‘It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out.’
When scrawling these words into a manuscript in 1933, I very much doubt that George Orwell meant it to permeate so deeply with a young flame-haired fresher, ready to take on London’s gay scene by the horns. About to embark on my first Soho night out, I was very much out, and very much itching to get down.
My first few nights seem to blur into one as I try to recollect them, perhaps as a result of there being so many of them, or as a result of my alcohol intake on those nights. Presumably the latter. They began, like most London-based friends of Dorothy would know, with weekday £1.80 single vodka and cokes. Sticky, dark with the worst of today’s top forties being the soundtrack to my night. I was far from the underground gentlemen’s clubs of the 1930s Paris that I had envisioned. The freaks were no longer on podiums performing their oddities to the pleasure of the roaring crowd, but rather concealing their freakdom and socialising amongst us. Yet there was the odd hunk here and there, and the nights where I could drink the odd-looking into hunks, so I was content. After a few nights though, I finally felt ready to make my gay-pilgrimage to London’s gay mecca. I finally felt ready to ascend to Heaven.
Contrary to what Led Zeppelin would have us believe, it is not a stairway that leads you to heaven, but rather an hour-long queue, in which you are forced to stand crotch-to-ass with strangers, whilst trying to stay in the party mood and nod to the whispers of Beyonce that you can almost hear from inside. Having reached the door of Heaven, you are greeted not by Saint Paul, but rather a middle-aged, chubby black man who gropes your ass and calls you ‘delicious’. It is clear that I wasn’t concealing a weapon, or an ounce of self-worth, I was allowed to enter.
Inside, elbowing through middle-aged men in Super-dry t-shirts, I reached the centre of the herd. It was mating season. The rest of that night exists in my memory as an abstract expressionist painting. Large colourful smudges and blurred faces. In the year that has followed, I have now become a Heaven regular, and the nights move into less abstract post-expressionism. Still, no matter how often I went, a familiar face was still rather a rare sight.
Unable to fund a London summer, I took my debaucherous acts to the streets of Cardiff. There, the gay landscape was condensed to two establishments. I had gone from drinking a large pint of orange squash to sipping its sickly cordial. A night out in Cardiff is like those episodes of Friends where they don’t leave Monica’s apartment. The same ensemble cast, ridiculous situation, and an all too familiar setting. I would appear as the guest star in ‘The One with the 7 am McBreakfast in Bute Park’ followed by ‘The One with the Vomiting in the River Taff’. Not to say that these nights weren’t fun. They were, in fact, the best nights I’d had in a while, yet they did produce the worst ‘ morning-afters’ of my life. My last night in Cardiff had my parents seeing me back through the front door at 8am in a bright pink fur jacket and jumping into bed with them.
My main grievance with Cardiff was its incestuous nature, and there one club making the social-scape unavoidably intricately intermingled. Never before had I walked into a smoking area where all my recent tinder-matches were all standing neatly in a row. In Cardiff, one really did have to be ‘scene’ to be seen.
In returning to London after my summer, I was excited to rejoin the queue to Heaven and writhe in the sweaty crowd, yet a part of me still longed for the familiar faces that the raise of pulse Cardiff provided. I could not be as pessimistic as George Orwell in 1948, of the year 1984, which only held horror in George Michael, telling you to wake him up before you go-go.
I could only hope that in 2061, being 64 that I’m not still traipsing through some sticky gay club, still looking for mister ‘right-now’.
Ifan Llewelyn 