We Can Be Heroes by Burston Paul

Author:Burston, Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little A
Published: 2023-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19:

Outside

‘He’s out. As in outcast.’

This was the headline in the Independent in October 1995, the first time I was profiled. The accompanying interview portrayed me as a controversialist, a troublemaker, the gay journalist other gay men loved to hate. There was some truth in this. I certainly had my critics. But for every letter of complaint to Time Out calling for my head, there was often another thanking me for sticking my neck out and challenging the political complacency of the time.

Gay culture was steeped in false optimism, I told the journalist from the Independent. ‘There’s this denial that a lot of us are traumatised. Many gay men simply haven’t learned how to talk about it. Small pockets of friends communicate, but the subculture as a whole doesn’t. I want gay men to make a fuss not only about what the straight world does to us but about what we do to each other.’ Years later, this theme would be explored in a book called The Velvet Rage by Alan Downs. At the time, I got little thanks for what my detractors described as ‘washing gay men’s dirty linen in public’.

In the days before the internet, it wasn’t uncommon for journalists to keep their hate mail pinned above their desks as a badge of pride. I had more than my fair share. Some letters were written in green crayon – no, really, they were – and came from homophobes who invariably referred to themselves as Christians. Others came from outraged members of the gay community whose anger seemed to stem from the fact that I wasn’t expressing their opinion but my own. Imagine! A gay columnist doing what any other journalist would do and voicing an opinion without first consulting an entire community! What an unspeakable outrage!

Back then, the Gay section at Time Out was one of the few gay platforms in the mainstream media. Whenever a gay news story broke, I would invariably get calls from well-meaning heterosexual journalists asking, ‘What does the gay community think about this?’

‘Hang on,’ I’d reply. ‘I’ll just open the window and ask them for you.’

I was picturing that scene from Life Of Brian, where Brian urges the hundreds of followers gathered outside his window to stop and think for themselves. There was no gay community that spoke with one voice, just as there is no single opinion that everyone shares, whether they happen to be gay or not. To suggest otherwise is lazy and reductive. As a gay journalist, I never claimed to speak on behalf of anyone but myself. But I did claim the right to speak.

An epithet often applied to me at the time was ‘the enfant terrible of gay journalism’. Given my personal history with Cocteau’s novel, this might have been fitting, were it not for the fact that I was fast approaching thirty and hardly an enfant. In gay years, I was practically middle-aged.

I’d always felt like an outsider. At various times in my life I’d been a stranger to my own family and even to myself.

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