Back Home With The Boys
fight night with the nocturnal fraternity
I emerge from Bristol Temple Meads station around midnight, cold, tired and zoned on train beers. I’m on my way back from a London literary event, the kind attended by agents, editors and a smattering of established authors. Though it necessitated a four hour roundtrip, in a single evening, in exchange for a scant ninety minutes of social-professional hobnobbing, I opted to go, propelled in part by a homesickness for the capital, a yen to treat Bristol as a suburb of London, or London as a suburb of the entire West Country. I’ve not been to an event of this kind since before the pandemic, when I’d usually be tending bar, selling books, hanging banners, checking guest lists, etcetera, miscellaneous duties that my freelance, non-contracted jobs in the arts sphere required. Tonight, without any such responsibilities, I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so to speak, and mostly hung out at the back of the room, cracking wise with an ally or two, keeping watch. The crowd was flush with familiar faces from that before-time: acquaintances who, back then, held entry-to-mid-level publishing jobs, but are now in senior positions. No longer on the outside listening-in, a new crop of publishing saplings were shouldering their way to talk to them, and they knew it, deploying those familiar tactics that suffuse the atmosphere of these events with an eerie hostility: the blankings and gossiping, forever peering over the shoulder of one’s interlocutor, divining the most advantageous person to talk to next. There are, after all, still rungs to climb.
And I fell back into my own predictable pattern: overstrung, eyeing the exit, manically rolling cigarettes, perturbed by the peculiar pleasure I take in this psychic tug-of-war, attracted to that I wish to reject, armouring myself with a pose of outsiderness in order to feel superior to a world I presume feels superior to me.
*
Back in Bristol, slouching toward Park Street, replaying scenes and overheard remarks from the event, I’m too distracted to clock that I’ve been clocked by a group of men, in their early twenties, staggering towards me. As they pass, one of the pack literally spits in my face, upon which I reflexively suggest he fuck off, or whatever. But the trap has been set, I’ve walked right into it, they swing around and their figurehead – a shortish, muscular guy in athleisure-wear, sporting a Paul Mescal mullet – unleashes the predictable verbal onslaught (‘What’d you say, say that again,’ etcetera) in a heavy West Country accent. He finishes his tirade with a volley of homophobic insults. Chief among them, the curiously anachronistic ‘fruit’.
Being read this way is one thing. My paranoid lizard brain, pickled in years of bad discourse, first questions the extent to which I can ‘justifiably’ feel offended. Before the ego-death that hits most millennials at around thirty, I spent a long time – longer than I care to admit – in a kind of broiling inner turmoil around sexual self-identification. A cringing retreat from pressures, both real and imagined, to explain oneself, an allergy to labels and their reductivism, the way they give others permission to force one’s uncertainty and instability into a little cell. How difficult to remember, as Baldwin says, that a label ‘may seem to define you for others, but it does not have the power to define you to yourself’. But isn’t there an ethical imperative to self-identify, particularly if the initial within the LGBTQ+ initialism to which one is most closely aligned is frequently denigrated as false, as nonexistent? Does opting out betray an internalised, phobic self-hatred, or cowardice, or shame, does it invalidate others’ choice to identify that way? But then, what if that label is itself a paradox, reinforcing, through etymological awkwardness, the very binary it seeks to unrivet itself from?
Among the many boring stereotypes levelled against those who claim the bisexual label is that it’s a milk-and-water identity, an intermediary stage which one’s life choices will ultimately reveal as a pose: eventually, we all settle on one side of the fence (if one is fortunate enough – or even wishes – to ‘settle’). In the meantime, opposite-sex relationships might be characterised as beards, same-sex relationships as experiments: both these accusations emerge from latent, or explicit, homophobia. According to this thinking, the only way one’s bisexuality is not a pose is to arrange one’s romantic and sexual relationships, across the duration of one’s life, according to a perfect, half-and-half division between ‘men’ and ‘women’. This is, of course, impossible, as desire can not be tallied or organised or rationed or made to fit some imaginary rubric. These old-school stereotypes, though destabilising (it is a legitimately jaw-dropping experience to have one’s desires scrutinised and invalidated, especially, as might occur, by the object of one’s desire) are at least easy to recognise, and therefore, perhaps, to conquer.
Other stereotypes, less so. The reasons behind the general uptick in casual or explicit denigration of bisexuality are, I think, more slippery. When otherwise intelligent (often very online) people question the existence of bisexuality in toto, what they sometimes mean is that they suspect those who identify as such are – as a former colleague once put it – ‘shopping for a wound’, dipping their toe in the horrific ocean of queer oppression without ever really getting wet. It’s a bad faith reading that stems, in part, from the common complaint that the Junior Millennial and Gen-Z generations are uniquely narcissistic, desperate to find something, anything, to make them special and different and worthy of sympathy and attention in our attention economy. Claiming a non-normative sexual identity – the argument goes – is one way to do this, and, well, even better if that particular sexual identity appears to confer all the privileges of a normative sexual identity. This bad-faith criticism – a cranky, irate, defensive move levelled by people so cynical they’ve lost all connection with humanity – reveals its own narcissism. How else to describe those who imagine themselves capable of understanding the vagaries of another’s heart, or think they have the authority to delimit another’s desire?
Anyway, my own personal psychic turmoil has, recently, settled. It’s not only an age thing, but relates to ditching out of a social-professional scene in which sexual gossip really is a valuable stock, its outsized share price driven, I suspect, by scarcity. A scene which – despite its surface tolerance, fattened on learned discourses – so often surprised me with its rigid social-sexual codes, its probing eyes and office whispers. Away from this world, it feels newly possible to live in the light of uncertainty and ambiguity, unfixed, contented.
But back home: to the boys.
*
A globule of spit in the face at midnight. Has the lilac COME TEES luxury streetwear tee I’m wearing (hashtag ‘bisexual lighting’) acted as a red rag to the bulls? Has my hair, lavishly perfumed with Davines conditioner, sent them into a panic? I’m only being partially facetious: perhaps these boys, these West Country boys, are merely reverting to a script. To call another man a ‘fairy’ or ‘fruit’ or whatever might have nothing to do with the legibility, or not, of his sexual orientation. But it does have everything to do with power. ‘Fruit’ is uniquely archaic, I can almost see how it fell into his vocabulary. It is surely learnt, it is surely inherited: there is an angry, terrifying, afraid father in the background, hurling slurs, and behind him, there is another one, and on and on. To be called a ‘fruit’ is to be called a fruitcake (crazy), and effeminate (soft, tender), though these might be one and the same: mental ill health, so the masculinist pedagogy goes, is latent in the ‘feminine’. In this way, ‘fruit’ illustrates how homophobia so often manifests as an essentialist repudiation of the so-called ‘feminine’ in men, a mechanism by which men attain and hold on to power, in a heterosexist world and system which relies upon the enforced subordination of one gender(s) beneath another: ‘effeminacy’ is conflated with the ‘queer’, the ‘queer’ with ‘effeminacy’, both must be eradicated, lest they threaten the totality of male power.
But something else going on here. Something to do with fear, something to do with isolation. Their homophobia, I think, is a lie, one which is inherited, and one which is totally oblivious to its own fragility. By calling another man a ‘fruit’, they successfully insulate themselves from potential ‘accusations’ of queerness, and they believe this insulation to be a dire necessity. How closely these boys stand together! How attached they are to one another, this nocturnal fraternity, bonding over the prospect of violence, desperate to close-off that space between themselves, that space between us. And how fastidiously cut is his Mescal mullet: in imitation of an actor whose latest opus revivified the ghost of Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar, that dripping ur-symbol of modern male eros, dreamt-up by a queer playwright, Tennessee Williams, and canonised by Brando, a sexually ambivalent actor. Even the choice to spit – an insult whose power is derived from its proximity to sexual intimacy, the bestowal of bodily fluids – reveals the fragility of this lie: the twisted, contorted, incoherent posture of modern masculinity.
I do not mean that all homophobia is armour against ‘hidden’ or sublimated homoerotics (if only it were so simple). I mean, more crucially, that all homophobia – from men directed to other men – exposes the fault lines of this inherited, scripted, public masculine identity, one which must extinguish the possibility of any affirmative desire and intimacy between men – inclusive of, but not dependent on, the sexual – in order to deny just how badly in need of such communion it is. To admit that need is, by proxy, to see one’s own life, one’s image of oneself as a man in this world – monolithic, unassailable, dominant, solitary – turn from marble to rubble, an almost unbearable process, because it necessitates building something entirely new from that rubble. And this, too, intersects with men’s relationship to, and subordination of, women. Baldwin, again: ‘when men can no longer love women they also cease to love or respect or trust each other, which makes their isolation complete. Nothing is more dangerous than this isolation, for men will commit any crimes whatever rather than endure it.’
In response to the spit-and-slur assault, I want to relent to my own learnt, scripted tendencies, want to deny the slur, want to spit back and convert the frisson between me and the boys into violence, flesh on flesh, muscle on muscle, blood on blood, a dumb and infantile bid for photonegative intimacy, a bid for annihilation. And I would’ve, too, I think, if not for my age. No longer young but not yet old, fatigued but still restless, close enough to these boys to remember how it was, to remember how I was, far enough away that I hope things can get better for them. Of course, I just walk off, though not before fact checking the use of ‘fruit’.
*
Mingled with the shock and temporary identity crisis instilled by my run-in with the boys, there’s a feeling of disappointment, or irateness, that the altercation has happened here, because it seems to give credence to the worst prejudices that some literary London acquaintances hold against the area. The repeated disparagement, from the lips of certain intelligentsia more provincial, more myopically attached to their postcodes than any of the literal villagers I grew up with, that the West Country ‘backwaters’ – where these boys are surely from, they have the air of small town kids out in the Big City – are solely populated by idiotic hayseeds, racists, Country Life Tories and narrow-minded farmhands. I’m not inventing opposition: these remarks are real and prevalent in certain circles, and are applied, of course, to other rural and semi-rural regions too.
And although my knee-jerk defensiveness about ‘where I’m from’ betrays at least some suspicious sentimentality, the lazy regionalism expressed by my former literary counterparts always said more to me about them than it did about their target. The suspicion that, in those particular circles – as the evening’s legacy lit event had reminded me – good taste is so often confused with ethics, brutish careerism with talent, where one’s solidarity with certain causes or basic political beliefs is more frequently reified in exacting home decor and aesthetic sensibilities than action. A suspicion that beneath the apparently progressive surface – for e.g the endless hijacking of once-meaningful language (‘utopian’, ‘radical’) into SEO wins and book marketing campaigns – lies a deep-rooted, terminal, small- and big-C conservatism, one borne from the hoarding of monetary and cultural wealth. I thought this suspicion would evaporate the further away from the scene I got, but it’s redoubled since I left, revealing just how invested in it I had – have – become. But suspicions, I guess, are not evidence, and generalisations are misleading. Sometimes.
*
Walking back to my flat above the Veterinarians, hopped up on adrenaline, I pass a grand, Bath stone Palladian villa, Clifton Hill House, where the nineteenth century poet, autodidactic historian, and early sexual theorist John Addington Symonds once lived. For many years, Symonds would sit at his desk, in that house, looking out across the treetops, over the reddish River Avon, and pen letters to another poet: the American bard, Walt Whitman. Symonds was one of Whitman’s many male disciples. But as the years of their correspondence passed, he came to challenge his spiritual father. The issue was Whitman’s concept of ‘adhesiveness’, explored in Leaves of Grass. Conceptualised at a historical moment in which language and ideas around sexuality were rapidly changing – the words hetero/homo/bisexual did not yet exist in English – adhesiveness vouched for the importance of affirmative and intimate bonds between men: camaraderie, fraternity, intimacy, love. As a poet-philosopher’s theory, it resisted and resists precise enumeration. But Symonds wanted Whitman to explain. He wanted him to acknowledge the barely-suppressed fucking that occurs between men in the poems, perhaps sensing that this part of the adhesiveness spectrum needed to be made visible, accepted and validated, needed to be ratified, in order for the entire concept to have any meaning or validity or efficacy at all.
Of what significance is this? Only a reminder that we’re all flowing through the waterwheel of history… Fluid as language… A rotation that goes on for ever…
