Dear Alter,

Life should be a game that is for the playing (as elegantly as possible), not the winning – just like erotic intimacy. The spectrum of sanity is even wider than the spectrum of taste and smell; the spectrum of autism is much wider than the spectrum of sexuality.

A great deal of human behaviour (which is to say human destructiveness) originate in the fear of loneliness. I am fortunate in that I have very rarely felt lonely. A general contempt for one's fellow-humans (which is liberation) is very soothing as well as moderately 'empowering'.

I have the impression that in France this contempt, though not much voiced, is more common than elsewhere. My connection with France goes back to my childhood – and to my mother, whose moderate snobbery and romantic fantasies made her a Francophile. There were the dozen or so Dumas novels in the attic... She was also a fan of Somerset Maugham.

In 1952, not long after their mother's death from a stroke, my mother and aunt each inherited some money from a great-aunt in the United States who they had hardly even heard of. They decided between them to buy a car – and take a trip to the south of France. But not in the car, which was the first "people's car" in the British Isles, a post-war re-manufacturing of a pre-war, two-door basic Ford (priced at £300 I think) called the Ford Popular. It came "in any colour so long as it was black". Suddenly we had the mobility that is now taken for granted. My mother was a good driver...until the the first unheeded signs of dementia.

Hitherto, our holidays had been very low-key, as was normal in the 1940s. I don't always know whether what I remember are events, or (vague) memories of events. But I remember the bleakness of holidays with my Coventry uncle, aunt and cousins in various cold places on the rocky coast of county Antrim. There must have been good times (ah, yes, I remember the dodgems at Ballycastle!) but mostly I remember being cold a lot of the time. I (alongwith my two cousins) was eventually taught to swim by my macho uncle – in the unappealing waves that thundered on Ballycastle beach and in a surging rocky creek at Ballintoy. I have, as a consequence, not been too keen on beaches, except for walks with friends and dogs.

This uncle Mac (Matthew McAuley Weir) restrained his feelings about my origin and sissiness, but, being from Ulster, could not refrain from the same sarcasm that I was subjected to by a particularly nasty teacher at Cabin Hill school, a rare Ulsterman on the mostly-English staff by name of Victor Brennan. He also loved teasing, which is a form of baiting not so far from sarcasm. He even teased his upper middle-class, 'county' wife by loudly and crudely singing a snatch of an Irish music-hall song, altering the first line to D'ya want your auld lavvy washed down, Mrs Brown ?

But my true aunt Girlie once took me to Cornwall in the hot August of 1947 to visit friends of hers from London before the war. Their names were Flip (Philippa?) and Gert and they had bought Deer Park Farm, somewhere near the coast.(Now probably a horrible hotel-like chambres d'hôte.) Forty years later I realised that they were a gay couple. Meantime Flip had died and Girlie was still in contact with Gert, who had moved to New York. I wrote to her, too, out of a kind of solidarity, and to thank her for a wonderful summer holiday 40 years earlier. I remember whole banks of nasturtiums and their distinctive smell outside the farmhouse, buzzing with bees. I ate the flowers, not knowing for many years that the seeds are excellent substitutes for capers. During this wonderful holiday, with calves and goats to commune with, I also communed - at a sexually curious level - on top of a hay-cart with a boy my own age from the neighbouring farm. I adored the breakers on the beach at Polzeath; playing, diving and body-surfing in waves has always seemed to me much more fun than the tedium of swimming.

In the summer of 1953 all three of us made the journey to Juan-les-Pins on the Côte d'Azur, via boat and train to London, and boat and train to Paris. Then we went by bus to Nice and on to Juan les Pins. This was before modern mass travel. There were no package holidays except for the rich. There was tight control on money leaving the UK, and no-one (except of course the rich and the spivs) could take more than £20 in cash out of the Island Nation. My mother and aunt (both then referred to as my aunts) were honest and timorous. They did not tuck lovely white £5 notes in their suspender-belts. Come to think of it, I don't think they had suspender-belts also called garters; my mother never wore stockings, a source of great shame to me on "sports days" at school. I guess I echo this in having almost never worn a tie (though I have some lovely ones in Donegal tweed, in leather, in silk) since I was 18. They had to be very careful with expenditure, and eat as cheaply as possible. Travel and the hotels were paid for in English money in advance, I think. The hotel in Paris was the little Hôtel du Caire on the rue du Caire, off the rue Saint-Denis. When I started to go to Paris in the nineteen-seventies I stayed a couple of nights in the same hotel – which had not changed at all. Breakfast was still served in the bedrooms. And, by a remarkable coincidence, I was the new proprietor's first guest.

Martha (my mother) and her sister Marcella (ever in the background) on the Eiffel Tower, summer 1953.
My first decent photograph.

In those days, France still had the bowl-less (therefore seat-less) water-closets, in which you placed your feet on two porcelain piers and squatted healthily over a hole. (A few still exist in 2022, for example, in the cinema at Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val.) These were somewhat daunting, especially for my poor aunt Marcella who had "the runs" on the two-day bus-journey to Nice. At every stop she rushed out to relieve – and sometimes to clean – herself.

The hotel (Les Orangers) which was booked at Juan-les-Pins (then a charming village, now a mind-frazzlingly concreted holiday resort) was owned by a very kind Russian émigrée who was very sympathetic to our financial situation, and who I am sure charged us less than her going rate. We all slept in the same bedroom, which was no problem to me. I have never minded sharing bedrooms, and latterly beds, and I can sleep on a floor even now so long as I am warm enough. The hotel industry had hardly got going again in post-war Europe, except for the luxury places, and I am sure that the owner was happy enough to receive two-and-a-half impoverished (and exotic) Irish.

Two years later my mother scraped enough money together to send me to a summer school farther along the coast. The boys there were both French and English (plus myself) and were paired. I was paired with a quiet, beautifully olive-skinned boy from Marseille...whom I visited in Paris forty years later. It was by a much more interesting sea-shore with rocky coves – and I discovered the delights of snorkelling with borrowed goggles (not a mask which covered the nose as well as the eyes), which I did as often as I could. I still remember the beauty of little fish and weed and mica-flaked rock. This was my only love-affair with the sea, apart from a wonderful holiday with Girlie in Cornwall in the hot summer of 1947.

Twenty years later I started going to France regularly with Mattie to visit Romanesque churches for my researches into exhibitionist sculptures, which eventually were published in a book, and on my Satan in the Groin website. We greatly enjoyed our excursions around Western France, staying in little family hotels with interesting (or little) plumbing, sloping floors, wobbly stairs and tables d'hôtes. These were in contrast to the kind of purpose-built tourist-hotels my mother stayed in when she went elsewhere – usually on her own – to Cyprus, Tunisia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Iran and so on.

I made one trip alone to Paris to visit the Bibliothèque Nationale, en route to the Romanesque heaven of Poitiers. I stayed in the little Hôtel du Caire for a couple of nights. Wandering down the rue Saint-Denis on my third day, I saw a man sitting at a café table reading Gregory Bateson's esoteric Steps to an Ecology of Mind in English. I asked if I might sit at his table, and started a conversation about the book. The conversation went on, and it turned out that he was a teacher at one of the important Hautes Ecoles who had a little bachelor pad in a few hundred metres away, as well as a house close to the campus near Versailles. He said I could borrow it, because he was going back to the campus that evening. So next day I transferred to a tiny, dark, old-fashioned flat in the rue Saint-Sauveur (between the rue Saint-Denis and the rrue Montorgueil), whose toilet was shared with the flat across the landing.

That meeting changed my life. Suddenly I had free, almost bohemian, accommodation available in Paris, haunt of one of my favourite writers, Jean Rhys. My new friend Robert started visiting me in County Down every February. I joined him for trips he made house-hunting in rural France. Much later he joined me when I was house-hunting in south-western France, much farther away from Paris.

My next visit to that city was six months later, when I went to a Salvador Dalí exhibition at the Beaubourg's Centre Pompidou (a fine architectural experiment ruined inside by rampant division of great spaces) and needed to piss. The toilet facilities there are probably still lamentable. I went to the very small and crowded ground-floor set of urinals, where a number of men were obvious willy-wavers. One of these was a handsome bearded man with a beautiful face, whom I took to immediately. I winked at him and left. He joined me in the concourse. I took him to "my Paris pad" about 5 minutes' walk away, and I felt homo-erotic fusion for the first time.

This was the first queer man to attract me physically – and it was largely because of his beard, not to mention his unveiled eyes. It was a sort of 'imprinting' for me, since I immediately connected my sexuality to beards, which had not featured hitherto in my brief and primitive genital encounters. He was the first man I had ever kissed on the lips. The revelation that it caused ran like electricity down to my balls, and up again to the top of my pointed head. . Hitherto, I had flinched or turned away when a man's face came close to mine. Thereafter I kissed only bearded or moustachioed men (and dogs).

Gregorio Fritz was a charmingly forthcoming and relaxed Mexican-American from San Antonio, Texas, who was on a short tour of Europe with the Merce Cunningham modern dance company. The "troupe" was in Paris for a few days before going on to....I think....Barcelona.

Needless to say, he had a lovely lithe body. This was a novelty. In fact I had seen very few gay bodies up to that point. It was even more novel and indeed 'beyond my ken' that he declared me to be attractive to him. I had been made aware of my skeletal 'weediness' at my rugby-and-my-piss-in-your-mouth third-rate "public" (i.e. fee-paying) school in Belfast, which my mother (whom I then thought was my lone adoptive parent) innocently thought would be of benefit to me.

We kissed and licked a lot. We cooked great meals together. We laughed a lot. Like a coup de foudre came the understanding that sexual play with a man was not a sordid second-best to "real sex", but something beautiful and mutual, life-enhancing, thrilling. I became touchy-feely for the first time in my Ulster Protestant noli me tangere life. For the first time in my life my skeletal body was admired, and verbally. (A few years later I was a big hit in Siena because I look like Jesus or an emaciated saint). Even better, sodomy was not committed or attempted. I discovered to my continuing relief that arseholes did not have to be involved in erotic fun between men, though buttocks and perineums could be lovingly appreciated. I have always had the nagging thought that the anus is 'the wrong hole' to insert a penis, though I much later discovered the safe pleasure of prostate massage - especially when in a seated position on top of a sexy man with a not-too-big willy - notably "Mr Megafuck" alias the artist William McKeown, with whom 'sex' was a multisensual and sometimes laugh-out-loud delight.

I had tended to avoid anal sex because of my first painful experience on the Old Cavehill Road in Belfast. I could hardly bear the pain. Long before I met Gregorio, or Jim - it must have been around 1970 - I found myself in a comfortable North Belfast flat suddenly realising that I was going to have to receive a rather fat dick callously (or urgently) shoved into my tight little 'virgin' arsehole. I was paralysed on the one hand by fear, on the other by curiosity. This was not a good introduction to the practice which should caress and thus stimulate the prostate gland and, in turn, other parts of the body - depending on how holosensual one allows oneself to be. I gritted my teeth. I bled. In the morning I slunk off to the (mercifully nearby) house of a sweet and lovely sweet-singing young woman called Noreen, whom I met at the Folk Club on Castle Street (or was it the Lower Falls ?) – and mooned over. I went to her 'for tea and sympathy'. Fortunately her parents were on holiday, so she gave me breakfast, cotton-wool, tenderness – and a tepid bath. I was then pretty sure that I was not 'homosexual' - if homosexuality was buggery. I also fancied her long-limbed bi-boyfriend! Interestingly, I never had any fear of The Polis even though, having read Wildeblood, I knew what they could be up to. I was in much more peril from my shoplifting!

I considered in a foggy way that I had a variable sexuality, so I experienced none of the angst and misery that other (especially older) men apparently did. I could also see the funny side of willy-waving in urinals and privy-stalls. (The notes that were passed…!)

I was pretty 'tight-assed' as they say in the USA. Not to mention naif and unimaginative. I hadn't even considered the idea of kissing a man until I was 39. It wasn't until I met a laid-back, marijuana-dispensing Californian ex-hippie in London that I discovered that 'sex' with a man could be a beautiful and subtle, barely-genital, holosensual experience. This man (whose name I have no hope of remembering) very generously spent a whole day "opening me up" (as he put it) relaxing me, showing me tenderness and the sensual rather than the resistant kind of feeling induced by one of the most anti-sensual cultures the world has ever known. Thus I have, on occasion, been on the receiving end of delightful anal/prostate sex – even unprotected in the early eighties. Good, tender, playful fuckers (like William McKeown from the county Tyrone) have, however, been rare.

It wasn't until I started to look at men erotically that I realised that I had never looked at women with the 'male gaze'. I looked only at their faces, not their legs, bosoms or buttocks. Similarly with men. Less so with dogs.

My first and only female lover, Lone Bruun Beyer of Copenhagen (already mentioned). introduced me (aged 20) to the sensual whirlpool of my little nipples, the first time she permitted me to 'have deep physical intimacy' with her, several months after I somewhat hesitantly and awkwardly started our relationship. She was quiet and unassuming. She wore no make-up on her pleasant face. She had neat little breasts. She introduced me to pleasure that I had been incapable of imagining – and which, I have to say, I have never since experienced. She was passionate about Scandinavian and Danish culture, and introduced me to the mediæval Danish viser (rather like the Scottish Ballads) – but not to Danish megaliths. Her previous lover (a couple of years earlier) had been a sensual, demanding, probably-violeent hairy Tuscan called Adelchi, also bearded. (A quarter of a century later I would cavort with three sensual, hairy, bearded Tuscans in Pisa !) That connection ended badly for her – I never knew the details. Our connection likewise ended badly. It was twenty years before I found my next lover – male – who caressed my nipples with the tip of his tongue.

Thanks to the Web, I found out (in 2022) that Lone eventually went to live on the island of Bornholm,
and was on the management committee of a theatre group in 1995.

My briefly-best friend who later married her – the most grievous of the Alans in my life – directed a film for Danish TV.
It is ironic that, before I brought him to Denmark, I had shown him my little 8mm film called Promenade, featuring Lone in Amsterdam.

Lone simply broke off relations with me, appearing one afternoon to tell me she had transferred her affections. It was over fifty years later that, surfacing from the long angst of the abrupt separation, I thought that the pair had treated me badly, not coming together to tell me the devastating news. Had Alan been with Lone, I would probably not have erupted in shocked, shouting, briefly-violent despair. She would not have fled in paranoid panic to her sister in California.

Gregorio continued the tour with Merce Cunningham. I went back to Ireland "on a cloud" – by train and hovercraft and plane. He changed his air ticket and visited me in Ireland on his way back to Texas. And so I "came out" – not from a closet but from a fog of unknowing. Rather, I shot out. A whole straitjacket of timidity and inhibition started to fall off me. I took advantage of free accommodation in London and Paris to go looking for a pal or a play-pal in London and Paris. I discovered to my utter astonishment that handsome men actually fancied me. I was exhilarated. Cruiising was fun. I was very good at it, mainly because I have never much cared for pubs or the drink-culture, and I 'got down to business'. I was always attracted to men my own age or older, but tended to attract men up to twenty years younger (as Malcolm is). Men of my own generation found me somewhat alarming. Apparently good at facial signals, I looked them in the eye. Younger ones found my directness – or youthful naivety – refreshing. I met a lot of men. But I was always watching myself, somehow separate from what was going on. It was not long before I was offered pot and grass that I got fully 'into the groove', and the straitjacket of socio-sensual inhibition evaporated entirely.

The only (but quite strong) effect cannabis has on me is aphrodisiac, so I found that I was dependent on it for full erotic experience. But at the beginning it took months for me to feel any effect – taking higher and higher doses to no avail – until suddenly I broke through the barrier. Now just one or two puffs of a pipeful of local grass is enough to catapult me into the arms and groin of Eros.

I used to weep over a nineteenth century American song about a young flower-seller -

'There are many
sad and weary in this pleasant world of ours,
crying every night so dreary,
Won't you buy my pretty flowers.'

It was "this pleasant world" which got to me. I don't think it was meant sarcastically. Seventy years later, I refer to our world as The Planet of Pain.

It has a haunting tune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzVVWaIdl8s

'While the thousands pass unheeding
In the evening's waning hours;
Still she cries with tearful pleading,
Won't you buy my pretty flowers ?'

As a man whose heart has always been melted by dogs, winos, the halt and the lame, lame dogs (or ducks), bearded ladies, the legless, penisless and all who are "freaks" and rejected, I have longed to have cuddles with a hairy dwarf. One of my favourite Schubert songs is about a dwarf, and my favourite Velasquez painting is of an aristocratic "midget" who was the court jester or bufón. I also rather fancy the mediocre still-life painter Juan van der Hamen y León's painting of a dwarf simply titled Ritrato de un Enano.

The nearest I got to one was a sweet Welshman called Russell John in London who worked part-time at the venerable Coleherne pub at Earl's Court – where I cruised him eagerly. He resembled Toulouse-Lautrec, and indeed I used his body as a model for my nude portrait of the famous painter. He introduced me to the music of Jean-Michel Jarre and thus, in my forties, began my foray into floaty electronic music...Pink Floyd's Meddle and Wish you were Here...Klaus Schulz's Velvet Voyage...David Parsons...Steve Hillage...Terry Riley... At the same time, thanks to the once famous Record Exchange at Notting Hill Gate I discovered Brahms' erotic Trios, Quintet, Sextet, Sonatas and Double Concerto...and Franck's orgasmic Piano Quintet.

In my diary for 1984 is the comment that "caviar tastes of ripe, but not smelly, cock". This, presumably, adds to its value. A sequence of entries for October of the same year reads thus:

# Two letters this week from readers of my Field Guide. And six for Mark in response to "his" ad in Gai Pied to be a "domestique" in France. Lovely bright weather after storms. Pottered about and posted letters in Strangford [nearby seaside village mentioned in Boccaccio's Decameron (2nd day, 8th story)].

# Up to Belfast on motorbike – thence To airport. Flew to London with Joan Newmann. Magic. To Mark's, then to dinner with friends of his in Hampstead. Thence to David's for a cuddly night.

# To Mark's in morning. Don 3 p.m. Cambridge Circus. He arrived with shaven-headed Frank from way back. More magic. To Dennis for delicious and elaborate dinner – then back to David for cuddles.

# To Don's at Holloway. Then to Batsfords [publisher]. Useful afternoon. Text and pictures of "Sex and Sin on Mediæval Churches" accepted with enthusiasm. With Don to David's where Don made an Anthony-ish dinner. Nice Crozes-Hermitage. Dessert of David's "Stuffed Monkeys"(a delicious Yiddish dish) with sour cream.

# To Don's at Holloway, then to London Apprentice and on to Frank Ainsworth's. Lovely man, lovely flat, good photographer, very exciting sex. Matisse and Koudelka exhibitions at Hayward, the latter superb.

portrait of Frank Ainsworth

# Frank for cuddly psilocybe breakfast. Spent most of day in bed at David's under Frank's transcendentally-athletic and acrobatically-sensual influence.

# To Paris with Mark by Hovercraft. To Café Central and Le Piano Zinc after dinner in flat.

# Growly organ recital at Notre-Dame..

Although I 'cruised like mad' when I was in London and Paris and horrible Florence, I have a 'low sex-drive'. Once or twice a week is enough ejaculation for me. But I wasn't wanting to empty my testicles: I was wanting romantic adventure and erotic play. I loved to see where and how people lived: sometimes I lived with them for a fortnight. Although in the good old days when there were still famous cruising 'facilities' in every town and city, it was possible to find a nice bearded hairy man at any time of day, very often the most exciting places were frequented only at night : the Canal Saint-Martin at the Place Stalingrad, among the columns supporting the Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris.

I have always loved darkness, night and deserted streets which make me feel I am in my own film. But I have also loved sleep, so my nightwalkings were infrequent. But I loved the narrow, empty streets, the crowded night-spots I passed, the strange 'gay' bars in the Marais that I entered but did not drink in, the occasional stray dog or Holy Homeless in a doorway. Brightness burns, consumes. Darkness is soft, embracing; brightness is hard and harsh and the obsession of religions. Jesus may be revered as The Light, but in darkness (especially duvet-shrouded lightlessness) is Truth, as Carl Jung might have said.

'Depression' is often described as 'dark'. But I think it comes from too much light, too much noise and activity. "Work is killing the World" I wrote on a wall in London. Work delivers the coup de grâce to the minds of most people, after the mortal wounding inelegantly performed by 'education'. In both London and Paris I was filled with despair. In Paris I attempted to dispel it one long, overcast November by getting a tattoo – of a little snake on my belly, drawn freehand in an S by an excellent (but not too-hygienic and not at all cheap) tattooist who had a booth-like shop on the corner of the rue de Lappe, where the last of the famous Bal-Musette establishments survived. I liked the guy. He was elfin, androgenous, smiling, light on his feet and obviously an artist (which was rare amongst tattrooists at that time. He called me Papa.

But the snake looked silly. So I went back the next day, with my marijuana pipe, and asked him if he would do another snake, with tail adjoining, wriggling down to the tip of my cock. He was surprised by this request, but, after a little consideration, complied. He played spacy music, I floated onto a marijuana cloud, and he finished this second snake in half an hour – the same time he had taken on the first.

But this, though impressive, still didn't look right. It was not a good composition. So on the third day I had the third snake looping out of my navel to join tongues with the first snake. This looked so good that he called his copains over from the bar opposite to admire our joint handwork of design and execution. They all so approved that they cheered, and one of them gave me a little chunk of hash, which was sweet of him – and slightly reduced my feeling of loss at the several hundred francs I had spent on what many would think was narcissistic defacement of my flesh.

FAQ: Tattooing the foreskin does not hurt: apart from the (ticklish) soles of the feet,
it is the thickest dermal tegument on the male body.

Nearly a year later I went to another tattooist in London, who was scrupulously hygienic (towels, sterilised needles, lots of tissues and so on) and took ages (two long and painful sessions) to draw a stencil and then tattoo a much larger snake issuing from my bum-crack, passing to one tender side of my vasectomy-scarred scrotum and coiling round to threaten my todger with its wide-open jaws. Do I have a Freudian 'castration complex' ?

My tattoos artily-distorted in a hinged triple-mirror.