My talk from The Queer Forum #2 on 7 December 2014

The Queer Forum is an event that I co-host in Manchester in which people who identify as Queer/LGBT can come and talk to an audience for fifteen minutes or so about anything they like. People have spoken about ACT-UP New York, about their intersectional identity, about life modelling, about dementia, about erotic art and more besides. We also show very short films and we meet new people and we are hoping this event will grow. We are mainly all about the love. At the second Queer Forum event I thought it only right that I give a talk too, rather than just encouraging others to talk, so I wrote this to talk about the very confusing but enlightening year I have had, and some opinions and hopes and some personal anecdotes. I finished by reading an extract from Andrew Holleran's novel Dancer From The Dance which I can't reproduce here but which I recommend everyone reads. Here is my talk:

My name is Greg. I’ve lived in Manchester for eighteen years. I came to University here. I used to work in advertising and publishing. I’m now a freelance writer, a DJ and a club promoter. I’m also an event organiser. I also copyedit academic books and write fiction and reviews. I also do research and writing for artists and art institutions, and for the last six years I’ve written a blog about all of this stuff, and more stuff besides. I am a bit of a jack of all trades, which has as many drawbacks as benefits, but for that reason, and because I enjoy analysis more than conclusion, my talk today, given partly in homage to James McCourt’s book Queer Street, is anecdotal and personal and has several themes and is entitled:

‘Where I am and what I’ve learned and am learning as a queer gay man in the twenty first century’

I am 36 years old. Twelve years I stopped eating meat. Two years ago I got rid of my television and stopped buying newspapers. I am from a working class family who are now middle class because they have a car each, and I am middle class too because I’ve been to University twice and I work in the arts, even though I sometimes struggle to make the rent. I am, like many people, trying to work out what it is that makes me tick, what it is I should do, how to be good, how to be happy, how to contribute.

The Projects

This summer I had a cycling accident. I spent some time in hospital, far from home and delirious with morphine. At one point I thought I could speak Maltese. I had lots of time to think. In the last couple of years, two amazing people who I was lucky enough to know both died very young. Because of these experiences I have decided that if something should happen to me, I don’t ever want to have to say that I regret not doing x, y and z. So instead I have made a list entitled ‘The Projects’, describing all the things that I think I might want to accomplish. Some of them have been long-standing, others are accidental ambitions and are already underway, such as creating a club night, becoming a DJ, getting paid to write, hosting an event like The Queer Forum; some I haven’t tried yet, like stand-up comedy or staging a play; some might never happen at all, like getting my novel published… I just don’t want to have regrets.

Learning about social justice

A lot of my work and my life happens online. I am an enthusiastic user of Twitter and Tumblr and online writing, one of the main reasons being that it keeps me politically conscious and cuts out media bias when listening to other people’s voices. Here are 5 things I am learning online from social justice activists:

1. Racism has never gone away, it has only changed shape as society has changed shape. Capitalism needs racism.

2. The politics of, ‘We will come back for you’ doesn’t work. ‘When we get full marriage rights as gender conforming gay people, and we can adopt children, and we have equal everything else, we promise will make sure that everyone gets the same rights and protection too. We will come back for you.’ It doesn’t work.

3. Learning about your own privilege is vital and enlightening, but how do you use that awareness to help and make a difference? You need to find out.

4. There is an epidemic of violence happening against women worldwide and against poor trans women of colour especially. It isn’t going away.

5.  Social justice doesn’t mean a thing if there’s no clean air to breathe and your town floods and the ocean is poisoned.

Having therapy

When I was 24 I spent a year having therapy. My counsellor was a young lesbian and the message I left on her answering machine, long since erased, was the first time that I had ever said out loud the words, ‘I am gay’. In our first session she asked me to describe what I would like to work through in my therapy. I told her that:

1. I need to deal with the fact my Dad left, and:

2. I’m gay and I don’t want to be gay.

A year later anyone who mattered in my life knew that I was gay. My therapist once said to me, ‘As a lesbian, my sexuality is central to who I am and how I live, and at the same time it’s of absolutely no consequence.’ I had no idea what she meant at the time, but now I do. Everyone should get some therapy.

Why I don’t think Alan Turing should have been pardoned

Alan Turing was a bona fide genius with a singular mind who should have lived a long and productive life, excelling in his many fields. Instead of being allowed to meet this extraordinary potential, he met a guy outside The Dancehouse Theatre on Oxford Road in December 1951 and three months later the two of them were facing prosecution for gross indecency. A little over two years after that, Alan killed himself. A popular campaign succeeded in gaining a Royal pardon for Turing one year ago for the crime of gross indecency. I think this act pardons the State of responsibility for what it did to Alan Turing, rather than pardoning Turing himself. Alan didn’t need a pardon because he never did anything wrong in the first place. If he hadn’t been of use to the State there would have been no petition to start with. The original petition read, ‘This may act as an apology to many of the other gay men, not as well-known as Alan Turing, who were subjected to these laws.’ I strongly disagree. Turing’s usefulness to the State singles him out from the countless prosecuted and silenced men who suffered the same fate. I would be so angry to learn that a grandfather of mine had jumped off a bridge for the same reason but wasn’t deemed fit to be pardoned. In December 1952 Alan Turing was a criminal, the State should wear its shame for making him one. If only useful homosexuals get pardoned, I don’t want to be useful.

Having a partner

In 2011 I saw a movie called Weekend. The set design and cinematography of the film was based on the work of a pair of photographers working under the name Quinnford and Scout. Their work set the visual tone of the film and they were also invited to do the set photography, eventually resulting in the film poster image which graces the walls of so many gay men’s bedrooms. The film had a big impact on me, one that I was not ready to deal with. I had decided at some point to no longer make emotional commitments to anyone and for the first few weeks of the film’s release, various gay men, about six of them, with whom I had had some kind of relationship in the preceding years, each messaged me to find out if I had seen the film, and if not they urged me to do so right away as there was a lesson in it that I sorely needed to learn. They were mostly not very kind about it, but I knew exactly what they meant. So, because of the film, I decided to make a change and open my mind to at least the possibility of a relationship, maybe some time in the future. Not long after I made this decision I met a guy named Oisín Share who was one half of the photography duo Quinnford and Scout who had worked on the movie. In March we will have been together for three years. There is a strange synchronicity sometimes to life.

Am I gay or am I queer?

I am very attached to the political, social and cultural history of men who have identified as gay but when I look at anything that is labelled as gay culture today, I feel alienated. My body is wrong, my politics are wrong, I can’t afford anything they advertise, I don’t want anything they advertise, everything is badly designed and nobody wants to talk about books. Thinking queerly helps me to square all of this. Thinking queerly is a way to critique not just gay culture, but all culture, society, capitalism. When I find gay culture threatening or trivial, queer culture says to me to take what I like, give what I can, be something better. Gay is what I am, but queer I think is something closer to who I am.

Thank you.

‘Manchester: In Residents’ … #27 Okey

‘I probably imagined myself discussing dense philosophical texts over crepes or something…’

What’s your name?

Okey.

What do you do?

I work for Carcanet Press, which is a small poetry publisher based in the centre of Manchester. It’s a lovely place to work and I’m very fortunate to have encountered so many fascinating people and so much writing I really admire, while also wearing skinny jeans and ‘chunky knits’ to work.

The road to my current job was actually pretty straightforward in some ways, but also long and windy. When I was seventeen I saw an advert for a reading by Togara Muzanenhamo, one of Carcanet’s poets, at the Central Library. I was just starting to get into poetry, and I think I’d just read somewhere that attending cultural events alone makes you seem mysterious, so I decided to go, and I actually really enjoyed it. It also occurred to me how cool it would be to do that as a job. My concept of ‘cool’ is still very much a work in progress.

A couple of years later, when I was home from university one holiday, I asked if I could do some work experience with them, which I did and also loved. I came back again one summer to do some office work for them (less fun, but paid this time) but then I later decided I might want to be a lawyer. After graduation I did admin work in a Manchester law firm while I started my novel and interned at other law firms. Just when I was deciding that law might not be right for me after all, a job came up with Carcanet, which I was lucky enough to get.

I also do a little bit of freelance writing on the side (poetry, drama, reviews) and I’m (still) working on the inexorable post-English degree novel. I should be free of it any day now.

Tell us the story of how you ended up in Manchester.

My parents came to the UK from Nigeria in the 1980s as part of the Brain Drain. We went back to Nigeria a few times for holidays but we always lived in the UK. I was actually born in Withington and raised largely around the Greater Manchester area, but we moved according to wherever my dad was working at the time. So I suppose you could say I grew up in various different places including Bolton and Heaton Mersey, and we lived in Wales for a short time. We eventually settled on Stockport. I didn’t mind moving – it was probably easier because I have siblings – and in fact I think this might explain why I don’t have a regional accent…

I went to university in Cambridge, a very small city, and my college, Girton, was about five kilometres from the city centre. As much as I loved it there, I think it made me appreciate how nice it is to live in a city where the buses continue after 6pm. I also remember one of my friends complaining that Cambridge isn’t really a place where, as an undergraduate, you can just go somewhere and not be a student: it’s too insular, you can’t help bumping into people you know. I don’t think the same can be true of Manchester.

I came back to Manchester because I thought it would be easier to find work but also because I was curious about the city. I’d never really lived in Manchester itself, at least never for very long. Now I think I’d like to live in London for a while, just at some point in the future, not just yet, I’d like to live abroad first.

What’s great about this city?

The history, I think, is my favourite thing – and how open that history is to the public; how public that history is, as well as all the nooks and crannies. One of my favourite periods of literature (and art, which I know less about) is the Victorian era: I did a special paper on it at university in my final year, and so when I came back to Manchester I started thinking more about Elizabeth Gaskell and going to see Valette’s paintings in the City Art Gallery. Towards the end of my degree, when I knew I was leaving Cambridge for good, whenever I was coming home from the city centre I would alter my route slightly so that I got to cycle across King’s Parade, past King’s College and the beautiful old lampposts under the moon. Especially when nobody else was out, it really did feel like going back in time – or rather, like being somewhere that, in some ways, hasn’t dramatically changed in a long time. As though anything (or anything historically consistent) could happen. I feel the same way walking across Albert Square at night.

But then, the interesting bits of the city’s history continue so much further back - and so much later. Last year I did some writing on Alan Turing, which was really, really fascinating – as part of my research I spoke to someone who went running with him when he was alive. That was really wonderful.

What’s not so great?

I could roll off a pretty long list, simply because I’ve lived in Manchester for so long. But I suppose my absolute least favourite thing is true of any city but here it is: that, despite the fact that some parts of Manchester are very diverse, it’s not entirely comfortable with its diversity. I remember how sad and surprised I was when, coming back from university with a shiny new degree, I realised that security guards still follow me round shops to see what I would do.

Do you have a favourite Manchester building?

This is probably controversial. I’ve told this to a few people and have been roundly judged: the building which was on the site of the new KPMG building in St Peter’s Square [Elisabeth House]. I fully acknowledge that, especially in the increasingly economically tough years before it was demolished, it was becoming emptier and emptier, and looking more and more unloved. But I’ve always loved it and I was so sad when I realised it was being replaced. I’m not sure why, exactly. I think it was probably because, when I was much younger, I heard very cool sixth-formers talk about how much they loved the Dutch Pancake House the building used to house; and, being very impressionable, I began to see it as the epitome of some kind of run-down urban romance. Ridiculous as it sounds, I really thought it was unspeakably, breathlessly romantic. I probably imagined myself discussing dense philosophical texts over crepes or something…

But, since that building no longer exists… I think I’d have to say Central Library, as it was before the renovations, anyway. I’ve no idea what it will look like when it reopens but I really, really loved it before and even from the outside it’s just beautiful. I remember going on school trips to the Library Theatre; being a teenager and taking the bus to the library and feeling very grown up finding a copy of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus in the Black History Month display, borrowing it and racing through it, feeling for the first time (I read Adichie before I read Achebe, the more famous Igbo writer) what it’s like to read something by someone who comes from a very similar background to your own.

I remember reading about the Henry Watson Music Library (top floor of the central library) in An Equal Music by Vikram Seth and being so excited that it existed – and then borrowing two or three times the number of pieces I was ever going to practise just because I could. I think I probably imagined myself into his novel - in fact I probably half expected to bump into a dashing violinist between the stacks but even if I did, I would have been at my least captivating: wild-eyed and clammy with delight, clutching Quantz’s treatise on flute-playing, two or three recorder pieces by obscure German Baroque composers and the PVG scores to some truly embarrassing pop music which I will take with me to my grave [Our readers need to know!].

Do you have a favourite Mancunian?

A tough question but I think… I’d have to say Alan Turing. He wasn’t born in Manchester and in fact he lived in Wilmslow, but he worked at the University of Manchester after the war and socialised in the city centre (to the extent that Turing really ‘socialised’ at all).

He’s becoming more and more widely admired and accepted, which is good: even aside from his code-breaking work, I find him absolutely fascinating. I think it’s well known that some people found him an odd man to work with (he could be quite socially awkward), but then in my research I also found out what a deeply passionate person he was, how fixated he was on the relationship between a machine and a human mind. I read that when he was at school, his best friend, a boy he really hero-worshipped died very young: it’s thought that, for the rest of his life, Turing carried with him the idea – perhaps the hope – that something of his friend, some part of this boy’s essence remained on earth, and that it might be encountered again. This could well be the germ of his fascination with what we now call artificial intelligence. I don’t know that I ‘admire’ Turing for this, because you can’t really admire someone for something they didn’t choose – in fact it seems like he was haunted, perhaps even dogged by it. I read he was quite introspective and intense: once he’d fallen in love with someone he idolised at such a young age, and who then died young, I don’t think he stood a chance against the way he felt. But I do find it fascinating: the fact that he could work so steadily, that he persevered in something so jugular-close to himself, and that it might well have been love (although sadly a kind of stunted love, maybe not even real love at all, after all those years) that could drive his creativity so forcefully, I think is a really interesting notion.

What’s your favourite pub/bar/club/restaurant/park/venue?

These aren’t very original, really. There’s the John Rylands Library, especially the reading room. I love the Cathedral and I want to go and see more evensongs and concerts there. I love Platt Fields Park. I don’t really go clubbing all that much but pretty much anywhere I’m unlikely to get stabbed will do me.

What do you think is missing from Manchester?

It would be nice to live in a city that really doesn’t sleep. To be able to get the train or the tram or the bus or a doughnut at literally any hour of day or night would be something. But that’s just a small thing, and I don’t think Manchester’s missing all that much, to be honest. I quite like it the way it is, but I’ll be happy to move elsewhere when I feel like it’s time.

If I was Mayor for a day I would …

Make it a law for people to talk to strangers more! I’m chronically shy myself but whenever I go to London I notice how much friendlier and forthcoming people are up North; last time my friend visited from London, a stranger said two words to her on public transport and she almost had a stroke. But – and this could be my imagination – I think as time passes, strangers seem to talk to each other less, here. (My friends tell me Liverpool is way ahead of us in that respect.) I think it’s a really good thing we’ve got, this degree of openness, I’d like more of it. Manchester should be less… British.

Who else would you like to nominate to answer this questionnaire?

Alan Garner. I loved his novel Elidor when I was at school, the way it’s set in Manchester but encompasses the surrounding countryside.

Okey reads some of his poetry at The Poetry Society, London, this evening (Saturday 25^th January).

Why I didn’t sign the Alan Turing petition

“We ask the HM Government to grant a pardon to Alan Turing for the conviction of 'gross indecency'. In 1952, he was convicted of 'gross indecency' with another man and was forced to undergo so-called 'organo-therapy' – chemical castration. Two years later, he killed himself with cyanide, aged just 41. Alan Turing was driven to a terrible despair and early death by the nation he'd done so much to save. This remains a shame on the UK government and UK history. A pardon can go to (sic) some way to healing this damage. It may act as an apology to many of the other gay men, not as well known as Alan Turing, who were subjected to these laws.”

Some supporters of this petition seem to be conflating a pardon for Turing’s conviction with an apology for convicting him in the first place. For anyone looking the other way, the apology already happened. Feel any better? Nor did I. The wording seemed genuine enough but it wasn’t for Gordon to apologise. That’s the problem. Political apologies are almost always for the apologist, not the victim(s). Formal apologies can be diplomatically useful (see the complex litany of apologies surrounding the Korean War) but then a formal apology from the United States government for the most protracted genocide in history (slavery in America) coming 150 days into the Presidency of the first Black man in the White House looked like precisely what it was: a very modern exercise in diplomatic PR. It can’t begin to touch on the truth that it purportedly apologises for. I think it’s vulgar to try.

I might be on dangerous ground here. I’m not Black, I’m not American, I’m only a student of African-American history and firmly of the belief that a perpetrator ought to wear their shame. I believe an apology, in the form of a pardon or otherwise, has potential to relocate, or worse, to diffuse shame, and possibly responsibility. An apology on behalf of a perpetrator (especially one who, like the philosopher’s typewriter, no longer exists) is tantamount to a statement of allegiance. And if it isn’t that ... well, isn’t it far too easy to apologise for something you didn’t do and don’t feel implicated by?

Mississippi didn’t ratify the anti-slavery amendment until 1995. This surely stands as an equivalent truth to an apology from the Senate. Should Mississippi apologise for dragging its heels? Did the Nostra Aetate make meaningful reparations for any Jewish person drowned in a well? How could it? And where does it end? How about an apology for something happening now? The exclusion of poor people from the means to get out of poverty, for instance? Yes, it sounds absurd, but only because history is easy to simplify and is reductive by comparison with the present. If Obama apologised tomorrow on behalf of the Reagan administration for turning its back on thousands of Americans with AIDS, what exactly would that mean? It would ring profoundly hollow.

I might be on safer ground with Turing. We’re both gay after all. I’m choosing not to play the ‘gay card’ though because sexuality doesn’t validate anyone’s opinion about Turing, any more than a pardon (in the infuriatingly crummy words of the petition) “may act as an apology to many of the other gay men, not as well known as Alan Turing, who were subjected to these laws.” May it? I think the writer of the petition earmarks the Achilles heel of the gesture right there. Why Alan? Alan’s usefulness to the State singled him out from generations who suffered the same way. I think I would be angry to learn that a grandfather of mine jumped off a bridge for the same reason yet wasn’t seen fit to be pardoned. Alan belonged to his time. He was guilty of gross indecency. Alan Turing was a criminal. You might as well arrest a person for a crime that used to exist as try to re-interpret what happened to him. If your problem is with the historical fact of the law, I’m afraid it’s a frustration that a pardon for Alan won’t remedy, and the assumption he is yours to use to that end is presumptuous. It’s selective, elitist and in a very real sense it is meaningless. Using Alan as ‘precedent’ for a broader general pardon is not a reason to sign; I don’t think other convictions should be pardoned either, for the reasons described here.

Alan Turing committed a crime of which I am proud. Many of my heroes are criminals. ‘Criminal’ is a legal category, not a moral judgement. This is a clear distinction if you acknowledge the injustice of every legal system in history. Alan Turing committed a crime I cannot commit. Unfortunately I need her Majesty’s Government to acknowledge that my life isn’t grossly indecent in order to fully live it (though I don’t require their moral approval). I don’t need them to do this for Alan Turing. Why would I? The time for that was 1952. As the petition says, the ‘shame’ was the Government’s, not Alan’s. It never was his shame, we never believed it was. Let them wear their shame. A historical addendum of ‘...but was pardoned in 2012’ would be a shabby and deceitful postscript to reality.

Alan’s suicide wasn’t shameful, it was a desperate alternative to a life of poisoning by state-administered hormones. It was an act of defiance, but not of liberation. Alan is not a martyr; his rejection (by death) of an injustice should not be backdated for anyone’s agenda. Please don’t believe I am less angry than you. I am angry. I’m angry enough to believe that Alan’s contribution in bringing about the end of the War shouldn’t be separated from the disgust that the people he helped felt towards him. Our grandparents, in other words. It is a truth. It is possibly the only truth. But I am angry; for him and lots of gay men. It is a grim truth that Britain honours heroes selectively. It is a selection process as exclusive as the privilege on which it depends and which it loves to propagate. There is no way to count suicides now. Separating Alan from history, from other persecuted homosexuals, is to isolate him from the magnitude of suffering under that law. It’s nobody’s place to re-contextualise the degree of misery required to poison yourself because you cannot be yourself, however well-meant your intentions. Fashioning history in your own image is a curious oxymoronic impulse to perform whitewash through the very act of memorial. A pardon for Alan isn’t a ‘start’. There is no start, it is over, that’s what makes it history, that’s what makes it dangerously simplistic to call for pardons and strip lives of context. Context is meaning.

Signing the petition is not a statement of opposition to homophobia either. Please at least understand that. If you need an outlet to vent your rage at homophobia, take ... your ... pick. If you ask for reasons that people are upset at the denial of the pardon, expect to be met with statistics on the rate of code-breaking instigated under Alan’s expertise, or with plain outrage that a law against homosexuality is allowed to mar his memory (it doesn’t mar his memory; there is no shame in gross indecency). Neither line of reasoning holds because what they both insist, intentionally or otherwise, and however much the wording of the petitioner resists, is that useful homosexuals deserve a pardon because they are useful.

A man called Dudley Cave talked to Peter Tatchell about being a gay soldier in the Second World War:

‘They used us when it suited them, and then victimised us when the country was no longer in danger. I am glad I served but I am angry that military homophobia was allowed to wreck so many lives for over 50 years after we gave our all for a freedom that gay people were denied.’

Alan Turing is the tip of an iceberg that cannot be fathomed. For those that insist a pardon is symbolic, that it is only a tacit acknowledgement of a wrong committed; I want to ask why such circuitous semiotics is required? I have something better than symbolism. Alan Turing is dead.

I’ll finish with a quote from Derek Bentley’s Wikipedia page:

‘On 29 July 1993, Bentley was granted a royal pardon in respect of the sentence of death passed upon him and carried out. However in English law this did not quash his conviction for murder. Eventually, on 30 July 1998, the Court of Appeal quashed Bentley's conviction for murder... However, Bentley's parents and sister had died by this date. Bentley himself would have been 64 years old...’

Unlike Alan, Derek’s guilt under the law was questioned from the very beginning, but just read the above one more time.

What was it all for?