Writing has become increasingly difficult in lockdown. At the beginning I leapt on the extra time, finishing up one short story, writing a whole new one, and even submitting a collection to a publisher for consideration. At Day 54 that feels like a Herculean effort by a person I no longer recognise. My enthusiasm for almost everything (except, thank God, for reading) is muted. But I need to write; for my work, and just because I desperately want to. It’s in my nature. I also do work to support artists to be creative in difficult circumstances so sometimes I need to try some of my own medicine.

My first piece of quarantine writing was an exercise in shifting focus away from an article I was working on (and feeling a bit overwhelmed by) and producing a simple adjunct piece to flex my word muscles without the pressure of an outcome. With a very light touch I produced a few paragraphs following up on a thread of a subject I found interesting. Soon enough, my natural urge to write took over and I finished both the articles, with the helpful support of my editor on the main feature. I’m pleased with them both and even decided to publish the ‘warm up’ piece.

The writing you’re reading now is also an exercise in getting something out of my system so that I can concentrate on other things, but it has other functions too. It’s an attempt to do something creative because I can feel myself shrinking from the world. The article’s subject is my attempt to celebrate and draw meaning from the many coincidences and connections I’ve been experiencing. It also fills in for my proximity to my community, who I miss. It’s an appreciation of the act of writing for its own sake. It also makes a contribution to research I am doing around queer space and community at Islington Mill in Salford. This is, though, a piece of writing primarily for myself, and so mercifully I don’t mind who enjoys it, but I sincerely hope you do.

 

This is a tale of coincidences, synchronicity, connection and queer spirit. When there’s nowhere for you to go, that’s when certain places – places you may know intimately, those you’ve only visited, those you were dreaming of seeing – become more alive with meaning and desire than ever. I’ve been spending a lot more time than usual in Southern Cemetery lately, either running or cycling on my state-sanctioned outings, and always spotting something new, depending where the light falls. One day I noticed the grave of Jack Flaherty who was Captain of the British Gymnastics Team at the 1948 Olympic Games. Known as the ‘Peter Pan’ of his sport, Flaherty competed in the Games at the grand old age of 40, coming in eighteenth on the high bar.

Just a little further along from the junction at Jack’s end of the cemetery – on Barlow Moor Road in Didsbury – sits an attractive mural of Alan Turing, painted on the side of a small brick building. The day after spotting Jack’s grave for the first time, I learn that Turing was also in training to compete at the 1948 Olympics – running in the marathon – but a leg injury had damaged his qualifying time. On one of my cycle trips, I decide to make a pilgrimage from the Turing mural to the house on Claude Road in Chorlton where Quentin Crisp died in 1999, and on through time and space to The Dancehouse Theatre on Oxford Road, once known as The Regal Cinema. Whenever I pause to take a photograph, nobody is around except for good-looking builders, smoking and spitting and violating social distancing guidelines.

I have been writing ­(just in my head so far) a story featuring Arnold Murray, the Manchester teenager who picked up Turing in December 1951 on the once-cruisy stretch outside the Regal. Murray was rough trade who turned out also to be bright, interested and impressed with Alan’s work. He was a young creative guy craving to be part of the world in his own way. Sadly, the sex he had with Alan inadvertently led to Turing’s slow crucifixion by the British state. After it was all over, Arnold moved down to London and wound up hanging around the hip new coffee-shop scene of 1950s SoHo. He was married twice, became a musician and had some of his musical compositions published. I would love to find that music and make some work with it.

Embarrassed by their own behaviour, the state that disowned Turing and drove him to suicide has retrospectively ‘pardoned’ him in order to publicly expiate their guilt. Not so the rest of the poor men also violated by the justice system in the exact same way or worse, many of whom also killed themselves because of blackmail or from the shame of being registered sex offenders for life. To express anger at this injustice my intention is to add a pink triangle to the Turing mural in Didsbury to remind people of this violent homophobic history. If I get done for vandalism I will crowdfund money from my queer community and we will pay off the fine using fifty pound notes with Alan’s face on them. This will be art that I dedicate to Alan.

The day before I make the pilgrimage described above, I spend some time on Zoom with the artists AL & AL to discuss a project honouring Allan Horsfall, the Wigan gay rights pioneer who built the first gay community of its kind via letter writing from his home. We talk about concepts of ‘home’, ‘staying home’, ‘there’s no place like home’. The pair have lately revisited Salman Rushdie’s essay on ‘The Wizard of Oz’ as part of their thinking. AL & AL’s 2016 show at HOME, entitled ‘Incidents of Travel in the Multiverse’, was my first exposure to their work. I keep the accompanying publication on my bookshelf and when I take it down to browse through it falls open on a description of Turing’s visit to Blackpool, my hometown, where he sits for a fortune-teller whose glimpse into his future terrifies him to his core. In a BBC interview, Barbara and Maria Greenbaum recall this incident and others from their childhood (edited for brevity, original piece is here):

Turing came into their lives as a patient of their father Franz Greenbaum in 1952. “Our father trained as a Jungian psychologist,” says Barbara. “He was Jewish and got out of Berlin just in time. In 1939 he settled in Manchester where he had a private practice in Didsbury.” Her sister Maria was seven when she met Turing. “It wasn’t unheard of for patients to come to the house in Longton Avenue.” [Which is just around the corner from my flat where I am writing this]. Barbara says she knew Turing was homosexual but thought little of it. “Our father was broad-minded and liberal. He thought he could help Alan come to terms with the person he was.” Turing even went with the Greenbaum family on a day trip to the seaside resort of St Annes. But Barbara recalls it ended badly:

Alan turned up at our house in a very strange outfit, which looked like his school cricket whites. White trousers which came half-way up his ankles and a white shirt which was very creased and crumpled. But it was a lovely sunny day and Alan was in a cheerful mood and off we went. Then he thought it would be a good idea to go to the Pleasure Beach at Blackpool. We found a fortune-teller’s tent and Alan said he’d like to go in so we waited around for him to come back. And this sunny, cheerful visage had shrunk into a pale, shaking, horror-stricken face. Something had happened. We don’t know what the fortune-teller said but he obviously was deeply unhappy. I think that was probably the last time we saw him before we heard of his suicide.

The fortune-tellers of Blackpool traditionally hail from the legendary Petulengro family. It was most likely a Petulengro who held my mother’s wrist on the Promenade one day and told her, unbidden, that she had four children and would also be a grandmother within the year. Both things were true, the latter a complete surprise to all of us. She also told Mum the age at which she would die, and what that would be like. Maybe Alan was given similar information.

On 7 June, AL & AL are due to take their annual trip to Blackpool to commemorate Turing’s visit. On our Zoom hangout I recommend that they book a room at the Art B&B, a beautifully refurbished old-school bed and breakfast on the seafront, where each room has been designed by a different artist. A few weeks ago I brought my Mum there for coffee. “I used to work as a chambermaid just near here,” she told me. “Maybe even next door to this place. It was called The Ocean.” The barman, overhearing, tells us: “Actually, this used to be The Ocean,” and shows us the stone nameplate in the fireplace that bears the hotel’s original name. “In that case,” Mum tells me, “the window where you’re sitting now is where you and your sister used to play and wait for me to finish my shift.”

Also in June I was due to make another pilgrimage of my own, this time to Prospect Cottage, Derek Jarman’s former seaside home at Dungeness in Kent. Who knows if AL & AL or I will manage our journeys now? This summer I was also set to stage a one-night takeover of the Jarman retrospective at Manchester Art Gallery via my role as Project Manager of Superbia. It was an event that I intended would resurrect and celebrate ferocious queer spirits, a night entitled ‘Derek Jarman Is Not Dead’. To bless the evening, I wanted AL & AL to share the story of how they first met, in Derek’s garden at Prospect Cottage in 1997. They have been together and making art more or less ever since. From one of our email exchanges:

AL & AL: We met in Derek’s Garden as a consequence of another pilgrimage trip organised with friends, the synchronicity of like minds, soul mates meeting at the appointed hour in the appointed place, initiated us into an idea about the Multiverse conjuring moments of magical alignments… In the book, ‘Transactions of Desire’ we wrote a short essay about this…

Greg: Just to further the web of connections, I also had a story published in Transactions of Desire! [About a man who attends Judy Garland’s 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall]

AL & AL: Yes Greg we re-read it as we were assembling the orbital notes for Allan Horsfall, you inspired us to return to Rushdie’s Wizard of Oz essay.

The Jarman show, and my intervention, are postponed until 2021. I admit I am suffering at having had so many of my creative hopes and plans taken away so unceremoniously. So this is partly why I am writing this, to summon up some power for myself, to make something new, to replace lost queer moments and the temporarily vanquished queer spirit.

What do I mean by queer moments and queer spirit? AL & AL’s book, ‘Incidents of Travel in the Multiverse’ begins by telling us that ‘Every variable of everything that could ever happen has happened to us. To all of us.’ My Turing pink triangle intervention is a piece of conceptual art that already exists somewhere in time. It is an act of queer spirit that connects me to Alan across time and space, joyfully refuting what the homophobic state dictates we should think of him. Marina Warner writes of AL & AL, “working in [Turing’s] afterlife so that his ghost grows and thrives.” The procession I have imagined in the streets around Manchester Art Gallery – with drag queens and The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and artists and witches ­– to announce that ‘Derek Jarman Is Not Dead!’ is a queer moment waiting to be fulfilled. Queer moments nourish and energise and connect us to our pasts and futures in joyful negligence of linear time. “Coming together forever,” as AL & AL write.

I have been thinking a lot about these types of experiences in lockdown, remembering a queer moment last summer, watching Justin Vivian Bond perform at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan. She recalled a concert she’d attended years earlier at which the singer was “the gayest thing I had ever seen” – could any of us guess who it might be? She gave the answer with a cover of Erasure’s ‘A Little Respect’ and at once I recalled Arnie Kantrowitz’s words in Under The Rainbow; how hearing Judy sing ‘Over The Rainbow’ in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ for the very first time was like “hearing the national anthem of a country of which you did not yet know you were a citizen.” ‘A Little Respect’ is that same song for me. A joyous look into a future I could not imagine but could already feel. A profound connection made in a musician’s heartbeat. Threads of meaning and memory combining in an uplifting queer moment in time. I can still feel it. I used a video clip of Bond singing ‘A Little Respect’ to launch Fabaret!, my queer cabaret event at Manchester International Festival, to release that same spirit onto Albert Square.

I’m in a drumming circle in Tompkins Square Park in New York’s East Village to begin the Drag March for Stonewall 50. In a haze of marijuana we are summoning the people of the park, not only the living around us but the spirits of the park’s past; the homeless rioters, the drag queens of Wigstock, the neglected and missing, the spectacular dead, including the many souls who succumbed to AIDS in the streets surrounding the park – people with AIDS who were isolated or self-isolating, socially distanced through illness, choice, rejection or stigma. Let us enter the Multiverse and imagine a drumming circle in Tompkins Square Park that exists throughout all of time, forwards and back. Who might hear the pounding from their apartment window? Keith Haring in his apartment at First Avenue between First and Second, opposite the Club Baths, or later on in his scruffy boarding house at East Twelfth and Second. Perhaps his neighbours Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz, living directly over the way from Haring’s boarding room, gazing out from the arch-windowed apartments above the Village East. Or Quentin Crisp, holed up in splendid dust at Second Avenue and Third Street, years and miles from the house in Chorlton. Or AL & AL themselves, visiting Philip Glass in his Third Street apartment, directly opposite Quentin’s rooms, to play him the first cut of their film, ‘Icarus at the Edge of Time’, and invite him to make the soundtrack.

By email AL & AL share with me:

William Burroughs is of course the queer writer and master of time travel who continues to guide us and enables us to see ‘in the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen’. Like Burroughs’ writing, Allan Horsfall willed a new gay reality into existence, we live currently inside their dream of equality, the past is always in the present shaping the coordinates of our future.

As I finish writing the paragraph above this one, my Google map of the East Village open in front of me, I reach for AL & AL’s book again and open it at random to find a quote about time but of course my eye at once lands on the phrase ‘East Village’ and that’s where I accidentally learn about their visit to Philip Glass. At this point I need a new word for these synchronous accidents and coincidental facts.

Queer spirit. Queer moments. Synchronicity. I am hosting a public conversation with David Hoyle, whom Justin Vivian Bond calls ‘the greatest living performer’, talking about our childhoods in Blackpool and his life as an artist. I am sobbing on the train from London at the last pages of Dave Haslam’s book We The Youth: Keith Haring’s New York Nightlife, which he dedicates to the crazy queer disco party I co-curated for seven years: ‘To the boys and girls at Drunk At Vogue, with love,’ it reads. I  am in the long room at Whitworth Art Gallery with Dave, discussing Keith’s life in front of a sell-out audience. I am carrying Ken Morris’ beautiful hand-made banner bearing Marsha P. Johnson’s face into Greenwich Village on the New York Pride March, past The Stonewall Inn itself, in solidarity with QTIPOC communities, and the people call out Marsha’s name as I pass by and I am humbled. I recognise Jim Fouratt, another Stonewall original, standing at the side of Fifth Avenue for the Reclaim Pride March, the anniversary of Judy’s funeral. I give him a kiss as I pass by. “I’ll see ya in the park!” he says to me, as if it is 1970 and we have always known each other. ‘Moments of magical alignment.’

I trace my initiation into this magical world of thinking and feeling to Islington Mill in March 2017. I am hosting an event in our old club space to celebrate a new edition of Close To The Knives, the uncompromising memoir of David Wojnarowicz, New York artist, AIDS activist and East Village resident. I curate a night of film, performance, art and conversation, which is also the initiation of my art practice, ‘A mile of black paper’ and the beginning of my thinking of myself as a queer artist. A kind of being born once again. What might it be like for us to make special places where queer spirit and queer moments can be collaboratively summoned through art and community, as we need them, without fear, for the good of our souls, in and beyond queer community, for the chance to connect, to move back and forth in time and space with no fear of an end, no fear of illness or poison or prison, no shame or loneliness? Islington Mill has been and will continue to be one of these places. It must be built. Until then, please stay home, stay safe, and plan your pilgrimages.

 


0 Comments