Authors: Graham Norton
I don’t spend a great deal of time thinking or talking about my straight experiences, but if people find out about them they always want to know about the difference in the sex – is it better with men, can a woman give a blow job, that sort of thing. This is just one aging homosexual’s opinion, but I really don’t think there is much of a difference.
I once knew a friend of a friend called Jackie. Jackie lived in Canada and was a transvestite, and while I’m sure he didn’t consider himself a hooker there did seem to be a fairly direct link between dollars and sperm in his life. Jackie had wanted to have a full sex change for years, and saved all the
money he could until finally the day arrived when he could afford it. My friend received a phone call late at night. He groggily answered the phone to hear an hysterical Jackie at the other end of the line screaming from his hospital bed that he couldn’t go through with it, he was too scared, etc. etc. All very moving I’m sure, but sadly his emotional tug of war isn’t that relevant to the point of the story.
These second-thought cries from the heart began to happen about once every couple of months for a year. Jackie wanted to be a woman, but he wasn’t man enough to go through with it. Finally, silence. Word reached us that Jackie had bitten the bullet and let go of the smoking gun. Jackie was a woman. She was thrilled. Finally the time came for her to earn an honest dollar and try out her new womanhood. She chose a handsome Canadian trucker to do the honours. Like a burly version of our own lovely Queen launching a new cruise ship, he splashed his salty champagne down her new slipway. She lay there flushed with her own sense of achievement. The trucker, however, just lay there, breathing hard, but not being very forthcoming with the reviews. Jackie could bear it no longer – this was the moment her whole life had been leading up to. How had it been for him? Well, the story goes that the trucker rolled on to his side, looked at her with a mixture of puzzlement and impatience, and in a deep Canadian monotone replied, ‘A hole’s a hole.’
Now I don’t mean to be as crass as our trucker friend, but I sort of know what he means. You can’t really compare straight and gay sex because sex is simply about mechanics, what feels good, what doesn’t. Sexuality, however, is all about emotional responses. In truth, vaginal sex is probably physically better than gay sex, but for me sleeping with men is
about their strength, the feel of their body, the stubble of their kiss. I do realise that I’m slightly pissing on years of research done by very clever men and women in white coats, but as far as I’m concerned, the difference between being straight or gay is as simple as whether you prefer dogs to cats, or coffee over tea. There is no better or worse, no right or wrong, and if there is a why, who cares?
End of lecture. Back to Elizabeth.
My memories of the time I spent with her are like one of those long montages you see at the end of a weepy romantic movie just before the heroine finally loses her battle with some mysterious disease that prevents her heart from working properly, but leaves her just enough energy to constantly reapply make-up. We walked all over the city hand in hand, went to the movies, battled the wind on the beach, laughed as her scarf blew high across the trees. Mostly we talked, and talked, and talked. It felt good to be in the heterosexual gang. Maybe we would get a dog.
About eight years ago I saw Elizabeth again. She was in London with her boyfriend (whose wife, interestingly enough, had left him for a woman) and we went out for dinner as some sort of weird masochistic demonstration of how all right we were with our past. I’m not sure what I think my relationship with Elizabeth is now, but that night she treated me like an ex-boyfriend, which of course I am, but it still took me by surprise. When her current boyfriend slipped away to the toilet, she looked at me and, almost to underline the awkward silence his departure had left, said, ‘You know, you were the only one who ever talked enough for me.’ This, of course, was true because I had been her best friend in lover’s clothing.
I was having a great time with Elizabeth, but at the end of my year in San Francisco, I felt it was time to go home. I’d given up on university and had failed to get a degree, and there was nothing concrete to go back to, but it was something I felt I had to do. The hippies all piled into Obo’s old blue van to see me off, and we posed for pictures in the airport. On the plane during take-off I stared out of the window at San Francisco and started crying. I could see the green flag of Golden Gate park, and from there I could work out exactly where Stardance was. So small and getting smaller. The tidy elderly lady next to me asked why I was going home. I answered that I was going home for my parents – they were worried about me being away for so long, etc. – but then I remembered that my teacher and friend Niall MacMonagle had given me some very harsh but sound advice years before: ‘Never do anything just for your parents; after they’re dead you are still going to have to live your life.’
So why was I really going home? I knew that the year I had spent in San Francisco had marked some sort of beginning in my life. The slightly frayed jumble of hippies had taught me so much. I had finally learnt what my mother had meant on a good luck card for my exams when she had written, ‘You can only do your best, but do it!’ There is no shame in failure; the only shame is in not making the attempt. These are all obvious platitudes, the sorts of things you can read in any third-rate self-help book, but to be twenty-one and fearless is a very powerful combination. I decided then and there that I would head back to London, I would go to drama school, and then I would become a respected member of the acting fraternity – actually, fuck that, I would be a star!
4
Acting Out
L
ONDON IN NOVEMBER 1984 WAS
really not very different from what it is now. As a city it doesn’t really grow, it moves in circles. The trendy neighbourhoods may change, but there are always trendy neighbourhoods. When I arrived, the place to be was just north of Covent Garden. It was called Neal Street and it was a Mecca for the cool kids. The restored cobbles would be teeming with screaming girls from the suburbs desperate for a glimpse of Bros., whose management had offices there. Horny teenage boys soon caught on to this and started hanging around dressed up as the boys from the band in the hope that a lazy groupie might think to herself, ‘A tribute band in the hand is worth two nowhere near the bush.’ Today it is an odd area where you can only buy fashionable trainers or kites. Mmm.
When I arrived in London I headed back to my old friends Julie and Harry. They had now moved into a squat in Camberwell that was struggling to become part of a housing association. The house was wedged up against the railway line, and sitting in the bath you were almost able to read the headlines of a commuter’s
Evening Standard
as the trains rumbled by. The vibrations gave the water a sort of low-tech jacuzzi effect. The lack of privacy was compounded by the lack of a door or indeed a wall on the other side of the room.
Similarly the stairs just seemed to hang from the wall with no visible means of support. Mattresses of mysterious origin were the only recognisable pieces of furniture, though I was assured that a large wooden electricity cable spool in the kitchen was a table.
I lay on my mattress that first afternoon looking through old copies of
City
Limits
, a sort of politically correct version of
Time Out
, and two weeks in a row I noticed an ad in the gay section for a restaurant called Smiths on Neal Street. Now, I was still supposed to be going out with Elizabeth at this stage, even though she was still in San Francisco, but for some reason that idea of making money out of my sexuality had lingered on in my mind (never mind that I didn’t know what my sexuality was). I made my way to Smiths and discovered it was a large basement restaurant, all tastefully decorated in white and red with a huge collection of art on the walls, exactly the sort of place, I thought, that two rich old queens might start up. I asked about the job and was told to sit and wait for the manager. An obviously gay man came up to me and introduced himself as Mike Belben. He clearly liked me and the job was mine. I would start as a busboy the next day.
While the job was real, everything else turned out to be all in my imagination. It was just a weird coincidence that the ad had appeared in the gay section. The restaurant was in fact owned by Christina Smith, an imposing woman who had made a small fortune speculating in property in the seventies and who was now trying her hand at catering. Mike Belben was one of the most heterosexual men I had ever come across and was just being friendly.
I was soon to discover that Mike wasn’t hard to work for,
he was
impossible
to work for, but, mysteriously, for every employee who thought he was an unreasonable fanatic there were ten who despite themselves adored him and would have defended him to the death. I was with the ten. Over the years he has been incredibly loyal and supportive towards me, and besides having become a great friend himself has, by some very fine hiring of staff, provided me with several of my best friends in the world.
Mike staffs restaurants as if he is casting a play. When I started at Smiths, there was David Eyre, now a very successful chef and restaurateur in his own right, who told us stories of his childhood in Africa. I listened with the blinking incomprehension of a dog. All I could hear was ‘posh, posh, posh, posh, posh’. Phineas and Orlando Campbell were young eccentrics in training, and Eileen McGowan was a red-haired bolt of Scottish energy. Soon after, Helen Smith arrived, breezing in like a breath of fresh air from Salisbury, full of headscarves and tales of her recent stay in New York. All blonde hair and huge blue eyes that nearly exploded at the mention of champagne, she was my sort of replacement Elizabeth, except that this time my penis respected the boundaries, and as a result we are still very close. A girl called Nicola Reeder also worked there. Nicola hails, rains and shines from Leeds. She is without doubt the funniest person I know and has a heart the size of one of those freak vegetables that get seen at country fairs. Again, twenty years later we are as close as ever.
However, the one who really rocked my world was a gay man called Syd. That was the way he spelt it. He was part of a group of Canadians all working in various restaurants around the city, and for some reason, especially given that
Canada’s chief export now seems to be dullness, they all seemed extraordinarily cool – in fact they were the ones who knew Jackie, the man who would be Queen.
Syd was many things, but what he was, mostly, was beautiful. He had a smile that defied you not to fall in love with him, and eyes and a walk that made you blush, they were so sexual. All thoughts of Elizabeth – and indeed women in general – flew out of my head. I developed the most enormous crush on him and would spend most of my time analysing every word and glance he addressed to me. In my heart I knew I didn’t stand a chance, but in that desperate way of the unrequited lover, I secretly enjoyed my love-spurned role. I became consumed by my feelings for him, and I remember one late night walking drunk all the way from Covent Garden across Waterloo Bridge and on through the concrete plains of South London to Camberwell shouting nonsense into the streets full of nothing but wind. What were my feelings? Did I love Syd? Why couldn’t life be simple? For what seemed like hours I trudged southwards, wailing and flailing. Of course it was raining.
Desperate, I went to a tarot reader around the corner from work. Perhaps the cards could tell me what I should do about my feelings for Syd. I walked into the small room at the back of the shop full of crystals and books that had unicorns on every cover, and found a very pedestrian-looking woman – less mystic gypsy, more Countryside Alliance. I resolved that I would tell her nothing specific about my problem, I would simply listen impartially to what the cards had to say. I sat down, she said ‘Hello’, and when I opened my mouth, instead of a similar greeting out came a tidal wave of emotional sewage. I told her everything, things I
hadn’t told anybody. ‘Sometimes he cuts enough bread for my tables as well.’ ‘He hangs around the cash desk when I’m doing my bills . . . sometimes.’ My sensible footwear soothsayer made a half-hearted show of shuffling a couple of cards and then went straight into counsellor mode. ‘You must tell him how you feel, or you’ll never find out how he feels.’ As advice went, it was simple and sound. Putting it into practice, however, was a whole different ball game.
Sometimes Syd and I travelled on the same night bus home. He lived in Peckham a couple of stops beyond where I got off in Camberwell. We would sit upstairs to get away from the people who were so drunk they couldn’t manage to climb steps. The charming Adonis in his perfect uniform of baggy Levis and white T-shirt sitting next to me, the small grey potato with sprouting hair on my head and espadrilles on my feet. My mind was racing. I had to say something. This was it. Of course I knew the answer, of course I didn’t really need to ask, but in some weird twist of logic it is always the hopeless that dare to hope.
My initial pick-up line isn’t quite as bad as it sounds.
‘Would you like to be my cousin?’
A couple of nights earlier Syd had picked up a man who had been eating in the restaurant, and when Helen had asked him why they were leaving together, Syd had told her that his companion was his cousin from Canada. She had believed him, and to be someone’s cousin had become our new favourite expression. However, Syd, presumably desperate for me not to have meant what he thought I meant, looked at me and just said, ‘What?’
The agony continued. I braced myself and went for the direct unprotected approach, devoid of cutesy armour.
‘Would you like to spend the night with me?’
As embarrassed as I was at the time, I can only begin to imagine how mortified Syd must have felt. He looked at me. Judging from the expression in his beautiful eyes, I might as well have asked him to hold my vomit for a moment while I nipped to the loo.