chic, according to the scene maker Sue Tilley, ‘to flaunt your newfound poverty,’ and ‘no one was properly dressed without at least one belt slung around their hips.’
I emailed our landlord, John, about it, and his reply brimmed with nostalgia. He told me that he frequented the London Apprentice—the LA—weekly in the early nineties, before moving into the immediate vicinity. It was a bar for its time—it was men only and had a distinct edge of anything goes. It had a macho feeling. Leather was very popular but there was no dress code. On Friday nights they had a maze upstairs where people had sex…although quite discreetly. But people were having sex in the toilets as well. There was a dance floor in the basement that played great music. Upstairs on Saturday became a drug den. There were two tables, each with its own dealer. One sold speed and acid, and the other hash. People would line up. It was completely open. Speed and acid were very popular then…and lots of pints of beer. An LED sign behind the bar cautioned against drugs on the premises, even while they were being blatantly exchanged and consumed all over the place. The women’s toilets were repurposed as a dark room. Men came from all over London, and much farther afield. Jean-Paul Gaultier arrived from Paris on the weekends. Marc Almond would attend, as well as Boy George, who seemed to John like he’d arrived from a different era.
The London Apprentice would have been our closest gay bar if it hadn’t gone straight again by the time we moved in. We passed by on most days; it was operating as a live music club called 333 Mother. It was located on a narrow, snaking stretch of Old Street, which is indeed very old, already called Ealdestrate in the year 1200 and le Oldestrete by the end of the following century. The London Apprentice is thought to have existed since at least 1767. Around 1894, it was entirely rebuilt as an elaborate three-floor pub with billiards in the basement and an upstairs dining room. On the ground floor, some thirteen separate public and private parlors radiated from the same large bar, suggesting the clientele was minutely segregated by class. It’s possible, though, that the pub was named in a spirit of solidarity with the 1595 riot at Tower Hill by London apprentices incensed by the social imbalance between have-nots and elite. Five of those rioters were hanged, drawn and quartered; the pub’s moniker may have been selected to make a martyr of them.
This particular apprentice, I’d surmise, worked with wood: Shoreditch had been the country’s locus of the furniture trade since the eighteenth century. Eventually, production was broken down into stages between different small-scale manufacturers so that, as the urbanist Peter Hall put it, a kind of dispersed ‘assembly line ran through the streets.’ The zone became dotted with piles of unpolished furniture and frames stacked high on barrows. The population of the parish more than tripled in the first half of the nineteenth century, nearing one hundred thirty thousand in 1861. Ancillary trades flourished—raw materials, accessories, tools, finishing—and necessitated a service sector. The new low-wage, less skilled jobs were taken by immigrants, particularly Eastern European Jews. Other industries moved into the district: tobacco, printing, boot making. In the twentieth century, factories were constructed outside of London, and by the forties, the furniture industry in Shoreditch had largely dissolved. According to the 1984 city directory, though, the neighbors of the London Apprentice at that time still included a furniture carver, potters’ supplier, tool dealer and machinery merchant.
It must have been about that time when the London Apprentice was taken over by its new publican, Michael Glover, and the place earned its homosexual reputation. From the 1983 edition of the East London & City Beer Guide: ‘Has discos, fairly pricey.’ The 1986 edition is more explicit: ‘Used by gays.’ Glover is understood to have been influenced by his experiences on the New York City scene, which likely places him at the hedonistic disco palace the Saint and the meatpacking district leather bar Mineshaft where, as the British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman once recalled, guests were sniffed at the door to ensure they weren’t covering their natural musk with aftershave: ‘In fact, so dark were the recesses of The Mineshaft all you could really do was touch and smell.’ Glover turned the basement of the London Apprentice into a dungeonlike disco—the Tool Box. Wall to wall, men posed in leather jackets, steel-capped boots, cropped hair, tattoos.
Two centuries on from its inception, the London Apprentice name proved conveniently pliant, suggesting a lusty nubility. On the sign, the young laborer was reinterpreted as a bit of rough trade. For most of the twentieth century, London’s gay subculture was dominated by cruising grounds and unmarked pubs frequented by rent boys and the gay men who picked them up, the latter sharing between them, as the historian Rictor Norton put it to me, an uneasy camaraderie. Middle-class homosexuals would boast of their encounters with a real man, meaning not one another. The British diarist J. R. Ackerley searched for his perfect companion (the ‘Ideal Friend’) not among fellow gentlemen of privilege, but errand boys and soldiers. His criteria: young, normal, working class, obedient. Hooking up with a bit of rough was not merely a matter of taste, but a way of playing by class-conscious rules: it could always be a dalliance, not a commitment to an aberrant existence.
Rough trade was imagined as instinctive, dangerous. His alluring brawn was also a potential threat—all the more exciting. (The archetype is so commanding it overshadows the true range of gender expression in men of lower social status. Poor femmes—queens—have been consistently targeted by police or erased by other gay men. If the pub sign was revised as a different apprentice—a mincing hairdresser’s assistant, a giggling dressmaker’s trainee—it would be read as a derisive caricature.) Rough trade self-perpetuated the brutish image, and cultivated it in one another’s company. They egged each other on. The historian Matt Houlbrook noted that tapping wealthy older men was seen as street smarts. Trade instigated and pursued transactions themselves. Sometimes the money exchanged was so negligible it amounted to little more than an excuse. The London Apprentice pinup—with his large hands, small lips, hammer—embodies this mutually devised ideal. He looks like he smells of sawdust and sweat, his biceps earned by cabinetry, not a gym membership. But he has agency: he is not merely gazed at, but gazing.
The narrative of wealthier homo as predator has had plot twists over the years: in 1891, for instance, the well-to-do English socialist Edward Carpenter spotted George Merrill on a train from the platform. Merrill, who’d drifted between manual jobs since the age of thirteen, more than returned his circumspect glance: he jumped off the train. Merrill liked dirty jokes, was a resourceful craftsperson, had bedded several aristocratic men. The two of them became a thing while continuing amative relations with others. Eventually, they created a domestic life—one darning socks, the other mending a shirt—which struck admiring acquaintances as utopian; for them, it was a matter of splitting the chores. They’d found a way to live. Such luck in love contained the potential to destabilize a whole class system. In 1954, one worried magistrate issued a statement—coincidentally from the Old Street court just across from the London Apprentice—in which he condemned homosexuality as morally wrong, physically dirty and degrading. And: ‘Is not this conduct even more anti-social where the participants are not of equal status…?’ His examples of such offensive trysts were ‘the artistic genius and the younger man needing his professional help’ and ‘the man of wealth or title and the friend from a simpler walk of life.’
In the seventies, the import of American clone style into London discos unseated the entrenched cross-class tropes and introduced a cowboy-hatted egalitarianism. Social roles became harder to read, became roleplay. Gay liberation sold itself as a story of equality among men, a sexy democracy. In doing so, it revised historical class systems as fallacious in the first place. The apprentice himself gently evades clear-cut social status. With that faraway look and strands of hair dangling foppishly forward, not to mention the handkerchief, he serves an alluring ambiguity. Who’s to say if the apprentice is trade who doesn’t think of himself as homosexual, or trade who does, or a middle-class gay fronting as rough, or a straight model posing for gays, or something slipping between.
Nearby, at 56 Hoxton Square, a group of neotransvestites (they dressed in women’s clothes without necessarily adopting a female persona), led by one Greg Slingback, squatted a shop front previously occupied by the leather gear retailer Expectations. In the hands of the neotransvestites, it was turned into Gl’amour, a secondhand boutique for cross-dressers. Apparently, straight guys—burly Irish builders, footballers—would arrive to get oiled down and ‘trannied up’ in lingerie before having a wank in the basement—or being encouraged along by the staff to the London Apprentice, where they could strut their stuff.
In 1990, the landlady of the Young British Artist hangout the Bricklayers Arms took over the license of the London Apprentice. She largely maintained its lawlessness and kept the men-only policy, exempting herself. The next year, Rupert Haselden’s bleak article ‘Gay Abandon,’ almost wholly set inside the LA, appeared in The Guardian. The scene is established as smoke-filled, ‘with shafts of coloured light piercing the gloom.’ At the LA, Haselden writes, ‘AIDS dangles like a flashing neon sign.’ He speculates that the destructive behavior was proof of an inbuilt fatalism, which he attributes to gay men being ‘biologically maladaptive’ and unable to reproduce. He regards these men as resigned to HIV infection, even viewing it as a form of graduation. The bar manager pronounces the casual sex a game of Russian roulette. Haselden concludes the risks amount to a spiral of denial and recklessness. He despairs at the futile act of ‘falling into each other’s sweaty arms at the London Apprentice.’
The article elicited a week’s worth of debate in the Guardian letters page. Gay men wrote in to assert their custom of practicing safer sex. David Bridle, an editor at Pink Paper and Boyz, faulted Haselden for neglecting to mention how customers and staff raised funds to convert the upper floor of the pub into a drop-in center for people living with HIV and AIDS. The Guardian offices were picketed for allowing such a pernicious angle on homosexuality; the editor called meetings to ensure the paper maintained credibility with the gays. Haselden himself died from the disease three years after his article was published. His partner, Nigel Finch, passed away the following year, while a movie he directed about Stonewall was in postproduction.
Around 1993, our landlord, John, had moved into the flat, from which he could walk to the LA and to the gay karaoke bar the Spiral Staircase. John characterizes the area as low-key and local yet cosmopolitan, with artists not yet priced out, and the image of Cool Britannia netting international attention. It was a great place to be gay, as John puts it, because it was kind of post-gay. But when I pressed John later, he also recalled fractures and simmering tension, including otherwise liberal queers making comments about homophobic black people, while gays and lesbians of color made known they felt unwelcome on the scene. People were not only freaked out by reports of London’s latest gay serial killer, the Gay Slayer, but were under constant stress over AIDS. It was a time of surging violence against gay people, yet this did not always inspire unity.
* * *
By chance, I came across a photo of the sign in its original context. I was scrolling through annual reports from GALOP, the Gay London Police Monitoring Group, learning that the summer of 1986 through the next year marked a concentrated increase of gay bashing in the city. GALOP was especially troubled by what appeared to be premeditated attacks near London gay bars. The digital scan I was reviewing was fuzzy, but still I discerned a familiar form in a small photograph: the apprentice. The sign was at that point mounted high on the pub’s exterior.
It turns out a remarkable number of this spate of hate crimes took place outside the London Apprentice. According to the GALOP report, in August 1986, over twenty men were attacked by a band of youths with bricks and bottles. Two men were hospitalized. That month, another gay man was kicked and beaten, sending him into the hospital. In September, a party of four was attacked on Hackney Road on their way home. The group of ten or fifteen attackers wielded bricks, bottles and blunt instruments. One of the victims had his jaw wired for two months. Only one assailant was arrested, and was the first to be charged in any of these incidents. In February 1987, another man outside the pub was attacked by four or five youths. In March, two gay men were punched and kicked in the face. Later that month, another two men were attacked after leaving the pub, thought to be by the same gang. They were cut about the face with broken glass. Police officers arrived within seconds, but failed to make any arrests, though the perpetrators loitered only yards away. Instead, an officer cautioned one of the victims to stop spitting blood, or he’d be arrested himself. The second victim was told Shut up you queer bastard by another cop.
That was the summer the young author Neil Bartlett was beginning to conceive what would become his novel Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall. As the story (an intergenerational romance set in a somewhat surreal unnamed gay bar overseen by a matron reminiscent of a Genet madam) took shape, Bartlett was hanging out in two East London spots in particular—the Backstreet, the city’s first dedicated leather bar, and the London Apprentice. Bartlett began to sketch the book out in his head on his late night perambulations from the LA through the deserted city. ‘Those nights out were inspiring—but the solitary walks home were foolish,’ Bartlett writes in a foreword to the book’s reissue. ‘London, in 1986, was not a safe place for a visibly gay man like my twenty-eight-year-old self to be out alone after dark—or even by daylight, for that matter. The cresting of the first wave of the British AIDS epidemic had been accompanied by an extraordinary outpouring of hostility towards us both in the media and on the streets.’
Boy, the nineteen-year-old at the heart of Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, is a walker, too. A precariousness hangs over Boy and his cohorts, even as they are discovering rare, intimate joys. The book’s narrator, one of the bar’s regulars, interjects news of the attacks: ‘I know there’s not always blood, it’s just that each time I hear this, that’s what I see, a knife coming down. Sometimes it’s not that at all, but a metal bar across the legs. Or a single word thrown out of a car window, tossed at you like a bottle, so like a bottle that you involuntarily duck to avoid it, or look down to see the broken glass at your feet.’
An East London bashing also features in Alan Hollinghurst’s 1988 novel The Swimming-Pool Library, when a gay man is set upon by a group of skinheads. The blond, Oxford-educated homosexual protagonist, Will, calls skinheads ‘a challenge.’ While the first iterations of skinhead looked outward—namely to Jamaican ska music and rude boy style—an agitated white contingent enveloped the hard look of bare scalp and military surplus into their aggressive stance against outsiders. In the eyes of the horny and privileged character Will, the skinheads loitered on city streets and estates ‘magnetising the attention they aimed to repel. Cretinously simplified to booted feet, bum and bullet head, they had some, if not all, of the things one was looking for.’ Having ventured to Stratford East, a landscape of gasometers and warehouses, Will is encircled by a group of skins, who call him poof. He tries to get the tone of his comeback right—a high-wire speech act familiar to many gay men. ‘I acted out a weary sigh, and said, tight-lipped: “Actually, poof is not a word that I would use.”’ He fails at the adverb. ‘“Isn’t it, actually?” said the leader, again with a smile that seemed to say he knew my game, he knew what I liked.’ Will is rebuffed with a broken bottle and boots.
It’s a persistent trope: upper-class homosexual desires contemptuous thug, hot for the brute as likely to kick his ass as fuck it. Now gay men wanted to not just copulate with but be that bully. (As Rupert Haselden wrote, ‘For 20 years we have been mimicking the traditional force of oppression, the macho male. By sidling up close, by taking it home and fucking it we, in pantomime, had been destroying its power over us.’) With skinhead style, British men could transpose the American clone archetype into their own nationalistic fetish. Gay skins hung out at the Union Tavern and the Coleherne, a discreet upstairs nest called the Craven Club, the Anvil, the Block, an exclusive club called Skins ’95, as well as at the London Apprentice. Steve, a skinhead and regular of the LA, remarked: ‘People look at me on the Tube like I’m trouble, like I might be about to kick their face in. I wonder what they’d say if they knew I was a poof.’
Interviews with gay skins in the zine Square Peg turned up a range of motivations. Peter was rebelling against who he used to be: a nice middle-class boy at university. By going hard, he figured he could no longer be called ‘not a man.’ Dave had been a skin for six years—two years longer than he’d been an out gay. Tom chose to become a skin because it turned him on. The uniform was erotic predilection and protective shield. In his book Gay Skins, Murray Healy posited that you were less likely to be bashed if you looked like a basher. That is, until the skinhead aesthetic—especially late at night, in London, near a gay bar—began to look like chinked armor. The final interview in Healy’s book is with a gay member of the neo-Nazi skin group Blood & Honour: ‘For me, the gays have fucked up the Nazi skinhead image.’ People on the street in London used to shout Nazi bastard at him. Now, due to the proliferation of gay men with skin style, they’d begun to hurl batty man—the Jamaican patois slur for obvious gays—instead.
In Britain by the nineties, elements of skin style infiltrated a generic gay look: rolled jeans, flight jacket, boots, a buzz cut of grade four or below. What appeared like an obvious case of appropriation—as The Guardian put it in 1992, an anti-gay image mirrored by a gay group—didn’t just operate in one direction. The common perception would be that in order to become gay, a snarl and heavy boots require purloining, to be then adorned like a sheep in wolf’s clothing. But there have probably been gay skinheads as long as any other skinhead. As Murray Healy put forward, ‘Who’s copying who here? Who owns the copyright? Were skinheads ever the property of heterosexuality?’ He gives the example of a man known as Wolf, signed by the Ugly modeling agency in the late sixties for his convincing skinhead authenticity. In 1973, his corpse washed up on a shore of the Thames, reported by The Sun to be a suspected gangland hit. Wolf’s apparently duplicitous personality confounded the media. He was an actor, drag artist, criminal with several aliases: Michael St John, Bernard Cogan, Anthony Cohen. And if his birth name really was Wolfgang von Jurgen, who was that exactly? A well-spoken German man, he lived alone in a room with walls painted red and covered in pictures of Steve McQueen and other men in motorcycle gear. He wore expensive leathers himself. His landlady had never known him to have a girlfriend, though he was often seen with two close male friends. These apparently contradictory aspects were irresolvable to the tabloid press of the early seventies. As Healy put it, Wolf would always ‘remain an unidentifiable body.’
In the eighties skinhead revival, homos again provided some of the most iconic imagery. The homosexual neo-Nazi Nicky Crane, with his tall, taut frame, bald head and mean mug, became a skin poster boy. In one image, Crane is shown stomping, photographed from the sole of his boot. One hand makes a fist, the other foists an upturned index finger at the viewer. Used as the cover of an Oi! compilation album, it was then printed on t-shirts sold at the East London skinhead shop the Last Resort. The poster was tacked onto bedroom walls by teenage boys around the nation. This craze was vividly captured by fifteen-year-old photographer Gavin Watson when he snapped his little brother emulating Crane’s bellicose posture in front of the poster at Oxford Circus.
As a ringleader in the far-right group the British Movement, Crane recruited young members and organized attacks. With a gang of over a hundred skins armed with iron bars, knives and pickaxe handles, he ambushed a queue of mostly black filmgoers at a cinema in southeast London. It’s said he led a mob of two hundred in attacking Asians on Brick Lane, turning over market stalls and punching and kicking Pakistanis; beat a black family at a bus stop; struck Jews at a Remembrance Day event; stomped on a young leftist’s head until it was unclear whether he was alive. He was in and out of jail. Even after Crane began working as a bouncer at Heaven, he remained a fascist, helping found Blood & Honour. There were raised eyebrows about his proclivities, but because he was brutal, he was left alone. In 1987, Crane was reported to be organizing a gay skins movement—meeting Friday nights at the London Apprentice. Eventually Crane became so nonchalant he turned up in gay porn—demanding men lick his boots as he shouted racial epithets. Finally he renounced fascism, and changed his look. (‘I saw him riding around Soho in Day-Glo Lycra shorts,’ Gavin Watson told the BBC. ‘I thought, good for you.’) Crane died of AIDS-related illness at the age of thirty-five in 1993, in a hospital in West London, a young man named Craig by his side.
Earlier that year, a black man had been set upon by three racist gay skinheads inside the LA. This exacerbated an impression that bar management was turning a blind eye to swastika armbands worn by customers, though at least one fascist skinhead claimed that they were expressly verboten. (Disturbingly, the custom of gay men aiming for authenticity meant that a punter with a fascist tattoo could pass as merely passing for a hooligan.) A boycott was called. The Lesbian and Gay Campaign Against Racism and Fascism picketed the club. A meeting was held between activists, landlady and customers, and a consensus reached that the venue wasn’t liable for its fringe element. In John’s words, In such an anarchic clubhouse, it was hard to police anything. Violence can lurk not only outside a gay bar’s boundaries, but within.
* * *
Around 1998, the landlady of the London Apprentice changed the pub’s name to its street number, 333, remaking it as a live music venue in a ten-day refit. It was being turned into a straight club, John explained. They had pulled the sign down and left it on the footpath. This was during the day—workmen were inside. I remember walking past the sign and I thought…just have to grab it. So I went back and just picked it up and brought it back. It was very heavy. It was an impulse action that felt very right at that moment.
When it was hanging off the side of the building, swinging only in the strongest gusts, the apprentice was solitary. (Unless you count his double on the flip side—his clone. One is drawn in a much more rudimentary manner, either the rushed copy or the practice run.) Bracketed to the wall, the apprentice was a captive in some sense, like a bartender who is forced to listen to patrons as they fill up with drink. Finally, the apprentice was kidnapped—brought home by John, who intuited he needed to be spirited away to his people.
Famous and I have lived with the apprentice for more than a decade. (He leans against the wall, his better side facing out.) Recently, Famous mused: There’s something camp about him. I balked. The sign is not priapic and overblown like Tom of Finland, or parodic like the Village People. If anything, it understates, and because of that could appear on the street simultaneously as code to a queer observer and banal to another passerby. I hadn’t really considered that this is camp’s methodology. A few days later, I happened upon Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s definitions of camp and kitsch. I read aloud to Famous: the latter, Sedgwick says, is either designed by the unenlightened, or made to cynically manipulate the sentimentality of an unenlightened audience. ‘Camp, on the other hand,’ Sedgwick wrote, ‘seems to involve a gayer and more spacious angle of view.’ That’s it—spacious, Famous enthused. To Sedgwick, a camp object asks ‘what if the right audience for this were exactly me?…And what if, furthermore, others whom I don’t know or recognize can see it from the same “perverse” angle?’ Camp is an open secret.
Susan Sontag confirms—in number 17 of her canonical essay ‘Notes on Camp’: ‘Behind the “straight” public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.’ In note 51, Sontag proffers that homosexuals constitute the most articulate audience of camp. She adds parenthetically in her note 53: ‘(The Camp insistence on not being “serious,” on playing, also connects with the homosexual’s desire to remain youthful.)’ Then there’s the apprentice’s hairstyle. In his book Camp: The Lie That Tells the Truth, Philip Core includes ‘quiff’ in his alphabetical list of things so camp they need no further explanation, alongside ‘Querelle de Brest’ and ‘quickie.’
The critic Susan Stewart writes, ‘In all their uses, both kitsch and camp imply the imitation, the inauthentic, the impersonation.’ The apprentice is making furniture, but what of himself is he constructing? The image casts doubt over authenticity itself. Authenticity attaches itself to working-class and rock-’n’-roll and skinhead identities and, so the narrative goes, inherently evades gay men, who, from the first indication that their flair is considered abhorrent, become lifelong impersonators of real men. Gay men are capable of not only unsettling gender roles, but exaggerating traditional masculinity unsettlingly. Sontag contrasts camp sensibility with the preciousness of the dandy, the nineteenth-century man of leisure whose engagement with urban life tends toward disaffected or snobbish. It’s almost as though she had the crowd at the LA in mind when she wrote, ‘Where the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves.’ I take from Sontag that camp can be dangerous and raunchy.
Homophobia is instilled by not only gay as an absolute, a known quantity, but the capability of gay to subvert and surprise, to fool and to blur. It must be no coincidence that all those beatings occurred outside the London gay bar whose signage and clientele willfully twisted the iconography of the working male. No longer an invisibility cloak, masculine had become ostentatious. The real man had been perverted, by way of the sign and the bodies passing beneath. Each bashing outside the London Apprentice was an attack on the pretenses and failures of maleness—including, of course, the pretenses and failures of the attackers themselves.
* * *
When I think of the word poseur, the person who comes to mind is Walt Whitman. The American poet loved to lay down with farm boys but wasn’t a homosexual, exactly. (‘No, no, no,’ in his words, plus the word homosexual wasn’t used in English until 1892, the year of his death.) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called him a ‘louche and pungent bouquet of the sheepish and the shrewd.’ (He referred to himself as a furtive hen.) Whitman had a thing for sending his portrait along to correspondents and companions—‘hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover’ goes one of the Calamus poems—so that he became a pinup on the walls of other men. His lust for laborers extended to a longing to inhabit their rough, loamy look, as in the frontispiece to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, wherein he is depicted wearing coarse trousers and an open-collared, rumpled shirt. Whitman’s friend William Roscoe Thayer called him ‘a poseur of truly colossal proportions, one to whom playing a part had long before become so habitual that he ceased to be conscious that he was doing it.’
Then I think of how the word poseur was hurled at me when I was thirteen years old, on my first day of high school. When I heard it, and it felt true, I was led to believe that there must be some genuine thing I was failing at being. Whether the accusation was pointedly homophobic, to come up short of realness was tied up with the impression of homosexual chicanery. I was seen as inauthentic by this guy who’d elected himself border patrol. To be perceived as pretentious may be the greatest offense, and whatever I was pretending to be, his objection was about my presumed middle classness as much as my homosexuality. My crime: I was wearing an army-green, plain, but brand-new shirt with a label sewn into the cuff. My accuser made a show of pointing this out: my department store extravagance was clearly inferior compared with his stolid thrift store clothing. I covered the telltale label with my fingertips.
After school, I sat in the park across from campus, tearing at grass with two girls my age. An older crowd clumped under a nearby tree, a cloud of clove-scented smoke and fumes of Manic Panic hair dye wafting around them. Then the sole skinhead of the group approached. It took a moment to realize it was me he was addressing. He was tall and broad-shouldered, square-headed and amped-up, wearing a white t-shirt I could almost see through and cherry red Doc Martens boots, probably fourteen-eyelet. I’ve been offered ten dollars to beat you up, he announced. I looked over to the group. Laughing hardest was the boy who’d called me a poseur earlier that day, and I knew it was his idea. I thought I’d soon be pulp. I did nothing, glanced up at the skinhead, who inspected me like he couldn’t decide what to do.
I considered how the boy under the tree who’d judged me to be an imposter held a view of the skinhead as a henchman. He presumed the skin could be hired to destroy me with his brutal working-class fist. It was quietly momentous for me, not only because I was scared I was about to be hurt, but because I was astonished by the financial transaction involved. The girls I was with had strong words to give, and they directed them to the decision makers under the tree. They went to the top. The skinhead walked away. He wore his thin elastic suspenders hanging down, so that they framed his butt like a jockstrap. As I watched him go, it struck me that of everyone, we two were somehow on the same level. I considered him to be, as much as a threat, in his own way humiliated. He was meant to puncture my inauthenticity with his realness, thereby cementing each position. Instead, in the end, he left both unresolved.
* * *
Famous and I resided in that flat in Shoreditch for seven years or so, longer than anywhere either of us had lived previously. Around 2015, the club at 333 Old Street restored the London Apprentice name. But it wasn’t reverting to gay. It was now just some whatever bridge-and-tunnel place. The windows were opened up after all those years of concealment, revealing sports projected onto the wall and Ping-Pong tables. Staff would be stationed outside offering Jägerbombs to the punters arriving into the area on Essex trains.
The George and Dragon was remodeled, adding a loft from which the DJ would spin, and this had the unintentional effect of dulling the bonhomie in the room. The Joiners became known as a late night option for straight students on drugs and out-of-towners with an intense drive to have the best night of their lives, which is never going to end well. (The historian Seth Koven has uncovered midnight omnibus tours of the East End as far back as the 1880s. By 1893, English Illustrated Magazine ran an article on the question ‘Is Slumming Played Out?,’ its author outraged by rich people with literary preconceptions who complained the environs weren’t slummy enough. East London has long elicited speculation over the profane and passé.) On the pavement in front of the Joiners, the Heineken-branded metal barrier was replaced by a red velvet rope, and a cover charge was introduced. The management issued some kind of card to people who could prove they lived locally. I never got one myself, because we just explained ourselves each time at the door and were generally waved through out of vague recognition. We had stayed too long at the party.
John was selling the flat, which was hardly surprising considering the property boom. We’d begun to give up on Shoreditch anyway: The pissoirs were rolled into Hoxton Square on Friday nights as large groups arrived for the weekend. The riled-up men wore button-up shirts with jeans and leather shoes. More than once I was awoken by a group of girls shouting Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ on the street after the clubs shut. By Sunday morning, Shoreditch was a soggy ashtray, the curbs littered with nitrous canisters. Vomit pooled at the base of historical brick walls.
We moved south of the river, where the lay of London is defined by a spectral quality, the neighborhoods strung together by large, wild graveyards. Undergraduates study Derridean hauntology at Goldsmiths University. We rented a flat near a cemetery in Brockley, an area as leafy and wholesome as its homonym. I emailed John and told him we were happy to remain caretakers of the sign—for safekeeping.
We rarely returned to Shoreditch. We did find ourselves there one late afternoon in November 2015, at the Ace Hotel for the launch party of the final issue of Sam Ashby’s journal Little Joe. In the basement bar, I found Francis, whose eyes twinkle like Walt Whitman’s, and interrogated him as to whether they were going someplace afterward. Francis informed me with a shrug that it was the last night before the George and Dragon closed for good, and everyone would head there soon. Though it probably shouldn’t have, it came as a shock that the G&D was closing. It was the last remaining point in the Triangle. A while back we’d chanced upon the Nelsons Head with its windows shuttered like gay bars used to be to protect their patrons. The closure of the Joiners I caught wind of in the press. It became a big stink: the building was being razed, and a highly mobilized coalition formed to fight for it to be replaced by a community-led queer venue. Finally, the G&D had been slapped with an unaffordable rent increase. It seemed such a stalwart that it was unnerving to think it was only ever renting.
It rained. In the doorway at the G&D, we ran into Prince Nelly, who looked shell-shocked, and pulled him into an embrace. The G&D was always the night’s amuse-bouche. It was seldom salacious. However, there would inevitably be one pair of fresh-faced geeks having a big sloppy snog in a corner, elated to pair up so early in the night. And there they were: tonight’s two boys clinging—the last of such couples, I figured, who I’d witness getting off there under the carrot-munching mule. One wore spectacles: he momentarily prized himself from the embrace in order to remove and desteam them.
The barroom was becoming crowded. We jostled against one another. Several of the sticky decorations had been taken down already. We thought we’d just have the one nostalgic beer with the tumbleweeds, but things were heating up—like it used to be, someone said. Everyone had come out of the woodwork. I mean look at us, I said to Famous, two termites. We chatted with an acquaintance who said he hadn’t been there in ages, either, and that he’d texted Robbie, who might come later. But, I thought, we really should leave shortly. I couldn’t stand the situation, like seeing a gay bar in hospice. I already had a headache from the lager. We were far removed from the boys we used to be.
It dawned on me that many of the people we used to know to say hello to we never really knew. We just enjoyed recognizing faces. There’s that tribal gypsy, I pointed out. He’s finally cut off his dreads. Famous said, I’m glad he still looks like he lives in a squat, though. There was the teutonic-looking woman with violently chopped hair, the husky fashion blogger in his belted trench coat, the silver fox with his newest twink. Later, the club kids would arrive, wearing inflatable collars and vinyl platform boots, along with the drag queens, dressed to set the scene of other people’s experience. What was being lost as all the gay bars folded was that particular satisfaction of the company of strangers. The atmosphere relies on the presence of brand-new gays. Over the years, they’d continued to come—the freshly arrived, in a tailspin from pre-drinking, turning around like whippets trying to locate the bathroom. I knew when they finally found it, they’d encounter the juxtaposition of putrid toilet and high art, and also that they maybe wouldn’t really process that as noteworthy. After all, I can’t even recall my first gay bar. But I can remember being new to the scene.
And there’s Jonjo. He was still blond and cherubic, still lovely. You’re leaving? the Lovely Jonjo asked incredulously. He’d just arrived and was scheduled to DJ. I want to get the place dancing, he said plaintively. He said, I remember when I first met you guys here. You came up and talked to me. I can’t believe it: we have no place left. Where are we going to go?
I was thinking: back to our flat in Zone 2, nearly Zone 3, where we cook vegetables procured at the Saturday market and comment on their intense reds and vivid greens. Our randiest neighbors are foxes, literally Vulpes vulgaris. They mate with ungodly wailing. I am intimately aware of the goings-on in a magpie nest I can watch from our bed; the daddy magpie defends his eggs with stentorian warnings delivered to local house cats. We’ve surmised that someone living near us throws chemsex parties—according to Grindr, he’s as close as twenty meters away—but we haven’t determined exactly where the place is, and the one time we recognized the host in the street we were spooked. Basically, it’s the neighborhood where gays go to retire.
From the swelling throng of the G&D, I posted a snapshot to Instagram. In it, a young man can be seen putting his fingers to forehead, a random gesture but it looks appropriately despondent. I saw that a friend who’d moved back to New York had already reposted somebody else’s picture of the cardboard Divine effigy, now packed in bubble wrap. Several dozen likes within minutes, and one comment read: It used to be our home. We rode the Overground back to Brockley, itchy with sugary beer. It used to be our home: the comment stayed with me. Was it my home—did it used to be?
The next day, I happened to read some lines from Proust, in which the narrator opined that being among strangers on holiday compelled him to care again about making an impression, reignited his desire to see and be seen, made him want ‘to please others and to possess them.’ He pitied those holidaymakers who, by insisting on not mingling between classes, denied themselves ‘the disquieting delights of mixing with unknown company.’ I reconsidered how people are wont to call their regular gay bar a home. To me a good gay bar is a vacation, promising the novelty of a resort full of strangers, making me want ‘to please others and to possess them.’
Several weeks later, early in the new year, we stayed on a large forested property in northern California—a former commune that had been purchased by an artist. He had turned it into a living art project and informal residency. One night at dinner, the closure of the George and Dragon came up in conversation. The artist was familiar with it: Such a shame, he said. It was such a community. I could sense Famous shifting like I did. The artist said, In London you have such a great queer community. The G&D was so familiar to us, and made a brilliant footnote in the area’s history. But I couldn’t relate to this widely held notion of community. We hear the word community all the time. Often it sounds like wishful thinking. Queer community is just as vague—just piling a confusing identity onto an elusive concept. Maybe community, as Famous says, excludes inherently. At the word community, both of us are prone to hear clique. And here, in densely wooded headlands at the edge of the Pacific, the term was being thrown around to describe a London gay bar, several thousand miles away. Imagining London, I saw not one big queer coterie, but different people moving in different directions, entropic. I thought of amiable moments I shared with nurses or people who worked in local shops. They came to mind clearly. A queer community I couldn’t picture.
The day before, the Irish social historian Iain Boal had arrived to tour the property. He’d said something that stuck with me—that language is doomed to fail, but metaphor can help explain things. Community was the word that had consistently failed for me. So: Could I solve it through metaphor? If the word community is indeed a failure of vocabulary—too broad, too utopian—perhaps the metaphor to best replace it is metaphor itself. Disparate objects are brought together, alike in some, but not all, respects; in fact, metaphor edifies and amuses when things are vastly dissimilar in all ways but one. I’d like to think we can be different together—even homos, ostensibly the same.
The commonality I experienced in the G&D, or in any given bar, is tenuous and fleeting. The staff will be intimately familiar with one another, of course, but what they serve to the rest of us, even the barflies, is the opposite of routine. Gay bars require strangers, a constant influx of immigrants, whose presence foreshadows the next morning’s regret. A gay bar is the idea that you may end up going home with the first hot guy you see. Then every drink is dopamine, as you determine whether it is him or the next guy you’ll see. Gays can relax in a gay bar, people will say, but I went out for the tension in the room. Perhaps you could call a gay bar a galaxy: we are held together but kept from colliding by a fine balance of momentum and gravity. I miss, more than any notion of community, the orbiting.