Because of childhood bullying I tended to shy away from any overt displays of aggression, whether in cloths or behaviour. Risk averse, I lacked self- defense skills, unsure how to assert myself. I didn't want to turn myself into a fist magnet. Still discovering who I was, there wasn't much yet to assert? I'd left the parental home for the first time the year before for an Arts Foundation Course in Hull. In my memory the defining characteristic of that period were emerging internal conflicts, the boy/man in late teenage getting to grips with managing himself and adult life in general. Frustrated to discover I was an introvert. Why couldn't I be effortlessly extrovert and turn it on like a tap? I mistook success as residing in an outgoing ebullient personality. I started doing research, absorbing Nietzsche, reading about psychology in books and magazines. R D Laing got very close attention, scouring The Divided Self and Self & Other, looking for clues to why I was like I was. I seemed to believe something was either missing or innately wrong with me.
In Leeds a new lifestyle, more representative of me and my interests, was forming. For the first time I was surrounded by more like minded 'Arty' friends. Adopting, however mildly, a few street punk tropes placed a tentative toe into another way of being me. Underneath I remained the rather mild mannered chap I was before, but with punkish trimmings thrilling around the edges. I wanted to be a firmer, stronger individual. Punk offered a way to outwardly display that. Perhaps this would keep the thugs at bay.
Look into the soft moons of my eyes, there is no attitude problem to be read there, just the open iris of vulnerability. I'm 19, with a young man's body, slim, a wee bit of tummy fat, not particularly fit, you'd be hard put to find anything resembling bulk or muscle mass. But then this is the seventies, and my type of male body was common place, almost the default for the majority of wiry young lads. Developing vein bulging muscles and a firm ribbed washboard of abs was then thought to be weird, baffling behaviour. Only vain self obsessed people would do such a thing to themselves. Muscle men were novelty acts on TV variety shows twitching their biceps in time to 'Wheels Cha Cha' whilst sprayed in silver metallic paint. It was all a bit gross. Well ripped men inhabited super hero comics or if you knew of them, the gay drawings of Tom of Finland. But most men in my Lincolnshire village drank far too much beer to be anything other than chubby hunks, with flabby love handles.
The well sculpted body form, is not a new thing, but in recent years its started to produce an unhealthy preoccupation in younger men. Teenage boys, much younger than I was in this photo, are now obtaining and using body enhancing steroids. The pressures on them to look a particular way are immense. Visual provocations and reminders bombard them. Every male film star looks like they were carved out of stone by the divine hands of gods. These days we understand the link between the way women are portrayed in the media, expectations of who and what they're meant to be like. This body fascism has broadened to incorporate men, with the rise of this pumped up hyper male. That it is raising no huge concern, is that its happening to men. Men are supposed to not be weak, to be physically strong and overtly express their power through their physique, so this is just business as usual, isn't it? But improved physical health is not being matched by improved mental health. So 25% of people with body dysmorphia are male, hospital admissions for men with eating disorders have doubled in the last eight years, not to mention the escalating mental heath and suicide crisis in men?
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| Dwayne Johnson |
You are a young lad living in a country backwater, average looking, average in the intelligence and charm department. How will you succeed in relationships, in the world, in a career, with life? Perhaps emulating Dwayne Johnson or any other Hollywood chunk of tanned muscle, might mean you feel better, more confident about yourself. Not everyone inherits the looks of a suave dashing man. Yet even an ugly looking brute with a broken nose can obtain a hot body. Go on, get fit, be healthy, take back control of your destiny, forget the face or personality let your body be the babe magnet. Its not hard to spot guys who are addicted to the gym. They are built like leather sofas with a pea sized head, shaved smooth perched on top.
So men tend to massively overcompensate, using their external bodily appearance, their flesh and muscle as mental armour. The same sad masculine story, build a body impregnable to break ins, so no one discovers that beneath the Rambo lies Bambi, characterised by a lack of confidence, weak self knowledge and arrested emotional development. There are many many ways to live a healthy fulfilled life, being built like Hercules is not necessarily at the top of the list.
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| Heracles |
Armour once taken off, is a clanking, cold, hard shell, a void echoing from within. Men appear to feel safer when soldered up in a restrictive metallic casing, whether literally or as a metaphor for physique. Tattoos are a decorative addition to contemporary body armour, displaying the allegiances and insignia of urban tribes. Its a war paint permanently drawn on the skin, shielding you from evil, protecting in the midst of clashes over territory in our towns and cities.
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| Poster image of Hitler wearing armour |
Masculine armour, though usually physically manifested, does have its mental and spiritual correlates. The words we chose to use can be armour. The beliefs we hold can be armour. The politics we espouse can be armour. Our public persona can be armour. The things we own, our possessions can be armour. Some people use their spouses as armour. Anything can be used as a means of protection, of displaying strength. Projecting an unyielding hardness is a masculine addiction. We demand it of our politicians, whether male or female. Our leaders, like our country, must be strong, stable and well defended. Pull up the drawbridge, prevent invasive foreigners from getting in. Men are like nations, islands unto themselves. You wear armour if you're feeling vulnerable. Armour protects, but does so by cutting you off from the outside world. Armour isolates. When wearing armour you're always alone.
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| Soviet Poster |
By 1976 I know I'm gay, but have not yet come out. Still faking being straight, I think I'm hiding in plain sight, that no one sees this side of me, which was doubtful actually. An art college is probably 'the' place to find yourself regularly in the company of a galaxy of oddballs and queens of all shapes, sizes and outrage. There was Big Joe, well over six and a half foot tall, a massive hulk built like a concrete wall, wearing day glo hot pants, makeup, necklaces, earrings, a shoulder bag akimbo, a voice loud and proudly effeminate. Simultaneously both provocative and a warning. I found people like him inspiring. they gave me confidence that being out as gay would not be just OK, but fun too. That it was possible to be honest and open about who I was, started here. Though I was still a few years away from coming out to friends, and over a decade from telling my family. So the momentum was slow in building.
Though 1976 was nine years after being actively gay had been decriminalised, it was still far from straightforward being an out gay man. Big Joe was attacked by a gang, he gave them what for, being mentally brave and unbowed, but he was nevertheless physically bruised. In Quentin Crisp's book The Naked Civil Servant published in 1968 and made into a TV film in 1975, he describes his life as an out gay man many decades before gay relations were legalised. Defiantly himself, despite the oppression of his time, Crisp was to become a major hero for me. Though, strangely, he could never quite bring himself to consider his homosexuality as being normal. Nevertheless he became something brilliantly arch. Defiantly individualistic, he declared everyone could do as he had done, to be true to yourself but larger than life. Crisp was critical of 'camp' because it had become a series of behavioural cliches, an affectation adopted in order to identify yourself as part of 'the oppressed group'.
" I would not wish to be shunted into a siding. The trouble with gay reservations is they breed a terrible conformity. They claim to be a place where people can be themselves but very often that involves the most boring form of camp which has nothing to do with individual style and everything to do with a fear of 'breaking ranks". *
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| Quentin Crisp in his youth |
For Crisp developing individuality in your way of being, was to find 'your style'. This 'style' blossomed out of self-understanding and required courage to live out who you really are. Regardless of whether you are gay or straight, being who you really are builds an inner strength more resilient than any outwardly constructed form of defensive armour. However, on the journey to self-knowledge, for a gay man, affecting camp has its role to play because it makes the invisible visible. There were times in the 1980's when I cranked up a camp appearance simply because it made it easier if people knew what I was without needing to be told.
I don't have any photos of myself during this 1980's phase of wearing jewellery. Acquaintances who knew me at that time, referred to me as 'Flamboyant Steve' The single pierced earlobe was becoming quite common place among men, but I decided to have both ears done. Overtime I progressed from wearing pairs of colourful studs, pink triangles, zigzag snakes, silver lizards, jade drops, to earrings closer to candelabras or tubular bells, dangling and swinging like wind chimes from my lobes. Along with a hand full of rings, this was jewellery as public power statement. My clothes didn't particularly partake in this flamboyance, they remained straightforwardly generic. Unconsciously what I seemed to be trying to communicate was that I was an ordinary guy, who also happened to be gay. Let's not sweat over the details.
There were moments of panic, when I did feel far too exposed. I worked in an art shop, in a multi-cultural district of North London, where no one was detrimental about how anyone dressed. I did tone it down when I visited my family. A few years later I become uncomfortable with anything that felt like an affectation. Did this baroque appearance really represent anything that was true about me? The earrings gradually reverted back to just studs, A decade later I wasn't wearing earrings at all. For a while jewellery had been this outward expression, a way of advertising my sexuality, my chosen form of theatrical peacock display. Gay armour, like any armour, performs this dual function as visual statement and voodoo protection.
I came out to my parents, and though they always remained appreciative and loving, they didn't talk any further with me about my life as a gay man for ten years, until I brought the matter up. They just found the whole subject too disconcerting, and may be I did too, because I hadn't talked about it either. Most gay men hold some bitterness, hidden in their being. Its the hiding, the pretending, the fear of not feeling accepted for who you naturally feel yourself to be, this is inherently difficult existentially. It can't help but dent your self view, your joie de vivre in some way. Gay banter, the bitchy cattiness towards others, though a cliche, becomes a resource that gay men call upon to fight back. It can be cruel, unkind, saying what ought to be unsayable, exposing human flaws and fallibility, to hurt, despise and ridicule. Though its frequently funny and pointed, it emerges from essentially a soured place in the heart. But you do have to laugh through the hurt, don't you?
When I became a Buddhist the negativity embedded in my speech, became an area I had to really work on. I was too prone to letting rip with the witty spur of the moment put down. By then my life had had a few stalled, a few aborted, attempts at taking a different career path and then the closing of a failing business. For ten to fifteen years following 1976 I'd wandered down a more self exploratory but often quite punishing path, of which a degree of bitterness and spite were consequences. Words became a defensive armour, to stop people coming too close and perhaps perceiving how internally fractured, at that time, I could sometimes feel myself to be.
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