Two Gentlemen Sharing
Meeting my penpals up north in
Manchester
13 March 1999: Two
Gentlemen Sharing
I got up early
again. Yikes. I always sleep soundly and get up early on vacations. Holidays are
unnatural times. I took the tube to Euston Station and for a mere 41 pounds
sterling bought a return ticket (round trip) to Manchester. This is the most
expensive single-use purchase on the trip. The most expensive train trips in
Europa are in the UK.
Manchester is one
of those places no one seems to visit unless you know someone. In this case, I
know A, of A and A. He is one of my penpals and I visited him in Bath last year.
I stayed in their suburban home and took the train to Cardiff from Bristol the
following day. A is the one who first told me about the Teletubbies, when all
they were were annoying children's TV characters, and not a lavender menace to
all good anglo-saxon children.
It was
just three hours for Euston to Manchester (Mcr from now on). I was met by A and
M at Piccadilly Station. M is my penpal from Yorkshire who drove over so we
could meet. Ain't that nice? In Manhattan I have trouble getting people to visit
me in my glamourous Upper East Side old-law walk-up tenement flat. Yet in
Britain people are coming round for dinner with perfect strangers, and driving
over the Pennines just to say hello. Perhaps I am living on the wrong side of
the Atlantic.
We went to the Gay Village,
a revitalised portion of industrialised Mcr that is actively marketed to queers.
A muddy brown canal runs along Canal Street. We went to a large airy pub and met
A and C. A is A's partner and he and C are going on a cruise to
Scandinavia.
After about an hour A and C
headed off to the coast to catch their ferry across the North Sea and M and A
and I toured the centre of Mcr. It's full of wonderful Victorian architecture,
and despite a devestating IRA bomb blast in 1996, Mcr is rebuilding quickly. Mcr
will be the home of the world's largest Marks & Spenser's. It is already
home to a gigantic white Debenham's that looks just like Mussolini's train
station in Milan. The only thing missing was a she-wolf feeding swarthy twins
over an SPQR insignia.
We walked through
Affleck's Palace, an old department store that caters to youth and nostalgia
that has nothing to do with hacktor Ben Affleck. Dayglo, beads, and clothes only
the young would wear. I could feel every cell in my body aging as we walked
around the place. But, skin problems, Fun Boy Three albums, and a voracious
appetite for chocolate keep me young.
We
had lunch in a cavernous chain restaurant that used to be a cinema. Wax figures
of old women sat where the balcony might have been. Disconcerting only because
they seemed to be staring at me and I wanted to tell them to stop. That would
have been silly. Almost as silly as the time a kid in London's Mme. Toussaud's
Wax Museum, in 1985, thought I was wax and screamed when I moved. He was
probably scarred for life and probably voting Tory
now.
M drove us back to A's semi-suburban
home. We stopped for a scenic overlook of a reservoir. It's amazing how amazed I
am by a simple thing like a valley. In New York the closest thing we have to
this is Sixth Avenue in the 50s, where the cracker box skyscrapers make a glass
canyon.
In A's town we took a nice walk
around the brook and the canal. A Victorian-era railway bridge featuring stone
arches still carries commuter trains. The town is small and compact and formerly
a mill town. The mills are still there. A's house is an attached home built in
the 1870s. After tea, and a long conversation about pets (which must've been
driving M crazy), we went to dinner. A's dog was "poggy," whatever that means.
Probably old and smelly. But I didn't notice. My olefactory senses are off,
always are. I am practically anosmic. He's a sweet 13-year-old spaniel or sorts
who just wants attention. He runs around with his squeaky toy and puts his head
on your lap. That's just what I do when I need
attention.
We walked about a mile to the
pub. We all had "chicken supreme." That's chicken with some sort of creamy
sauce. The waitress was quite friendly. A says that everyone is friendlier up
north. A says that there is a local paper named NOW -- north of Watford. Many
Londoners and others down south don't thin that there is anything worthwhile
north of Watford.
A and A probably do not
think they are activists, but they are. They are not hiding their relationship
(except for A2's mother), and A says that it takes him two hours to shop on
Saturday mornings because everyone is so chatty in the small shops -- the
butcher, the produce, the news agent. A says that it's sort of like the British
book Two Gentlemen
Sharing, where two gay men move to a small
English village, and how it eventually dawns on everyone that they are gay. A
and A have even gone to a mostly straight line-dancing event and danced together
as a couple. This was not an everyday event for the usual
dancers.
In a world that is not granting
us civil rights, marriage, or legal protection, doing things like this in small
places is, in my head, a major political act. A is also the one who, encouraged
by a superior at work who came out in front of an audience no less, also stood
up and outed himself, and so did five other people. A would never bang his own
drum, but in a world where speaking your mind is sometimes to dig your own
grave, standing up, chatting in the store, line dancing with your lover, are
activist moments. It's the odd perversity of our lives, that just being
ourselves is an activist event.
The
closet is something straight people find convenient, and something they have to
walk by en route to larger rooms. Trying staying in a closet for a while. It's
claustrophobic. Closets are not pleasant for gay people. So come out, encourage
someone to come out, and support those who do. It's a continuous process and it
can be exhausting, and even dangerous, but it has to be
done.
As we walked back to A and A's
house, it was quite chilly. The pavement was barely enough for the three of us
to walk at the same time. The moon wasn't out but there were lots of stars.
Orion was out hunting in the southeast sky. You just cannot see the wonders of
nature clearly when you're in the closet. Being closeted is just unnatural. It's
probably the only thing about homosexuality that
is
unnatural.
Posted: Sat
- March 13, 1999 at 02:05 AM