In Oscar Wilde's play Lady Windermere's Fan, Lord Darlington quips that a cynic was 'a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.' I am a Cynic, a follower of Diogenes the Dirty Dog of Athens. Like him, perhaps, I have to know the price of everything - because I have lived all my life on hand-outs and with an income judged by most to be insufficient. Yet I live a life undreamed-of by Roman Emperors. Because I know the price of everything, I have been able to live in two countries and even had my own vehicle in each. Almost everything I own (car, computer, clothes, furniture....) is at least second-hand. As for value, Wilde did not specify whether he meant commercial or artistic-intrinsic.

Like any æsthete (such as Oscar Wilde) I am pretty good on artistic value, and so (within my liumited budget) I buy beautiful ceramics, Oriental rugs, and even pictures.

Having mentioned Oscar Wilde, whose name was whispered and sniggered at when I was at school, I would like to quote the magnificent Marlene Dietrich:

"A man can realise his sexuality only through a sexual relationship with another man."

backed up by the "legendary" Margaret Meade:

"Extreme heterosexuality is a perversion."

As of course is extreme homosexuality. Which leads me to the "legendary" Joe Orton, who claimed that he "had sex with" any male available, "even a dwarf".

Posthumous shame on him for that "even" ! 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 "freaks" (Yes, I have downloaded the 1932 film, just as I have downloaded dissident genius Genet's Un Chant d'Amour), 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 Enano

I am a curious and peculiar kind of queer.

The closest I got to a hairy dwarf 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 began my foray into floaty electronic music which continues to this day. I find the music of David Parsons, for example, and Terry Oldfield's Spirit of the Rain Forest excellent accompaniments to love-making. Jarre's Oxygène opened up a new world for me in a dank and dark basement flat heated by bottled gas.

In those days the Coleherne had distinct areas surrounding the huge oval bar. One was one for the leather-brigade, one for the denim crowd, and one for the rest, including the rare wearers of corduroy like myself. At the back was an old grand piano. On Sunday lunchtimes there was a jazz-group and the place was packed. There was free bar-food (this was before Thatcherism and the globallistic tidal wave of Profit-Motive inundated the world and destroyed all the gay pubs in London), and many 'gay' men went there for a free Sunday brunch. At The London Apprentice in Shoreditch more substantial fare was offered, and it was a rival Sunday treat in the 1980s to go to Brick Lane market and on to The London Apprentice for a free lunch. Of course even the poverty-stricken paid for a half-pint of some horrible English beer or inferior Guinness.

Note: a Gay Bar (intimidating, ghetto-oriented, expensive, depressing) is very different from a Gay Pub - open, unpretentious as The Champion was at Notting Hill, and simply a hostelry which is 'gay-friendly' if not cruisy.

Some time after the then well-known Russell (nowhere included in any mention of The Coleherne on the Web), I met a sweet Dubliner with cerebral palsy. I brought him to the posh hotel I was staying in (but of course left without paying for) and loved him sensationally. He was disappointed, however, because he was used to being abused, and this I simply could not do, not even (in his case) as play-acting. Still, he was cuddly enough, and we liked each other enough to keep in touch for years. I stayed with him a couple of times and left my car at his house in Santry which was convenient to the airport.

I had met him in Dublin's now-long-lamented Hirschfeld Centre for sexual 'misfits', which was a very pleasant, open and easy meeting-place with a café where you could go and read a book, or cruise. It was firebombed by the pious. Belfast's [Edward] Carpenter Club (a disco-venue run by the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association) also perished by fire. It was named after an influential socialist, journalist, pamphleteer, sandal-wearing vegetarian and "homosexualist" from Belfast. Magnus Hirschfeld on the other hand was a contemporaneous German-speaking Jew from Kołobrzeg in Poland, who claimed that "homosexuality" was part of the plan of nature and creation just like "normal" "love." He died in Nice, not in a concentration-camp, and is not known to have been a friend of fellow-Schwuler Ernst Röhm.

You will remember that Paris' splendid Sauna Continental was also destroyed by fire. The only people to gain from all this anti-"gay" arson have been the ghetto-bars, many of which have bouncers to prevent the ingress of those deemed ineligible to enter, such as women and grungy old queers like myself.

Edward Carpenter is remembered by a Community and a Trust named after him. Malcolm has attended their rustic holiday weeks for queer men in south-west Scotland and north-west England. A few years before I met him, I stayed at their lovely Victorian house for queer men called Wild Lavender, whose co-operative vegetarian cuisine was sensational. I had thirds of everything. It was one of the tenants there who taught me sensual synchronised breathing, which is a marvellous eroto-spiritual exercise, and also an intimately excellent way of sharing a puff or two of weed. He lent me his big, airy, plant-filled room while he was away one weekend, and I invited a very beautiful, stocky, perky, furry man from Leeds to come and spend some time with me there. He had been a pin-up in one of the early (1984, black-and-white) issues of Bear magazine. I met him, romantically, at Platform 1 of Victoria Station, and took him to Hackney, where for two hours, we swirled and swam in vortices of reciprocal sensuality (and sensual reciprocity) made yet more magical by mote-filled beams of plant-filtered sunlight - before my guest changed gear, and fucked me very sweetly and pleasantly in the manner of a sewing-machine. He had won me over by his sensuality, and I accepted the penetration as a natural progression, or like a good dessert. Despite appearing in a porn-magazine and two videos, the handsome Richard Prosser was deliciously diffident. He had a lovely way of walking, throwing his feet out to either side. Our encounter was one of those delicious one-offs which both parties recognise as such, and put their heart and soul into, thus adding to the matrix of beautiful experiences which encourage a creative approach to life and make it seem worth living.

Later we went to The City of Quebec pub at Marble Arch, (also known as the Gay Elephants' Graveyard) where we met Carlo (see chapter 10). I was in heaven, sitting between two beautiful, sweet, tender and sensual men. It was for this sort of joy that I embraced a homosensuality made more open and feasible for me by the efforts of political 'gay' men such as Jeff Dudgeon who fought for decriminalisation of 'unnatural acts' in Northern Ireland even as far as the European Court of Human Rights, and won them some years before decriminalisation was enacted in the Republic.

Jeff had also been sent to the same dreadful school, disliked it at least as much as I, but was not repeatedly caned because he kept a low profile, something I find very hard to do. His house in Belfast was generously open to queers of all kinds, and was home to two others, one of whom was definitely not low-profile and whom I took a shine to. He, Mark, had just dropped out of medical school and decided to devote his life to exploring his sexuality and 'identity' (a concept I have difficulty in differentiating from 'personality'). We embarked on a highly experimental and intense relationship, which lasted a few years. We loved cooking together - experimentally, of course. Because he was twenty years younger than I (as is Malcolm) I was very happy to take on the rôle of what the French call parrain, a sort of godfather-mentor to help him explore the heights and depths - although I was no more experienced in polymorphous perversity than he. It was with Mark that I finally was able to overcome my resistance to cannabis and, after ingesting a huge amount, get 'stoned' for the first time in my life. We took mushrooms and LSD. He was often at my rural retreat, and it was surely our naked cavortings in the garden which led to my eviction notice and its overturning by a court. We made a few trips to Paris together. We explored music together, I introducing him to Brahms, early Jazz and North Indian Classical, he introducing me to Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Peter Gabriel, Grace Jones, Bauhaus and others. It was a very cross-fertilising relationship, for which I have doubly to thank Jeffrey Dudgeon.

In my naivety I was not even aware of the possibilities of blackmail or of police provocateurs lurking in smelly toilets to make sordid arrests. Some policemen were also blackmailers, of course, thus tripling their income. I was too poor to blackmail, in any case, had already been to prison, have rarely worried about what people think of me, and despised rather than feared the police. I like being at the bottom of the social pile. It is a very comfortable choice - and in my case it has obviously been a choice.

Having a solitary consciousness and thus never having in my mind even the mind-splitting concept of Identity, I did not understand that Mark was trying to find one and express it - by his dress. He had a period of wearing fur and feathers, for example, then moved on to the typical jeans-and-leather-biking-jacket quasi-uniform that I find deeply depressing and (having a horror of uniforms and uniformity) somewhat distressing. Finally, he (like thousands of others) decided that tight little Northern Ireland was too small for his psycho-sexual aspirations. I encouraged him to go to London, where he soon was in a position to receive me in a dank ground-floor flat in Holloway, heated by bottled gas... There he (nearly 2 metres tall, broad-shouldered, hairy) eventually decided that he wanted to find a real, beleathered, strict stereotypical Master to serve as a Slave, and we parted company.

Mark in my Bath, 1983. Click the photo to enlarge.

I was usually taken to be "top" by the men I cruised. But "top" is a description of sexual role-play, whereas, although initially diffident and ready-for-anything (even fist-fucking on one sad occasion), I tend to be a dominant (and risk being a domineering) personality - not the same thing at all. Or rather, if someone else does not take the lead, I will, just like my mother did within the family. So men were somewhat put out when they cruised me expectantly as a "top" and an arse-penetrator, but then found that I could not take role-play seriously (as psycho-therapy or as role-trap ?), "only" as fun. Homosensuality is fun; homosexuality, on the other hand, usually is not.

Inevitably, despite having been a medical student and fully informed about the infection-situation amongst the promiscuous in the 1980s, Mark contracted HIV from his "top" Master.

A pissotière (left) on the boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris, 1983.
The kiosques (right) have also disappeared or been replaced.

My Homospherical life had two pathways. One was direct on-the-spot cruising, which had a sense of adventure about it, especially in atmospheric places such as the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris, at night - as opposed to daytime cruising on the riverside esplanade of the Tuileries Gardens above one of the last tasses, vespasiennes, pissotières or, in English, cottages to be removed in the interests of moral hygiene - despite homosexuality never having been illegal in France, "merely" a source of shame. (It was, allegedly, Madame de Gaulle who initiated the onslaught against those excellent meeting-places. Had she heard, I wonder, about the soupeurs who threw in a hunk of bread in the morning and retrieved it in the evening to enjoy at their leisure ?)

Only in the cases of Gregorio and of Mark (whom I blatantly cruised in the Botanic Gardens in Belfast) did the meeting lead anywhere. The other main pathway was by advertisement in magazines (and latterly the internet) which often had ramifications, and led to other meetings. Through an ad in Drummer magazine I met Fergus; through him I made Tuscan and Vatican connections (with four trips to Italy), which led via Bear magazine to meeting Richard (an overworked male nurse in an establishment for the elderly insane)) and, less directly – via the little magazine of the Bear Club UK – Carlo, whose family came from Salerno, and who dispensed mildly-subversive advice to dole-claimants. Through Carlo I came in contact , and through it found Malcolm, who, later, met Carlo independently online. A kind of Old Boys' Network, you might say. The Homosphere.

I met the perky artist William McKeown through a friend.

After Malcolm moved to Northern Ireland he joined the government-funded organisation which ran a telephone helpline for sexual minorities. In their records he discovered that, many years before - when I was still being limited by Jim - I had enquired about finding a female friend who would not want a sexual/penetrative relationship. I have always liked the company of women, and at that time, of course, I had not seen any attractive men in Ireland (full of very pasty and unattractive people) while in France the only people to have caught my attention were dark-skinned people of both sexes. In Africa I had found the women wonderfully attractive, sexy, and humorous, so my slide along the spectrum of sexuality was inevitably hesitant.

As I write this I am reading a book by sexy professor Gary Taylor about castration. Besides quite rightly excoriating the disastrous Dr Freud for his ignorance of the female anatomy and his ignorant assumption that castration involved the penis, he very interestingly points out that until quite recently the testicles were more important than the penis, notably in statuary. You would have difficulty now in finding as "gay" porn site featuring the scrotum and perineum, for the penis is now totalitarian dictator of porn. Yet the scrotum and perineum are highly erogenous and are often more æsthetically pleasing than an erect and quivering willy.

The only - but important - difference between vasectomy and castration is that in the latter the possible pleasure of having one's balls squeezed luxuriously is removed; though what remains of the scrotum might well become highly erogenous like the "useless" male nipples. Should any happy, homosensual or iso-erotic eunuch read this, perhaps he will give me some feedback.

Often in the mornings Malcolm comes into my bed and performs SSPP Therapy: squeezing the scrotum and pressing the perineum. It is a nice way to wake up - or to return to sleep. Then we turn round and reverse the roles. Sensual thoughfulness - an aspect or function of wholesomeness and holosensuality - is as rare as it is sublime. I am not sure of the difference btween thoughtfulness and mindfulness; does one not imply the other ?

A totalitarian society is one which attempts and almost succeeds in eliminating loners. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, Western "liberal" societies have become more and more totalitarian. Not that some weren't already: Jean Genet became - thanks to Sartre, especially - a "respected other" in France, whereas in the anglosphere he would have languished miserably in gaol, or in a "Mental Institution" - if he had not been shot "trying to escape" the Morality Police. A country which not only accepted Jean Genet but which accorded him serious respect is one worth escaping to. I am a Cultural Refugee, unnoticed and uncounted because of the "free movement of people" enshrined in the concept of the European Union, a citizen of which I am because of my Irish citizenship, and not because of my British upbringing. Here I am just another "curious one among many" originaux-marginaux. In the BritIsles I am quite simply an undesirable, unspeakable Dissident, apt to do outrageous things like sniff armpits in public. I wonder how Diogenes' armpits and perineum smelt...

Of course there are more senses than the Aristotelian Five. But of those five, smell is now, in our increasingly totalitarian culture, decreasingly appreciated, the least developed and used. From birth our noses are assaulted by horrible chemicals - perfume, bleach, deodorant, detergents, etc. - and we are encouraged to disparage and be repelled by rich scents such as horse-dung, sour milk, ripe armpits, wet dogs, and so on. Mark's first partner had, for some reason, the most delicious-smelling armpits - of leather, pipe-tobacco, musk and vetiver. I would ask him frequently for a sniff. Other people thought this outrageous. I love the smell of my own armpits and never wash them. Malcolm's pubic mat smells delightful. Feet smell like cheese; people eat cheese - what's the problem with cheesey feet ? It's quite fun to insert a tongue between the cheesey toes and rub a beard along the soles. When I took magic mushrooms my sense of smell became very acute and I would sniff walls, carpets, leaves, mulch, earth as well as the more commonly-appreciated books (for the glue and the paper), and of course the entire body of whomever I was sharing the experience with.

Some men I have made love with have, needless to say, smelt of nose-constricting chemicals. I have, therefore, reached for my bottles of argana-oil (bought, along with rugs, in Morocco where it is also used for cooking) or almond oil scented with various combinations of essence of vetiver, chamomile, lavender, fennel, cedar, etc. and given them a relaxing massage.

It seems perverse to me that it is considered OK, if a bit pretentious, to sniff the 'nose' of wines, but not to savour the sweat of a desired body. Some wines, indeed, such as those using the Mourvèdre grape, smell and even taste of subtly-ripe scrotum, whereas some men, doused in eye-watering after-shave and deodorant, smell much worse than skunks.

Southern Morocco is full of beautiful Berber men who smell good. I first went there with the daughter of my odious headmaster, an independent spirit and Legal Eagle for the rich, whom I found after placing an ad in the Belfast Telegraph for a non-sexual female companion - nearly twenty years after I had first approached Cara-Friend with the same idea. My period of turbo-homosensuality made me feel that I lacked female input somewhat. Malcolm had come over from England, and it was with his bemused consent that I embarked on a strange little affair with Alison. I have always included Malcolm in my plans, and he often goes along with them. He even started shoplifting food - but was soon caught and did not resume a criminal career nipped in the bud. Alison had us to dinner, and she came up with the idea of a romantic (but asexual) holiday somewhere warm in November. At that time there were cheap flights from Dublin to Agadir, so off the two of us went, hiring a cheap and very rickety (but reliable) car the next morning from a garage-man a few hundred metres from our inexpensive hotel and heading off to the hills.

It was an excellent trip, spoiled only slightly by Alison's wish to be penetrated by me, which I reluctantly and pleasurelessly did a couple of times. We looked at carpets in Tafraout and at traditional Berber pots outside Marrakesh. I love countries (such as the whole Mediterranean basin apart from meat-obsessed France) where it is possible to be vegetarian without "making a meal" of it. I adored the food, especially the salads, and so, inevitably, I contracted enteritis. I took to wearing local garb almost immediately, so when the shit started pouring down my legs it was not too obvious, and I could go back to our (cheap) hotel and shower, tramping my jellaba in the water until it was clean. Then I had to go and lie in a dark room for two days with damp cloths on my forehead, moaning and groaning until the affliction abated. Alison was an excellent nurse.

Like all tourists we loved the Jemaa el-Fnaa, in the heart of Marrakesh's medina, where musicians gather and stalls sell freshly-squeezed orange and grapefruit juice. Some of the musicians were excellent. This was my first introduction to Berber music, which has since become better-known because of music festivals in North Africa, Europe and Turkey.

Only a couple of days after rising from my bed, we headed for Sidi Ifni, a beautiful former Portuguese enclave on the coast. The ocean looked very inviting. suggested a bathe amongst the shallow rollers, but Alison declined. So I went down to the deserted beach and, naked, into the water, where I disported myself happily - before realising that the beach was getting farther and farther away. I was caught in a rip-tide. I didn't panic, but I was sure that I was living my last moments. How ironic, I thought, that I should drown in this gorgeous place, having survived the glacial grey waters and rocky coves of the north coast of Ireland where my uncle made sure that I learned to swim. The ability to swim was of no help in my situation. But the water was shallow, and suddenly one foot hit a sandbar, and I stopped my rapid and mortal progress towards the Canary Isles. This allowed me time to think, and so I turned round, dived down and crawled back to the beach with my hands underwater, surfacing briefly to take deep breaths, and then submerging again to crawl to safety. I was exhausted, and lay panting on the beach for a good twenty minutes before going up to the beautiful little hotel to recount my little, foolhardy adventure to Alison.

Shortly after returning from our delighful Moroccan trip laden with ceramics, rugs, clothes, jewellery and stones, Alison fell out with me because of my deep-seated resentment of her father, my greasy headmaster, who had started to show signs of dementia - as my mother also had, unnoticed by me or her sister. This was a great pity, because she was excellent company, up for anything (even penetration by a thin, bearded queer in exotic garb), and an excellent cook as well. But she had been tinged by the bitterness so prevalent in Northern Ireland. With her former husband she had once run a restaurant in Piedmont. The last I heard, she too had moved to France, near the feet of the western Pyrenees. I wrote to her, but she did not reply.

Here I am picnicking at Aït Mansour, February 1993.

I returned to Morocco on my own the following February, staying much of the time at a rug-dealer's vast house in Tafraout. I drove through the countryside playing Berber music tapes by the folk-rock group Archache (Arshash) that I had bought in November, and giving lifts to gorgeous Berber men in the beat-up Renault 5 which I had rented for very little, from the same garage. February was much colder than November. The snow was a couple of metres thick in the Middle Atlas mountains over which I drove, together with a young German hitch-hiking couple. Even an up-market but old-fashioned hotel with central heating in Marrakesh hardly thawed me out. Going down to the coast, however, was spectacular, with spring arriving and the countryside alight with vivid and sometimes almost fluorescent greens, some like that in this 'sampler' rug I brought back from Tafraout - which now hangs (vertically) in my stair-well.

Almost thirty years later, in 2022, I flew very cheaply from Toulouse to Agadir, and, next day, having again hired a car locally, I met Malcolm after he landed on a flight from Dublin. Agadir had grown enormously. We went to Tafraout. The rug-dealer had died, but his son (on the right in the picnic picture above) was now in charge. He remembered me from twenty-five years previously. He remembered my taste in rugs and produced a very beautiful one for me, which would nicely obscure and insulate an ugly glass door- panel.

We went to Sidi Ifni. We went to Imouzzer. We had a great week. It was Malcolm's best-ever trip abroad.