The fact is that for some time now Professor Zazzo Thim has been lost, and it is my duty to find him. The manner of his disappearance is, beyond question, one of the most unusual cases I have ever come across. Yet the evidence I have before me, and the testimony of various witnesses, all point to the one conclusion: that Professor Zazzo Thim is trapped, helpless, somewhere in Marcel Proust’s grand novel, ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’.
It did not take me long to deduce the basics of this case. Various students and colleagues of the Professor attested that he was busy constructing some sort of grand device in the basement of the institute in which he was employed. Various noises had been heard from the cellar towards the end of each academic day, and strange lights were seen by those leaving the building, orange in hue and regulating a slow rhythm. Those closest to the Professor could not find out from him exactly what it was he was building, though one colleague, Doctor Hermann Spatt, was most helpful in his assertion that the Professor was constructing a device which would, atom by atom, replicate his body as a series of words, and distribute them throughout a chosen text.
‘How do you know this?’ I asked
Spatt grinned at me from across his desk. I asked my dear old colleague. I came right out and asked him. Of course, he was pretty drunk at the time. But he told me what the machine entailed and what would happen to him as a result. At this, Spatt’s smile faded, and he leaned back in his chair. ‘Such a sad waste’, he whispered
‘You must obviously have been close to your colleague’, I said, gently.
‘Thim? Oh no, I couldn’t stand the chap. What I’m sorry about is that a book so wondrous as a la recherche should be sullied by his ugly mug’
The key to the basement in question remained locked and, on account of the strong, fortified doors to the cellar, I quickly deduced that it would take months, possibly years to enter that sacred room. Yet I remembered what Doctor Hermann Spatt had told me, and I set about reading Proust’s epic tome, that I may find some mention within its pages of the eminent Professor Zazzo Thim.
The institute was good enough to provide me with accommodation during my stay. It was late autumn, and the trees were almost without their leaves. The paths around the park land in which the institute is set were slippery, and it seemed the sky was hardly ever anything but a deep grey. Proust’s volumes accompanied me everywhere. I would take walks in the gardens, or through the woods, with one volume open under my nose and the next thrust under my arm. I would go to the dining hall and sit with the other students, hardly noticing their banter, so engrossed was I in the societal gossip as recorded by the redoubtable Marcel. Even my rare journeys outside of the campus were spent in the company of the Guermantes family, the many minor characters and the overriding sense of times past as recorded in those weighty books. It seemed my whole life had started to revolve around the novel, and I would make lists of the endless family members, associates and contemporaries of the narrator, but each evening I would sit down and study these lists, safe in the knowledge that none of those mentioned bore the slightest resemblance to Professor Zazzo Thim.
At around this time, Doctor Hermann Spatt, with the help of two science students and a Professor in electronics, began to build a machine using the blueprints found in Thiim’s empty office which might, when up and running, be able to rescue the Professor from the depths of the accursed novel. The machine started to take shape in a far corner of the institute’s gymnasium, roped off from the rest of the hall by an arrangement of badminton nets, and each lunch time I would call in to see what progress was being achieved
‘None at all’, Spatt said, despairingly. ‘The machine just won’t function. It needs more electricity than we are supplied’.
‘Then how did Thim’s machine run so effectively?’ I asked.
Spatt pushed back the hair from his forehead and let out a deep sigh. ‘The energy needed to suck a character from a book is ten times more powerful than that needed to throw a character into the narrative. You see, Thim had the advantage of gravity, but we have nothing, nothing at all.
I walked around the machine and looked at it from many angles.
‘It’s looking quite hopeless’, Spatt said, and I swear I saw a tear well in the corner of his eye as he contemplated his missing colleague.
That night I retired to my room. By now the bed was covered with the six volumes of Proust’s masterpiece. My reading of it was haphazard at best, covering the first three sections of each novel simultaneously, so that my understanding of the plot and the order in which Marcel’s life was playing out was tenuous at best. At worst, I didn’t know what was going on.
So many dukes, matriarchs, minor members of the aristocracy, childhood memories, subtle, beautiful women with strangely masculine names. That night I fell asleep and found myself in a nightmare, a dark, dismal Paris street where Proustian characters advanced upon me with their arms outstretched, their eyes displaying a frightening malice, humming, intoning some strange, ritualistic prayer which sounded for all the world like Kylie Minogue’s first hit single, ‘1 Should Be So Lucky’. I woke with a start, frightened into reality yet not trusting the world around me, the darkness of the night, the wind which, ever so gently, was roaring in the trees and felling the last of the leaves.
I got up and walked to the window. I was dizzy, I was sweating, yet the room was cold. It was as if the natural laws which surrounded us all had ceased, that the earth itself no longer recognised whatever constitutions had kept it going for so many years. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the trees, and the leaves falling, one by one, across the sodium light of a campus street-lamp.
‘My God’, I whispered.
Excitedly, I telephoned Doctor Hermann Spatt immediately. He answered on the third ring, and asked, blearily, what it was I wanted.
‘The machine!’, I said. ‘You remember what you were saying? That Thiim had the benefit of gravity?’
‘Hmm?’
‘And that we needed more energy because we were sucking a character out of a book, not throwing one in?’
‘Yes?’
‘Then why don’t we just turn the whole machine upside down? Put the machine on the floor and the book suspended above?’
There was silence on the other end of the line, and then Spatt’s voice came back. ‘My word’, said he, ‘You’re a genius’.
The next morning Spatt, accompanied by his assistants, set to work making the modifications I had suggested, while I, now with the help of three assistants of my own, continued my reading of Proust’s novel. We each took a volume and, starting at the very beginning, ploughed our way through the dense script, using different translations and even the French language original, so that we were working on three separate texts at once. Halfway through the afternoon Spatt rang to tell me that the machine was working perfectly, and all it needed was for me to find Thiim in the novel so that we might rescue him. This news gave us a welcome feeling of progress and we intensified our efforts until, by six in the evening, we were all very tired and our eyes and heads ached.
‘Thank you, lads’, I whispered, as they headed towards the door.
‘Erm, we were wondering’, said one of them, an amiable young man by the name of Adam. ‘Would you like to come out for a drink tonight?’
I smiled at their offer, for it was proof that we had gelled as a team. ‘Thank you, but I would rather maintain my capacities’, I told them.
Their shoulders slumped.
‘And I suggest you do the same, for we need our full concentration if we are ever to find the Professor’
Adam smiled. ‘Very well’, he said. ‘We wouldn’t have gone overboard, anyway. Just a couple of drinks and then back home.’
‘Thanks once again, I whispered
The days were getting shorter, and once I had eaten my dinner, (accompanied, once again, by the ever-present Monsieur Proust), I went back to my room and prepared for sleep.
To be honest, I was beginning to doubt that we would ever find Thim in this mammoth book, and a part of me was content just to sit back and enjoy the experience of being a small part in such a large, well-funded experiment. Though the more I thought about it, the more desperate I started to become, as I realised that the whole project now depended on me and my abilities to wade through the novel for just the smallest clue. Worse still, I was afraid to sleep, for I knew that I would be haunted by Kylie once again, that inane, stupid song, ‘I Should Be So Lucky!’ Timidly, I retired to my bed.
At two in the morning I was woken by a fierce pounding on my door. Hardly able to concentrate, I opened the door and blinked in amazement to see Robert de Saint-Loup.
‘Do forgive my intrusion’, said he, ‘But I was wondering if you had had word of the Duc de Guermantes?’
‘I beg your pardon?’, said I, hardly believing my eyes.
At that moment M. de Charlus bounded down the corridor and patted Saint-Loup on the shoulder. ‘There you are!’, said he. His eyes then focused on myself, standing in the doorway in a pair of boxer shorts and nothing else. ‘Hello!’, he said, twirling his moustache.
‘I say!’, said a voice from the end of the corridor. They both looked up and bowed, courteously, as Albertine approached. ‘Are you not on the way to the Verdurin ball? I proclaim it to be the most whimsical event of the decade!’
Hurriedly, I shut my door, then went over to the window. Oh, what a scene met my eyes!
The quiet park was awash with people, elegantly dressed, bowing, nodding, dancing, chatting in the glare of the street-lamp as if they were in a ball or a turn of the century function. And they were all, I was horrified to note, characters from Marcel Proust’s mighty tome.
I telephoned Spatt and he confirmed my worst suspicions. Some students, drunk of course, had broken into the gymnasium and fiddled with the machine. Instead of pulling the hapless Thim from the depths of the novel, they had, wantonly and without thought to the effects of their crime, pulled out every other character instead.
‘But this is horrendous!’, I whispered.
‘There’s no choice’, said Spatt. ‘We must round them all up and post them back into that hideous novel. Do you know what they’re doing now? They’re in the canteen, holding a mass madeleine tasting. This has got to stop!’
‘There’s only one way we can get them back into the novel’, I told the Doctor. ‘We must break into the basement and use Thim’s machine.’
It took the best part of the night to round up all of the characters. Because we had been using three different translations, there were three of each of them, and the three Marcels had met some time after half four and, indignant that their individualities had been compromised, had challenged each other to a duel, (from which, naturally, each one backed out.) Charlus was the worst, and three of his characters had to be retrieved from the public lavatories and from various male student’s bedrooms before they were all accounted for. At last we had rounded them all up and we were engaged in the act of congregating them around the door to the basement, a tricky act which was achieved only by the entertainment of a piano playing Chopin and the liberal refreshment of champagne. Spatt and I, meanwhile, busied ourselves at the door. The thick oak would not budge to our shoulders, neither to rudimentary battering ram fashioned out of an old roll-top desk. However, when one of the Robert de Saint-Loups saw what we were trying to achieve, he supplied us with some dynamite which, he assured us, was fresh from the Great War battlefields.
The following explosion was deafening. Two of the Mme de Verdurins went flying through the air, their stiff petticoats flaying in all directions. At last we entered that hallowed room and saw Thim’s machine which, somewhat comfortingly, looked not unlike the reverse example we had fashioned in the gymnasium. Yet only now did Spatt and I see the almost fatal mistake that Thim had made. Indeed, the machine functioned well, and had been put together expertly. However, the absent-minded Professor had, one can only assume, accidentally, mistakenly placed within its confines not Proust’s magnificent novel, but a CD of Kylie’s first UK Number One hit, ‘I Should Be So Lucky.
It didn’t take long for the machine to be put to use. How affectionately we said good-bye to all the characters, who each invited us to various balls and society functions for the following Paris season. When they were all quite delivered, Spatt and I took Thim’s CD upstairs to the gymnasium, where we placed it on top of the machine and pulled the necessary levers. Seconds later, Professor Zazzo Thim materialised
‘Oh, my word’, he said, feeling his nervous forehead. I was having the time of my life! I’ve never danced so much!’
‘You realise what you did?’ Spatt asked
‘Oh, the CD? Entirely intentional, my dear friend.’
‘But that’s preposterous!’
‘So many hours l’d spent on that machine, a copy of Proust under my arm. So many years I’d dreamed of meeting those wondrous characters. Yet when it came time to leave, I thought long and hard about it …
‘And?’
‘And I realised I would rather be with Kylie, instead.
‘Good gracious!’
‘Well, my dear Spatt. They’re so stuffy, aren’t they? And Kylie’s much more vivacious’. At this, Thiim looked left, then right, then left again. ‘And another thing’, he said, confidentially. ‘She’s quite a go-er, I can assure you’.
Alas, the story does not end here. The following week, Kylie’s management refused to confirm that a new mix of her original hit single had been mixed, with some quite bizarre vocals by various French dignitaries, mostly concerning the petty discriminations and social faux pas of turn of the century Paris.
‘My god!’ Spatt whispered to me, down the telephone line. ‘We must have sent them to the wrong place!’
Yet not one scholar, student or academic genius happened to notice that Proust’s six-volume masterpiece now seemed not to have a single character at all.
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
Put some feta cheese in there, Put some Camembert in there Put some other things in there It's very very quiet.
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
Bought it from a man from Bern The man from Bern his name was Bern Fridge freezer, Swiss geezer So so quiet.
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
Have you turned it on? Of course I’ve turned it on. Have you plugged it in? What am I, daft or something?
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
The old one went chigga chum chigga chum The old one went witty witty woo The old one went chigga chum chigga chum The old one went to the tip.
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
As 2025 lumbers to a wimpering snuff, many of us see a world that seems almost unrecognisable to the one we’ve always known. Division and hatred, thinly veiled racism, outright transphobia, and the prevalence of the ego have combined to create a cultural environment in which core principles of neighbourliness and humanity have taken a back seat. Other and better writers have written about this and to much greater effect. It’s hard not to see our lives, dominated as they are by so many distractions, and consumed mostly by looking at a screen or a mobile phone, as being the primary reason for this. But I’m not a psychologist. Nor an analyst. I just believe that it’s so much easier to tell a lie than it is to disprove it. And quicker, too. Do I despair of the world? All I can say is that people get bored very quickly. They want instant gratification, and now. The shock of the new.
As for me, 2025 has been, well, unnecessarily interesting. I’d had a good life for the last fifteen years, writing and performing poems while working in my job, in retail management at the same branch of a charity for almost thirty years. 2024 was marked by the drug dealers who lived in the flat above my shop. There were frequent fights, arguments, knives, needles, gangs of ne’erdowells to contend with, all happening right above the shop. I thought it couldn’t get any worse, and then, all of a sudden, it did. In February of this year, the drug dealers upset someone, (an ex-girlfriend, apparently), who then announced on social media that she was going to burn down their flat that very evening. (Incidentally, this was Valentine’s Day. How symbolic). So the drug dealers did the right and humane thing, and moved out for the night taking their possessions with them. I watched them go through the security peephole in our back door. They loaded their possessions into a car. I hope they don’t burn the place down, to cover their tracks, I thought. So it was no surprise when I got a phone call first thing the next morning to say that the shop had burned down.
Yes, it was arson. But now I found myself in a tentative position. Would I still have a job, especially in the current financial climate? What would happen to my staff, would they still have a job? The company could very well have ‘let us go’ then and there, but they were understanding. I was made into a floating manager. My job was now to travel through the south west and cover at any branch where a manager was absent. Over the course of 2025, I worked in almost every town you can think of between Bournemouth and Cornwall. Some of them I thought they’d just made up. (Midsomer pNorton?!). I spent a lot of 2025 living in hotel rooms and eating buffet breakfasts. So yes, I still had a job.
But it was my performing which suffered. I could not commit to gigs because I never knew where I was going to be staying or working. I could not rehearse, because I used to use the shop to rehearse every single morning while I was getting the place ready. I couldn’t learn lines, especially in a hotel room. I had a few wonderful gigs which I had to book time off for, including Penzance, and a quick trip to Edinburgh. I had a good enough time.
The one thing I did, though, was to work on a novel. I’d already written the first draft when I applied to Curtis Brown Creative, and amazingly, I was let on the course. Over the summer we developed the novel, and it’s looking very good indeed. I am now tinkering with it and hoping that an agent or a publisher sees enough in it to accept it. I’m very happy with it, indeed.
This last month, I was made temporary manager of the shop in Torquay. This is much closer to home, and all of a sudden, I have time now to rehearse again. It feels like things have turned a corner. They’re even due to begin building work on my old shop, (the landlord died over the summer and nobody owned the place, thereby everything came to a shuddering halt). Which is to say, I’m starting to feel like my old self again. The whimsy is returning.
So what did I get out of 2025? A lot of memories meeting people all over the south west, and a novel, and the benefit of the tutelage of Suzannah Dunn, (who really liked my novel), and a huge amount of time sat on trains. (Working in TIverton for three months meant five hours on trains and buses a day). And time to look at my fellow passengers, all watching TikTok.
The world will not change and I cannot make it. I just know that there are civil people out there, concerned for humans and humanity, opposed to stupid wars and political bullying, opposed to toxicity, big business, politics in general. Sometimes it is better to whisper than it is to shout, but I only say this because I’ve never felt entitled to shout, and that there are others who are much better at it than me.
It may not have escaped your notice that I’m quite gay. I’m steeped in gayness, ensconced in homosexuality, which I wear like a coat which sparkles iridescent in my undeniable queerness. I’m gay in the same way that Donald Duck is a duck. Daffy, too. I’m massively gay. It is my identity and I’m incredibly comfortable with it, though this has not always been the case. And it has often been the subject of my poems.
When I was younger I was downright embarrassed by my evident homosexuality and I’d get all hot and sweat thinking that at any second I’d be unmasked and that this would result not only in deep humiliation, but also the possibility of a slapping, because the world was a different place when I grew up in the 1980s. The AIDS crisis was in the news and it seemed to give the more discerning homophobe a presumably tangible reason to accelerate whatever hate their puny minds could muster. But they had public opinion of their sides, and the government, too. Section 28 was prevalent, and it was illegal even to ‘publicise’ homosexuality, whatever that meant. There were no adverts for it on television. Tabloid newspapers continually outed pop stars in the crudest of languages. Brave soap storylines were mocked. Gay accents were impersonated by prime time hack comedians. School bullies shouted, ‘Backs against the walls, lads!’, which always got a laugh. No wonder I didn’t want the world to know.
And in my council house bedroom, I tried to make sense of it all. I reasoned that it was something I’d soon grow out of. Suburbia was a place of endless bland business-orientated culture-deprived outlets, roads, infrastructures, tower blocks, office buildings, slipways, airports, train stations, noise, pollution, homophobes, and a sense of Just Getting On With Things, and it all seemed very straight. Only the M25, which is far from straight. My school didn’t have a drama department, but we were taught German because it was assumed that all future business would be conducted with Germany, and we had something called Enterprise Week every year, which was nothing to do with Star Trek. We had to start up small businesses and try to make money. Survival of the fittest, dog eat dog, backs against the walls, lads. It was in this incredibly drab world that I spent my formative years, knowing deep down that there was something amiss.
Because the sight of a bloke with his shirt off would get me all a-quiver. Not that we had many shirtless blokes in the suburbs. I now live at the seaside, where they’re two a penny during the summer, but it was much different in suburban Surrey. The only place where it seemed even remotely likely was at the amateur football matches where one could hang around after the final whistle and see what happened, though these were inhabited almost overwhelmingly by the straight male community. And once the football season ended, the cricket season would be in full swing, and cricketers are usually less prone to spur-of-the-moment shirt removal. But whatever the sport, I’d come over all ‘unnecessary’ and retreat to the sanctuary of my bedroom and ask myself, irritably, when this damn heterosexuality was going to kick in.
Naturally, I had to come out to myself. And the thinking behind it went something like this:
I don’t seem to find the opposite gender attractive.
Most people find the opposite gender attractive.
There’s nothing wrong with these people.
There must be something wrong with me.
Society (and the Bible, for I went to a very religious Church of England school) dictates that there’s nothing wrong with those who find the opposite gender attractive.
But it’s not like I chose this. I am a product of both society and (according to my school), God. But what if –
What if
What if society (and the Bible) (and God) are wrong?
Isn’t God meant to be all-knowing?
They’re obviously wrong because I know that I didn’t choose to find my own gender attractive, which means that there is no god.
I’ve looked deep within myself and I really cannot get excited by boobs.
Gosh, I’m quite gay.
The weird thing is, I can remember exactly where I was when I worked through this whole process.
It was a sunny Sunday afternoon in 1986 just a couple of weeks before leaving middle school and going to secondary school. I was in the bath, and my parents were gardening. Mum was mowing the lawn. The noise of the lawn mower came in through the bathroom window. And just like Archimedes yelling ‘Eureka!’, I felt that I’d figured out an incredibly complex scientific equation and, as a byproduct, also happened to prove the non-existence of god. I was 12 years old. The world had suddenly exploded.
Naturally, this complex equation is something that every LGBTQ person has to go through. And perhaps it’s slightly easier these days because the world does seem a genuinely more accommodating place, and a lot of the working out has already been done. Perhaps it isn’t so easy. That’s why pride is important.
For me, the shame came shortly after making this momentous realisation, of course. The pride wouldn’t kick in until around 1999, which was also when I would have my first boyfriend. And in any case, there was so much else in life that I liked. The comedy of Bob Newhart, the writings of Douglas Adams, the music of the Pet Shop Boys, Formula One motor racing, civil aviation, late night jazz, travel, Doctor Who, and my cat, Lucy. This new-found gayness was only a small part of my identity and of what made me tick. Sure, there’s something hugely exciting about a good looking bloke with his shirt off, but the same could be said for the sight of a Boeing 747. But the shame was deep and it was real, and I couldn’t understand why I had been cursed with this weird affliction which, as far as I knew, only affected two other people in the entire world. It was just Peter Tatchell, Ian McKellan, and myself. I decided that it was best to keep it under my hat,
For 13 years.
Coming out was the predictable car crash. Apparently I was significantly more homosexual than my loved ones had been expecting. This had also coincided with my first relationship and, being 1999, the pre-Millenium angst which seemed to colour the world as a place of flux. If the ultimate state of the universe is chaos, then this at least made me feel better about the cupboard under the stairs.
As I explored this – to my mind – totally unsurprising aspect of my personality, mixed as it was with the slightly more surprising fact that I’d managed to snag myself a boyfriend, I realised that I would never be able to look at the world or, indeed, myself, the same way. The world was very slightly evolving, yet the act of ‘coming out’ still felt like a political statement rather than a personal necessity. The biggest mistake certain people made at this time was the assumption that my honesty, and my declaration of who I was, had been undertaken more to upset the status quo and to be purposefully reacting against society, rather than just stating a simple fact.
But this was, and remains, a necessary and final part of the process.
I might as well confess here and now that I was not one of the world’s greatest lovers. I was with my first boyfriend, Jamie, for over a year. And even though he was a few years younger than me, he had the onerous task of showing me the basics. But we didn’t have much in common. He liked clubs and dancing and raving and I remember going out clubbing with him and asking at the bar for a nice cup of tea. My next partner was a Lithuanian who worked in a Cornish pasty factory, and while my technique in the bedroom had certainly improved, he did insist on playing Lithuanian pop music at random moments. I then went out with a nurse called Paul, and then even more bizarrely, once we’d broken up, another nurse also called Paul, which certainly made things complicated. My next boyfriend wasn’t even ‘out’, so everything had to be kept hush hush, though we were together almost ten years. And when that was done and dusted, I went back to Jamie for a bit.
I’ve now been successfully single and celibate for a few years. Obviously, I do ask myself every now and then whether this disqualifies me from the Gay Club. I don’t know what I have to do to renew my membership, but as I said, homosexuality only ever felt like a very small part of me. I have other things going on, you see. Because, (and I’m still not sure how this happened), I became a performance poet.
It took a few years before I started mentioning LGBTQ themes and queer identity in my poetry. When I first started, my poems were fun and silly, but safe and non-threatening, and to be honest a lot of them make me cringe now. I think every new artist or performer goes through a learning stage in which they’re just finding their feet, working out their voice and their technique, and for me this seemed to take quite a while. Sure, some people found me hilarious and I was offered gigs here and there on the basis of poems which I’d perform while reading from a piece of A4 paper which trembled with my nervousness. And the poems were badly in need of editing.
In truth, I didn’t really take performance poetry that seriously, at the start. It’s just something I did every other week, and I’d bash out a poem, not read it until the night in question, and then throw it away immediately afterwards. But the laughter, oh, when you write something funny and the audience laughs, that’s the best feeling in the world, and I started to realise that I wanted this to happen every time. I wanted that laughter. It was like a drug, making people laugh. But the laugher only felt good if there was some purpose behind it. And my poems were mostly about other people.
I decided that it I were to sustain this laughter and be taken seriously as a performance poet, (because it was still called performance poetry in those days), I would have to study what other people did. So I’d go on this new website that had come out called ‘You Tube’, and there were one or two ‘slam poems’ on there. (At this stage I had no idea what a ‘slam’ was). These poems would be performed in front of huge audiences, who went wild and laughed at all the funny lines.
At the time, I’d just finished a distance learning university degree in literature, so analysing content, syntax, grammar, intent and meaning were second nature to me. I applied this to the poems I was watching and I discovered that the best ones all had something in common. They were all about identity.
This was another Eureka moment, and I wasn’t even in a bath. And once again, I remember exactly where I was. It was a sunny day (again!), and I was in the living room of my parents’ bungalow (in Devon, for we had moved ten years earlier), and I was watching You Tube on my dad’s laptop. And I remember writing in my notebook, IDENTITY, and then underlining it. And that afternoon, I wrote my first ever LGBT poem.
The thing I liked about what I’d called ‘The Straight Poem’, was that it was the first poem I’d written where I became aware of its internal rhythm, and the economy with which I could defer the funny lines. I structured it like a wave, allowing the funny moments a chance to breathe, and the audience space where they could laugh. But this was only half of what was going on.
Because this was the first time that I’d written a poem which not only addressed my identity, but played around with the whole theme making homosexuality the norm, and applying the way that straight people look at gay people but the other way around. During the poem, I’m amazed that a friend has just ‘come out’ as straight. It’s a silly idea, but it visits several straight cliches and ends with an absolute stinger of a last line which never fails to get a laugh. It felt new and it felt innovative, because I’d never seen another performer address LGBT issues in such a way back then in 2010, though I’m sure that one or two existed.
There would be one or two criticisms of the poem. A well-known performer at the time, (who I’d just beaten in a poetry slam, back in the days when I could beat people in poetry slams), said that there was nothing new about the poem. Another poet, (straight, male), said that the poem was incredibly prejudiced against straight males. Perhaps he had a point, but it’s not like I was punching down.
I did quite well with the Straight Poem. It helped me come second in the very first poetry slam that I entered, in Bristol, 2013. And then it helped me (joint) win the Exeter poetry slam. This was followed up with second places in Swindon and London, and a fourth in Wolverhampton. This was a totally surprising development for me, and while I have since come to loathe slam competitions with a passion that you can only dream of, they certainly helped put my name on the performance poetry map. Or ‘spoken word’, as it was now starting to be called.
I decided quite early that the best way to help make a difference in the promotion of LGBTQ lifestyles with my poetry was to normalise such identities. Which is top say, that the humour should be based not on homosexuality as the traditional 1970s stereotypical punchline, but as almost incidental to the evident homosexual content. In other words, the poems I was writing could (hopefully) be equally funny if they’d been written from the hereonormative position. My two poems The First Time, and Orgasms, were both about sex, only the sex contained within those works just happened to be gay sex. But it didn’t matter, anyone could have been doing it, and if the sex being described were straight sex, then the jokes would still have worked just fine. Sure, the gay content added to the building tension necessary for the explosion of relief which comes with the punchline in live performance situations, but the fact remains that so many of my poems from this period were about sex because I had recently stopped doing it on a frequent basis. This had given me the ability to stand back and see sex as the bizarre act that it is. Even educated fleas were doing it, but not me.
When my first collection, Nice, came out in 2014 published by Burning Eye, a couple of copies were bought by a poet who was a workshop facilitator working with youths in an arts centre in Manchester. She put the copies in her poetry library which everyone was welcome to browse when they were looking for inspiration. One day she sent me an email with a photo attached of what someone had written inside the front cover of one of my books. ‘Not nearly enough poems about sex’, someone had written.
Also in 2014, I started work on my first solo show, Static. I decided that Static would be autobiographical, telling the story of how I came to be comfortable in my identity, but it means that I would have to write some autobiographical poems to perform amid the prop-based performance art set pieces that I had, for some reason, decided to pepper throughout the show. The poem ‘2 Abbey 1’, (which was the name of my secondary school tutor group), was about being a closeted kid in a class full of (presumably) heterosexual lads, and it was set just a couple of months after that Eureka bath moment. The poem is also about my first infatuation with a fellow classmate, (or anyone, come to think of it), who would also be the subject of a poem called Cocky, in my 2021 collection Yay!.
‘2 Abbey 1’ felt like a milestone of my poetry writing career, because it was my first purely autobiographical piece and it made me realise that my own life, ostensibly so boring as it was, could be fair game for both poetic and comedic inspiration. It’s as the first time that I had seen myself as a character in my own work, and because of this, it seemed instantly recognisable. Because we’ve all been to school, right? Amid the jokes of ‘2 Abbey 1’, there’s also this sense of underlying sadness, that this was 1986 and the world was a different place, really not quite so accepting or as accommodating as it now seems.
‘Not Flamboyant’ was also written at this time, and it’s about people not realising I’m gay, written from the imagined perspective of one of those kids in my tutor group. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’, the poem asks. But in actual fact I couldn’t tell anyone. I’m sure they all knew, though. That said, I enjoyed performing this poem because it made the (presumably predominant) straight audience a little uncomfortable, more so that it sounded as if I were about to skewer gay stereotypes, only once again for there to be some kind of ‘sting’ at the end of the poem which changed everything around.
It was probably about this time that I realised I was turning into some kind of ‘safe’ gay performer for straight audiences. The issues I was touching on were universal and serious, but they were not being done in a preachy kind of way. Audience members could therefore enjoy the jokes as well as the subtext, and I felt pretty good about this. That’s not to say that things always went well.
Sometimes they went too well. I remember performing at a very bizarre private gig in, of all places, a florist, where they’d decided to invite some friends round, cook them a meal and then have me come on as the after-dinner entertainment. The hosts knew all about my act, having seen me perform at a local theatre. By the time it came for me to perform, the audience was very tipsy and one chap in particular had decided that he would heckle. They weren’t nasty heckles, and afterwards he announced that he rather liked the gay stuff, even though he wasn’t gay. The next thing I knew, he was hugging me tightly and kissing me on the cheek, because, well, I think he assumed that this is the sort of thing that I would like. It was a little uncomfortable and I shudder to think that he would also have done this if I had been a female performer. I suppose he just assumed that he was the epitome of male beauty and that I should have been grateful for his unwarranted attention!
The poem ‘Jamie’ was about my first romance. It was not exactly a nostalgic piece, though there were touches of pathos in between the jokes and the one-liners, and writing the poem made me realise that I could mythologise certain moments from my own past. By the time I wrote the poem, it had been 18 years since I’d been with Jamie, and that relationship was definitely something I looked back on with immense fondness. In fact, once again, there was nothing overly preachy or political about the poem, it just depicted a relationship which just happened to be homosexual, and the subject of the poem was not that in itself, but the usual memories and fondness – and break-ups – which anyone goes through, LGBTQ or not. Around the same time I wrote a poem called ‘Kate’, which detailed a failed romance I’d had with a fellow student in 1991, hoping that having a girlfriend would magically make me straight or, at the very least, prove to the world that I was, when in fact I wasn’t. The self-mythologising of these two poems, I believe, certainly made me more confident as a writer.
Writing such poems did feel more like therapy than the creation of art. I’d spent the first adult years of my life unsure of what my motives had been and how I should have acted, and having this chance to stand back and write about them with the benefit not only of hindsight, but of the justification which came through performing these to an audience, helped me to feel more at ease with my own past. By this stage of my life I was starting to feel old, and a little overtaken by the succeeding generations. I had been late to love, late to ‘coming out’, late to living life as myself, late to the party, and this had been entirely due to the culture in which I had been brought up. Suburbia, the 1980s, the AIDS crisis, my own constitution as a human being, they’d all held me back or discouraged me in ways which, hopefully, no longer hinder those who want to be who they actually are. And this is definitely the kind of world I want to be a part of, where transgender people can live their own lives and come home to themselves, and gay people no longer need the ‘coming out’ process, or those Eureka moments, because such lifestyles are accepted the same way that hetereornormative assumptions are readily accepted.
By the late 2010s, it felt like the spoken word community had changed. When I’d first started performing, it had resembled more a cabaret in which invention, props, characters, dancing and costumes had been as much a part of the spectacle as the words themselves. The fact that I was an LGBTQ performer was often seen as part of this cabaret atmosphere, a justification for its existence. I wore a sequin top hat and a pink feather boa and I did so much crazy stuff with props that I would have to lug around with me a bulging bag full of wigs and gold-embossed bric a brac. In fact, often the words themselves were secondary, as I once performed a poem with no words in it at all. And it wasn’t just me, it was almost every performer, and it was flipping wonderful.
The scene now is dominated by the ubiquitous slam style, in which authenticity and emotional truth are key. My own performances have evolved along with this. I no longer turn up at gigs with boxes full of props, though the clothes that I wear are still very much a costume. There are many more LGBTQ poets now, and this is something which I inwardly celebrate, though the emphasis at spoken word events seems less like a cabaret in which spectacle is key, and more the sort of place where lifestyles and opinions are validated. Spoken word is a platform where people can assert themselves and their beliefs, their politics, their truth, preach hope and aim to change the world, and I flipping love it. Though I do get nostalgic for the old days.
You see, I’d always tried to depict my identity as incidental to the bigger themes going on within my poems. But I realised that I would very much like to assert a level of pride. Perhaps this was because I’d always felt a little outside of the gay community, without realising that I was slap bang right in the middle of it. Perhaps it was because most of my friends are straight. Perhaps it was the political situation in the world in the late 2010s, where it felt like the world was lurching suddenly to the right. Perhaps it was because I wanted to show some kind of solidarity to the transgender community.
I started work on a new batch of poems, which would ultimately become my collection and show, Yay!, again published by Burning Eye. I wanted the poems to be upbeat and celebratory, touching not only on identity, but also issues of mental health. ‘The Queer Express’, was written as a celebration of LGBTQ history and mentions Stonewall and freedom fighting, with lines such as, ‘Our history is one of pride and those who dared to stand / And fight the law and rise above, let’s shake them by the hand’. I had real fun writing this poem, not to mention a feeling of real emotion as the rhythms of the piece seemed to lead me on to other images and ideas which gave the piece an inexorable logic. I’ve performed this poem at pride events both online and in the actual world. It’s the first poem in which I have declared belonging to a community, and celebrating that community, and it is, I reckon, the gayest poem I could possibly have written.
‘To the Car full of Youths . .’, is another celebratory LGBTQ banger from the Yay!collection, though this is based on a true incident in which I was the subject of homophobic abuse while waiting to cross the street in Edinburgh one year. I didn’t think much at the time this happened, though afterwards it got me thinking: how had they known? The poem which resulted from this starts with a little fun as I try to work out how someone could identify me as LGBT just from my appearance, and then becomes a life-affirming pride-filled roller coaster in a similar sort of vein to ‘The Queer Express’, again ending on a very Garnhamesque ‘stinger’ with a killer of a last line. Tackling as it does the theme of homophobia, this is one of the few poems I perform which needs a content warning.
‘Nathan Went for a Walk in the Rain’, is a poem about mental health. It’s one of the few serious poems from the book and I’d written it after seeing the depression suffered by a friend of mine, and how this can easily lead to suicidal thoughts. The poem is a third person piece, and the imagined character within the poem, Nathan, feels bullied by the assumptions that people make about straightness and how he approaches the world. In my mind as I wrote the poem was the idea that Nathan was LGBTQ, though this is not asserted in concrete words, and the poem works whatever Nathan’s sexual persuasion.
So I was very pleased with Yay, both the book and the show. These were written and rehearsed during 2020, (we all know what happened in 2020, but needless to say I had a lot of free time), and the show was performed between 2020 and 2022.
In late 2022, it dawned on me that I’d been performing LGBTQ material for over ten years, and that it might be something of a challenge to work on some projects which had no LGBTQ content at all. Naturally, not all of my poems are about gay issues. (In fact probably only about 20 percent rely on their being gay-based). But every single one of my shows and books had such content in them, and I felt that the world might like to see what I could do if I were to concentrate on other things.
I came back from the Edinburgh Fringe in late August and immediately started thinking about my next show. The truth is, I wanted to do something mainstream. This isn’t to say that, in spite of my poems about pride and being comfortable with who I was, that I wasn’t comfortable with who I was. It was more about the challenge of writing a new show which found its laughs or its motivations elsewhere, just to prove to myself that I could do it. After much pondering and prevarication, I wrote a show about my ill-fated appearance on Britain’s Got Talent.
This is not to say that I have abandoned LGBTQ content in my work, or that I have turned my back on who I am. Far from it. While feeling, every hour of every day, distinctly and overwhelmingly gay, the need for actual sex – and indeed, male companionship – has dissipated over the last few years. I’ve always ever felt myself to have many identities and interests beyond those defined through my sexual orientation and gender, and as I’ve got older, the need to find love or to explore this part of me has been subsumed beneath the daily pressures of Just Getting On With Things. Sure, I wear a rainbow badge and I fill in my sexual preferences on forms and paperwork whenever it asks me, and I’m not about to go scurrying off back into the closet, but I feel somehow . . . Less gay than before.
Typically, I’ve written a new poem about this very subject. ‘Not As Gay As I Used To Be’, is a poem very much from an older perspective than those I performed over ten years ago. Tongue in cheek, it mocks my current – some might say, celebate – lifestyle, and I can’t wait to start performing this poem on stage. Bemoaning the fact that my gay radar is not as finely calibrated as it once was, the poem is a more or less accurate depiction of how I genuinely feel at the moment. And of course, it ends with something of a ‘sting’.
I often wonder what the young version of myself would make of me, today. I have loved and lost, and pined, and lusted, and made love, and enjoyed loving relationships, and I’ve done everything that I ever wanted to do when I was a young man who was still trying to figure out the world. And perhaps this is the biggest thing of all, the fact that I feel that I genuinely have been able to figure out the world. I know who I am and I know my place in the grander scheme of things, and I’ve performed silly poems in front of large audiences and I’ve made strangers laugh, and I’ve spoken with honesty and with a pride which didn’t exist when I was growing up. But most of all, I’ve seen new communities and groups gain the recognition they need to help make the world a more understanding place. And I believe that it’s happening, albeit very slowly, and more so in some places than in others.
I’m also aware that even though I often bemoan the circumstances of my upbringing as a young gay man, there are people in other places in the world where things are much worse off. My poem ‘The Doors’, which appears in my collection Zebra, was written after reading an article in Time Magazine about the situation of homosexuals in places such as Uganda and Russia, places where it is not possible, and often life-threatening, to live lives as comfortably as I have managed. I have lived a life of such incredible privilege compared to these people, that I’m truly thankful.
For fifteen years I’ve been performing a poem called I Wish I Had a Cow. It has audience participation which relied on me pretending to do a selfie onstage. Often, I actually do the selfie part. All of these have been stored on my phone. I’ve edited them into one long very unusual video!
Robert Garnham 