by John Maley
Don had always fancied Rory. He had never particularly liked the man, too posh and pompous. But he was so effortlessly handsome. It was the lack of effort that rankled. It had been Rory’s genetic destiny to be gorgeous and he played on it. Don had never fancied Terry. But Terry had been a loyal friend to Don. A pain in the arse, but loyal. You needed him, he was there. He didn’t always say the right thing, he didn’t always do the right thing, but he was there and he was on your side. Loyalty, Don felt, was a rare treasure he had seldom found with friends or lovers. Things changed too much, that was it. Friends became acquaintances became strangers. Lovers left, interminably they left. After one night or one year, they left. There was nothing wrong with changes, Don welcomed changes, but it was all so fucking transient. He looked down at the kitchen drawer and thought of Rory reduced to ashes and his flat like a shipwreck yielding up its contents.
‘Finished!’
Terry stood with his hands on his hips and cocked his head, peering into the kitchen. Don emptied the drawer into the plastic bag.
‘Me too.’
They drove home with the books and CDs and bric-à-brac they had retrieved from the flat. Terry was still intent on speaking strictly business.
‘I’ll go over tomorrow and gut the place. Bit of elbow grease. There’s a couple coming to view it next Monday.’
Don was quiet.
That night Terry and Don went to Delilah’s. They used to go there with Rory. There had been some kind of connection, some kind of inexplicable bond between Terry and Rory. Don tried to think what it was as he sat in a booth with Terry. There was a kind of emotional coldness about them. Coldness. That was too strong a word, too judgmental. They just didn’t give much away. Terry had once confided in Don that a man had broken his heart when he was twenty and he’d never really got over it. Without trust, he said, you can’t love.
Don checked out the crowd in Delilah’s. It was Friday night, a young crowd. Skinny young guys who seemed ten times more confident than he’d ever been at their age. Or maybe he was just tired. He was tired of Terry. His caution, his brisk, no-nonsense, businesslike approach. Life’s not tidy, Don wanted to tell him. It’s a mess.
‘When did we last laugh?’
Terry eyed him suspiciously and took a frugal sip of his rum and coke.
‘My oldest pal just died. I don’t get the joke.’
Don worked on his pint of lager. Terry drummed his fingers on the table and stared wistfully out of the window. It began to rain and the street outside shone blue. Across the road they could see the posters on the derelict building flap and peel.
From where Don sat he could clock Bob the Bouncer at the front door, through the glass of the interior door. Don fancied Bob. He was sexy in a caveman kind of way. He was a good-looking guy and the fact he was straight made him irresistible. Don wasn’t so sure Bob was totally straight. He had once overheard Bob say to another bouncer friend something about it didn’t matter, man or woman, as long as it had a hole.
‘You staring at that Bob again? He’ll lamp you one.’
‘He can get me in a half nelson anytime.’
‘You’d run a mile.’
Don looked at Terry. He looked tired and sexless and lost. Terry had said he was celibate. He’d had enough of it all. Don thought, maybe Terry had just got tired of looking. Don hadn’t had it in six months. He hadn’t honestly missed it that much. His last encounter had been pretty disastrous – a drunken young queen who had puked on his bathroom floor and snored like a giant. When he thought of Rory now, a beautiful big bear of a man who had withered and died so young, he didn’t feel so horny.
‘I’m going to powder my nose.’
Don watched Terry weave elegantly through the raucous customers that crowded the main drag, and upstairs to the loo. He took the opportunity to eye up the talent away from Terry’s punitive gaze. The younger set had been joined by some smartsuited office-types. They looked like shop-window dummies. A biker with hair down to his feeble excuse for an arse drank a whisky in one go and fled. Maybe he was in the wrong place. Maybe they all were. Joanie danced behind the bar, wearing a huge coppercoloured wig and chandeliers for earrings. Don remembered seeing Rory here. It was in Delilah’s where he had first set eyes on Rory. He had said to Terry, Adonis Alert. That was what he’d always say if he spied a handsome man.
‘That’s my pal,’ Terry had snapped, and snorted indignantly. Don had only recently started hanging around with Terry and harboured a forlorn hope that he’d get a boyfriend out of Terry’s social circle. He had thought Rory had potential, but from their first conversation it was clear that there was only one man in Rory’s life – Rory. Emptying Rory’s kitchen drawer into a rubbish bag was as intimate as they had got. And that, decided Don, was curiously intimate.
Eventually Terry came back from the loo and sat brave and redeyed in front of Don.
‘That toilet’s a bloody scandal. The dryer’s broken, there’s no paper towels, there’s a bull dyke sniffing glue in one cubicle and a wank-off party in the other.’
Don leaned forward and brushed Terry’s hair lightly with his fingers.
‘You’ve been cryin’.’
Keep the Claws
Everybody was talking about Section 28. Some people were calling it Clause 28. One picky pansy was even calling it Section 2A.
‘I don’t care what it’s called,’ said Joanie, sorting his wig at the big cruising mirror behind the bar, ‘it’s homophobia, that’s what it’s called.’
It was a Saturday afternoon and it was almost impossible to have a decent conversation for the rabble of shoppers. Section 28 had been dominating the news for weeks. The Scottish Executive, that vanguard of queer liberation, had decided to repeal the Section, much to the horror of homophobes everywhere.
‘I’m a teacher and I’m gay,’ said Roger, a prim looking queen at the bar. ‘Does that mean I’m illegal? My very existence is illegal? Because I like to think I’m a good teacher. And good teachers are going to have an influence on their pupils.’
Joanie was stocking the fridge with alcopops.
‘You’ll be okay as long as you stay in the closet. That’s where they want us all.’ He closed the fridge door. He never drank alcopops himself. He’d seen some of the younger queens get out of their pretty little faces on them and even had to order a few of the rowdies out of the pub, they’d got so wrecked. He turned to join in the conversation again. Roger was giving his famous faggots of history speech that ran from Alexander the Great to Jimmy Somerville. ‘We’ve given so much to them,’ he opined. ‘Yet look what we get in return. Abuse and ridicule.’
Joanie nodded thoughtfully. A big, gangly, intense queen leaned forward on the bar.
‘It’s been open season on queers for years,’ he said. ‘First we were the gay plague. Now we’re coming to get your children. Talk about social exclusion. We’re living in a fuckin’ dictatorship!’ He banged a bony fist on the bar at the last point, rattling the empty glasses.
Joanie had seen the posters on the billboards around town. Photographs of ‘concerned parents’ and some crap or other about what their children were being taught in schools. There was a ‘Keep The Clause’ campaign and it was in your face.
‘What goes on in ma bed is ma fuckin’ business,’ said Joanie.
The intense queen shook his head. ‘That’s a red herring, the whole sex thing. It’s the social fact of homosexuality they hate. That’s why the clause talks about forbidding local authorities from ‘promoting’ homosexuality and presenting gay relationships as pretend family relationships. They just want to think of us as fucking in the bushes. That’s what turns them on. They don’t want to accept that we’re just as normal and boring and fucked up as they are.’ The bony fist banged on the bar.
The intense queen and the teacher began a big discussion about whether discretion was the better part of valour, or whether loud and proud was the only way to play it. The teacher said he had to keep firmly in the closet. ‘
I don’t want to be lynched and lose my livelihood.’ The intense queen gave him a look somewhere between pity and scorn. ‘That’s how the Nazis got away with it,’ he said. ‘When they come for me I’m going to make sure I’m kicking and screaming.’ Joanie didn’t doubt it; he was waiting for the fist to come down on the bar again.
It was just after two and Bobbie came in with an old pal and some new clothes she’d bought.
‘Was that you shopliftin’ in Buchanan Galleries again?’ quipped Joanie.
‘The only things I steal are women’s hearts,’ retorted Bobbie.
Bobbie ordered drinks for herself and her pal. She overheard the guys at the bar talking about Clause 28, and the referendum against the repeal of the Clause. Joanie said he’d received his form but hadn’t done anything with it. He thought the whole thing was bogus and he didn’t feel he should even grace it with a response.
The intense queen said there was going to be a ritual burning of the ballot papers by ‘gay activists and democrats’ and invited Joanie to come along. Bobbie said she’d shat in a shoebox and posted it to the Freepost address. Her pal guffawed at that and they went off to a booth.
The pub was getting busier with the Saturday afternoon set, brunchers and browsers. There were faces Joanie saw on a Saturday afternoon that he never saw any other time.
‘I hope none of you travelled into town on one of those buses,’ said the intense queen to a group of pals who had bunched up at the bar. A wee guy with sticky-up hair and a nose ring replied.
‘I’d sooner ride my own mother than one of those buses,’ he rasped. ‘I’m not going to be dictated to by tabloids and millionaires.’ The intense queen nodded his approval. Before long the wee guy’s pals had disappeared as he and the intense queen put the world to rights.
Roger, the teacher, chatted to Joanie as he gathered his shopping things. ‘I’m all for gay liberation,’ Roger said, ‘but I’d be out of a job if I went public.’
Joanie smiled reassuringly at him. ‘We all do what we can,’ he said. Roger attempted a smile and left. Joanie continued serving what was now a steady stream of customers.
Papa had come in about three o’clock but only stayed for one drink. He was meant to be going for dinner and then to the theatre with Mama, but Mama’s bleeper had gone off as they were having coffee in the Italian Centre and she’d been called away to a different kind of theatre.
‘What d’you think of this “Keep The Clause” campaign?’ Joanie said. Papa said he believed in equality before the law, then asked Joanie if he’d like to go to the theatre with him but Joanie couldn’t get the time off.
‘We just can’t get the staff these days,’ he moaned.
Papa left alone, despite the attentions of a young guy with some very old chat-up lines. Joanie checked out the two gay liberationists at the bar, who were now busy trashing the Catholic Church.
‘The Pope’s not too old to come over my knee,’ he heard the wee guy say, deadpan. ‘I mean I was raised a Catholic and it makes me fuckin’ sick tae hear them.’ He went into a big rant about the terrors of organised religion. ‘A johnny bag is not the Antichrist!’ he yelled.
‘Absolutely,’ said the intense one, banging his fist on the bar.
As the afternoon wore on into the early evening, punters joined the debate, putting in their penny’s worth. A trendy young guy who said he was an art student asked Joanie if he would like to model for him – he wanted to do his own posters. Things like ‘I’m a grandmother. They take it up the bum, you know,’ and ‘Gay used to mean happy. Now it means blowing a boner in Kelvingrove Park.’ Joanie said he’d be happy to oblige. He even came up with some ideas of his own. He offered to drag up as ‘Sandra Bollock’ and hijack a bus.
‘I want to be Keanu,’ insisted the art student.
‘You keanu if you weantu,’ retorted Joanie.
Joanie had to do a split shift that day due to another no-show from one of the skinny malinky boys that the clueless senior management kept imposing on him. He had a snack in the wee café across at the next block as he couldn’t be arsed going home and back into town. When he arrived at Delilah’s for the seven-to-twelve shift, Joanie was surprised to see the two liberationists still in the pub.
The intense queen said they’d been for a Chinese meal and decided to return to Delilah’s to continue their plot to overthrow the wicked kingdom of Homophobia. The wee guy was full of ideas, each one more fanciful than the last. Joanie thought there was something quite cute about the two of them and wondered if their poofy politicking was only about changing the world or whether it was really an advanced form of foreplay for the brainier bentshot.
Somehow Joanie got through another night in Delilah’s, but it was not without its dramas. At one point a group of studenty types got a bit out of hand, shouting orders at Joanie like he was their slave and putting their dirty hands up his dress. Joanie told them he wouldn’t mind so much if they weren’t so fucking hackett. So then they started singing Bitchy Queen to the tune of Billie Jean. Joanie was glad when Bobbie came in and bawled them out, although she ended up being called a flat nose for her trouble.
‘Why don’t ye chuck them out?’ Bobbie asked him at the bar.
‘If I had tae throw everybody out that gave me a bit ay lip,’ replied Joanie, ‘I’d have tae buy myself a mouth organ and a whiskery old dog for company. Because this place would be empty.’
Bobbie sympathised. ‘You’ve been on yer feet all day,’ she said soothingly. ‘Are you the only person that does any work here?’
Joanie said he’d tried speaking to the management. ‘It’s no good,’ he complained. ‘They keep hiring daft wee boys with faces like pop stars and arses like peaches who don’t know Guinness from gonorrhoea.’
He remembered few things after that. One was trying to unblock an upstairs lavvie with a plunger, a mop, lots of thumps on the flush button and enough salty language to stop a sailor in his tracks. When he finally got back to the bar and faced the ensuing riot, he told them somebody had better phone the Navy as he thought they’d lost a submarine. Another thing he remembered was pleading with Bob the bouncer not to beat up a boy who kept putting his sweaty hand down the back of Bob’s trousers. It was one of those nights when everybody was feeling everybody else up.
Joanie said that Delilah’s could give Sodom and Gomorrah a run for their money, but somehow or other he got through another crazy Saturday night. The reason he could only remember parts of it was because he ended up in a lock-in with Bobbie and the liberationists.
The three punters were already pissed and they lost no time in getting Joanie in the same condition. The wee guy had more crackpot ideas than you could shake a prick at. He said he was going to start a ‘Keep The Claws’ campaign. It would urge gay men everywhere to grow their fingernails for the cause of gay liberation. ‘So we can scratch homophobes’ eyes out,’ he shrieked. The intense queen was drunk enough to laugh now, but it was a scary mad laugh which, coupled with his fist banging on the table, was kind of unnerving. Bobbie was in fine form, saying she was going to chain herself to the railings of the Scottish Parliament wearing nothing but her Doc Martens.
‘If that doesnae frighten the shite oota them, nothing will,’ said Joanie.
The wee guy said he was going to change his name by deed poll to Guy Fucks and dedicate his life to face powder, treason and plot.
At one point the four of them were dancing on the tables to some old Kylie songs. The intense queen even got into a heated debate about who was the most magnificent Minogue, Kylie or Danni. It was all drunken madness and rage and joy and then Joanie felt the place start to spin. The four of them agreed to share a taxi although they lived at opposite ends of the city. The last thing Joanie remembered was singing Glad To Be Gay in the hackney cab and endlessly falling off the fold-down seat and endlessly being helped back onto it by the other three.
Joanie finally got up out of bed at two thirty on Sunday afternoon. Later, after a bath and some vomiting o
ver the lavvy pan, he retired to the couch with a cup of strong hot tea and the ballot paper he’d found amongst all the rest of the shitty junk mail that seemed to come through his door like an avalanche. Joanie looked at the ballot form. He wondered if he had a shoebox handy.
And I Love You So
Greg sat at the bar with his bottle of Bud. It was a shite place to sit. You had to keep craning your neck to see anything. That wasn’t strictly true – there was a large mirror behind the bar. But looking at that meant you saw not only what was going on behind you but also your own flushed, lonely and terrified face. It was shite, but he was too scared to move, plus the pub had got a lot busier now so there wasn’t much room to move anywhere.
He wasn’t the only barfly. There was a row of them seated right along the length of the bar. Everybody trying to get served had to lean over them or squeeze in between them. Greg drank his Bud and hoped somebody would talk to him. Somebody nice. Not the scary guy at the far end of the bar that was giving him heavy eyeball. Greg pretended he didn’t know him. He did know him. The guy had chatted him up in Club X once. Greg had sucked his cock in a cubicle. He’d fled after that, hoping he’d never see that cock or its owner again. He’d just ignore him. He looked in the mirror, avoiding his own dial but watching the clientele swell and ebb behind him. At one point someone was feeling his arse but when he looked in the mirror to see who it was they were gone. The phantom feeler.
The night wore on and the beer kicked in and Greg could see himself upstairs in the bog on his knees sucking creepy cock. It was then he was rescued.
‘Mind if I sit here, son?’
