SUGGESTED OUTLINE/SCRIPT FOR A BBC RADIO PROGRAMME CALLED 'LIFE-CHANGING'

My life changed at the age of 40 in 1981 at an exhibition of the works of Salvador Dalí at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Up to that time I had no real understanding of my sexuality. As a little boy of around 5, little girls and I explored each other’s hidden parts. Little boys and I compared our willies. I thought girls had more interesting privates.

But after this precociousness my sexuality did not progress. There were mutual masturbations in the bushes at school, but as a youth I was not interested in meeting girls. I preferred to stay at home and read or play the classical music I had discovered. Sibelius was a revelation.

As a student I worked in the summer at an International Student Hostel in Copenhagen, where I learned Danish and was close to a few other girls also working there. They paired off with other rather macho types, and eventually I approached an unattached Copenhagener whom I found very pleasant and reassuring to be with. Slowly, I fell in love with her.

The following year I collected my student grant for the Michaelmas term and went off by merchant vessel round the stormy north of Scotland to Copenhagen. I was seasick.
I stayed with my first and only girl-friend, Lone, for a while, and then went to an islet off Bornholm in the Baltic to stay with a schoolteacher friend (also working in summer at the Hostel). Lone came to visit, and, after I had known her for over a year, she permitted me to make love with her...or rather, since I was somewhat inept and a very delayed ejaculator, she instructed me.

I fell in love with making long, slow (very slow) love. We each travelled severally between Copenhagen and Christianø, and life was wonderful, especially during the big freeze of 1962 when the sea froze. I had no money, of course. I was trying to write short stories.

The following two summers we both worked again at the student hostel. In September 1964 I invited my best friend in Belfast to come and visit...and, guess what! he replaced me in Lone’s affections. I returned to Ireland in a state of shock and sadness which lasted for years, and was only relieved by my adopting a beautiful dog from the Animal Shelter in Belfast, after moving into a free ‘peppercorn-rent’ National Trust cottage (without electricity or bathroom) on the edge of Belfast. I resumed my university studies.

From 1965 to 1981 I had no 'love-life' apart from my beautiful bitch, nor ‘sex-life’. I had one or two not-very-satisfactory intimate encounters with women, and many extremely unsatisfactory encounters with very unappealing men whom I picked up in public conveniences and usually took home on the back of my scooter.

In the late seventies I started to take advantage of £5 standby flights to London and cheap cross-channel deals by ferry or hovercraft to Paris. I had the use of one friend’s flat in Bayswater and another friend’s pied-à-terre in Paris.

And so I found myself bursting to pee in the tiny, totally-inadequate and crowded men’s toilets on the ground floor of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. A very handsome, bearded man stood beside me. He made facial signals and we left together for the pied-à-terre about 10 minutes away. He was my life-changer.
Firstly, he was the first queer man with a beard whom I had ever met. Most of my encounters had been with unattractive, rather sad and desperate men. I had worn a beard since I left school in 1959. They were very rare in those days and attracted unfavourable comment, for example, Fungus-face. I had some bearded friends, but they were straight and I liked their girlfriends.

Secondly, he told me that I had a beautiful body. I had never regarded it as anything except skeletal, of the unmuscular ‘weedy’ type. We stayed together for a few days. He was a dancer with the Merce Cunningham troupe on tour in Europe. He went off to Germany with them. I went back to my rural county Down farmhouse in a state of elation. A week or two later he came to visit. He told me about gay bars, of which I was totally ignorant.

I went to London with him, where he took a plane back to the States. He was a Chicano from San Antonio, Texas, and lived part of the time in Cuernavaca, near Mexico City. After he left I went to ‘my first’ gay bar at Notting Hill Gate. It was a revelation. Until that moment I had been weedily, wussily nervous of groups of men (except when they were standing sadly and unthreateningly in conveniences). I associated them with the rugger bullies who had pissed on my pinned-down body at school, two of whom later played for Ireland. I never went to pubs, I never even went to fish-and-chip shops.

But within minutes of entering my first gay bar I attracted appreciative looks. This was like a beautiful rebirth. I felt like a very slim Poseidon rising from the waves.
The third time I went to The Champion at Notting Hill Gate I was propositioned by a handsome, hairy bearded man...with whom, the next morning, I went to Paris for a week. It was a fling, which was sad for the tender romantic who had again fallen in love...or rather, infatuation.

After this I had liaisons short and long with bearded men I encountered in Belfast, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Florence and Pisa. I visited a famous sauna in Paris where sensational orgies took place. I cruised often in the café-bar Le Central in the Marais at the time that area was being gentrified, mainly by gay men.
Though demophobic I even went to the famous gay Heaven on Leicester Square in London, a sort of rave venue before raves; I wore ear-plugs and thought of Chopin.

But I was introduced to Pink Floyd, J-M Jarre, Klaus Schulze and other then-modern musicians. A lover of traditional jazz and blues I discovered 'trans-cultural' African and Maghrebien Jazz Fusion. In Paris and Amsterdam I was plunged deeply into Indian and Iranian classical music...and music from all over the world, of which I had had only a taste from the BBC.

Through Bearded-gay Newsletters, men from Bern, Basel, Cambridge, Vinci, Dublin, Norwich, Le Havre, Paris and Crècy-la-Bataille visited me in my rural idyll, where sometimes we picked magic mushrooms, and always visited some of the many splendid megaliths (tombs, stone circles, stone-rows) of north-eastern Ireland. Many are listed in the address book which I have had since 1960, when, like André Gide, I was approached by a fisherman on the beach at Sousse, Tunisia.

I even managed to attract some rare non-white men, which gave me an extra thrill because I have, since childhood, always regretted my sickly pale colour, and don’t really appreciate it in others.
In Italy I was a Big Hit because I looked like Jesus or St Francis. When sensuality and religion combine, there’s no stopping the passion.

These encounters were not in pursuit of Sexual Release or ‘hygiene’, but a search for a Pal. I had no brothers or siblings. My cousins avoided me, the little bastard. My father was, allegedly, an RAF pilot killed in the war. (I found out through Ancestry last year that he lived until 1995, a married man who produced half-brothers.)

This was during the arrival of AIDS, about which I was not duly concerned since I never engaged in penetration. I was much more interested in hugs and cuddles and rubbings and erotic wrestling and para-sexual activity, always involving breaks for wine and nibbles...or dinner. Some ‘sessions’ lasted for hours or even days.

Now I’m over eighty, and my cruising days are long over. I live alone in rural France, but am visited frequently by my ‘buddy’ of over 30 years, who now lives in Ireland. We have always lived apart, and so have never had time to oppress each other. Very rarely, I visit a queer man approaching my own age, and share food and other pleasant sensations.
I am very grateful to the Mexican-American Gregorio whom I met at the Dalí exhibition (and only once since) and who in a sensual sense raised me from the dead.

Practising Howling

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