Kid Gloves (31 page)

Her design was un-heroic, even anti-heroic. Names
of the dead were etched on walls of black granite, in chronological order of casualty, without
any additional information – rank, unit, decorations. Visitors would see themselves reflected in
the polished stone as they searched the roll-call for their loved ones. Remembrance of the
conflict as a whole took priority over any individual combatant, so that if you wanted to find
one particular name you had to consult a printed directory on the site, to cross-reference
person with date of death and so find the right place in the chronological list. The visitor to
the memorial, as Maya Lin has arranged things, goes down to a lower level to find a name, in
some small way visiting the underworld.

She chose not to represent human figures in the
monument. This isn't unprecedented (think of the Cenotaph) but was
certainly the aspect of the design most strongly contested by veterans of the war. To
resolve the deadlock, one of the competition runners-up was commissioned to design a statue of
three soldiers in a group, though Maya Lin, realizing the danger that this might become the
focal point of the monument, fought successfully to have it installed some distance away from
her wall.

Even so, the bareness of the memorial was hard to
take for the visiting public, and objects began to be left behind to soften its edges (objects
amounting to several thousand a year), not just flags and flowers but teddy bears and even a
motorcycle bearing the licence plate hero. A separate display of medals was installed in the
1990s to recalibrate the all-important balance between grief and pride.

Any sensible entrant in the competition for the
California design would take note of these debates. It was unlikely that the judges would reward
a confrontational approach. Including the human figure was a sensible decision, though it might
be going too far to restore it to its place high above the visitor, as in the more
self-confident nineteenth-century tradition. Doubt, fear, loneliness, all these could be
acknowledged.

Mike's design solution was to devise a
shrine-like space, in the shape of two half-circles, so as to offer visitors a sense of being
shielded, though the memorial is open to the sky. On one side the gap between the half-circles
is interrupted by columns taller than the walls, not supporting anything but providing the
visual rhetoric of a gateway, flanked by free-standing decorative buttresses. There's a central
flagpole. The panels listing the dead, in alphabetical order of home town but also giving their
ages and the relevant branch of the service, are hung on the outside walls.

The outside of the memorial gives you the
statistics, and the inside tries to render the experience. Reliefs on the
curved inside walls show servicemen in combat and off duty, as well as planes, ships and
aircraft carriers. There are five bronze figures on the site, four of them attached to the
walls. The fifth is of a young soldier sitting at the foot of the flagpole. The intention is to
produce a double-take effect on someone visiting the memorial alone, and thinking for a moment
that there is someone already there. This fifth serviceman is bare-armed. He rests his rifle (an
M16) against his leg, holding it steady with his left hand, while in the other he holds a
handwritten letter from his parents. You can read it over his shoulder.

The judges of the competition must have been
overjoyed when they found that the winning design was actually submitted by a veteran. It was a
gift in terms of public relations. Mike had certainly paid his dues, seeing
Apocalypse
Now
again and again during its first run, gravitating towards his fellow vets where they
had established themselves at the back of the movie theatre with their booze and their joints,
hunkering down in the foxhole of shared dope and shared damage.

In time Mike was frustrated by the bureaucratic
aspects of realizing his memorial design, particularly when corners were cut. He had specified
an infinitesimal gradient for the floor of the memorial, to make sure that water ran off. This
was omitted, as a cost-cutting measure, and on the grounds that it never rained in Sacramento
(in whose State Capitol Park it was erected). Mike knew better, and realized that in some
seasons there would be puddling. He didn't attend the opening and has never visited, as far as I
know, though he does have the consolation of being able to see it in the background of the local
TV news every Veterans Day.

There's a debate that never seems to die down
about whether there's such a thing as a gay sensibility. If being a veteran presumably affected
Mike's ideas for the memorial, did his
being gay also make a contribution?
It's hard to come up with a definite answer. Is there gay input in his memorial? Just possibly.
If you reach inside the young soldier's flak jacket (not that you would), you'll find that his
nipples have been moulded.

After three years spent very happily in Virginia,
and with a book soon to be published, I had the benefit of a new interpretation of my
personality by Dad, but I was still living at home. Why not? I was two hundred yards from a Tube
station, but Gray's Inn was quiet in the evenings and more or less deserted at weekends. I could
walk to the West End on a Monday evening and get tickets to see a play. What were the advantages
of setting up on my own, even if I could afford it on the £600 advance
Lantern Lecture
brought me? I was ahead of my time. Nowadays it's standard for people to wait a good long time
before they can get established on the property ladder, but in those days the lower rungs were
pretty access-ible and it took some fancy rhetorical manoeuvring to make my choices look
anything other than lazy and infantilized. Snow might fall on my bed, thanks to the rusty
skylight, but I doubt if anyone was really fooled by my charade of starving-writer-in-a-garret.
I wasn't even sure I was a writer. I had convinced a few other people but not myself.
Lantern Lecture
was ‘well received' but I had no idea what to do next.

I had written my first book review, of Edmund
White's
States
of Desire
,
while still in Charlottesville, for Craig
Raine's
Quarto
– I remember sitting in the Howard Johnson's on West Main Street to
write and rewrite my piece. Happy days! It would take me about five years of literary journalism
in print and on the radio to start earning a living. My lowly status was partly disguised by my
being so conveniently located, only a short walk from the
Sunday Times
on Gray's Inn
Road, where Claire Tomalin would let me root through the book cupboard for lateral assignments,
and from the
TLS
in Clerkenwell. Physical
proximity was much more
important in those days before e-mail.

It was only the anomaly of a new and
serious-minded broadsheet newspaper (the
Independent
) being set up, with an arts
editor, Tom Sutcliffe, whose address book was full of radio names rather than hacks as such,
that edged me into solvency. It was an unlikely combination of events, a shower of frogs
coinciding with a blue moon.

In the meantime I was an adult with an eccentric
portfolio of privileges and restrictions. If Dad had been a bed and breakfast, he would
certainly not have advertised himself as gay-friendly. Limits to behaviour weren't spelled out,
and of course there was more potential leeway when Dad was on circuit. Even so, it was clear
that a new face wouldn't be welcome at breakfast, unless possibly it belonged to Camilla
Parker-Bowles. Now there's a lady who can wear a hyphen!

However little time Dad and I actually spent in
the flat together, it's perfectly obvious that one of us (at least) was compromising his
principles, and naturally I'd rather think it was him.

Did I want to invite someone into the flat for
the purposes of pleasure, someone who might murder my mother or make off with the Investiture
chairs? Well of course I did. Yet the situation suited me well, even in the aspects that seemed
to chafe the most. I imagined I was looking for a relationship but didn't actually establish
one. Certainly the partners I pursued were self-disqualifying by reason of unavailability. If
they weren't ruled out by reason of a previous commitment then it was a matter of distance,
whether geographically or emotionally expressed.

I wasn't a fully paid-up non-committer. I was
really just stringing committophobia along. I kept it dangling, never quite saying in so many
words that I didn't see us having a future.

As far as I could see, my
brothers weren't in any great rush to settle down either, and perhaps I can hide my particular
pathology behind wider patterns in the family.

I remember one idyllic picnic on the flat roof of
the Gray's Inn flat, where Mum used to sunbathe. I hauled food, plates and cutlery for a
romantic lunch up the vertical metal ladder which provided access, using the
carrier-bag-on-a-rope system she had devised to convey her sun cream and chosen book. From this
distance it seems jarring to be calling her ‘Mum', but it can't really be avoided, Mum being
what I called her at the time.

At the end of our rooftop meal, my date delivered
what may have been the tenderest, warmest speech of romantic severance ever made. He had been
having a very nice time, he said, and there were many ways in which I was wonderful, but he was
looking for a lover of his own age.

It took a moment for this to sink in. ‘Tony,' I
asked, ‘how old do you think I am?' The age difference between us was about eighteen months.
Even in a highly competitive gay market I didn't qualify as a dinosaur or even a coelacanth, the
‘living fossil' that turned up to everyone's surprise in a fisherman's net in 1938.

I told myself that being a Published Author
conferred a gravitas which might be mistaken for seniority of the flesh, and so this comment
wasn't the vote of no confidence in my grooming regime it might seem to be. I've never tired of
reminding Tony of his micro-gaffe, not when Keith and I attended the party to celebrate his
civil ceremony with George, nor when the two of them came to celebrate ours in 2008.

I suppose it was forgiving of me to use this
new-fangled legal procedure, since I had declared in the
London Review of Books
in the
mid-1990s that marriage was too central an institution of heterosexuality, too well defended, to
be made to yield even a junior mechanism for the benefit of same-sex couples. I suggested
instead, following up a remark of
Foucault's, a modification of the
adoption process as the most practical way of securing legal rights for loved ones. Since then a
Labour administration had introduced new legislation, as if determined to show me up as a poor
prophet of social developments, but there was no sense in bearing a grudge.

The dynamics between homophobic judge and
publicly gay writer son, tolerating each other at least to the extent of sharing a roof, are
probably not standard. I dare say each of us tried to avoid confrontation while also steeling
ourselves against compromise. It was my impression that the slow, slow melting came from his
side of the glaciated valley, but perhaps he would have said the same thing.

Along the way there was a series of small
breakthroughs and setbacks. A timeline of sorts can be established.

Even before I left for the States in 1978, when I
was still based in Cambridge, there was a postscript to the protracted New Year seaside debate
about sexual identity. Dad sent me a letter in which he told me that remarkable results had been
obtained from testosterone treatment on homosexuals. There were references to medical
journals.

I found this fairly insulting even before I
consulted the journals. The articles concerned testosterone levels rather than treatment, and
the homosexuals on whom the tests had been carried out were female. I wrote Dad a curt note
pointing this out, saying sourly that he should do more homework before accusing his sons of
lesbianism.

The most painful thing about the episode, though,
was that the references to medical journals were not in Dad's handwriting, but his clerk John
Cant's. There had been delegation. Dad couldn't be bothered to do his own skimpy bigoted
research. I felt very let down. We'd had our difficulties in the past, but I had always been
able to rely on the stamina of his prejudice, and I missed the personal touch.

Back in residence after my
time in the States, I didn't willingly expose Dad to details of my ‘private life', but that
didn't make me culpably discreet. Sometime in late 1981 an estranged sexual partner stuck a
wounding letter through the letterbox of the flat. Seeing me flinch as I opened the envelope,
Dad said hoarsely, ‘Is it … blackmail?' He was playing a very straight bat to the googlies
that the queered pitch of life with a gay son was going to send his way. Even so, it wasn't
clear in his scenario quite how the proposed extortion was to be managed. Presumably the
blackmailer was threatening to expose my secret life. But to whom?

Dad and I were basing our assumptions on
different historical periods, or perhaps different trends in the theatre. He was giving a
performance of pained dignity out of Rattigan, while I had overshot even the kitchen sink
brigade, ending up on the far fringe, where the Lord Chamberlain would hardly have dared to
tread. For those few hours my personal drama edged into Orton territory, black farce rather than
liberal-leaning problem play.

In 1983 Dad asked me if I was responsible for
editing
The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse
, which had recently been published. I was
offended that he could ask such a question. Wasn't it perfectly obvious that if I took on a
project of such a sort I would do it under my own name? If I did decide to use a pseudonym, I
would try to do better than the name on the book's cover, Stephen Coote.