Looking back it does seem like I was twisting and turning like a serpent on the spit trying to avoid making any mention of gender whenever the subject of romance came up in my blog. Whatever the reason, the cat’s out of the bag now because none of the following would be relevant without context. The date I mentioned last month has grown into a relationship. It’s with a guy and his name is Phoenix. Honest to Goddess, it is.
The reason behind this confession? I just attended my first Gay Pride. And yes, it’s as crammed with all the jockstraps and fake eyelashes you would imagine. In the event, I was actually quite intrigued by all the goings-on, moreso than Phoenix at least, who confessed after a few hours that the blatant nature of it all had him out of sorts. He was born in Cyprus and raised in suburban Essex so that is understandable. Still, that he felt, in his own words “slightly homophobic” is doubly ironic because he isn’t exactly an icon of machismo himself. Pink skinny jeans, mesh tank tops, I’ve seen him wear them all. He’s even counter-acted my natural slouchy hippie instincts to hoist me in a new pair of trousers, throw on a red shirt and complete the look with a pair of sparkly devil horns. The tail was a bit much but I did take the plastic pitchfork. Ah well, if you’re going to be camp Gay Pride is probably the time and place to do it.
It is perhaps a side-effect, and a terrible one, of the fact that many young gayers find little love at home that they tend to accept it in dubious forms. What really brought this message home for me was something that happened as the day wound to an end and most of the revellers on Trafalgar Square had begun to make their way to the darkrooms and saunas. There was a group of young people (at 23 I’ve now reached an age where I can refer to others as ‘young people’ and it freaks me out) sitting in front of us on the Square steps watching the live final episode of the current series of once-a-cult-phenomenon sci-fi Doctor Who, Britain’s answer to Star Trek (although it started three years earlier so really it’s the Trekkies who are indebted), which is currently being run by one of the homosexualist persuasion, hence the link. These youngsters were accosted by a somewhat delirous man well into his fourties, sweaty, bronzed, wearing inappropriate white shorts and an even more inappropriate leer. He came to sit next to one of the fey younglings, put an arm around him, eventually even licked his face. This went on for about ten minutes before the guy left. From overheard conversation afterwards it became clear the kids had no idea who he was. And yet the fresh-faced 18 year old had let him do his thing and – somehow worse in my mind – his four friends had done nothing to help, not even the two rather fierce-looking fag hags. “How is that possible?” I asked Phoenix, astounded. “It’s the way it goes,” he said wearily. “That’s what it’s all about.”
When Nelson Mandela leads a civil rights march he’ll be followed by black men and women in national dress, playing djembees and singing African songs. And we clap along, donate a few pounds and feel good about ourselves. But Gay Pride is not about race or cultural freedom, although that last point can be argued with, but about sex. So of course people are going to be swinging their dicks around. The gay community, if it exists at all, is held together by a shared desire to combine bits of genitalia that don’t go together for the purposes of the majority. Not much to base a society on. Are thongs, boas and a dash of glitter national dress? They’re certainly important to an element of what I will for now still grudgingly call the gay community, but definitely not for everyone. Not even for Phoenix, who bleaches his hair and wears a sparkly faux-diamond stud of his first initial in one ear. Drag and scene queens have their place, and I will forever support their right to be there, but next year I’d like to see a more equal representation for the Wildean aesthete, the civilly-unioned luvvie, and the boy-next-door.
It’s a couple of days later, and Phoenix has taken me out to – what else? – see a musical. It’s The Lord Of The Rings on stage. At times tear-in-eyes perfect, at others so inconceivably wrong it makes one wonder whether it’s creators even like Tolkien at all. The music and visual effects were not to be faulted – Hobbits ran after fireflies, Galadriel descended from the heavens, the stage rose from the ground and a strong wind blew ash made of paper strips into the audience at the Balrog’s entrance. Costumes varied from the glorious, like Galadriel’s fragile starlight dress, to the garish, like the Flash Gordon inspired golden loincloths of the Lothlorien guards. Rosie even potters around with a modern umbrella, and the men in Bree look like they’ve wandered in from the set of Gangs Of New York.
The writing was teeth-gratingly bad whenever it needlessly diverged from Tolkien’s original words, with some scenes absolutely stripped of pathos by the lacklustre performances (they even cut Frodo’s iconic “Here at the end of all things” line). The tone was off, and at times we felt we were watching parody, so camp or, inversely, disinterested seemed the proceedings. The hobbits dismiss the sight of Nazgul on fell beasts with an almost casual air and Gollum flings himself into the Crack of Doom with such speed it makes you think he wanted it all to end as quickly as possible. Frodo and Sam make a good fist of it but they don’t have the talent (or the narrative space) to invest their relationship with the power it has in the books and films. Merry and Pippin are identical to their filmic counterparts and excellent, Saruman likewise, but Galadriel and Gandalf in particular seem to have eaten a whole ham each, constantly playing on the intensity level of the temptation by the Ring and the confrontation with the Balrog respectively. The rest of the characters are little more than ciphers, though Gimli has a beautiful elegy in Moria.
Eowyn and Faramir do not appear at all, Rohan and Gondor are conflated into one and Boromir’s father, the Steward, seems to be a mixture of Theoden and Denethor, though lacking the power of both their tragic stories. The show takes three hours. The interval’s after Gandalf’s fall in Moria, which comes halfway through the first in the book trilogy and gives some idea of what they cram in, and at what speed, in the second half. It feels more like a travelogue – the Ents appear for a cameo, the Scouring is half-heartedly attempted for two minutes, and even Tom Bombadil warrants a pointless mention, but a decent character-building song for Gollum was too much to ask for. Still, at 25 pounds for a seat four rows from the front it’s a good way to spend an evening, especially when capped off with a moonlit, hand-in-hand wander through St James’ Park afterwards.
Because I’ve got a boyfriend now. Just in case you’d forgotten.
