Gerry Millar: Full Interview

TRANSCRIPT

Gerry Millar
Interview by Ray Larman
5th March 2019

RL: This is Rachel Larman for West Yorkshire Queer Stories. It is the 5th of March 2019 and I’m with Gerry Millar, who’s going to introduce himself.

GM: Oh yes, hello, I’m Gerry Millar. I’m 70 years old, I was born on the 25th of November 1948, and I live in London now, I’ve been back in London since 1986, but when I was, when I left uni I went to Leeds at the age of – oh you want to know how I identify, don’t you? I identify as a gay man. I’m, I don’t go round with the label queer but I don’t, yeah. So, that’s me. Yes, I moved to Leeds as a, a year or two after I finished my uni, because it seemed like quite, like a vibrant left-wing sort of place to be, really. In fact, as I later found out, it was a hotbed of feminism. I don’t know if it still is, but it was in the, in the mid-70s when I moved there. It would’ve been ’73 that I moved. And, and I wasn’t out when I went, I was 24, 25, 24, something like that in 1973, beginning of ’73, and… So yes I came out about a year and a half later, after I’d worked in the children’s home for a bit. And, so it would be just before my birthday in, so I was not quite – it was 1974 and I was very nearly 26 [laughs]

RL: Do you want to say a little bit about coming out, how did that happen?

GM: Oh okay. So, I’d known I was I suppose since my teens but I grew up in quite a conservative environment – actually I grew up in Kenya, in East Africa, which was a colony when we first went to live there, although it was independent by the time I was, left. The white part of the society was still old fashioned compared to Britain, which and also of course even in Britain in the ‘60s, it wasn’t that easy to be out and gay. So I’d had one – and then by, at uni I had one attempt to come out, via a sort of helpline, which didn’t really work for me. And I had one bit of, sort of sexual fumble, which also didn’t work very well. And then I got – so anyway, so in Leeds, after I stopped working in the children’s home I had started attending a teacher training college for a bit, cos I didn’t know what else to do with myself. And I was living in a shared house with other young people of a similar age. And my neighbour was a woman who was very easy to talk to and, although she wasn’t lesbian herself she had a number of lesbian and gay friends and she talked about that. And, it was to her that I came out eventually. I’m guessing it was about November ’74, that’s when I have it in my head always anyway.

And, I’m sure it wasn’t the same time, I think a couple of nights later she called in one or two friends and they took me to, they took me to a meeting of GLF, Gay Liberation Front, in Leeds, which I think… can’t remember if that met in the Fenton or Woodhouse Lane or whether it might at that point have been in another pub down, down somewhere like Boar Lane, I forget exactly now, but it wasn’t at the pub I remember meeting in. And that was a bit of a trip. There were two, two of the men were in dresses – I mean radical drag, so they weren’t some, they didn’t have false boobs or, or, or wigs, they didn’t try to be, they didn’t try to look like women or drag queens, they were just wearing radical drag. One called David and one called Sam. So that was a bit, a bit – yeah, it was quite hard for me, I mean I wasn’t very I suppose in these sort of, the sort of person that would call themselves straight-acting, although I don’t think I ever did – call myself that. And…

Yes, and anyway I went to this Gay Liberation Front evening and met some people there. And, I think by then, so GLF began as a mixed, mixed group, it was women and men. I think by the time, I think by this time it was already, the women were already feeling that the word gay didn’t include them, that it was dominated by the men. But it was in fact two or three women that took me to the group, so I think they still felt that they were welcome there, so they took me as I was under their wing, but I suspect – well, and anyway, Toni, my next door neighbour, the woman, the straight woman who I came out to, she, y’know she wasn’t lesbian anyway, but I didn’t ever see the other women come to GLF again either. So, I think, I think the split or y’know the separation out had already happened, of lesbians and gay men by that stage. Might’ve helped I supposed if anybody invented LGLF rather than just GLF but [laughs] Yes, in those days it wasn’t quite the thing yet.

RL: What do you remember about that first meeting, apart from the two guys in the radical drag?

GM: Not a lot, to be honest, I don’t have, I’m not very good at precise memories, I just remember being quite shocked and I’m sure there are one or two, y’know, guys that I fancied, and that was quite thrilling, to be in a place where I could fancy men and know that they might be available, but also quite scary – that was quite scary too, I wasn’t used to having relationships. Yeah, so it was a mixture of scary and exciting. That’s the main thing I remember.

RL: Do you remember how many people were there, roughly?

GM: … I don’t have very good visual memory in that sort of way. I mean I can visualise David and Sam to some extent, the guys who dressed up in dresses and makeup, but I can’t, I can’t sort of y’know pin down a memory of how many – I would guess there were probably about a dozen, something like that. And I heard that Leeds GLF actually had a, y’know, quite a heyday and was quite, had been very active in, in challenging stereotypes and so on. We continued to be political.

RL: So, what sort of things were you campaigning about?

GM: So, we’re talking about the 1970s. I mean, quite a lot of it was… we’d go on demonstrations sometimes and be very vociferously gay about it. I mean that could be any demonstration – we supported lots of left-wing things, I mean not – I don’t remember specifically at that point, but I remember being on a march in, in London where a group of us had gone down from Bradford, where I was living for a short while, against, a troops out of Ireland march. I remember someone saying, ‘so who recruited you guys?’ We hadn’t been recruited by anyone, we just heard about it and went, but yes. Yes, so yes, so I can remember that, oh, it was about six months later I think, or maybe a little less, for some reason we, we held a, we managed, we helped organise a gay workers – I think, you have to forgive this, in those days we so often haven’t got used to the idea of lesbian and gay, and indeed very, very rarely, I don’t think LGBT as an acronym or a set of letters had come along at that stage. So I seem to remember, I do remember a gay workers conference that we organised. I forget… I can’t remember where that was. It might’ve even been – it was when I was living in Leeds, but it might’ve been in Bradford. So yeah we, and if there was a London demonstration, we’d take our Leeds GLF banner, which I seem to remember was purple with white lettering, down to London, at least one of the, the lesbian and gay demos that, y’know, pride as it’s now known, but I supposed it was probably then called lesbian and gay pride.

RL: Could you tell me a little bit about the places you used to go out in Leeds, like you mentioned the Fenton.

GM: So, yes, so my first night of being taken to GLF, afterwards I was taken, my friends took me to, to – I think actually we might’ve gone straight to Charlie’s Club. There were a couple of other gay bars as well, but we went to Charlie’s Club, which was, which was a real trip. It was upstairs. You had to kind of, they were a bit, obviously, not surprisingly perhaps, they were a bit cagey about who came in that they didn’t want people who’d cause trouble, particularly straight men. But having said that, they had some pretty tough bouncers and, they could be pretty nasty to if they, if they threw them out, not even, not just straight people; I can remember – Wednesday’s nights, for instance, I found out later, at Charlie’s tended to be women’s night. It wasn’t exclusive, but they, lots of women went on Wednesday night. And when there were drink and lesbians together there were sometimes arguments which became fights, and then sometimes there could be some pretty brutal throwing out by bouncers. So yes, it wasn’t always a nice place. And also, there was a certain level of where it seemed like maybe prostitutes went, and pimps. It was a very weird mix this, this Charlie’s Club, but it was – they did play things like Donna Summer. I mean, I can, my first sort of summer of being out after that was probably to the theme tune of Donna Summer and her like. ‘Love to Love You Baby’ and those sorts of songs.

RL: So, was the Fenton sort of a more kind of political place if Charlie’s was a club?

GM: Charlie’s was a club, and Charlie’s was – and yes in fact there were, I think the first time I went there and said I’d come, or when I got chatting to people there, they would, I would say I was part of GLF, they’d go, ‘oh they’re very political’, and ‘are you like that?’ I had a sense that there was a big divide between the political group and the club group. I used to go to both, but I think there is a bit of disapproval on both sides. It was kind of interesting that, y’know, yeah not everybody crossed that divide. I remember, you would get asked, y’know nowadays on things like Grindr you get asked are you top or bottom; in those days it was butch or bitch? [Camp voice:] ‘Are you butch or bitch?’ [laughs] I remember one, one little Yorkshireman with a big beard and a belly coming up to me and saying, ‘are you a man or a lady?’ And I said, ‘well, I’m a man of course’, I said right-on-ly, and he goes, ‘oh great, cos I’m a lady’ and put his arms around me [laughs] Had to push him off [laughs] He was quite small actually, although he was round [laughs]

Yeah but it was, yeah there were some little stories like that, but yeah it was exciting and – that was also exciting and scary, y’know there were these, there were men dancing together and so on. But it was a closed little scene, it wasn’t like going to, I don’t know what Leeds is like now, I don’t really go. But in London, when I later was out in London, y’know you could go to a club and you might not see the same people you saw if you went a week earlier, but in Leeds, in Charlie’s, you’d see the same people you see every weekend and so on. It was upstairs from Lower Briggate, it’s where, I don’t remember exactly, but you went up, I think it was at the side of the shop or something and I think there might’ve been a – not exactly a ginnel but a sort of cut-through alleyway that you, and you went in through the side of that and up, up – I think the first floor was where the ticket, the check-in desk was, and the next floor up… It may even have been the fourth floor – I remember there were two levels, one with mainly a bar and then upstairs was a dancefloor, also with a bar.

And then there was a pub called The West Riding, which, well there was a bar, at the back of The West Riding, which was opposite where Leeds Post Office then was – I can’t remember if it’s, I think it is actually, it’s where the mechanised letter office, which I later worked at as a postman, and that was rather strange to be, because the postmen tended to use the main bar of The West Riding, and the back bar was where the gays went.

RL: Did you have to walk through to get to the bar?

GM: There was a sort of corridor, you didn’t have to go through the main bar, but I, but yeah… So that was one bar, and then there was a rougher bar, that was in those days called the Hope and Anchor. That was known for fights, and, and I think was more mixed, I think more women went to that one. And, I mean, I don’t, I don’t know if this is – this doesn’t sound very politically correct but there was a sense that women got drunk and the fought and so that was one of the reasons that the Hope and Anchor was rough, whereas The West Riding was, was I suppose more well behaved queens [laughs]

RL: And so was the Fenton the more political one?

GM: The Fenton wasn’t a gay bar at all, but it was a more political place, but in fact we did used to, either then or later, used to use a room, they had a sort of side room that we could – I don’t think you had to rent it, I think you had to book it and then as long as you bought some drinks you could use it, for GLF meetings. Think it maybe actually, think it maybe come to think of it, there was – I think GLF used to hang out in there, and very often go for drinks in there, but I think the actual room we rented to, or hired or booked rather, to have meetings might’ve been the one down on Boar Lane whose name I’ve forgotten. Maybe the Fenton was like a place where the, where the political gays hung out, amongst other lefties. And there was some tension. I don’t think, y’know, especially when y’know if guys were there in radical drag, but there was, y’know, a lot of left-wing people didn’t necessarily feel comfortable around, y’know straight left-wing people didn’t feel comfortable necessarily around, around us.

RL: Was there ever a since of, some of the left-wing people trying to kind of co-opt GLF?

GM: The which people? Oh the lefties. Not really, no. I think on the, if anything I think they felt… if you mean straight left groups. No I think on whole, if anything probably it’d be beyond the pale. I remember a guy who was very big in Bradford politics later – I think I will mention his name, because he’s pretty political round then, or he used to be, he probably isn’t now – called Don Milligan. And he was, he was very active in what was called International Socialism, which later became Socialist Workers Party, SWP, but in its earlier days it was called International Socialists, IS – they owned Pluto Press, which published things. And Don had been very active, and closeted, in IS – International Socialists – and when he came out he basically got told, y’know, ‘we don’t want that sort of thing here’ basically, y’know it was maybe those sort of things might get sorted out after the revolution, but we didn’t want that here in fact, yeah.

RL: What about – you were mentioning that women kind of drifted away from GLF – what were the issues there?

GM: Well, I think it was because… It was already happening before I joined, or came along, so. But I guess there was a sense that, that men’s voices tended to be more dominant, that there were more men than women. And that it was talked about as gay issues and so the women felt marginalised in some way. Yeah, and so I think they just felt they would get – it’s not that all women, that the women, that the lesbians who, who were around were necessarily unsympathetic. It’s just that they felt they needed a space where they could voice their concerns and not feel they were an adjunct to what the men wanted.

RL: And when you mention the men at the first meeting in radical drag, what was the radical drag thing all about?

GM: Yes, it was basically pushing the boundaries of, of gender, and I mean, GLF’s… I don’t think I’ve got a copy of it now, but there was a sort of GLF manifesto, you might have, I don’t know, I’m sure there’s stuff about it in the archives, of the main ones in, in London if nowhere else – about not wanting to change, not wanting society to accept lesbians and gay people and so on, but that society needed to change, and that… that the way things were arranged, y’know, with the nuclear family and the assumption that the man would be the breadwinner – I mean, we’re talking about the ‘60s and early, the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, so we’re still, you know things had not really progressed very much in society, and so. I think there was a sense that, that the order, the whole order of how things were done needed to be overturned and that men shouldn’t have to be macho, men could wear dresses if they want to, men could wear makeup if they wanted to. Men could be soft and gentle.

But equally, men could wear dresses and be strident and shout at demonstrations, and so there wasn’t, y’know we tried to push the boundaries of what, of what was seen as normal and acceptable and politically okay; we thought that things ought to change, root and branch, and I still kind of think that to some extent, which is one of the reasons why modern day versions of pride are often seen very anodyne or very y’know they just try y’know – as long as we’re accepted on equal terms with straight people, we can get married now, we can have children and so on, so what else, y’know what battles are left to fight? But then, y’know, what’s life like if you’re in, just in a, if society just stays the same, the way it is in terms of… well, I suppose it was anti-capitalist as well, it’s hard to remember now, I’m pretty sure we would’ve been anti-capitalist. I don’t think we actually were, I don’t think we actually ever claimed to be socialist as such, I think it was a sense of an alternate way of seeing things, of which sexuality was an intrinsic part, but so were equal rights for women and, y’know just the overturning of the way everything was done, it was always designed partly to keep people in their place, whether that’s women or fags or nowadays we’d say trans people and so on, but also working, working people and people of other races and so on. So it was, yeah, that was part and parcel of it, the radical drag was part and parcel, trying to overturn the established order, really, and say: ‘we’re not gonna conform, we’re not gonna be nice, well behaved people’, y’know. People’d say, ‘oh, I don’t mind gay people as long as they don’t rub your nose in it’, or something like that, so we wanted to rub their noses in it [laughs]

RL: So, did you ever experiment with drag?

GM: A little bit, a little bit, it wasn’t really – I did a bit more with makeup and earrings than I, not so much with dresses. I dunno, it wasn’t something I particularly felt drawn to, I suppose. But I was going to say something else. There was another group, which I think quite probably, might well have preceded GLF in Leeds, I’m not sure, but there was another group called CHE, and they were, I dunno, a bit like the Lib Dems to the Socialists or something like that y’know. So they were, they were the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. And again, they were basically men, although they were, women were welcome, but in the title, Campaign for Homosexual Equality, just like Gay Liberation Front doesn’t sound very inclusive.

RL: And would your paths cross then, with CHE?

GM: Occasionally. We might meet on demonstrations, and there was a slight sense of – I imagine we, that we looked down on them, and they either looked down on or disapproved of us, probably. Y’know. But I don’t want to be… critical, cos I think that they were doing what they felt was important, and I don’t want it to make it seem like anybody who was in CHE was… y’know, I think there are some people in CHE who worked very hard to campaign for equality, and so.

RL: Could you tell me a little bit about GAYSOC at the university?

GM: Yeah. When I, what I discovered after I came out, or became part of GLF, was that they had the use of a shop premises, which was a few doors up from the Fenton pub, on Woodhouse Lane. Is the Fenton still there? Dunno, doesn’t matter. Anyway, there was a pub on, on Woodhouse Lane just below the university called the Fenton and about three doors up there was a shop front that had, at one time the members of GAYSOC who’d persuaded the university that they could use it as a gay centre. And there actually, when I came into GLF, I don’t think there were any active, any current students of Leeds University in it, but somehow they managed to hang on to this premises. And, we tried to keep it open, I think it was probably too scary for most people getting ready to come out to walk into, they’d need to be brought there or – but we wanted it to be a place where people could come, but mainly I suppose it was a place to sit and chat and have a coffee and gather and so on.

I remember there was a trans woman called Barbara used to hang out in there. And she was very radical for the time. She’d been a miner, I believe, a coal miner. And, she was having a hard time getting further in her transition because they wanted her to be more conforming. Most trans women in those days were expected to, to dress up like 1950s housewives basically, with nice makeup and nice hair and, and nice false boobs and so on and, and Barbara just kinda wanted to hang out like any other feminist woman, smoke rollies, and y’know only wear makeup on special occasions and so on, y’know. She didn’t, she didn’t make any effort to look like a ‘50s housewife, that’s for sure! [laughs] I think later she did kind of have to do, compromise a bit in order to be able to go the next stage in transitioning, cos the psychiatrists, y’know, were the people that said whether you could transition in those days. But yes, Barbara was great, she used to hang out and – I don’t know what her surname was and I’ve no idea what happened to her, but.

There was also a guy from another gay group of the time, called IMG, International Marxist Group, called Martin, and it was said – cos I think I – y’know, my memory’s not good, so I can’t remember whether this was before or after, but I remember that the window had been smashed, and whether this was when I was going there or not, I can’t remember but, the story went that Martin from International Marxist Group, or some of his buddies, had smashed the window to try and make the group become more radicalised and to want to fight back against, y’know, heterosexist aggression or something, I don’t think it’s true, but it’s the sort of story that went around [laughs] Anyway, the window got repaired I think by university people.

Oh gosh, we ran a disco once, which I helped organise in a, there was a portacabin space where discos could be held, and we had a GLF disco on Leeds University premises. This would’ve been, I dunno, probably late, mid, maybe about ’76 or ’77 or so. And somebody came in who was probably straight, or maybe closeted, and who got aggressive and threw glasses and people got hurt, the police were called. And I can, because I was one of the organisers, I was interviewed by the police, but I wasn’t interviewed as somebody who could witness to the horrible things that had happened, but I was interviewed like somebody who’d done something wrong. In my first experience of being interviewed by the police as a gay man, as an openly gay man, and that real sense of what was going on there, and what we you doing, and just – there was no sense that, oh somebody had come and started smashing things up and, y’know, that person needs to be arrested and they were attacking gay people. It was, it was very definitely that, that y’know, gay people – there must be something immoral and illegal going on, so I felt very challenged by that. I was not very warm towards the police afterwards.

RL: Was that the time kind of time as… that the disco you mentioned that we were talking about –

GM: No, that was much later, that would be in the early ‘80s, I think. So, let’s go, so yes, what else can I briefly – I think I’ve – oh, yes, the Hope and Anchor, by the way, later became – the pub I mentioned earlier, the sort of rougher pub, that became the New Penny – is that still going? Yeah. And there was a – there was a guy who, well there was a person – the person who ran it was, had a woman’s name, but dressed, but presented as a man, so I’m never really sure whether he’s a, whether they saw themselves as trans or non-binary or a gay man, but, it wasn’t Marjorie, but there was a female name for that person who owned it. Too long ago.

RL: You mentioned living in Bradford, for a little bit, so when did you go to Bradford?

GM: Yeah, that was again – oh yes, yeah so, let me see, is there anything else to say – yeah, I think that’s probably about it. So then… well I tell you what happened before then. [pause] Gosh, I’m trying to remember. So I think before I moved to Bradford I used to go over there, and it was because there was quite a nice mixed radical seen, there was a pub, think it might’ve been called Manningham Arms, either it’s not there anymore or it’s changed hands and become completely different, it’s very mixed lesbian and gay at the bottom of Manningham, I don’t whether you know Bradford. And I used to go over there, it was quite exciting place to go.

I’m trying to remember when the General Will Theatre Company, there was this… left-wing theatre company in Bradford called the General Will and they, one of their members was an out gay man called Noel Greg, he’s died now which is why I feel comfortable giving his full name, and he later went on to work with Gay Sweat Shop. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me saying his name anyway, but just I’m, cos of the archive thing I’m not sure, I feel like it’s okay to say his name. And he, he, he thought that, these resources ought to be available to lesbians and gay people, and so he, he tried, he made a bid really, basically, to take it over and it succeeded, and so it became a lesbian and gay theatre company, the General Will, and I think that was possibly before I moved to Bradford. And they put on a number of performances in Bradford and Leeds.

RL: So what was your role in the theatre company, were you acting?

GM: In that one, nothing, but in 1978, again before I moved to Bradford, I was, I had been working in the Post Office and I was thinking about visiting America and like having a year out or something and explore America, and that didn’t happen, but… But some people in Bradford who had been involved with, with the General Will had decided to put on a play, and so they formed a theatre company called the One-Off Theatre Company, who put on this, this play called, called ‘Men’ by Noel Greg and Don Milligan. I think that might’ve been the first, sort of scripted play that Noel wrote, and he wrote it with this guy, Don Milligan, who’s not in the theatre but very political. I had a role in that, we toured it a bit, and we ended up in London during Pride week in 1978, yes. And the guy who was the assistant stage manager, Colin, he and I were having a relationship, and – because by, by 1978 the Leeds scene was, radical scene had sort of vanished away, really, to me.

And I felt that I wasn’t really very happy in my, in my life, and so – and Bradford seemed to have something going for it, so 1979 I moved to Bradford. Actually, so I think everything that I can say about Bradford activities actually happened I moved there [laughs] like the theatre and stuff like that. I think actually when I moved there, there wasn’t a lot, again there wasn’t a lot happening. I guess maybe the late ‘70s wasn’t such a great time for gay activism in Yorkshire, I don’t know. But for some reason there didn’t seem to be much happening.

RL: What was it like touring the play?

GM: That was a trip. I mean, we didn’t get, y’know we were quite ambitious. And there were two gay characters, me and my, and the guy who played my boyfriend, Charles, from Bradford. And then there were, I think two or three, maybe three or four straight characters, all played by straight actors. I think it was all men. And my character, Richard, was, was like shop steward and completely closeted. And my character’s boyfriend was called Eugene, or Gene for short, so when Richard at work talked about ‘Gene’, it was assumed that Gene was a, was a girlfriend or wife, cos the name’s [unclear], anyway.

Actually, this was the second time that play was put on; I remember seeing it with some other people in it. Probably done, probably put on by the General Will, actually. Anyway, yes, so Charles played my very camp boyfriend. There’s a scene where, where the, one of the straight trade unionists says, Gene is talking about gay rights, and one of the straight trade unionists says something like, ‘well all these problems’ll be ironed out after the revolution’, and Gene says, ‘I don’t think I fancy being ironed out, thank you very much’ [laughs] So, that was the sort, that was, it was, it was a funny hodge podge of a play. The first part was too political and, anyway. I mean, too wordy really, wordy and worthy really. But it was interesting to be in it.

So, we toured to a few Scottish cities; that was very strange. It felt like going back in time, cos Scotland… I can’t remember, I have a feeling that Scotland’s, I mean we’re talking about the ‘70s, yeah it was 1978. So, Britain got the equal age of consent, sorry an age of consent of 21 for gay men in private, or homosexual men in private, which was permitted, legal. But I’ve a feeling there was something more backward about Scottish law; it’s quite possible that they never had the 1967 Act and it was still illegal, but it certainly felt more old-fashioned and we toured, I think we performed in Aberdeen, in Edinburgh, possibly Glasgow. One or two places in Yorkshire: Leeds, I think, Bradford I think, I’m sure we did. Then we ended up with two weeks in London. Funny enough, we were right in the West End. It was fringe theatre and we weren’t in a main theatre, but there was a little theatre, what had been a cinema preview theatre, down in on King Street in Covent Garden I think it was. And we were like the second thing they ever put on as a play, and I don’t think they stayed open very long as a theatre, but we had quite good audiences because it was Pride week. So that was quite exciting.

RL: So, what kinds of reactions did you get to the play?

GM: I think, I think people – well, I mean when we went to places like Aberdeen and so forth, I think – and Yorkshire towns that weren’t – I think people were sort of just excited to see a gay play. But I think there was a sense that it was a bit too wordy and worthy in certain ways. I mean there were, once Gene came, Gene wasn’t in the first half at all, the camp gay character. And, and his lines were witty and funny and warm and so on. Whereas the first half of the play was very sort of seemed very straight [unclear], and I think it wasn’t, y’know, it was a bit too wordy and worthy, so I think people enjoyed the second half.

I remember one night I was feeling very upset about my relationship with Colin, who was the assistant stage manager, and I – at the end of every night I had to be, I got slapped by my boyfriend who’s basically walks out on me, leaving me kind of stand on the stage. And the only way to do a slap easily is to just get slapped. You don’t have to slap very hard to get quite a loud sound. Because I was feeling upset, I was becoming quite tearful on stage. Somebody said to me afterwards, ‘oh you really got into that role, didn’t you?’ [laughs] Anyway, so that, it was mixed reception, really, but it was quite a trip to do that. Yeah.

RL: I think we might have jumped ahead a bit, but I wanted to ask you about Wild Lavender, which I think was back in –

GM: No, we haven’t jumped ahead actually, that was later –

RL: Oh, that was later?

GM: So, yes, 1979 was I moved to Bradford. I wasn’t very happy there, and I decided to take a year out and went to live in, I tried, I went and tried out living in San Francisco, which was a whole other trip, but it’s nothing to do with West Yorkshire Queer Stories. But for various reasons, I had to come back to England, and to some extent I wanted to, and to some extent I didn’t, but anyway, I ended up coming back a year later, so from 1981 I was back in Leeds, staying with a friend, and… It would’ve been in those ‘80s, I think by when I came back to Leeds, I found that people’d started a Leeds Gay Switchboard, which operated six nights a week and was, seventh night was a women’s night. So, it was staffed by gay men on six nights. And it was a, again university premises, I think it’d been done through GAYSOC again, a more active GAYSOC this time. We had a basement room somewhere on the campus at Leeds University, and we used to go in there – I think it was open for two hours a night, something like 7:30 to 9:30. So it was quite an ambitious thing, given we didn’t have a very large team of people to do it, I think we maybe had a dozen people, a few – the active people’d do it once or twice a week, and then you’d have the people who did it once a fortnight, or less. So, I was involved with that.

We didn’t get many calls. Sometimes it’d be like, y’know, ‘we had a call last night!’ y’know [laughs] Cos y’know you couldn’t have, there was no Internet, well of course if there had been Internet there probably wouldn’t need a Leeds Gay Switchboard, but. There was no obvious way to advertise. We would sticker from time to time, we had stickers. I’ll see if I’ve got some somewhere later. Anyway, we had stickers that we put around, and I guess we may have advertised in, occasionally, but I mean there’s no point in advertising in the gay press cos it’s not needed, it wasn’t needed – the people who’d read the gay press wouldn’t necessarily need to have a phone number to ring, though I think we perhaps did advertise in the gay press.

RL: So, what kind of things would people say or ask when they phoned up?

GM: Well sometimes they’d just be silent calls, somebody ringing you up who want, y’know, was too nervous to speak. And sometimes if you were lucky you could coach them to speak, and they were usually people who were isolated who hadn’t come out. Occasionally there’d be information calls, ‘is there a gay club in Doncaster?’ or whatever, I mean we tried to keep some sort of information, I think we probably relied on Gay Times or Gay News or one of the gay periodicals for things like that. We didn’t have the resources to compile a list of venues and things. I think we did have a binder, actually, with details in it, and also things like, I dunno, y’know Samaritan number and so on. (Pardon me)

So, there were, I suppose what you hoped there’d be was you’d get somebody who – we used to arrange to meet people too, if they wanted to be met. But obviously we’d have to try and be careful about that because, you didn’t want to have somebody pretending they were coming out then come and beat you up. But equally I think… being not a very, [unclear] if you met there was always the tendency to, if somebody was just out and they met a nice person who’d answered the phone to them, they might want to have sex with them if it was a man, and did that matter? We sort of argued a bit about that, cos we weren’t professionally run, but while I, when I worked on the Switchboard we’d try and – me and a guy called Mark – tried to make it, to develop a slightly more professional training for people who were new to it, y’know. Not just, ‘oh you’re gay, well I know what it’s like to be gay, so we can share’, but more like trying to be more open questions and ways of being supportive without necessarily assuming that somebody else’s gay experience would be the same as mine or what have you.

Anyway, so… so also in, oh well I – in – the other thing that I found when I came back to Leeds I think was, from America, or maybe it was shortly afterwards that it, there was a disco in the Merrion Centre that was downstairs. You went in through a sort of like a little kiosky entrance that had a door in it that you went, you could go, you went down a spiral staircase into this bar and disco floor downstairs, and one night a week it was gay. It was operated by a guy called Nicky who had been a barman at Charlie’s Club years before. Charlie’s Club, by the way, eventually burnt down; I don’t think anybody was in it. I don’t think it was, y’know it wasn’t a club night, it happened at some other time. Might’ve been an insurance job, who knows? [laughs] It’s probably unfair, I’ve no idea.

Anyway, Nicky ran the Phonographique it was called, this gay disco. And that was – that was a nice little place. It was very small and it wasn’t nearly as sleazy, it was, it was a gay disco, and I mean women were welcome, but there weren’t many women going because it was a gay disco, but women did come. Not always lesbians, some were straight women. But it was, it felt more safe than Charlie’s had ever done in terms of its, y’know, the clientele, there weren’t, people were there to have a good time, there was nobody there trying to make money out of – when I said prostitutes at Charlie’s, I meant women prostitutes not men, so it was a really strange place Charlie’s. But the Phonographique was much more, I suppose if you like, a normal gay bar. In fact, it was quite a nice, because it was quite small it could fill up quite easily; you didn’t need a massive crowd for it to be full.

There were people – I remember Marc Almond used to come in there occasionally, in the early days of Soft Cell, and when he was sort of closeted and so on, and he used to come out there occasionally.

RL: So, did people know who he was?

GM: Oh, yeah, I mean he would come with a mate or, come with mates or something and people’d be, ‘oh there’s Marc Almond’ [laughs] It was a little bit of fame for our group.

RL: And what music would they play?

GM: Gosh, what was popular in the… I mean, I’ve got out of touch with popular music, I have to say, I don’t listen to a lot now. So, I haven’t stayed au fait with what’s popular now. So, what would be popular then? Would that’ve been… I’m trying to remember, there was one I used to really love… Oh God, what was the group called? I can remember the leader, it was, ‘I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, when I met you’.

RL: Oh, Human League.

GM: Human League! Thank you, yes. Don’t You Want Me Baby, and I think that was possibly a little later in the ‘80s, but I can remember dancing to that in Leeds and that would fill the dancefloor twice a night at any gay bar or gay evening on the disco, yeah.

RL: So, would you be going out with a particular group of friends?

GM: Yeah, well initially, cos when I first came back to England, I was completely broke, so I was very down there, I would often walk. I lived up in Chapeltown, well actually Harehills, and so it was a sort of 45-minute walk or something to get there, but I would sometimes walk just to save bus fares. And I suppose I’d have a fiver to spend or something like that and have a few drinks. But I’d meet people there, cos it was the sort of place where you’d meet people, but people’d go with their friends as well.

And then I moved in with some friends in sort of Headingley area, near the university. Then I moved… to… I got a – a few years before I put my name down for a council flat, ended up with this flat in this tower block at a place called Little London, it was very close to the centre. And… where am I go – oh yes, some of the people that used to come to the Phonographique, there was one or two guys would come from this, this housing, thus gay housing co-op called Wild Lavender and, I went up to visit them once or twice. They’d come together in – I mean you’ll have heard more about this from Andy, but, who was the person I’m thinking of, he was probably the most likely to be out on the scene of the group in the house, the others were more… hippy’s not quite the right word, but y’know not the kind of people that’d be so much going to a gay bar. They were all gay men, but Andy was the one most likely to go to the bar or a club for the night.

Anyway, I got to know the people in the house, find out about its origins, that it’d basically come together cos of a guy called Will and a guy called David, who’d met at a men’s conference I think in either ’79 or ’80, and they’d discovered they both wanted to live in a nice rural gay men’s community house. And so, they managed to get hold of a short-life property, which I’m not going to explain, in Leeds – I will if you want me to. Anyway, a short-life property in Leeds in Chapeltown, a big, huge house – there was seven of them originally. And later they had to downsize cos the house got, because it was short-life, the Council took it back and it was, it was demolished and they got, managed to get a smaller house in a housing co-op called Tangram, which was only four bedrooms.

And in 1985 they organised a Gay Men’s Week at a place called Laurieston Hall in Scotland, a residential week, and I went on that. And that was wonderful, that was a big trip, I don’t know if that wasn’t really a Leeds things, anyway that was a whole trip and y’know just an astounding experience to be in a rural environment, a beautiful place nature and water to swim in naked if you wanted to; lawns to sunbathe on, naked if you wanted to; and lovely food, some grown in their own gardens and stuff. It wasn’t a gay household, but they welcomed us as a gay group. I think there were about 20 of us on that week.

And out of that I ended up – Andy invited me if I wanted to join Wild Lavender, which I did. So, I moved into the Leeds Wild Lavender house, and it was actually a year later that I moved out again, because some of us from that house moved to Leeds – to London, sorry, and set up a new Wild Lavender house in London. And that’s how I ended up back in London. So that’s that bit of the story.

RL: So, what was it like in the Leeds Wild Lavender, living that kind of lifestyle?

GM: It was interesting, I mean, we had house meetings every week, and I think those could be quite intense, quite difficult – it wasn’t so bad in Lon- when I was in the house, cos there was only four of us. I mean, when they were, I mean – Andy will’ve told you more about this – but y’know there were stories about the sleeping rota, y’know they thought as alternative gay lifestyles we shouldn’t just be paired up with y’know romantic partners, the old idea of romantic love has its limitations and so they thought we should experiment with, with sleeping with different people and y’know, so they had a sleeping rota at one time, but as I say, Andy could probably tell you more about that than I could. Cos that was a story from before my time.

But living in the house was good. We took it in turns to cook. I think we were vegetarian. Yeah, we were vegetarian, we weren’t vegan. And it was a lifestyle that suited me very well. I was working for a company called Suma, which the wholefood wholesaler, it was then in Leeds. And before I worked in Suma I worked briefly in, I used to work on a casual basis in a café called the Wharf Street Café, which was a vegetarian café. When David, one of the Wild Lavender guys, was a member of the co-op it was run as a workers’ co-op, and they had casual labour when they needed cover, so I sometimes worked in that. And because of that I heard about Suma, which was just down the street in this warehouse. It’s probably now bijou residencies on the canal, but anyway, it was rather inconvenient space that I worked in. It was great to work there, big workers’ co-op and so on, big sacks of rice and beans and so on. Anyway, that’s not really part of the gay story.

I’m gonna, can I check my notes, cos I mean you might have another question as well but. I thought it was. So, at some point somebody told me about this, this gay sauna in Leeds, and it was up Marsh Lane somewhere, and it was a street that didn’t have anything, any visible – it had what looked like former shops that’d been all painted over in brown or some other matt colour, but there was nothing else visibly going on there, it was just lots of lorries and things going up and down in and out of town. And I was told that one of these places, you went in a door and there was a little anteroom space – not really an anteroom space really, a lobby I suppose, with another door straight in front of you, and on your right a little hatch would open and this little guy called Stan who, who I supposed owned and ran, owned and ran the place would check out if you were regular – if you weren’t he asked y’know he asked you how you knew about it, were you gay and so on.

And then if you passed through Stan you opened the inner door, oh you’d give him your money – I’ve no idea what it used to cost – and you’d go in, and it was basically a space behind and above, I think it was probably two shops or two houses. A lot of shops in probably still actually have, are like, have shop fronts at the bottom but above and behind are like a residential house. So, there’d be these staircases that took you up to upper levels and rooms which I suppose at one time would’ve been bedrooms. So, there was a steam room, which was sometimes dark and sometimes dimly lit, and there was a sauna. And you were issued a little skimpy towel and, it was very – I remember somebody went there, and it was the sort of place people said, you’d go, you’d have a shower after you got home [laughs] It wasn’t, it didn’t feel very hygienic. And I think that – I think I heard that place burnt down as well, eventually. But anyway, yes that was a, that’s another little story from that.

And the other thing I could talk about is cottaging. I used to, I used to go cottaging sometimes in public loos, and this was before Grindr. And you could go to the club and see the same people that you saw every week and you’d either had them and you didn’t want them or they didn’t want you and so, it was, y’know you might have a nice time, but if you wanted sex you wouldn’t find it there. So, I used to sometimes go to toilets where I knew other men might go, or men who wanted sex with men, as we learnt to say later [laughs]

RL: So, where were they?

GM: Well, I remember going to one in Bradford that was very busy, and they’d had pretty policemen in there, and I was entrapped there by somebody who arrested me and took me in. But all they did in Bradford is they just took in I think, half a dozen a day or something, I’m not sure but, they used to take them to a magistrate’s court, and you were bound over to keep the peace, so you didn’t have a criminal record. But in Leeds, I used to go to one at, there was one at Hyde Park Corner, there was a public toilet on the corner of Woodhouse Moor. As you come up Woodhouse Lane to Hyde Park Corner, there’s a crossroads, I think it was on the near left-hand corner of that crossroads. The Hyde Park Hotel was a big pub there that the corner was named after. Whether that’s still the case, it was a big – anyway. So, it was kind of diagonally opposite the Hyde Park Pub. It was a men’s public toilet. I’d, sometimes if I’d come back from… clubbing in town, I’d go to the, to the toilet there hoping to meet somebody and have a bit of sex.

On one occasion I was caught by a policeman, who didn’t witness me doing anything, but it was clear that I wasn’t there just for a wee, cos I was hanging about, waiting about and so on, so I was arrested and taken to Headingley police station. This was 198- probably, either ’82 or ’83, I was living in the Headingley area at that time. And working for a, I was working as a coach driver for, Wallace Arnold they were called. And they took me in, asked me lots of questions, but at this point you could, you, they hadn’t changed the law about silence, so if you kept silent they couldn’t use that against you if you came to court later. And I just kept silent; I wouldn’t answer any questions except my name and my address. Cos I knew from, past experience was the police and so on that once you answer one slightly innocent question, then the next question’s a bit less innocent, then you suddenly you don’t answer when they get to the question about, ‘so what were you doing in that toilet?’ So, it’s better not to answer any questions at all, so I think I maybe just answered a very little bit, like my name, address, where I lived – obviously where I lived – but where I was coming from and going to but y’know, going home and some.

And they kept me, then eventually they gave up questioning me and put me in a – oh and I wanted to speak to a solicitor, and I’d heard that there was somebody, a solicitor that was quite good, and I ended up speaking to this woman called Ruth, I forget her surname now, but she was brilliant. She said, ‘well it sounds like you’re doing very well’, she said, ‘you haven’t said, told them anything’, I mean they must’ve spoken to her before they put her on to me, and she said – or maybe she asked me some questions, I forget, but she said, ‘oh I imagine they’ll let you go fairly soon then’, she said, ‘if you really need me to, I’ll come down, but as long as you keep not answering them, you’ll be fine as you are’. So I said, ‘okay, thank you, that’s really reassuring’ [laughs]

They let me go, and eventually I was charged, and I pleaded not guilty to something like soliciting in a public place. And it was gonna go to Crown Court, so I had to, I went to one magistrate’s court where I pleaded not guilty, then they waited, then it was gonna go to Crown Court, and then I think the, the police realised they didn’t really have enough of a case and so they came to my solicitor and said, ‘well, we’ll bind him over to keep the peace if he agrees not to challenge that’, cos you can’t – if you say, ‘well I didn’t do anything’ then they can’t bind you over. So, I had to agree to that, so it’s a bit like a plea bargain. But basically, it meant again, that I wouldn’t have a criminal record because of it. So, I agreed to that. And they told lies about me in court, they said I had an erection and things like that, and I didn’t. Not seen by that policeman anyway. I don’t think I did, actually. I was interested in finding somebody, I wasn’t that horny as it happens. And so, yeah, so they told some lies really, and, but I was quite pleased, cos the magistrate said, ‘well, this has taken a long time to come to us and it’s clear, y’know, you’ve wasted the court’s time with bringing this forward and I hope you’ll inform the prosecuting officers’ – or whoever it was – ‘that y’know, we feel this is waste of the court’s time’. So, I thought, I kind of won that one [laughs] y’know, yes, I didn’t get off – she said if you plead, if you plead you won’t agree to be bound over and it will have to go to Crown Court, and then it’ll be a lot more hassle and I don’t want to spend another year waiting for it to come back. So, it felt like a moral victory, really. So anyway, that was my experience of being – of nearly being, getting into trouble for cottaging. So, I think that’s it for stories, yes.

RL: Thank you very much [break in recording]

RL: So, tell me a little bit about the Gemini in Huddersfield.

GM: I didn’t go very often, it has to be said, but one of the, they say one of the best night’s out in, in, in West Yorkshire, or in that, or even in the north of England, really, was the Gemini Club in Huddersfield. Cos it was about halfway between, or equidistant anyway, from Leeds and Manchester, so I think people used to go from both places. But actually the first, the time – I think the couple of times that I went there, I didn’t actually realise what – one of the big attractions was there was a yard outside where people used to have, men basically used to have sex with each other. So it was basically an opp- y’know, it was – this is in the days – I mean later on there were lots of, the laws began to relax and the police became less heavy. Lots of clubs did used to have backrooms and it was, it was okay, but in those it was very much, it was very unusual.

And anyway, so eventually the police raided the place I think and… I don’t know if, I can’t remember what the outcome of the raid was, but it was felt to be very homophobic and aggressive and so on, and so the – for that year, whenever it was, early ‘80s, probably, the national Pride march that normally would be in London, was relocated to Huddersfield. And, it wasn’t as well attended as the London one but then, talking about the early ‘80s, the London one didn’t have the sort of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands that might be there now. So we wound through the streets of Huddersfield. I do remember that one of the owners of the Gemini Club had a pink Rolls Royce and that was in the parade [laughs] And there was a bit of me that had mixed feelings about that, cos this y’know capitalist man with his Rolls Royce! At the same time, it was a pink Rolls Royce and it felt very, very fun, yes. So, that’s my little story about the Gemini Club and Huddersfield Pride, or national Pride in Huddersfield.

[END]