Pride Words / Gig

On Monday I’m appearing at Pride Words at Foyles bookshop in London. It’s the first time I’ve been asked to provide next of kin and emergency contact details for a reading so I’m wondering what kind of crowd they’re expecting.


I had some trouble filling in the form as I don’t know what my mum’s or my partner’s addresses are. I toyed with the idea of putting down my own address, thinking that if anything happened to me then everyone would probably gather round there. But then I realised that they wouldn’t know anything had happened to me if I gave out an address for a place where they’re not.


I’m looking forward to the event but nervous as well as I always come away from these events feeling depressed. I believe everyone else is cooler and more intelligent than me. Mind you, I’m the kind of person who can feel inadequate crossing the road.


“Look at him, the way he nipped between the cars, it was brilliant!”


I’m currently reading Simon Armitage’s ‘Gig’. I bought it after watching his BBC4 documentary on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. If you don’t know, Armitage is a poet, and he has recently translated Sir Gawain which is a 14th century poem about a knight from Arthurian legend.


Anyway the documentary was brilliant. Armitage followed the journey Gawain would have made in his quest to battle the Green Knight. The poem has beautiful descriptions of place, sex, and a powerful narrative.


The documentary also had a fantastic soundtrack and it was then that I remembered seeing Armitage’s book about music last year when it was out in hardback. I can remember where it was too. It was Sheffield’s Waterstones and I was in there during the break between matches I was watching at the Crucible (the snooker place).


The book is funny (‘It’s amazing how many hermits have websites these days’) and warm and in one point moved me to tears. This was when he got to interview David Gedge from the Wedding Present in the Holmfirth Pictodrome. The whole interview consists of Armitage asking Gedge a series of either or questions:

SA: Hudderfield or Halifax
DG: Er… I don’t know really.. Er…
SA: The right answer’s Huddersfield.
DG: Put me down for that, then.

There was something honest and unassuming about it that touched me. The truth these days is either hard, or slippery, so we spend a lot of time giving poncey responses to poncey questions.


I can remember the first records I ever had. They were bought for me and my brother by our mum and dad. It was on the same day they bought us a stereo. It was one of those that looks like a suitcase and weighed about half a tonne. The records were something by Shawaddywaddy and Ravel’s Bolero. As a musical education it was a start.


My mum moved house a few years ago so me and Will (my partner) were called in to clear out / sort through my old stuff. One of the boxes contained my old music cassettes and I was pleased to see that it contained nothing too embarrassing, Floodland by The Sisters of Mercy, Closer by Joy Division, Boy by U2, Get Close by the Pretenders, Ratus Norvegicus by the Stranglers, Savage by Eurythmics, Bauhaus, New Order and so on.


(I haven’t got that good a memory, I’ve just brought down the box from my spare bedroom. Sad in a way because I don’t have a cassette player to listen to them. My current CD collection represents my musical taste from the last 8 or 9 years during which time I’ve been settled back in the UK.)


Like a lot of people that have older brothers, my older brother was a big influence on me in his music tastes. He was also always a lot cooler than me. He was in a band, various bands in fact, and then worked in a record shop.


Nick, my brother, was the kind of person who could nip out to the local shop for a hairspray and then come back a week later having been to London and Brighton. At 40 he hasn’t changed a great deal although his flights become more precarious and worrying.


That same day in Sheffield at the Crucible he managed to disappear. It was only as he leant forward to speak to the taxi driver, late at night, not recognising the town he was in to ask the question:


“Are we in Derby?” (where he lives)
“No, this is Bradford mate.”


Back then I was more into computers. On a Sunday I was allowed to plug my Sinclair Spectrum into the tele in the lounge. If Nick was around then he would play too and I remember one of our favourite games was Psion Tennis, little black stickmen running around a black and white court.


Nick would be in charge of the music and I can remember while playing that tennis game was the first time I heard The Smiths. Years later Morissey’s lyrics would come to be music that defined my coming out and Hatful of Hollow still seems to me to be an album full of gay angst. I mean just read the song titles, ‘William, It was really nothing’, ‘What Difference Does it Make?’, ‘These Things Take Time’, ‘How Soon is Now?’, ‘Handsome Devil’, ‘Still Ill’, ‘Accept Yourself’ and so on. And to this day my favourite lyric remains, ‘If you ever need self-validation, I’ll meet you in the alley by the railway station’.


I’ve got nearly everything Morissey has recorded since The Smiths but I’m pleased to say, in my humble opinion, that the latest album, Years of Refusal, is the best thing he’s done since his musical youth.


The first gig I went to was Sting at the Royal Albert Hall in 1985 for the Dream of the Blue Turtles Tour. I was 14 and went with my brother on the train to London.


I remember just before we set off I was in my bedroom playing Bomb Jack on the Sinclair Spectrum.


“Come on,” he said, “we’re going to see Sting.”
“Hang on, I’m about to get my high score.”


You see, not cool.


The best gig I’ve ever been to was Elbow last year at Rock City. They came on stage in darkness. The strings were playing the intro to Starlings. Through the smoke the band members all raise the trumpets they are holding and then comes the blast of noise and then, alone, Garvey’s voice. It makes me almost cry just thinking about it.


You see, not cool.


The worst gig I’ve ever seen was two years ago at the Charlotte in Leicester. I can’t remember what the band were now but they were something young and trendy. The place was packed and they made us wait for ages and ages before they came on like they were the fucking Beatles reformed of something and then they played for about fifty minutes before pissing off.


I went and stood at the back and drank wine so it wasn’t a total washout.


The band I’m most pleased I’ve seen is The Cure because I love The Cure. They’ve had a new album this year too and like Morissey it’s probably the best thing they’ve done in years.


The biggest gig I’ve been to was Michael Jackson. He was good. It was in Montpellier in the South of France. That’s when my dad worked on a roller-coaster and it was a good summer all round.


The band I’ve seen the most is Marillion and they are always excellent. I’ve been to their last two conventions in Port Zelande in the Netherlands and that’s just a good time all round. Lovely people, food, place and music.


All of this might explain why I wrote a novel about a band, gay pop duo Down by Law. I don’t know. All of the above though I’m sure are the things I am into, books, music, poetry, travel and that is how I see myself, this passionate, awkward, uncool outsider. How this will translate into me appearing at Pride Words might be interesting to see. I hope my next of kin details will not be needed.

A Day In The Life of a Writer. Yesterday.

I wake up. First thing I do is check the time. Have I overslept? I got home from work last night at 11 p.m. and then watched Question Time on the iPlayer. The one glass of wine I intended to have turned into several. Question Time turned into The Week. I like politics, especially when I’m drunk.


Sun is coming through the curtains. My mobile says 8:45. This is not ideal but ok. If I don’t write in the morning then I can’t write at all. Usually I like to read in bed for an hour first. If I do that it’ll be nearly 10 o’clock. Then by the time I’ve checked my emails, usual internet sites it will be 11.


I start to panic. I’m not going to get any writing done.


Downstairs there is a knock at the door. I know it will be the postman. He’s the only person who knocks on my door. I am naked.


I don’t always sleep naked. Sometimes I like to have a sweatshirt and underwear and I regularly have two duvets and a sleeping-bag on my bed.


I’ve ordered some books from Amazon. I imagine that’s why the postman is knocking. On top of the nakedness I have an erection. Why does the postman always come when I have an erection?


I can’t very well go downstairs like this.


I used to do door to door sales in Australia. Sometimes when I was doing areas by the coast you’d get surfer dudes out of bed. I used to hope they’d come to the door naked. It was a boring job and the mind tended to wander.


As it happens, it rarely happened. This is just one way in which life is different to fiction.


I stumble into the spare room and pull on yesterday’s work trousers and a cardigan. I either looked dishevelled and interesting. Or a tramp with a hard on. No time to check in the mirror.


Postman done I make a cup of tea and go back upstairs to bed. The books I ordered were ‘Jack’ and ‘The End of Alice’ by A M Homes.


A M Homes is getting to be one of the writers of whom I have read their complete works. In this she will join Rupert Thomson, Magnus Mills, Haruki Murakami, Kazuo Ishiguro, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver, Andrey Kurkov, David Mitchell, Timothy Mo, Sarah Waters.


She will be, I note, the only woman on the list. Except for Sarah Waters.


I spread the books out on my bed. The two A M Homes ones and also Nocturnes by Ishiguro. I have recently bought this too.


I haven’t got too long.


I choose the Ishiguro and read the first story.


So far I haven’t mentioned much writing. That’s the thing about writing. A lot of it is in your head. The rest of the time is not writing.


So when I am sitting in bed naked, books spread out before me, drinking tea, I am actually very busy. Convincing other people of this is sometimes a problem.


I have just finished six days in a row at work. Therefore I haven’t had much time to write. In fact, I haven’t done any. Prior to these six days I’d had five days off. In those five days I’d written 8,000 words.


Writing is like that for me. Once I start it’s easy to carry on. Once I stop it’s difficult to start again.


Once downstairs, and dressed, I open up the document.


I stopped right at the end of a long section in which a character on a boat to the Antarctic is telling a story over the phone to another one of the characters back in England. This story is about his time in Iraq and it’s kind of a love triangle.


The character on the end of the phone is in love with the character telling the story.


This 8,000 word section from my previous days off is this story.


This novel is a novel of people telling stories to each other. I like all the characters and the stories but I wonder if it works as a novel.


I have a cup of coffee.


Also all the stories are about death. Would someone want to read about so much death?


Someone slips under a tram, gets hit by a car, falls into a vat of acid, loses their hand in an industrial accident. But pulls through! Loses their feet to frostbite, is the victim of a serial killer, dies of cancer, dies in a water-skiing accident.


And so on.


As I don’t know if it works I am trying to establish a life / work balance. I don’t want to spend a whole year doing this and then have to delete it. If I’ve done other things I can look back on those things.


Like drinking tea in bed. Drinking wine and watching Question Time on the iPlayer. For a few years I didn’t do any of those things. I used to write all the time.


I follow pretty much the Stephen King model of writing. I try and do 1000 words and then stop. Like him, sometimes this can take hours and other times I can rattle off 1000 words in an hour.


While I’m writing though I am constantly checking things on the internet. Looking at the news, Facebook, my blog, YouTube and so on. So often I don’t feel like I am writing. When I stop I feel useless and berate myself.


“You’ve wasted your day. You’ve spent it on the internet.”


But I do hit my target.


At three o’clock I stop to go to the gym. If I’m going to sleep naked I owe it to myself to look the part.


Also I’ve managed to stop in a good place. David non-Dave has built a city out of toilet rolls for the miniature person who was living in his bum. This is a person he killed earlier in the book. He’s about to show it off to the other characters. His city that is and not his bum.


David non-Dave is having a nervous breakdown I should say and it is not a real miniature person living in his bum. These miniature people made an earlier appearance in another story of mine, ‘Neighbours’.


That’s another tip. Recycle.


After coming back from the gym I go straight out food shopping. This is on foot as I don’t have a car.


It’s a beautiful sunny day.


As I walk I wonder if I’m wasting my time with all this writing. There are other things I could be doing. I would like to be in the countryside somewhere walking by the side of a canal.


Then I imagine falling in the canal and getting attacked by a shark. It bites off my legs. But how would a shark get in a canal?


There was a lorry heist. They expected cash but instead found themselves with a shark on route from one aquarium to another. They don’t know what to do. Under cover of darkness they release it into the canal.


One of them has a favourite film of Jaws. During the heist he says, ‘We’ve got ourselves a shark situation.’


It could happen. There are sharks in the world. There are aquariums. It’s just the question of thinking it.


When I get back home I reopen the document.


I’ve been thinking about the beginning. It needs re-writing. I pour myself a glass of wine. I pick up Music For Torching by A M Homes and re-read the opening. It’s a good beginning. I’d like something like that, but Homes has already used it.


Shit.


I need more humour. The characters need to stand out more. Perhaps I should scrap the whole thing.


I drink some more wine. I make dinner. I watch the Pulling special. This is reassuring because it is more rude than my books. This is important to me but I’ve already gone on enough.


At ten o’clock I go to bed. I read ‘Jack’ for two hours.


I drink two beers.


I fall asleep.


Tomorrow it starts again.

Currently reading – see above


Currently listening to – Friendly Fires by Friendly Fires

Drew Gummerson’s first novel ‘The Lodger’ was published in 2002. It was a finalist in the Lambda Awards in the States. Drew’s latest book ‘Me and Mickie James’ was published by Jonathan Cape in July 2008. Drew is also an award winning short story writer, his short fiction being widely published and featured on Radio 4.

Mystery Man

Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the important things in your life, what with work, family, friends, loved ones and so on. For example, just a few minutes ago I was thinking, I really don’t have enough money.


It was like a revelation.


Take the other day as well, or other two days in fact, when two people asked me independently of each other if I liked mystery novels.


‘They’re the most conservative form of fiction,’ I said, ‘giving the impression that life’s mysteries are solvable. When I think the opposite. That life is absurd. You live, die and there’s no meaning to any of it. So you might as well get out there and enjoy yourself.’


Then last night, bugger me, if I didn’t find myself banged up in bed at 8pm with a glass of cheap wine and Colin Bateman’s latest, ‘Mystery Man’.


This is good, I thought 100 pages in, reaching for my glass. Let’s cut the existential dilemma for a couple of hours because, after all, what is existential dilemma but a guiding rope between life and death?


Well, I had had a few.


Mystery stories were my way into writing as well. When I was sixteen, seventeen I used to have my own fictional detective, Tod Towski. He was American style – hardboiled – rather than cosy, Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie say. Every week I’d put him in a different style of story. That I was the editor of our college magazine meant they had a good chance of being published too.


Those were the days.


I was a big fan of Raymond Chandler back then, still am. I have all his books. And also Dashiell Hammett. But my favourite was James M Cain and The Postman Always Rings Twice especially.


If that’s not the greatest book ever written, I don’t know what is.


(Actually it might be Don Quixote but T.P.A.R.T. is definitely up there.)


The story is simple, a drifter turns up at a gas station, has an affair with the fat owner’s wife, they plot to bump him off. And do.


What I like though is the relationship of these characters after the fact. After the infatuation has died they realise they don’t know or like each other but are bound together by mutual suspicion and also the act.


In this way, I guess, Cain is like Graham Greene – a single event has repercussions that spiral out of control.


Thinking about Cain, as I am now, I remember I wrote my own version of his Double Indemnity for a collection called ‘Death Comes Easy’. In my story an Australian door to door salesman sells life insurance to a man who wants to bump off his wife. My story is quite similar to Cain’s except there is no train in it and a bit more gay sex.


Such is life.


Other mystery writers I like are P D James. I’ve read all of those except for the ones written in the last 15 years. Don Wilmslow is good, as are the crime writing duo Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. These last two are Marxists and have something to say beyond the mystery.


What annoys me, in my head, about mystery books, is that the writing is geared towards a specific end. It’s exciting and I want to turn the page but when I get to the end I think I don’t care who did it.


What I like in writing is all those little moments in books that make you smile, or drop them on the floor, or leap up.


For example I like it in ‘The Insult’ when the blind man decides he is going off in search of the invisible man. Or I like it in the Raw Shark Texts when he takes his cat with him on his adventure. I like pretty much all of Willy Vlautin’s The Motel Life because it is full of stories. Or the tortoise in Pandora in the Congo called Marie Antoinette. Or when the penguin appears in Death and the Penguin and so on.


So maybe this sounds like I only like quirky odd moments and perhaps I do and perhaps this is what I write too. Aside from all this existential angst that I feel on a daily basis perhaps this is what life is about. Those little moments that make you smile every day, little acts of kindness, something you overhear, someone scoring a goal. Or missing one. They are what is important.


I’m not on a career path, I don’t have a goal. I’m not going anywhere. This is basically it, for me as it is for everybody. Books that hurtle me towards some end with no fun along the way are not then what I’m looking for.


Except…


I’ve got some wine left and my bed is calling and so is the Mystery Man.


Way-heyy!

The Postman Always Rings Twice clip

Amazonfail

I’ve been mad as hell at Amazon all week and then I saw they had this book on Ants half price and I forgave them a little bit. Because where else am I even going to find a book on ants, or know that I want it?


First of all I want to say something good about Amazon, because I like Amazon. First of all, they sell my books. No, no, that’s not first of all. First of all I like Amazon because they sell books, all books / most books.


Go into any bookstore and then spend a couple of hours on Amazon and you’ll find how many books aren’t actually in bookshops, books that I actually rather like. For example in the past two weeks I’ve read The Motel Life and Northline both by Willy Vlautin. Both have been published in the past couple of years, got brilliant reviews, but are they on the shelf of my local Waterstones? No.


This is obvious. Obviously. That Waterstones can’t stock all books because there are millions of the things published all the time.


Obviously it’s true but this isn’t where I was at ten years ago, five years ago. In those days I was a bookshop buyer. These days I buy things from the internet. My tastes have changed, improved I like to think.


Now most of the things I read aren’t on the shelf of your average bookshop. I don’t read obscure things, not by a long shot. I love books. Good books. But where are they and how do you find them?


The second thing I like is that when you buy one thing on Amazon it will tell you a whole list of other books you might like. That’s where that ant book came in.
(Does anyone remember Ant and Bee? They were my favourite books as a kid. They were brightly coloured. They were about an ant and a bee who lived together. Ant was put-upon and Bee was a bit of an arse. Ant was my favourite.)


Anyway, back to my books. When my first one, The Lodger, came out it was classified on Amazon as a ‘Gay and Lesbian’ book. It went to no. 1 in the gay and lesbian Amazon charts. I am rather proud of the fact. I printed off a screen-shot. Come over for a cup of tea and I’ll show you it. Bring a copy of Ant and Bee if you have one. We can read it together, me and you, after I’ve shown you my screen-shot.


So this is where I stood and then it all kicked off, Amazonfail.


On Easter Monday morning I logged onto Facebook before work, 6:30am, (I know, sad aren’t I? When you bring that book, Ant and Bee, you can bring a gun too. Shoot me.) There were stories all over the wall from gay writers talking about how their books had been ‘delisted’.


Delisted – this meant that the books had been stripped of their Amazon sales rank, and now wouldn’t show up in any searches.


I made a quick check. I searched under my name. There was ‘Me and Mickie James’. but no ‘The Lodger’. I was invisible. Partly.


What this meant for me personally was that if a similar thing had happened years ago The Lodger wouldn’t have trundled its way to the top of the gay charts and I wouldn’t have had my screen-shot.


What it meant on a far larger and more important scale was that anyone looking for a large number of gay and lesbian books would not be able to find them.
The rest, as they say, is internet history. A petition was started, Amazonfail became one of the most talked about things on Twitter, boycotts were talked of, Amazon HQ was inundated by emails.


By the end of the week Amazon had apologised, books were reinstated. Including The Lodger. Hooray.


Happy end.


But what is the fallout. What gives?


Was there some meeting at Amazon HQ where delisting books was talked about. There must have at some level, some decision that ‘gay and lesbian’ books would now be deemed to be ‘adult’ books. Although this doesn’t make any sense.


As Gore Vidal said, “What kind of a childish game is this? Why don’t they just burn the books? They’d be better off and it’s very visual on television.”


Amazon themselves described it “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloguing error”.


Putting on my own journalistic head for just a moment I would have to say that it is an almighty fuck up.


So what now? Do we boycott Amazon?


As of today, is my latest book ‘Me and Mickie James’ on sale on Amazon? Yes. Is it linked to lots of other nice books? Yes. Does it have some nice reviews? Yes. Is it cheaper there than anywhere else? Yes.


Is this, ultimately, the crunch?


Naomi Klein, who is one clever lady, has written two brilliant books about our capitalist society, ‘No Logo’ and ‘The Shock Doctrine’. In them she describes certain methods of grass-roots activism.


She argues, for example, that it would be almost impossible for you to not buy all your clothes from retailers that don’t use sweatshop labour. They all do it. What you can do is start a campaign to pinpoint one, raise consciousness, start to make a change.


Is this what the Amazonfail phenomenon was? People have raised their voice and Amazon have backed down (if ever they meant truly to back up).


And what of Waterstones, are they super gay friendly? Do Waterstones even have a gay and lesbian section? Does Borders? My local one did but over the years it has got smaller and smaller.


And over at Bookkake they are talking about the bigger issue, what happened in Dubai and all that.


And over across the Atlantic there’s the American Libraries Association’s ‘most challenged books’.


And so on. Etc.


So what do I think? Honestly.


I like that I’m gay. I like that I’m a writer. I like that I’m sold in the biggest store in the world. I don’t want to live in a ghetto. I do want the world to be a more fair and equal place.


I’m frustrated by comments, ‘Oh, so you like football?’ Raised eyebrows. Or, ‘this is Will’s friend’. And so on.


But my attitude is grin and bear it, fight from inside it. Try and make a difference. Like that Harvey Milk bloke did. It’s no good taking yourself off in a huff.


So is this me saying don’t boycott Amazon, that Amazonfail did the trick, that we, as consumers have power?


I don’t know. And…


Oh God, I can’t do this stuff and it’s three minutes to ten and the World Snooker Championship starts at ten so this is me checking out.


But if you get a chance check out Ant & Bee. They were my first gay insect love. Bee has an umbrella and wears a top hat, Ant wears a pinny. They share a bed in a little house.


Such things are sweet dreams made of.

Currently reading – We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek


Currently listening to - Magpie by Stephen Fretwell


Stephen Fretwell – New York

Some things, and some other things

I recently decided to write a novel of ideas. I quickly jotted down some notes, Darwinism, Nietzsche, Freud, the disintegration of modern society. Now all I needed was a story.


What about that bloke who wandered around the planet two thousand odd years ago, dangling his willy in front of all and sundry? What was his name?


Christ!


My memory isn’t what it used to be.


First of all, (after those other first things as per above), apologies that this blog has been absent for a week or so. It’s been a busy time.


I’ve done two readings, one of my story ‘Gus’ at the YMCA in Leicester, and one from ‘Me and Mickie James’ at Polari in London. Both went well, (in positive blog terms rather than what was going on in my head) and at the YMCA my name appeared in big letters and I got to wear my new cardigan both of which are a plus. You can see the picture here.
(‘Gus’ is available in a new short story collection ‘The Global Village’ just published.)


I’ve also been on the Eurostar to Brussels. If you haven’t been on the Eurostar then you should. It’s great. It goes at 270 km an hour and you leave from a city and arrive in a city – it was only ten minutes walk from the train station to our hotel.


We are the only generation that will enjoy cheap air travel. I wonder what will happen to airports in the future. Will they become hubs of duty free shopping as imaginary planes take off and land on video screens?


Idea for a novel….


After one night in Brussels it was another train journey to Rotterdam and from there on a bus to Centreparks Port Zelande for the 2009 Marillion Convention. You can see the pictures for that here.


Me and Will had our own chalet overlooking the sea, there was a big tent in which Marillion played a concert each night for three nights, there were excellent support bands, there was really nice food, and red wine was available to buy.


I have only been to two conventions, both for Marillion, one in 2007, one in 2009 and both at Port Zelande so I have nothing to compare them to. I once imagined a convention of ratchet salesmen for a story I wrote but that’s about it. A convention of ratchet salesmen wasn’t laugh a minute in my head.


I have also seen here and thereabouts that Star Trek have conventions. While I am a fan of Star Trek I don’t know that I would want to go to a convention. What does one do there for a start? Dress up as Spock? Watch repeats of Star Trek in a darkened room? It all seems, well, a bit geeky.


I wonder if that’s what people think of a Marillion convention. But it wasn’t, or didn’t feel like that. There were people there from all over the world. ‘America’ didn’t get as big a boo this time when it was flashed up on one of the screens. No doubt this is the Obama effect.


(And I wonder too who will save British politics? In the news today is Jacqui Smith claiming her husband’s wank movies on parliamentary expenses. This is the same woman who refused to backdate police pay which has alienated the whole police force from the labour party.)


While the thing that had brought the 2500 people there was Marillion it seemed to be much more than a sum of that single part. What I’m really saying is I had a nice time.


Now I’m back home and busy again. I’ve recently been commissioned to be a professional blogger over on the Literature Network, and I’m writing 72 linked short stories, and I’m buying a house. And there’s sill all those books on my shelves to read. And exercise to do.


And I still hoped somewhere, some day, to change the world.

Marillion at Port Zelande

Do you moisturise your cock?

I was in the gym changing rooms the other day when I noticed the guy standing next to me moisturising his cock. The movement was sure. He squirted moisturiser from the bottle into one hand, then ran this hand down the length of his cock. The residue he rubbed into his legs.


I should at this point say, the man was naked.


I wondered if he knew something that I didn’t, and if this was in fact something I should be doing. It is true, at certain points in my life, I have applied certain applications down there, when needs must. But moisturise on a daily basis, not really.


After he had finished this leisurely routine the man picked up his jeans and put them on, without first putting on any pants.


I have heard of such things of course. There was a lad at university who it was rumoured didn’t wear underwear. I knew him slightly and had heard he was struggling with his sexuality. In nightclubs he would sit in corners and write furious verse into a small notebook he always carried with him. One of them was about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He read it out on the dancefloor.


I thought perhaps this lack of pants was just a stage he was going through.


And another time I was with my ex boyfriend in Sydney city centre when a lad in tracksuit bottoms, no pants and an erection walked past us. That he had no pants my ex assured me although I couldn’t verify this myself.


“We’ll follow him,” my ex said, “just to see what happens.”


We were often doing things ‘just to see what happens’. I’ll write another blog about the skateboarder, the South Sea islander stripper, the Hollywood producer and the sex club bouncer. These four people followed one after another one night in Sydney.


But then, back in the gym, a friend of the cock-moisturising no-pant guy came out of the shower and the two started speaking to each other. The accent was foreign and one I recognised. Dutch. Ah, that explained it.


These Europeans have a certain way of doing things.


I had spent one Summer on a bit of land at the edge of a campsite in the South of France with eighteen Dutch guys. Those days my dad worked in Europe. He sold drinks on beaches, worked in cafes, did grape picking. He had dropped out. Where the Dutch guys came from I wasn’t sure. I think one of them had arrived and then one by one they had invited friends.


In the evenings dad worked on a roller-coaster at the local fair. He had to go around on the first run just to check that the tracks were ok. Quite what he would have done if they weren’t ok I wasn’t sure. Dad was good with nineteenth century French and Spanish poets. He was not good with soldering irons.


I was 17 then and those Dutch guys confirmed in my mind that I was gay. Not that they were but you know, put a straight lad with eighteen semi naked Dutch females and it would confirm something.


I enjoyed that summer. Because I didn’t see myself in a mirror. I got to cut my own hair with a razor blade. I was outside all day, every day and I was in the sea, or reading. Or writing. In the evening I would sit with the head out of the front of my tent, writing by candlelight in my notebook.


Sometimes I’d read what I was writing out to my dad.


“You write well,” he said which pleased me because it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to be good at.


These days I feel like I’m New Order.


“Every time we perform live,” said Peter Hook, “on Top of the Pops, the next week our single would go down.”


I performed at Hello Hubmarine on Saturday night and I just wish I was better at doing the thing that I want to do. And it is something I want to be good at. In the meantime I will distract myself with the simple things in life.


Like someone moisturising their cock in a gym changing room next to me.

Currently reading – The Great War for Civilisation


Currently listening to – Slaughterhouse Five, audiobook

Milk

Last night I went to see Milk. For those of you not in the know this is film-maker Gus Van Sant’s biopic of America’s first openly gay politician, Harvey Milk. Milk was assassinated by Dan White, another Californian city supervisor who had recently lost his job.


The cinema was packed, if you could say that 6 people could pack out a cinema. Mind you it was in competition with Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist and Bride Wars.


White, Milk’s killer, says to him, “It’s ok for you, you have a cause, something to believe in.”


This was the 70s, in the Castro, an area of San Francisco which had become home to a huge number of gays. I’d read about this before in Francis Fitzgerald’s excellent Cities on a Hill. I’ve also read her other excellent book, Fire in the Lake, on Vietnam.


The only similar experience I have to what the Castro must have been like back then was the two years I lived in Sydney. Oxford St, a long sprawl heading just out of the heart of the city, is where a lot of the gay bars, restaurants, shops, clubs are situated. But it was more than that. It was that there were gay people everywhere. It sounds a cliché and it probably is, but I felt at home.


70s America was also the time of Anita Bryant. This former Orange juice advert queen started a national campaign from her base in Dade County, Florida for the repeal of laws which stated someone couldn’t be sacked or thrown out of their accommodation because of their sexual orientation.


“It’s not that I’m not a friend of gays,” she said, “I am. And it’s because I am that I can tell them that their way of life is wrong.”


More sinisterly this campaign was then taken up by John Briggs, a conservative state legislator who went on to say that homosexual people should not be allowed to teach in schools. Or indeed anybody that was a friend of a homosexual person. It was this that Milk was fighting against. He won. And then he was killed.


Laws, at their most fundamental level, are formed from a consensus of opinion of what society deems acceptable. You won’t kill, steal, persecute people because of their ethnic background, sexuality and so on.


The laws protecting gay people are still, constitutionally speaking, babies. It was ok for John Briggs, Anita Bryant to publicly and openly conflate homosexuality and paedophilia and to talk of this pervasive threat.


It will take time before such aforementioned throwaway comments become unacceptable. But we are moving in the right direction. It is not so long ago that Thatcher, under whose authority more gay men than in the history of this country were arrested and who introduced the draconian Section 28 of the Local Government act, was nominally in power.


Harvey Milk was 40 before he became involved in any way in politics. Like the Village People song ‘Go West’ he headed from New York, where he was closeted and set up home in San Francisco’s Castro area.


So there is hope for me yet. As I said, I am 38 and I need to do something. It is that question again, what next?


I wonder about my writing. My first novel, The Lodger, I wrote after seeing a newspaper article which stated gay men shouldn’t be allowed to adopt. This is what, under the murder plot, it was about.


My latest novel, Me and Mickie James, has a gay couple at the centre of it but I wanted it to be mainstream. It is not a novel about coming out or gay politics, or dying of aids. It is a story about a pop group. And it was published by a mainstream publisher.


But in my head, that was its politics, that it wasn’t political. It was the kind of book I would want to read.


Like in my life I want my difference to be recognised but to be treated like everybody else.


Harvey Milk had a box and on it he had written ‘SOAP’. He would stand on this box and into a loudhailer say, “I am Harvey Milk. I want to recruit you.”


I want to recruit you.


And yet somewhere along the line I have failed. Perhaps it is because I am just not good enough. I am sure that I am not. But still I want people to ‘vote for me’. This is my what next. I am waiting for my Harvey Milk moment. Maybe it will be around the next corner.


Or maybe it won’t.

****

On Saturday 31st January I am appearing at Derby’s Hello Hubmarine event. It is at the Big Blue Coffee Company, Sadlergate from 20:00 to 23:00. Details on Facebook here.

I am also running another 50 Word Short Story competition. The theme is Love, Love, Love. Write your 50 word love story and post it here on Facebook. Winners will appear on this blog on 14th February.

****

Currently reading – The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk


Currently listening to – Talk Talk

Books of the Year 2008

Hello peeps. It’s time to put my hands on my head and announce my books of the year.

(Note from editor. If your hands are on your head, how are you going to type?)

One of the good things about keeping this blog, is that I’ve recorded week by week what I was reading. And a quick flick through tells me that this year I’ve read 36 books.

If this year could be said to have 36 weeks then that’s almost one book a week! Not bad on top of everything else I have to do.

(Note from editor. What exactly is it that you do? Remind me…)

Firstly, a short introduction.

(Editor. God help us! And while we’re on the subject, you make a note of the books you read? What are you, some kind of freakosaurus?)

Freakosaurus?!

Unlike other self-styled lists of the same name I won’t limit myself to books published this year; only ones that I’ve read. And I’m going to choose my top ten.

(Ed. Don’t tell me, it’s going to be in no particular order.)

That’s right. In fact, it’s going to be in chronological order.

(Jeez!)

1. Don Quixote. What a way to start the year. This was my dad’s favourite book and I bought it because I felt I should read it. I shouldn’t have worried. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are fantastic characters. So funny I read bits out at work, my pen a sword, my computer screen a shield.

2. Donjong Heights by Ben Borek. This is a novel in verse. And if that puts you off then don’t let it. Donjong Heights is the Eugene Onegin of its day, but set in a tower block in South London. Our hero, unnamed, is dying. This novel follows his last throw of the dice, a Christmas Party. A perfect novel for Christmas!

3. The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. This is the history of Reaganite / Thatcherite neo-conservatism. It’s particularly pertinent right now as capitalism totters and the neo-cons fall further out of favour. What was good for other countries, it seems, is not good for America.

4. Day by A L Kennedy. I loved this book, Kennedy is a genius. Day is the eponymous hero, returning to be an extra in a prison of war film, shortly after the Second World War in which he fought as a gunner. Both a love story, and a book about the horror of war.

5. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. Being chosen by Richard and Judy seemed to be a double-edged sword for this book. Looking at all the negative reviews on Amazon a lot of people, it seemed, just didn’t get it. I did. Narrated by ‘we’ and set in an office but so much more than that.


“I listened to Karen Woo give an explanation of photosynthesis once. God only knows why they were discussing photosynthesis. They hung on her every word, like she was a PBS special. *Her explanation didn’t even involve sunlight.*”

6. Pandora in the Congo by Albert Sanchez Pinol. I bought this as it has an awesome cover. It is also an awesome book, an adventure in the 19th Century mould, a journey into the Congo and a lost world and strange creatures found. It also turns into a treatise on the power of story telling.

7. City of Thieves by David Benioff. A buddy novel if ever there was one. A teenage boy, Lev, and a soldier, Kolya, are given a stay of execution during the siege of Leningrad. The condition is they must find a dozen eggs for the commander’s daughter’s wedding cake. What follows is an absurd adventure.

8. Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks. As the name suggests this book is about the Iraq war and the best I’ve read. It takes you from the first Gulf war and then through the whole kit and caboodle concentrating on styles of leadership – how to fight or not fight a guerilla war.

9. Blindness by Jose Saramago. The first time I picked this up in Borders I was put off by the lack of punctuation, pages of unbroken text. Actually, it’s not difficult to read. It’s like a Hollywood blockbuster with brains (and shit). Read it and see although don’t read it while eating.

10. What We Talk About When We Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. The best and only sport book I’ve read this year. Murakami started running at the same time he became a full-time novelist – sitting at the desk he was getting fat you see. And he applies to running the same methods he applies to his writing. In it’s quiet and dedicated way this book is inspirational.

So that’s it, my ten favourite papery multi-leafed things of the year. And there were also plenty of other nearly-rans. Seeing them here makes me realise how much better my life is for books, and how much worse it would be without them.


What would I do in my lunch-hour at work? When I wake up in the morning? Go to bed at night? And I think of all the pleasures I would have missed.

(Ed. Pass me the sick bag.)

Books, you are great!

Currently listening to: Day and Age, The Killers


Currently reading: This Book Will Save Your Life, A M Homes (brilliant so far. The horse has just fallen in the hole and been saved by the movie star in his helicopter.)

Drew Gummerson is the auther of Me and Mickie James

Me and Mickie James Launch

I don’t know what’s happened to this week. It’s like a salt and vinegar crisp someone holds under your nose. You turn your head away, you turn back, and it’s gone. Just gone.


However, I have now confirmed the date for the Me and Mickie James launch party. It’s going to be on July 22nd starting at 6:00pm in Waterstones, Market St, Leicester. There will be a reading, a chance to buy the book and free refreshments and music. Afterwards will be drinks and things at The Basement Bar.


I’m not quite sure what the things will be (a naked dancing boy? Several naked dancing boys? Lots of them?) but it will certainly be a good chance to buy me a drink. Haha.
Everyone is welcome. Especially as I have visions of myself standing alone in an empty room full of wine and books. Now you put it like that…


If you want to come just email me here or just turn up. Or if you have Facebook the event is here.


In my head I have been thinking about what I want to say. This is usually witty and erudite but I will probably turn out to be more like Bukowski. He was so shy that he used to get drunk before he was on and then become abusive. People loved it. Anything like the success of his novel Post Office would be amazing. He wrote it in a couple of weeks and then it went on to sell millions.


Of course any kind of success would be amazing. It’s quite a scary thing, wondering if this thing that has been produced with my name on it is just going to disappear.


I’ve had two emails this week which have started, ‘I know you must be very busy.’ If being ‘very busy’ means sitting watching the snooker every day and drinking beer then I am. Definitely. I am really very very busy.


I had a nice day in Sheffield last Tuesday thanks at the World Championship and I am there again tomorrow. Keep your eyes peeled. I will be the one in the audience naked except for a copy of Me and Mickie James strategically placed ( balanced on my nose).


Well, you’ve got to haven’t you? And I can’t bear the thought of being on Big Brother.

Currently reading – Northern Lights, Philip Pullman (I loved reading Once Upon a Time in the North last week and now have started on the Dark Materials trilogy. It’s great.

Currently listening – Hallam Foe, Original Soundtrack

Young Adam music video

Arse Licking for Beginners

Today is the first day of the 2008 World Snooker Championships. I am sitting here with the BBC Sport Player open in the top right corner of my screen. For your information, it’s 0 – 0, John Higgins vs. Matthew Stevens, in the first frame of the first round.


How exciting!


For the next two weeks (and a bit) we’re going to have lots of men bent over tables. What could be better?


There is a small side-show every year regarding the Women’s World Snooker Championship. No doubt this is someone’s idea of a drive for parity. Haven’t we already got enough women bending over tables?


In every cop movie, gangster movie, any American teen movie, there are plenty of women, usually waitresses, bending over tables. And in skimpy clothes!


When these films feature men, on a regular basis, in hot pants, legs up at 90 degrees asking ‘Coffee?’ while being ogled by A list stars then surely this will be the time to talk in a reasonable manner about parity.


For now, the World Snooker Championship provides a highly respectable milieu for men to bed over tables.


In a strange quirk of fate this week my story Arse Licking for Beginners has been published over on Velvet Mafia. It consists of eight 200 words stories about… (Actually the last story grew slightly in length.)


Hang on, there’s someone at the door.


*Drew goes to door, opens it. Frankie Howard marches in, gives a twirl and goes back out.*


It is now 1 – 0 to Matthew Stevens.


I have written before about how I came to be writing erotic fiction here but I don’t know that my writing is erotic. It is basically the same kind of story with a big naked arse in it. That’s a tip for writers by the way.


Perhaps David Mackenzie is of the same mind. I watched his film, Hallam Foe, last night. Mackenzie has previously filmed the controversial erotic book Young Adam. Before Hallam Foe started there was a warning that the film contained very strong language and sex.


It didn’t actually although you did get to see Jamie Bell’s bum quite a lot.


It’s a brilliant film! Intelligent and odd and unusual and you never know where it’s going to go.


Hallam’s mother has died and he has retreated from the world to his treehouse with his binoculars. He likes to watch people, having sex, but it is not an erotic thing. He is trying to connect.


After an encounter with his step-mother he runs away to Edinburgh. He sees a woman who reminds him of his mother and he follows her, scooting across the rooftop of the city, hiding in a disused clock.


What could be quite an uncomfortable premise, is in fact not. Watch it.


And finally, although it doesn’t fit into this week’s theme of bums, but it is another part of the body.


*Good link Drew*


I went to see Elbow at Rock City this week. They were awesome, possibly the best concert I have ever seen. Guy Garvey is a great showman and entertainer. You can listen to him here.

Currently reading – Philip Pullman, Once Upon a Time in the North


Currently listening to – Guillemots, Red




Elbow – One Day Like This