Birth and Childhood

Winston Churchill When I was born I, was dubbed Winston Churchill by the people who new best. Not because of the size of my cigar but because I was the biggest and heaviest baby on the maternity ward.

Eventually I became “Our Adrian”.

Lad-lass. I had a keen sense of smell and was fascinated by the exotic scents of celery, ground coffee, chocolate, vanilla. Nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon and cardamom. Thyme, sage, rosemary and lavender were intermingled with these and later flowers: Roses, honeysuckle, lilac, carnation and lily. I Loved to have a bath with bath cubes or pearls. When I asked for these my mother said she hoped I wasn’t a Lad-lass.

Pansy. Usage. Poor Brian Cant. Twice married and many times a father, my mother saw him on Playschool and said she didn’t like him because he was a Pansy. She knew best

He/Him. Not the woke declaration of the people who know best but the favourite name for me, not to me, of my father. The man who knew it all.

Usage: “Is ‘e gooin aat like that?”, “Tell ‘im to pick ‘is feet up wen ‘es warkin.”, Send ‘im to t’shop for 20 Embassy.” Ironically, I used the vouchers given away with these cigarettes to buy a hair dryer for my David Essex hairstyle. Even more Ironic, I still have it. The hairdryer, that is.

School

Comprehensive School introduced me to a raft of abuse aimed at anyone who was in anyway different. Anyone who deviated from the norm of the anti-intellectual, laddish, chavvy, toxic gang mentality or average appearance was fair game. I gave out as much as I got but it was a difficult time.

Puff: Usage: meaning I did my homework and enjoyed most lessons. I took Latin after school at the local Sixth Form College partly to get out of games, partly for interest but mostly to annoy the masses. Hence “Latin puff”.

Had I read Brideshead Revisited at that time I would have Identified myself with Anthony Blanche. Declaiming “The Wasteland” to the passing oars.

Other names on the roll call of shame: Hoe-Moe, Queer, Bummer, Fag, Fairy and Nancy-boy.

All synonyms according to my contemporaries, the people who knew better than I.

My few Latin lessons and a wonderful English Teacher, Miss Fellowes, obsessed with etymology, taught me how to pronounce Hommo- sexual, They really were the people who knew and cared about language.

I still wince at Hoe-Moe-sexual and Hoe-moe-phobia.

Not School

Overlapping school days, on Sundays, was “Round the Horne” where I eventually discovered I was an Omipallone and learned a fourth language: POLARI!

It was more than bona it was fantabulosa.

Before I dug a tunnel and escaped to Leeds, this secretive, ancient, yet to me, thoroughly modern milieu provided the inkling that I was not alone. I was like that. I was one of them. All this from a few minutes each week on the Home Service listening to the sophisticated, witty, camp people who really knew best.

I moved to my adopted city.

I eventually chose my own name: James

I read “The Naked Civil Servant” and discovered many other terms, euphemisms, not insults for my condition: musical, so, trade, queen and family. Names I came to know better

Usages

- a landlady interviewing a friend for a room in her house, “you’ll fit in right well here, some of the other boys are ‘musical’”.

-Nante vada now but, ooooh! the thews on that fenner omi trolling up to the park? Do you recon she’s family?

-Reported written on a cottage wall in the bus station at Pickering, “Anyone want to start a ‘so’ club meet here 4pm, Thursdays.

I read Walt Whitman and discovered I was a Comrade.

I read Edward Carpenter and discovered I was “Uranian”.

I read recently that I may even be an Androphile.

I should mention that I don’t declare my pronouns because they depend on company. Older queens will still use she for other men who are in the know.

Usage: disbelief- “Hark at her!” , “She sez!”, and “Get the madame”

And then, the time of enlightenment:

I WAS, to quote Tom Allen, GAAAAAAAAY.

And this was a word we had chosen for ourselves.

Mardy complaints about losing a perfectly useful word were met with the rebuttal: “you didn’t mourn queer, fairy and faggot; you can have those back.” For we were the people at the forefront of the struggle. We were the young people who knew best and fought for it.

After that I was boyfriend and partner and, when I started teaching, Sir, and Dad (acceptable mistake from 10 year old pupils). Then, as I got older, the horrific “Granddad” from the same source. The children who forgot or didn’t know any better.

Retirement and the patronage of age

Sometimes I become Adrian again, or love or dear.

Usage: “This thing in your hearing aid has got a little cross on one side, Adrian. It’s a battery.” No shit Sherlock! I was a person who already knew.

And now,

After the ages of abuse,

After the protesting and the marching and the chanting and the badge wearing.

After self-definition,

After Pride

I am,

Once again,

Apparently,

By the young people who know best,

QUEER.