68 GSCENE
GSCENE 68
NETTY’S WORLD BY NETTY WENDT
TWISTED
WE’LL HAVE A GAY OLD TIME
TANTALISING HOMO HERMITS
) I’m 52. When Mozart was my age he’d been dead for 17 years. As composing goes, it matters nought to me that I’m hurtling towards the grave without so much as a nursery rhyme to my name, but something else keeps me awake at night; it’s the thought that I might live long enough to be lonely. My partner and I have not even generated a ready-made care team. Oh well, never mind. It’s not a given that your kids look after you anyway.
) So now we’re all anchorites, secluded in our naughty nunneries, monasteries of masc, or manly marabouts, cenobiarch gender nonspecific folk, trans stylites, dyke eremites, non-binary recluses or bog standard solitudinarians. I know! Go look them up, learn some new vocab today. We’re all in this together!
Personally, I have a disproportionately high quota of older LGBTQ+ friends. To me, people over 60 are infinitely more interesting than youngsters; they’re living, breathing time-capsules filled with tales of bygone days. I’d love to know more young lesbians, but they’re as rare as hen’s teeth. The lack of young lesbian visibility today, indicates that the ‘me’ of tomorrow will not be writing about a scene she has had little to do with.
“I’d love to know more young lesbians, but they’re as rare as hen’s teeth” I think LGBTQ+ people age differently from the rest of the population. Lots of us have had to fight for the rights that so many straights take for granted, and it’s made us quite feisty if you please. Most older lesbians I know are either devoted to their partners, or very happily single. By single, I mean they don’t appear to crave sexual relationships to define them like so many straight women of their generation have to. They are the happiest people I know, and I wouldn’t cross them either! Lots of the older gay men I know have benefitted from careers that paid well and provided decent pensions. These old queens travel the world, they love their partners, their pets, their sexual dalliances (not always in that order). I don’t think I will ever recover from some of the stories I’ve heard, I’ve laughed till I cried, and it’s men like this who keep me coming out to play on the Brighton scene. In these crazy days of the coronavirus pandemic, we have all come to realise just how precious our older, physically more vulnerable population is. During the first week of lockdown, I was instantly cheered to see a Facebook post of darling David Raven aka Maisie Trollette, 86 years young and happily selfisolating. What a treasure he is. The older population of Brighton is a wonderful thing. Some of them are quite literally old hippies, others are bohemians, some are Tories, most are openminded, unlike the old folk of anywhere else in the world (apart from San Fransisco). I believe we owe it to them to provide appropriate social care. I’d like to see old people’s homes designed to cater for our very special community, after all, I may end up there one day. The old people today are the very fire starters who set the world ablaze with gay rights. They will not go gently into that great night, they’ll go out like so many of my older friends, raging against the dying of the light, laughing, loving, and covered in glitter.
GILDED GHETTO BY ERIC PAGE
I’m choosing a different type of seclusion every day, keeping it real, serving up ascetic precision, category is: Homo Hermitage. I am withdrawn from the world, retired from society and imagine the world to be no bigger than a hazelnut, but filled with wonders none the less, much like I imagine Julian of Norwich did; who was a woman. Mother Julian, a serious anchorite in her day, walled herself up in her church and took to dolling out advice from a small hatch. People walked across England to implore her wisdom, although I’d be far more interested in where she had learned her bricking up skills and what kind of mortar is best for permanently enclosing oneself in a cell. I’ve always been fond of feudal mystic Julian of Norwich. My dear grandmother Ivy used to sing a song about her, and strapped into the sidecar of her motorbike, my sisters and I would harmonise, in that sweet tight way that only family voices can achieve. The bungee cords, twisted and stretched around us, keeping us from being thrown out on the bramble strewn verges of the Welsh country lanes chaffed like hell as Ivy took another corner at 50 miles an hour, the wheel under us lifting, but she interpreted our screams as excitement and it drove her onwards, faster. ‘All shall be well again’ went the chorus of the song, ‘Let the winter come and go, all shall be well again, I know’. It’s a song that reminds me of Ivy every time I hear and sing it. Simple, profound and delicately subversive. Dame Julian also happened to have written the first book in the English language known to be by a woman. Revelations of Divine Love, written around 1395, which Ivy would quote huge chunks of. Filled with her visions, mystical prose, medieval medicine and serious advanced ideas about gender and sexuality and Julian’s own take on love; which is unconditional. It was Ivy’s bible. The last time I rode in Ivy’s sidecar I was 16, we screamed across England on the old A4 heading to Norwich – she’d added a seatbelt by that time – to pick lavender from outside Julian’s Church, reconstructed after being flattened by a wartime Nazi bomb. Ivy said the words and plants were the only authentic part of Julian’s life to be left to us, from an unbroken link of spring and regrowth. She passed me a spliff, one of those tiny carrot shaped ones she used to keep in her bra, (the first time I’d been given one) and as she cussed out Hitler and waxed lyrically about Mable Carter’s pizzicato and living in Maces Spring, Virginia where she said she’d first kissed Elvis I tuned out, and instead could only hear the bells of the cathedral, ringing out, loud and strong and tripping me out, my mind buzzing from the hashish. The cathedral bells pealed the tune that the song was based on, I suddenly made the connection, I felt a huge circle turning, from Julian to Ivy to me to eternity and back again, I laughed. Ivy grinned, the sun shone, the smell of engine oil from her Royal Enfield Bullet 500 mixed with the lavender in my hand and I hummed the song along with the distant tolling bells, they tolled for me. All shall be well I’m telling you, so during this Age of Covid-19 let’s all be exquisite and never explain.
