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VINTAGE
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Copyright © Derek Jarman 1992
Derek Jarman has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Hutchinson in 1992
First published in Vintage in 1993
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Spanning his entire life and divided into decades from the forties to the nineties, this book brings together Jarman’s poetry, prose, memoirs, photographs and film transcripts and includes newspaper extracts on aspects of gay culture. The result is a rounded portrait of homosexuality through the twentieth century seen through a fiercely personal perspective.
At Your Own Risk is angry, entertaining and humane, both a powerful argument against homophobia and a wild celebration of an individual’s sexuality and freedom.
Derek Jarman’s creativity spanned decades and genres – painter, theatre designer, director, film maker, writer and gardener.
From his first one-man show at the Lisson Gallery in 1969; set designs and costumes for the theatre and ballet (Jazz Calendar with Frederick Ashton at Covent Garden, Don Giovanni with John Gielgud at the London Coliseum, The Rake’s Progress with Ken Russell at Teatro Communale, Florence); production design for Ken Russell’s films The Devils and Savage Messiah; through his own films in super-8 before working on features: Sebastine (1976), Jubilee (1978), The Tempest (1979), The Angelic Conversation (1985), Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987), War Requiem (1989), The Garden (1990), Edward II (1991), Wittgenstein (1993), and Blue (1993); to directing pop-videos and live performances for Pet Shop Boys and Suede.
His paintings – for which he was a Turner Prize nominee in 1986 – have been exhibited world-wide.
His garden surrounding the fisherman’s cottage in Dungeness where he spent the last years of his life remains a site of awe and pilgrimage to fans and newcomers to Jarman’s singular vision.
His publications include: Dancing Ledge (1984), Kicking the Pricks (1987), Modern Nature (1991), At Your Own Risk (1992), Chroma (1994), Derek Jarman’s Garden (1995).
Dancing Ledge
The Last of England
Modern Nature
Editor: Michael Christie. Research and conversations: Chris Woods. Design: Derek Westwood.
I would like to thank: Pascal Brannan, Paul Burston, Dr. Matthew Helbert, Neil McKenna, Bob Mellors, Malcolm Sutherland, Peter Tatchell, and my friend H.B. (who thought of the title), for all their help.
The extract from Ruling Passions by Tom Driberg is reproduced by kind permission from Quartet and the Estate.
Alexander Walker’s review of Edward II in The Evening Standard, and subsequent correspondence, reproduced by permission of Alexander Walker and The Evening Standard.
I would also like to thank Capital Gay and The Pink Paper for permission to reproduce headlines and extracts.
Derek Jarman
January 1992
The cold night breeze is up. It’s two hours since you went to bed. I pick my way through the wood in the shimmering orange light, over the dead autumn leaves in their ghostly marbled pattern.
The blue smoke from the bonfire drifts in the branches, silhouetted against the clear winter night. A jet roars through the cold stars. I hug myself to keep warm.
At the fire’s edge strangers stand motionless. The trunk of a great tree burns, an open book where the saw has cut five fiery wounds. Ember pages shoot showers of sparks high into the night. My mind flows with the blue flames that flicker across the wood. Fire hisses the winter death of the great tree, the circles of its years reduced to ash. We are all dying here with the old tree, shedding its years to warm us.
A man strikes a light for himself in the night when his sight is quenched. Living, he touches the dead in his sleep. Waking, he touches the sleeper.
– Heraclitus
Landscapes of time, place, memory, imagined landscapes. At Your Own Risk recalls the landscapes you were warned off: Private Property, Trespassers will be Prosecuted; the fence you jumped, the wall you scaled, fear and elation, the guard dogs and police in the shrubbery, the byways, bylaws, do’s and don’ts, Keep Out, Danger, get lost, shadowland, pretty boys, pretty police who shoved their cocks in your face and arrested you in fear.
Last night was the first night of winter. We flew a kite round the moon, loop-the-loop, the leaves were falling off the trees.
I don’t know how long I spent there. My mind was racing. I was writing my book in the dark, angrily.
Squadron-Leader L. E. Jarman, R.A.F., and Miss E. E. Puttock.
The marriage arranged between Squadron-Leader Lancelot Elworthy Jarman, R.A.F., second son of Mr. and Mrs. H. E. Jarman, of Christchurch, New Zealand, and Elizabeth Evelyn (Betty), daughter of the late Harry Litten Puttock, of Calcutta, and Mrs. Puttock, of Northwood, will take place quietly at Holy Trinity Church, Northwood, on March 31, at 2 p.m. All friends are welcome at the church.
I was born on the 31 January 1942 at seven thirty in the morning at the Royal Victoria Nursing Home in Northwood.
For the first twenty-five years of my life I lived as a criminal, and the next twenty-five were spent as a second-class citizen, deprived of equality and human rights. No right to adopt children – and if I had children, I could be declared an unfit parent; illegal in the military; an age of consent of twenty-one; no right of inheritance; no right of access to a loved one; no right to public affection; no right to an unbiased education; no legal sanction of my relationships and no right to marry. These restrictions subtly deprived me of my freedom. It seemed unthinkable it could be any other way, so we all accepted this.
In ancient Rome, I could have married a boy; but in the way that ideals seem to become their shadows, love came only to be accepted within marriage. Since we could not be married, we could not fall in love. Since we could not fall in love, we were not loved.
The sin of the people of Sodom was a lack of hospitality – they rejected God’s angels and for this they were punished. The myth of sexual licence is a myth. The lack of hospitality that we have received in my lifetime reveals a true Sodom in the institutions of my country.
Heterosoc, imprisoned by monogamy in the ruins of romantic love, is quite dumbfounded when faced with our plurality. We are the 11,000 angels dancing on the head of a pin.
My book is a series of introductions to matters and agendas unfinished. Like memory, it has gaps, amnesia, fragments of past, fractured present.
To those who have not lived it, it might appear opaque; those of us who are living it will recognise the map.
My doctor says people have said to him that PWAs whom he has also treated for venereal disease, should be locked up – as they do in Havana.
The epidemic has spawned more hatred – we were locked in prison before it started, now we are to be placed in isolation. Am I to believe I am the delinquent you say I am? Or do I throw it back in your face?
How can I be open and honest if defenders of an outdated morality are not prepared to undertake a rudimentary re-evaluation of their prejudice, because to do so forces them to talk of matters they are unwilling to address?
Yet, how can I talk about responsibility when there is no information on these matters, and none of our political parties will give a lead?
How can the young express their sexuality openly and safely when the age of consent is 21?
This book, you can be certain, will not be in the school library. Youth will be told it isn’t ‘normal’. Their elders, the pillars of society, will sooner see them die than be happy.
The problem of so much of the writing about this epidemic is the absence of the author. How would the much-criticised article ‘Gay Abandon’ in the Guardian have read if it were in the first person?
‘I am maladjusted’, ‘I am the end of the line.’
It is no good alerting the ‘public’ whilst distancing yourself.
I have frequently been stopped by anguished young men, some still in school, who have confided they are HIV+. I am usually the first person they have told. There is so little support in the home.
They and I have had to struggle with a lack of understanding; have had to piece together a life under a great dark cloud of censure and ignorance. They and I are frightened of you, ourselves and the virus.
Five years ago in 1986, I walked into a crowded room aware that everyone knew my HIV status. Should I kiss old friends on the cheek? They might not yet know they could come to no harm.
Years passed, I strove for the celibacy of a saint. Around me people were enjoying themselves. They didn’t seem prepared to take the epidemic on board, left that to us. We were given so much practical advice, but so little understanding. Understanding does not appear on the drugs list, but is as vital as a hospital drip.
Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea.
Understand that your morality is not law.
Understand that we are you.
Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.
Sexual encounters were nice in the Palace, nasty in the park.
I was once given a blow-job by a male nurse while attending a clap clinic, he said: ‘I’ll just have to give myself a jab, but it’s worth it’.
I am the man who kissed in that Guardian photograph which was captioned ‘Kiss of death?’ If that was the way that paper saw me, what hope had I in the tabloids?
I kissed him. He said: ‘Suck my cock – you have the dick of death’.
‘Let me fuck you’
‘O.K.’
Death Fuck – What a great splash for the tabloids.
The young doctor who told me this morning I was a carrier of the AIDS virus was visibly distressed. I smiled and told her not to worry, I had never liked Christmas. I had put on my dark black overcoat to walk to the hospital. Wearing it at my father’s funeral a few weeks ago I looked more sombre than the undertakers. It gave me confidence for this meeting.
As I walked up the freezing street against the tide of Christmas shoppers I thought it was inconceivable I could have avoided the virus, though I had avoided the test for as long as was decently possible. Earlier this year the doctor had suggested I took it; at the time I was coping with the furore that the showing of Jubilee on Channel 4 had stirred up: 4am death threats on the phone. I felt insecure. I saw the news leaked to the Sun and the Star with visions of ending up as part of the daily diet of terror that sells these malevolent and jaundiced newspapers.
It was almost with relief that I listened to the doctor’s catalogue of do’s and don’ts – shaving, hairdressing, all the little details (soap and water it seemed eliminated the virus outside the body) – but for all of medicine you might as well just wash your mouth out with carbolic.
Walking back down Tottenham Court Road from the hospital, I thought how fortunate to be forewarned so that one can wind one’s life up in an orderly fashion. The finality of it seemed attractive.
As I joined the crowds at Oxford Street, I thought – could my perception of all this change, could I fall in love with it again as I did when I left home early in the sixties? The sun came out briefly, the thin wintry sun, so low in the sky it blinds you. The wind seemed colder than ever. I stopped at the stationer’s and bought a daybook for 1987 and a scarlet form to write out a will.
We wandered from the path and got lost in the woods. He stopped, turned and put his arms round me. He had a day’s growth, avoided a kiss, undid his jeans and slipped out of them.
‘Put on a condom and fuck me.’
‘OK’ I said knowing that I would never make it; I couldn’t get a hard-on for the life of me in this cold. I held him against a tree: young, stocky and firmly built. If only things were different. Overwhelmed with frustration I said:
‘I’m sorry I can’t fuck you, but I couldn’t think of anything sweeter.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m HIV+, and it’s too much of a risk, I can’t get a hard-on, let alone put a condom on in this cold.’ The cold was a good excuse.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Duncan.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-three … You’re the first person who has told me he was HIV+.’
‘Well, you should know the risk. How often do you come here?’
‘Often. I love being fucked … You’re really funny.’
We stayed there, holding each other for several minutes; then I said,
‘I haven’t a clue where I am. Could you show me the way back?’ He did.
‘All the best,’ I said as we parted.
‘Thanks’.
The painter Duncan Grant told my friend Simon that he cruised the Heath at the turn of the century.
The Heath no more belongs to the people of Hampstead than the Palace of Westminster belongs to the people of Westminster.
The death penalty for buggery was abandoned after 1836, abolished in 1861 in England, and in 1889 in Scotland, to be replaced by penal servitude of between ten years and life.
In 1885, the La Bouchere amendment criminalised all homosexual acts in public or private which resulted in a series of trials – the most famous of which is that of Oscar Wilde. It wasn’t until 1967 that this legislation was repealed.
Queerbashing is institutionalised in every walk of British life; if it wasn’t the newspapers couldn’t make capital out of it.
In a nation of the sexually paralysed …
There are no Queer judges.
No Queer churchmen.
No Queers in the City.
No Queers in the Forces.
No Queers in the Lords.
One MP.
One sportsman.
Three pop stars.
Six theatre queens.
Eighteen signatories to a letter in the Guardian.
Myself.
… and a few friends.
Why should I drag myself into all this? If I remained silent like the rest of them I could remain the likeable one.
Overheard in a bar:
‘What happened to Derek Jarman?’
‘The virus attacked his brain and he saw clearly, dear.’
Shall I begin on the day that I was overwhelmed by guilt? I had survived. So many of my friends caved in under the hate; I have known men to die for love but more to die for hate. As the years passed, I saw in the questioner’s eyes the frustrations of coming to terms with life; are you still here? Some were brutally frank: ‘When are you going to die?’
Didn’t you know I died years ago with David and Terry, Howard, the two Pauls. This is my ghostly presence, my ghostly eye. ‘I had AIDS last year;’ I said with a smile and they looked at me as if I was treating their tragedy flippantly. ‘Oh yes, I had AIDS last year. Have you had it?’
Now it doesn’t matter when I die, for I have survived.
‘What are you doing next, Mr. Jarman?’ What comes after, after, after, that’s the problem when you survive.
Now I understand my father very well. I can feel for him. He flew those bombing missions at the war’s height and after that his focus blurred in the slough of the everyday. Why did you fight for this grey street, Dad? This small office? This fax? This computer?
It’s been five years now and I still return to the ABC of HIV. Talk of condoms, safe, safer, safest sex again and again. The papers act delinquent, put the clock back to sell a fear, if you open up to them sure enough they’ll shoot you down. Well, we knew that would happen.
I was walking along Princes Street towards my hotel. The war was still on, and the whole city was blacked out. In such dim lighting as there was, one could just make out the forms of passers-by – and I bumped into a tall figure in a foreign naval uniform. One of us struck a match to light cigarettes.
He was a Norwegian sailor, typically Scandinavian in appearance, flaxen-haired and smilingly attractive. He may have had a few drinks too: he was eager for anything, and perhaps lonely (loneliness is as strong an incentive, often, as lust).
I recalled that there was an air-raid shelter under the gardens a few yards from where we were standing. Neither of us could speak the other’s language, but he readily came down to the shelter with me.
Down there it was completely dark, but another match showed a bench running along one side of the shelter …
In a matter of seconds he had slipped his trousers half-way down, and was sitting on the bench, leaning well back. We embraced and kissed, warmly enough, but my interest was concentrated lower down, on a long, uncircumcised, and tapering, but rock-hard erection; and I was soon on my knees. Too concentrated, and too soon perhaps; for in a few moments the stillness of the shelter was broken by a terrifying sound – the crunching, very near at hand, of boots on the gravelled floor. Instantly the blinding light of a torch shone full on us, and a deep Scottish voice was baying, in a tone of angry disgust: ‘Och, ye bastards – ye dirty pair o’ whoors …’ No concealment was possible … and I stood up, to confront a young Scottish policeman … with an older Special Constable lurking behind him.
– RULING PASSIONS, TOM DRIBERG
There was always a mythic past, for my generation it was the war. My elders told me of their sexual experiences in the war, how liberating it had been. It was a world that depended on economic disadvantage; the soldiers and the sailors were prepared to spend a night with them for ten bob, until the government upped the pay of the forces and ended National Service.
The wild stories I heard when I came to London were about guardsmen and sailors – violations of Heterosoc. There were guardsmen’s pubs. You had to be middle-aged and rich in that world.
In Rome, years later, I met a man who had an order with the local barracks. The Duty Sergeant used to send him four or five young conscripts, he’d take their clothes off and put them into immaculate white dressing gowns and cook for them. ‘Which one do you like Derek?’ I was tongue-tied.
Italy was like that. I was ‘raffled’ by a group of young conscripts in Ischia; and won by a delightful boy from Sicily who, as he came all over me, remarked that he was returning home to get married in a few days.
There were scandals involving the Guards, even as recently as the eighties. The boys who guarded the Bank of England were known as ‘the bum boys’. The Guards were run as rent boys for the privileged, members of parliament and the aristocracy. The Queers who you never met.
These people weren’t ‘out’. They were never seen in the bars. As a young MP, Harold Macmillan – who was expelled from Eton for an ‘indiscretion’ – used to spend nights at the Jermyn Street Baths; anyone who went to them would have been propositioned during the course of an evening. I went there myself on two or three occasions. They were a well-known hangout: dormitory beds and steam rooms full of guardsmen cruising.
There was a link between the military and rent. Waterloo Station was very cruisy in the fifties. The sailors who were Queer or wanted to make a few bob used to miss the last trains back to Portsmouth and catch the milk train after sex with a punter early in the morning. Class was central to these liaisons.
Churchill remarked the traditions of the Navy were rum, mutiny and sodomy.
The military have always been Queer, at least the best of them: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Richard the Lionheart, Fredrick the Great, Gordon, Kitchener, Mountbatten, and Alexander of Tunis
When I was 23, I spent a summer in Greece. One night in Rhodes, rather lost, I sat on the quay watching local lads catch octopus.
Several ships of the Greek Navy were in port. A young Lieutenant in immaculate white accompanied by a regular sailor stopped and asked me where I was from.
When I told him I was from England, he said: ‘Would you like to hear the real Greek music?’
He and his friend took me to a small flat near the covered market and put bazouki music on the gramophone. The sailor brewed strong coffee and brought sweet cakes and served them to us quite formally. Then he disappeared behind a screen and emerged with a piece of silver chiffon spangled with silver stars with which he danced.
Men, I learnt, are surprisingly good at striptease. When he had finished he put the screen around us. I fucked the arse off the Lieutenant and afterwards he asked me if all English boys had cocks like mine.
The two of them took me to a bar where their mates were dancing with each other and threw me into this scrum. I would have loved to have spent the night with them but had to get back to the YMCA.
God declared that the earth was flat,
but Galileo put an end to that.
Eve’s apple fell into Newton’s bed,
Where a lad named Adam lost his head.
Newton’s lad,
Bit the cox’s pippin,
As he was strippin’.
Apple pie corners on Newton’s bed,
Apple-cheeked Adam giving head.
Adam the apple of Isaac’s eye,
Gravity’s bent as apple pie.
Lucca said the English had the most backward attitude to homosexuality in Europe. They were obsessed by it; an obsession that was theological, pre-scientific. This was all the more ironic as Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics, was homosexual – he ate his apple with some bright lad.
Nowadays, there is no voice that the oligarchy will listen to. No Byron. After fourteen years living in this country he said he no longer believed in our democracy, it was only the English who were under the illusion they lived in a free society. Whatever advantage they had in the past, the rest of the world had passed by.
An old and decadent oligarchy creaking under the weight of vacuous institutions – look at the monarchy puffed up by the stale air of the tabloids, the whole country is so awry. It is, he observed, Europe’s madhouse, poor, derelict, and deprived; where the rulers batten on an ignorant and regressive working-class who are fed with the most tawdry material promises; so insular that no-one is able to see the shit-house this country has become.
What’s left? Not even a theatre; the apology that has taken its place is populated by the middle-classes with their strangled vowels. No English man or woman could play Antony and Cleopatra; passion and love were quite beyond them, they could never discard their suburban subservience. Antony and Cleopatra would always be mere John and Norma.
In 1946, my father was posted to Italy. Overnight home was transformed from the bleak wartime married quarters with their coke stoves and mildew to a villa on Lake Maggiore.
Villa Zuassa had beautiful gardens. There I chased lizards among the enormous golden pumpkins that grew along the gravel paths, played hide-and-seek in alleys banked with camelias, or crept off to the gatehouse where a little old lady in the blackest mourning fed armies of silkworms on trays in the gloom of her front room. She would give me caterpillars and cocoons to take home, and I would be driven back through the woods by her grandson Davide on the handlebars of his bike. He would stop and hoist me on his shoulders to pick a particular flower.
Davide was my first love and the love was returned. He stripped off and rowed me on the lake as summer storms blew in from the mountains. This love was my great secret. If only this innocent idyll could have continued. But after a brief summer we left for Rome.