Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints (15 page)

Betty was less than pleased that Slag had elected to let her hair hang limply to her shoulders and would have preferred an upswept style. She did, however, applaud the irate, opinionated aspect of the new Slag. Feisty, disgruntled rhetoric of any description appealed to her Northern Irish temperament.

The following year Slag left home for college and disappeared from my view into academia. Years passed. I disappeared
into the world of fashion and window dressing. Slag and I lost track of each other’s ideals and hairstyles. She disappeared further into academia, devoting years to the study of bizarre green worms and acquiring a Ph.D. in marine biology. I moved to America and got a Ph.D. in hedonism.

*  *  *

Fast-forward to 1986. I am living in a high-rise apartment building in New York, a great pad for a caftan party. The phone rings. It’s Slag. I am slightly anxious. We rarely call each other. I brace myself for the possibility of bad news.

“Slag! How are you?”

“I have become a lesbian. And don’t call me Slag anymore. It’s a bit sexist, don’t you think?”

Gulp.

“Congratulations!” I say with as much enthusiasm as I can muster.

I then barrage her with questions. I have to get to the bottom of her story. The call to lesbianism is, after all, not an invitation to a life of glamour and caftans. It is more about oatmeal, hiking boots, and fanny packs. Where is the payoff? While gay men are often feted, lesbians continue to be regarded with suspicion. There seemed to be, to my gay male eyes, no dangling carrots which would prompt a gal to plunge willy-nilly down that Well of Loneliness.
4

Shelagh’s answers to my frenzied questions formed a crazy collage.

She blamed her slow emergence first and foremost on
The Killing of Sister George.
This grotesque 1968 lesbian movie, though undeniably hilarious, is not exactly sensitive in its handling of the subject. The lead character, George, is a stereotypical bossy, drunken dyke who wears thick tweeds. She intimidates her ultrafem girlfriend, named Childie, by making her eat her cigar butts and threatening to force her to drink all of her bathwater. Shelagh had seen this movie at a sensitive moment in her late teens: the histrionics of Childie and George had caused her to remain in Hetero Town.

Feminism and activism followed. In 1982 Shelagh participated in the historic peace demonstrations at Greenham Common.

“A revelation! Nine miles of women holding hands around a U.S. army base,” recalled my sister of this emotionally charged counterculture
womyn’s
moment.

Betty traveled to Greenham Common to check in on her only daughter. She arrived just in time to see Shelagh and her feminist friends lie down in the street in front of massive, revving trucks carrying the thrusting phallic Pershing missiles. (Quel irony!)

Though basically quite right-wing, Betty quickly entered into the spirit of things. She shared her cigarettes and some Second World War stories with Shelagh’s new chums. A wonderful day was had by all.

“Okay, I understand the feminism and the Sapphic camaraderie, but when and how did your interest in men evaporate?” I asked in the shrill tone of one who could not imagine losing his interest in men. Betty had kept me up-to-date on the steady string of boyfriends—a sheepdog trainer, a schoolteacher,
a Lebanese pastry chef, a Jesuit priest—who had captured Shelagh’s heart at various times in the intervening years. How and why had she given them all the heave-ho?

By this time my sister was getting slightly irritated.

“Okay. It’s really quite simple,” she barked, sounding quite tough and dykey and a tad like Sister George.

“Are you ready?”

“Yes!”

“You see! Women . . . actually talk to each other. Most straight men are not interested in having a decent two-way conversation!” said Shelagh with the relieved air of a woman who had just realized she would never be bored to death by a bombastic hetero-male ever again.

I was about to challenge this idea. Then thought better of it. There was not a lot of point in trying to make sense of the mystical, magical realm of sexual identity. Shelagh was a lesbian and I was a poofter. As Hattie McDaniel
5
once said, “It’s jess somethin’ de Angels dun plan.”

*  *  *

I remember well the last time my sister received a gift from Vivian and Marigold. It was a small mauve, enameled powder compact. By this time Jim/Slag/Shelagh had long since stopped wearing makeup. I, meanwhile, had been experimenting with it for several years.

We asked Betty to intercede and let Marigold and Vivian off the hook.

“Call them up and tell them we’re both gay. Do them a big
favor!” said Shelagh, clipping on her fanny pack in preparation for a morning constitutional.

Betty had a word with our kindly redheaded aunt, and the gifts stopped. When asked if she had mentioned our proclivities, Betty replied, “No, of course not. Are these shoes too high for a woman my age?”

I guess it is not the easiest thing in the world to tell your in-laws—whose three children are all straight—that both your kids turned out queer. Nonetheless, my sister and I were disappointed. Betty had missed an opportunity to strike a blow for gay equality. (We were also terrified that, without sufficient deterrent, the gifts might start up again.)

I was determined to find out what our mother had actually said to Aunt Marigold. I waited until we were alone, and then I pursued the matter with her. Had she, for example, said something like “Simon and Shelagh are both horribly ungrateful and don’t deserve any gifts, so please stop
now
!”

Or maybe she’d been more creative: “Marigold, I regret to inform you that they have joined a cult and are not allowed to have any possessions, so everything you give them is sold and goes to fund the needs of the cult.”

I had to know.

Betty lit a ciggie and glared at me. Mater did not like to be backed into a corner. A triumphant twinkle appeared in her eye, indicating that she was ready to respond, with confidence and verve, to my probing.

I braced myself.

“When I was in the Air Force,” she began, sounding not unlike her actress namesake, the Academy Award-winning
Miss Davis, “there were men in the cookhouse who plucked their eyebrows”—puff, pause, exhale—“and they wore Max Factor midnight blue eye shadow”—puff—“and
I stuck up for them
!”

Pause. Puff.

“So don’t you talk to me about gay rights. If you want someone to march in your parade,
I’m your man
!”

T
he first time I got arrested I was wearing a Mickey Mouse printed shirt. The background was Easter yellow, and the Mickey Mouses were, as per usual, black and white with red and yellow clothing and accessories. The oversize collar of this shirt was cut with boldly rounded, cartoonish tips instead of points. It was purchased with trembling excitement from a trendy shop on Kensington Church Street called Mr. Freedom, which specialized in garish, infantile-themed apparel for glamrock devotees. There was a café adjacent to the store called Mr. Feed’em.

I was embarrassingly proud of this purchase, funded as it was by long hours of summer holiday toil at the Reading department store whose motto was “Never knowingly undersold.”

“Wait till the girls get a load of this little number,” I mused as I carefully folded it in preparation for my return to Manchester University for the start of the fall 1971 semester.

The females in question—my college roommates—were named Angela, Joy, and Rose. Angela was a pink-cheeked, brown-eyed cutie from the Isle of Man. Joy was a local girl with long, straight hair and high cheekbones whose celebrity look-alike might have been a young Judy Collins. Last but not least, there was Rose. This tall East Yorkshire brunette played the organ at the church in her tiny village. Rose was not quite as worldly as the rest of us, but she was catching up fast.

Together we rented a run-down row house in a part of Manchester called Whalley Range, pronounced “Wolleh Rrrrrange” by the locals. The decor was visionary. Designed and furnished by our Pakistani landlord with random wallpapers and sticks of furniture from the Salvation Army, our house resembled a crack den a full fifteen years before the advent of crack.

The adjacent neighborhoods were all in the process of being demolished. Everywhere you looked the sordid hovels of the Industrial Revolution, with their backyard toilets and smoking chimneys, were being leveled. This was all fine and dandy. However, anytime the wrecking balls started to swing, a river of displaced vermin surged out from under the rubble, down the street, and into our living room. Mice ran across our pillows while we slept. They scampered atop the gas meter while watched by us from the safety of our scrungy couch.

It was an urban calamity of biblical proportions. If the bubonic plague had still been active, we would all have died.

We were ambivalent about our new friends. On the one hand, they were disgusting, never failing to leave a trail of horrid little turds wherever they went. On the other hand, they provided us with hours of light entertainment, something which, on our overly earnest college campus, was in short supply. University life had fallen short of our collective expectations. The year was 1971: there was no lack of countercultural rhetoric and radical ideals. But where was the glamour? Where was the fun?

It was around this time that Margaret Thatcher elected to eliminate the tradition of free school milk. This angered our fellow students far beyond our comprehension. Most came from upper-middle-class backgrounds. None of them had ever been at risk for calcium deficiency. Nevertheless, there were endless demonstrations at which Thatcher was vilified as if she was on a one-woman crusade to bring back rickets. The soundtrack to our college years consisted of thousands of raised students’ voices shouting, “Milk-snatcher Thatcher! Milk-snatcher Thatcher!”

Angela, Joy, Rose, and I were significantly absent from the throng. We were pathetically apolitical. Me and the girls were far more concerned with alcohol than with milk. We were, to put it bluntly, drunks. While our fellow students got high on pot, we drank ourselves stupid on beer and highly intoxicating Devonshire cider.

Having grown up in the Doonan winery, I had come to think of myself as a fairly experienced boozer. Then I met Angela,
Joy, and Rose, and immediately felt like a lightweight. Angela and Joy were seasoned drinkers, and Rose was making up for her church-playing years.

Joy, being a Manchester native, knew all the best bars. She loved to drag us all to a Dickensian, proletariat watering hole called Yates’ Wine Lodge in the center of town. Here we spent the evening ingesting lethal concoctions called “blobs.” These hot, sugary, wine-based drinks tasted like cold remedies and, based on the frightening condition of the Yates’ regulars, were guaranteed to rot both your teeth and your brain.

Like many pub habitués, Joy was a serious darts player. Her team even won the occasional tournament. Their winning strategy consisted of one part skill and nine parts blobs. It was amazing to watch Joy—fag in one hand, dart in the other—wobble and sway, throw a bull’s-eye, and then collapse on the floor.

Angela, Joy, and Rose were instant converts to Château Doonan. At the beginning of every semester, I would transport as much of Terry’s homemade wine to Manchester as I could carry on the train. The girls and I were so glad to see each other—and the free hooch—we would usually knock it all back in one evening.

Joy and I were probably the most enthusiastic imbibers. We medicated our anxiety with booze. In addition to sharing my obsession with the losing of one’s marbles, Joy was terrified she would one day end up a bag lady. Any time she encountered a homeless person—there was no shortage in Whalley Range—she would shiver and reach for the cider.

One night Rose and Angela went out on the town with
their men-friends, leaving Joy and me to our own devices. We spent the evening knocking back drinks, smoking furiously, talking incoherently, and listening to Lou Reed’s album
Transformer
over and over again.