What’s LOVE got to do with IT? On the guest list: champion of the avant-garde and pioneering performer, David Hoyle; former Evening Standard theatre critic and writer of the critically lauded play Plague Over England, Nicholas de Jongh; DJ and writer, Stewart Who?; and porn star, performer and actor, Ashley Ryder.
By Cliff Joannou
‘TIS THE SEASON TO BE BITTER!
As the capitalist monster of Saint Valentine’s Day approaches, bringing with it a cocktail of desperation, disgust and disillusionment (and in that I am referring to those in long-term relationships) in true QX style we turn the subject upside down and shake it all about by throwing a lavender spotlight on it.
So, LOVE and SEX: what does it mean to us as gay men? Since we were little kiddies we were inadvertently raised by our parents, schools, society and the television to believe one day we would settle down with a lovely girl, get married and have kids. We were given sex education in schools that detailed the ins and outs of vaginas and ovaries, and what happens when they collide with a penis and sperm. Then – BAM! – the world implodes and it’s actually cock you want, and all the religious and social dogma of your formative years is made pretty much redundant. Sexually we begin to explore ourselves, and one another.
In terms of early experiences, the glorious gaggle of gays that have gathered in my living room to broach the subject of ‘love, sex and gay men’ couldn’t have been more different. Ashley Ryder’s first sexual contact was aged thirteen with a man in his 20s who would fuck him in the toilets on the high street near where he grew up. He “asked me to keep crying because it turned him on,” Ashley confides. Has this affected the way he has sex today? “Every time I have sex now I can smell a hint of chlorine… I guess I cut myself away from sex. Emotionally I can switch off. I can shut down.”
Stewart Who?’s first experiences were somewhat more playful: “I remember instigating with friends of mine. I’m not sure how sexual it was but it was an exploration of bodies. It was really weird because I know I hadn’t seen porn at that point; I was eight or nine. We were being really pornographic with each other, opening holes and stuff.
“What really excited me was a boy. Although I was fascinated by this girl’s bum and snatch, when he got his penis out and had pubes that was another thing entirely. At that age you don’t really have a sexual drive, it was a curiosity of the body. It’s much later when there’s an actual sexual connection to your brain where there’s pleasure.”
Somewhat more sinister was Nicholas de Jongh’s encounter in his early teens. He would visit a math teacher at his home for extra lessons: “He would come over and put me on his stomach, down over his knees. What precisely he was doing I’ve never been able to understand, because he didn’t actually wank. There was some sort of movement. He always wanted to have my cock on his knees so he would feel it. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want this’.”
Around the same time, he met a stranger on a bus journey home who proceeded to attempt to find out where Nicholas lived. “He was repellant to me. Finally, I broke down in tears, and the whole bus looked round and he got off. So I felt I was caught between these two, totally weird, nasty experiences.”
On the flip side to this is the experience of David Hoyle at fourteen, whose first sexual adventure was perhaps, many would deem, more idyllic in its romantic manifestation. “At school I had a healthy interest in another boy and one thing led to another and we did have a relationship… It went on until I was in the sixth form and I think it kept me sane. I believe he’s married with children now. I was very pleased. I saw girlfriends come and go, but like a lot of them, I could do things his girlfriends couldn’t. It was so natural to me.”
“When we try to simplify each other and project a mere surface on both oneself and the other person, it’s a bit tragic.”
David Hoyle
CLIFF: Have your early sexual experiences carried onto your adult lives?
ASHLEY: I’ve explored sex. So I can detach myself from it to just have that particular kind of sex. There are some experiences I’ve had that I didn’t associate with that first time, but when I walk past a public toilet it brings back floods of memories. I used to validate myself through sex. For a while when I was younger I was incredibly overweight. If someone would sleep with me, then I was good looking. That’s how I learned gay men treat each other.
NICHOLAS: I get into a sense of panic if someone comes onto me sexually that I’m not interested at all in. I’m sure I see these ghosts from the past, and I don’t know how to deal with it. I just want to run away.
DAVID: I wish I was still with the boy from school. I thought he was amazing. He was interested in music, and new music, like punk. To meet somebody who was, I found that very attractive, it was such a beautiful combination. In a way it has been my longest relationship. He was quite charming, they way he finished it. He took me for a drink and said it really has to finish now because ostensibly he was heterosexual.
ASHLEY: I guess the body issue was always a big issue to begin with. I never fitted into that gay stereotype that we are told we are meant to look like. Although I’ve changed now, back then sex was always uncomfortable. Even now if I catch myself in the mirror I still feel uncomfortable. To me sex is always sex. If I get bored on Thursday afternoon, I go and have sex with someone and then get back on with my life. It’s something that I just get rid of.
CLIFF: What do you look for when you instigate sexual contact?
ASHLEY: A big thing for me is what you are into. When I was fifteen or sixteen, I got bored of being sucked and fucked, and I said to myself if people in their 50s and 60s are still having sex, there has to be more to it. And thank God I walked into Clonezone; and thank God I picked up Tom of Finland’s book; and thank God I opened it to where I did. The most horniest picture I saw was a guy being held down and his bum hole was being held open by five hooks, and someone was dangling a lizard into his hole. It was the horniest thing I’d ever seen. And sex became a thing when you learned something, and you achieved something.
CLIFF: Are you confident in sex?
STEWART: For it to work they have to be incapable with desire for me. If I feel for a minute that they’re doing this for a joke, because they’re bored or if they’re not sure if they find me attractive… it’s a bit of an anxiety. If I feel that someone is helpless with desire then I in turn will be hugely turned on, even if they are completely unattractive. They could be utterly deformed. But if they’re helpless with desire that doesn’t matter. That to me is quite fucked up. It signals a very low self-esteem, possibly. I would rather be with someone who I would be ashamed to be on the street with, who is hot for me, than someone hot who is a little bit ‘whatever’.
DAVID: There is a lot of pressure put on the Greco-Roman ideal that keeps being trotted out. And we are living in an age of abstraction, so a wider cross section of people should be permitted a chance or an opportunity rather than the usual template. I don’t think I exist in that at all.
CLIFF: What has instigated sex in the past for you?
DAVID: It tends to be quite mental. I find that quite exciting, and I think it can become almost a fetish. I think what we are capable of doing psychologically and subliminally in all sorts of ways very fascinating, and I find it stimulating.
STEWART: I have a Gaydar profile and one of the things people respond to is the statement that I say, “I’ve no idea until I’m actually in a room with you,” because there are people that say, “no femmes, no camp,” and all that stuff on there. Chemistry is really important. I’ve had amazing sex with people that are camp because they have charmed me and surprised me – that I would never have thought I’d end up with. And I’ve been to bed with guys who a lot of people would pay money to have sex with and who are dull as fuck, and made me feel bad about myself. I don’t know if I should feel lucky that I was able to pull someone like that, because I didn’t feel lucky.
DAVID: And then you start to feel that this person’s doing you a favour, that you should be grateful.
NICHOLAS: The beautiful, narcissists have one thing in common, admiration.
DAVID: But they subjugate you.
CLIFF: Is casual sex – or ‘promiscuity’ – a bad thing?
DAVID: I think the there’s a lot of resentment when they created that word. Some people weren’t getting any, so the idea that some people were getting more than they really need, they were called promiscuous, as they are getting plenty of sex; and the people who are being moral are the ones who aren’t having it.
NICHOLAS: I think promiscuity is a word invented by heterosexual men to lament the fact that women are not available in the way that gay men are.
ASHLEY: My mother said that to be gay is very selfish because they don’t have children, you don’t have responsibility.
CLIFF: But is that not simply a circumstance of biology, so it’s not really fair to associate an emotion or moral judgement on that? Selfishness is a personality trait, not predetermined genetics.
NICHOLAS: I agree. A lot of gay men go into altruistic professions, like teachers or social workers, and that is very much going away from themselves to give of themselves. I think that’s a homophobic idea of gay men collecting sex as one does milk bottles.
CLIFF: What do we think of recreational sex?
STEWART: I have found myself being sexually compulsive. I don’t know if it’s promiscuity, which is a judgement of somebody you don’t know. But I have experienced periods of what I guess people check into a clinic for sex addiction. Not for a long period, but it’s when you have sex to validate yourself, and then the sex is over and you’re even more hollow than when you started, and instead of taking a reality check you go after more sex.
NICHOLAS: The biggest sex addicts of our time are John Kennedy and Silvio Burlesconi, both chronic heterosexuals.
CLIFF: Your character is out there as a performer, Ashley. Are you free with the sex in your private life? Do you ever feel guilty?
ASHLEY: I don’t feel guilty. Sometimes I feel like I’ve wasted my time, and that’s annoying. When I used to be an escort when I was 22 or 23, you’d have a really bad client and go online and you’d find someone you want to have sex with to get rid of that.
“All we can hope for is the best of some sort of alliance, or some sort of negotiation between the cock, and the mind and the heart.”
Nicholas de Jongh
CLIFF: Do you feel you have too much recreational sex?
ASHLEY: No, not at all. Sex is about exploring.
CLIFF: What about the rise of Gaydar, Grindr, Facebook and other forms of meeting other men for sex?
DAVID: Don’t you think it [Facebook] can bring a bit of stalker out in people?
STEWART: I’m aware of the stalker behavior. You make ‘friends’ but you can then take it to another level, because it says on their page who they’ve talked to, and you can leave a message for such and such.
DAVID: Thank God I’m not the only one…
STEWART: Everyone does it.
DAVID: This is what I mean about the forensic aspect of it. The detective aspects where you can get fragments, shards of conversations, and then if you’ve got any kind of imagination you can build up all sorts in your mind. It’s a weird archaeology.
STEWART: Sometimes someone will tag a photo of me that I don’t feel is flattering and I’m like, ‘Why am I taking it down?’ But now I let them go as I have the profile pictures that I’m happy with because they’re the ones I’ve stage managed myself, so there’s a bit of deception going on there. I think it would be unhealthy to only present myself in this stage managed way and destroy all the other photos.
DAVID: You should be able to live with the so-called unflattering photographs that present a 360 degree image of you, as much as the ones in which you’ve been homogenized.
STEWART: I’ve been on Gaydar and had a chat with someone and it’s been quite flirty, then they say, ‘are you on Facebook?’ Now on Facebook are my unattractive pictures, and a lot of pictures of me in drag! But sometimes I lose people at that point. It’s a shame and there’s a moment of pain because I think, ‘I liked you and you’re hot, and I had hope for us’.
DAVID: Well, good. You don’t want them if this person wishes to make concrete an illusion. You are not an illusion, you’re a human being with all the complexity and depth of that. When we try to simplify each other and project a mere surface on both oneself and the other person, it’s a bit tragic.
CLIFF: Totally. I have fun photos of me dressed as Catwoman, and in a wedding dress and all sorts of chill out drag on Facebook. There are people you give your Facebook profile out to who you have a sexual interest in and I think, ‘hold on they’ll see these photos’. But if they’re not interested in me having a laugh at the end of the day, I’m not interested.
DAVID: Exactly, exactly…
STEWART: And if you flip it, if I meet someone and if they’re going to fit into some masculine image that I think is hot, and I go to their Facebook and there are pictures of them in drag, I think, “oh my God, they’re more fun than I thought.” It does shut out a lot of people, but I don’t want those people in my life that will de-compartmentalise me.
CLIFF: Let’s talk about the issue of ‘love’ now. What do we make of love, whether we are talking about it in the flippant and over-used terminology, or whether it’s ‘true, deep love’. David, firstly, I was at your show recently and you asked questions of the audience and I shouted out, “Have you ever been in love?” And you replied, “All the time.” And I relate to that. I’ve learned it doesn’t have to last forever, it can be fleeting or sudden, because I feel love has so many guises and can happen over years, or just a few days with someone you barely know.
NICHOLAS: You fall in lust… you can’t fall in love with someone you don’t know.
CLIFF: Well, I think lust is a single emotion, whereas love is like sexuality, it’s a scale of varying differentiations.
NICHOLAS: So you can be erotically enthralled.
ASHLEY: No.
STEWART: It’s something else.
ASHLEY: It can be intrigue, lustful intrigue.
DAVID: If I can sense someone is intelligent, I go for it immediately. And if they have an interest or a passion, then I am in love with them.
NICHOLAS: Well, love isn’t only lust, it isn’t only the erotic, it’s being totally enthralled and overwhelmed by a presence. Everything else shrinks and vanishes and your life shifts to the status of an obsession.
DAVID: Yes, and I am an obsessive, so I do feel it very much. But I quite like it. I don’t mind the high octane, I don’t mind the rough with the smooth.
CLIFF: When was the greatest time you’ve been in love.
[Silence all round…]
DAVID: The best could be yet to come.
NICHOLAS: The most outstanding time was with someone who has now died of AIDS, just before combination therapy came available. We had a relationship but then he rejected me. I was there with him hours before he died, and I dedicated my play [Plague Over England] to him, because I felt he was such a profound victim of homophobia, and the play basically is about homophobia. That was a huge love and obsession.
DAVID: And an ongoing love…
NICHOLAS: In a sense ongoing, yes. I don’t know if it was a very useful love. He was very beautiful, and he knew he was very beautiful, and he was very vain.
DAVID: Charming, what a wonderful combination. I’m hooked already!
[LAUGHTER]
NICHOLAS: I remember my saying, “you have a terrible capacity to destroy love and you’re doing it now.”
STEWART: Wow.
DAVID: He had power.
CLIFF: But was that love, or the lust you just talked about?
NICHOLAS: The sex was wonderful. He was totally enthralled by me.
CLIFF: But was that not actually lust? What’s your classification of love?
NICHOLAS: Now you’ve got me. There was a strong lust element, and you can have wonderful sex with people whom you’re not in love with, but he made me feel quite wonderful.
STEWART: I’ve had great sex with people I hate.
NICHOLAS: I absolutely understand that. He made me feel quite wonderful. With him I felt quite amazing. He couldn’t keep his hands off me, and it was like a drug. I was high on that, so you may be quite right, that it was a particular, spectacular feeling.
DAVID: There was an intensity to it. It’s all wonderful to me. I’ve tried to analyse it and maybe it’s because of generation – oh God it ages you, doesn’t it, “in my day”. Because when we were in our very early 20s, before combination therapy, I knew ten people [with HIV] and seven of them died, and the ones who remained went on to have problems with dependency, because it was such a truly intense experience. And also because we had the moral opprobrium that was thrown at us. It was a very isolating experience, because nobody would sympathise with you because, “of course you had AIDS, and of course all your friends are dying because your homosexual and it’s wrong to be homosexual, and of course they’re diseased”. So now, when it comes to love, maybe there’s a fear in me that I’m going to lose these people. You feel that your care and concern for them is probably inordinate, probably off the Richter scale, but you can’t go through what was a holocaust again. Even now to talk about the statistics is crazy. The beautiful people, the beautiful boys who died were all pioneers, from small towns or villages who’d all come to London. We’d all come to escape from the fear of being thrown out or being rejected from their families, by our societies or communities. They all came here and what started out as a party ended up as a funeral.
NICHOLAS: There was a period from the early 80s to the early 90s where the sense of loss is huge.
CLIFF: And that’s affected your way of loving now…?
DAVID: Yes, it has. Because if I do love somebody, I really, really do love them. I don’t want them to die. And I don’t want them to leave my life.
CLIFF: Ashley, have you been in love with anybody?
ASHLEY: I don’t think I’ve ever been in love.
CLIFF: Who would you say you ‘love’ in your life?
ASHLEY: My friends. I would be very happy if the group of friends I have now I would die with.
CLIFF: Do you prefer friends to lovers?
ASHLEY: Yeah.
DAVID: The ideal for me would be to bring to two together.
NICHOLAS: Do you think love and sex don’t go together?
ASHLEY: No, I don’t.
CLIFF: Stewart, I was there at your wedding when you married Wayne, your best friend, who you love, but is not your lover.
STEWART: I think about it all the time, and I feel so grateful that I have it. We were great friends and we were like sisters, and nobody makes me laugh as much as he does. We got married and it was a big camp affair, and there was real legal reasons why we did it, but I completely underestimated how it would change our relationship, because of the minor little things. Say Wayne would say to me, “Do you have deodorant I can borrow,” and I’d be going down the aisle in a supermarket, and I knew he didn’t have any and I’d think, “Well, she can get her fucking own.” But now I think, “My wife needs deodorant.”
CLIFF: How did this change your private sexual life, because the two of you are not a sexual couple.
DAVID: Can I just say there are aspects of performance art in your relationship, I think it’s fantastic.
STEWART: Totally. It’s natural and you bring out the best with each other. I didn’t want to be in a relationship and I went into therapy to stop my issues around that, but now I can get sex if I want it. I’m a gay man, it’s easy. But now I don’t need to find a relationship, because I’ve got Wayne.
DAVID: Like a foundation…
STEWART: I’ve got a foundation, and that’s far more satisfactory than any sexual relationship.
ASHLEY: This is the whole thing about the companion. You’re relationship is purely companion based.
CLIFF: But isn’t it still love?
ASHLEY: I don’t really believe in love. If I’m really honest it’s so old fashioned, and manufactured.
CLIFF: Does that mean that what Stewart has with Wayne and what you have with your friends that you say you love, is not love?
ASHLEY: Because I think the word L.O.V.E. is something that’s so corrupted over the years. It’s about respect, honesty, truth. Love is an umbrella for other emotions that are much more important than the word ‘love’.
NICHOLAS: But we’re trying to distinguish between erotic love and other forms.
STEWART: love of friends; love of things; love of ideals. There is an area that relates to the erotic, and can you combine love and the erotic?
ASHLEY: Well, I have a flat mate, who we started off as boyfriends and now we’re best friends. We have orgies together, and we have separate sex together. To me that’s the perfect relationship.
STEWART: But love is about a kind of feeling somewhere. There must be times when he might say something or do something and you feel a softness somewhere. Like he might say a joke and the two of you laugh together. What you feel in that moment is love.
DAVID: Love is a human emotion and something generally we feel in the subconscious in the two or three hours preceding death.
STEWART: Literature and art and everything will tell you romantic love is that passion you feel when you’re in that moment and you just want to devour them. You go into therapy and you learn that’s severe co-dependence and unhinged behavior.
DAVID: Even though it feels very natural, you can’t stop it.
STEWART: I had lots of relationships one after the other in my 20s and they were all demented, all unhinged, all very passionate. It was great, but eventually the net result was that I was a broken person at the end of it. I went for the drug dealers, lunatics… and eventually I snapped and ended up in therapy. Now, if I start to feel those feelings again, rather than think, “Oh I’m falling in love, isn’t this great,” I think, “remember this from your 20s, why are you feeling this way?”
DAVID: It can be a making up of a deficit in oneself. It’s like, “Hello, I am a void, and you can fill the void.”
STEWART: Yes, so now I don’t think of that as love, I think of what I have in Wayne as love, what I have with certain members of my family is love, my sister, and people I randomly see that I fucking love. I now view romantic love as an unhinged thing, it’s celebrated in society, but actually I think it’s a sickness, it’s too addictive.
CLIFF: Is sex loveless?
DAVID: I don’t think I’m very good at recreational sex. I do think of it as some sort of portal connection that I’m engaging with this person, and the intimacy really means something. I’m not just prepared to do something just for the sake of it. It might be generational, or an old religious teaching. I don’t know where it comes from.
NICHOLAS: I think it depends which bits of you sex engages. Let’s face it, the cock is a very trivial instrument in itself so subject to whims, passing fantasies, phases and it’s deeply unreliable in the sense that it ignores our minds and judgement. All we can hope for is the best of some sort of alliance, or some sort of negotiation between the cock, and the mind and the heart. And if you can achieve some sort of lasting trinity – and I hate to have the religious association – then that is wonderful. But I don’t know that I can, or that anyone can.
STEWART: Doesn’t that sound amazing! It’s almost that that is the romantic love that we’re fed; that you can find somebody, you’ll have great sex, you’ll have this emotional connection and your minds will be together as well.
CLIFF: Is there a spiritual aspect to sex, a moment when you can feel that connection, something we aspire to?
STEWART: Occasionally, I’ll be having sex with someone where there’s a brief moment, where it’s amazing, and I think it’s when you’re not conscious of where you are and you’re very lucky if it lasts more than a couple seconds. But in that moment, I think maybe that’s love. Love is you without judgement, without worry, without insecurity, with you stripped of all that shit and at that moment when you’re just enjoying sex. You’re in just pure joy.
DAVID: I think it’s like what we were saying earlier, that “everybody that’s with me is acceptable and user-friendly”. I mean, why not have sex with Quasimodo? Everything is a bit silly for me. We’re being judged, I’ve been judged, I was judged as a child. Everything I did was wrong because of being a homosexual. I lived in an atmosphere of constant judgement, and that’s bound to have had an affect on me to the extent where maybe even I make judgements.
STEWART: It’s an animal thing, when you have a sexual fantasy it’s an animal instinct. It’s what you shouldn’t be doing.
DAVID: The pure essence of your desires.
STEWART: It’s whether you give in to that, you live with that, you cope with that, or you suppress it and let it torment you for the rest of your life. I know people that fantasize about people they wouldn’t be seen in the street with.
CLIFF: As gay men do we find it hard to love ourselves?
ASHLEY: I look in the mirror and I see bad bits before I see the good bits.
CLIFF: Physically or mentally?
ASHLEY: Physically to begin with, but mentally as well. I’m always thinking that I’m not educated enough, that I’m not reading enough. I get distracted very easily…
CLIFF: But do you feel that you love yourself?
ASHLEY: No. Not in any way, shape or form. I know it works, and I get compliments for it, but it’s not what I want.
CLIFF: Stewart?
STEWART: It’s a work in progress. I’m glad I got to the point that I had to seek help, where I had to look at my behavior and the rest of it. I’m hyper aware of my non-love of myself. So, when I think hateful thoughts of myself, which if I’m really honest, is a lot, I then have to have the overriding voice that says, “Stewart, reign it in, stop. What are you doing?” The important thing is that I’m aware of it. In my 20s I was having negative thoughts and was unaware of what it was doing to me.
DAVID: I enjoy keeping busy, because when I’m not busy, your mind can go to negative realms.
STEWART: I have a suspicion that’s across the board, because people don’t talk about it.
CLIFF: As gay men we’re unlike straight males in that we don’t have the traditional goal of getting married and having children. Are we confronted with the challenges we’ve discussed tonight about love and sex in adulthood because we’re not prepared for them as children?
NICHOLAS: Absolutely.
STEWART: Whatever you have, you will want what someone else has. I also have straight friends who are tormented by their lack of freedom. I think the key to joy is to be grateful for what you have. Be grateful that you have this liberty.
DAVID: We do have freedoms, and it’s up to us whether we can psycho-spiritually enjoy them, and really engage with it.
