A Young Man's Passage by Julian Clary

Author:Julian Clary [Julian Clary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448116584
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2011-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

Like the cock on a windless day

Grimly pointing out yesterday’s weather,

I am old news.

A motherless goose,

Hatched and blinking by chance at you

Yet having no instinct to beg,

I falter, fret but cannot follow.

Mark chivvied me out of my wistful state by taking me out again. ‘Let’s go and look for Henry!’ he’d say. We never found him, but I was pleasantly distracted by fresh faces along the way. ‘Looking for Henry’ became our coded phrase for going out on the tiles.

In those pre-AIDS days using a condom was regarded as a kind of weird hygiene-related fetish. The lottery had started but we didn’t know. Rumours circulated about a deadly virus you might get if you slept with an American. Bars would fall silent if a Yankee accent was heard. Eyes would roll, backs would turn.

I specialised in Spanish, Italian, Greek and French gentlemen callers. They seemed exotic and lusty, and if there wasn’t much joy to be had from conversation, so much the better. Sometimes I’d get exasperated, though, if I said something funny and wasn’t rewarded with a laugh. My particular brand of spontaneous comic quip has never stood up well to any form of deconstruction. Any requests to explain my remarks or translate into a beginner’s vocabulary got very short shrift.

‘You’ve simply no idea how witty I’ve just been!’ I’d snap.

‘Que?’

It was a bit like doing a gig in Chatham.

On Monday nights I usually went to Bangs on the Tottenham Court Road. It was there I met Siro, an Italian passing through London on his round-the-world adventure. His English wasn’t great but he could make himself understood. He wanted sex every 15 minutes, and by Wednesday I could take no more and made my excuses. Before I fell into an exhausted sleep, I wrote down one of his many monologues:

‘Portugal, America, Paris, London – I search for love, for happiness, I don’t know what. I like to make people happy. In the gay sauna in Boston I let 30 men fuck me. The 31st he call me a slut. I am not a slut. I like to fuck, so I do. I think I give a lot of pleasure. I am very sexual person. You just touch my arm and my prick is jumping bigger. Always it is this. Sometimes I just touch my arm with myself and it is doing it. So. It is the way I am. It is not wrong. Sex is like water. I am thirsty, I drink. Some people drink three or four drinks, some seven or eight. It doesn’t matter. I want sex, I have sex. Always I am ready. It is not love, I know this. Sex without love is just water. Sometimes you have water with the gas. This is sex with love. So.’

That’s as may be, I thought as I drifted off. But – moral judgements aside – didn’t the marathon in the Boston sauna make it difficult to walk the next day and therefore hinder rather than help the ‘search’ for love?

Another cruising sister was Stephen.

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