Andy Dubberley: Full Interview

TRANSCRIPT

Andy Dubberley
Interviewed by Ross Horsley
2nd July 2018


RH: This is Ross Horsley, recording for the West Yorkshire Queer Stories project on the 2nd July 2018, and I’m here with Andy Dubberley. Andy, would you like to just very quickly introduce yourself.

AD: Hi, this is Andy Dubberley. I’ve come today to talk to Ross about the West Yorkshire Queer Stories project. I’ve been asked to talk a little bit about my life, my history and how I might connect to Leeds.

RH: Thank you Andy. How long have you lived in Leeds?

AD: Well I’ve lived twice in Leeds, so in total if I add it up… just over 30 years I think. I first moved to Leeds in ’81, was here for seven years, went to London for six years, then came back in ’94 and I’ve been here again ever since.

RH: And how was living in Leeds compared to living in London?

AD: Well, London just got too much, and six years was enough, and I kinda returned to a place I kinda knew, no regrets about that… And I like Leeds. I’ve moved around a bit, but Leeds feels like home to me now.

RH: I know from hearing you speak a couple of weeks ago with a Touchstone event that was focused on mental health, that you’re interested in helping other people and drawing people together to talk through things, so what sort of work have you done in that respect?

AD: At the moment I’ve involved with a project called The Space, I was a founder member. The project has been going now about six and a half years. Our focus is peer-led, our focus is on working with people moving into recovery and sustaining the recovery from alcohol and drug use and/or mental health issues, or anything really, that life throws at us i.e. myself, I’m in recovery, I’ll be seven years sober and clean on this coming July 12th. And prior to that I’ve, in the past, I’ve been a group worker – I used to work in another project, which was part of Leeds Mind – again that was peer-led. I don’t know, I just really find facilitating groups, it’s what I do, one-to-one support and mentoring is what I do, I think I do it pretty well. And I really believe that recovery is possible. And I actually think that the people who have the lived experience have the best answers, in my opinion. Professional are fine, we need them, but actually the work is done by the people themselves. So that’s it, in a nutshell, kind of.

RH: Whereabouts is The Space?

AD: Well, we were in the city centre for six years on Great George Street. We were in this huge building, absentee landlords were the Yorkshire Conservative Association – we had it kind of rent-free, but they did no repairs, so it was falling down around our ears. And then they wanted to redevelop it into luxury flats so we had to move pretty quickly, and we’re now at the bottom of Chapeltown Road, Gemini Business Park, which is OK – it’s not far from the city centre, but it’s… a lot of people haven’t followed us. Seems a bit crazy to me, it’s only three bus stops out of the centre, but it’s a fully-accessible kind of building and we’re hopeful we’ll turn it around and more people will – people are starting to come, new people are joining. Plus it opens up – I mean, I live in Harehills, to me it opens up the possibilities of doing more work in the kinda of Chapeltown/Harehills area, which to me that’s quite exciting – not everything has to be in the city centre.

RH: Do you find that the service is accessed by a fair few LGBT people?

AD: A few, not as many as I would like – I think there are reasons for that. We’re a very small team of workers – three of us – two of us are gay. I’ve done specific gay group work, LGBT group work in the past. I would say probably at the moment, we’re probably supporting about a dozen LGBT people. But I think there are particular reasons why – I mean, research shows – I’ve been involved in research in the past in Leeds, and I think there’s more about to happen, but, I mean it’s a bit simplistic to say but probably, roughly, LGBT people are probably twice as likely to have substance issues than the general population, probably twice as likely to have mental health issues, half as likely to access services – there are all sorts of reasons for that. I think there are particular stigmas that attach not only in wider society about substance abuse and mental health, but I also think from within the community, the LGBT community, I think there’s another set of stigmas around substance issues and mental health. So yeah, there’s a piece of work to be done, and I think Leeds, I think MESMAC is involved, and I hope Space will be involved. Leeds has been commissioned by Public Health England to do some work, as a pilot project to look at the substance issues in particular, so what will come of that I don’t know.

RH: Are the groups that you run, are they mixed, sexuality-wise, or do you tend to say run a group that might be particularly friendly to gay men, for instance?

AD: Well at the moment I facilitate – they are mixed groups. I co-facilitate a couple of Smart groups – Smart is a particular way of working around addiction. Smart stands for Self-Management and Recovery Training. It’s different from the twelve step approach, which most people will be familiar with and AA and NA. It’s very much CBT, rational-emotional behaviour therapy stuff. We’ve adapted it at The Space so it’s… people can talk about their mental health issues. I also facilitate a couple of groups called Phoenix, which I started six years ago – the focus is on emotional and mental wellbeing. There’s one mixed gender group at the moment, and I do a men’s group – that’s my particular passion, is men’s groups. And that is mixed, in terms of sexuality. I was – I did try to launch an LGBT Smart group at The Space back in February. I did a lot of prep work for it, including meeting MESMAC workers, but there was really no take up and I really couldn’t justify to my managers in Bradford – I was sitting in an empty room, so I had to – it’s been parked into the long grass. It’s a bit of a shame because last week there were two kind of enquiries and it was like ‘oh no!’ But y’know, I think The Space is LGBT or queer friendly and I think the remarkable thing about the recovery community, what I’ve experienced of it, is they take all the kind of racism, the homophobia and the sexism and people just tend to dump it and move into recovery. It just gets in the way, so yeah… I’m hoping that y’know more LGBT people will use, will come to The Space.

RH: I’m interested in what you said about people dumping attitudes like homophobia as they work through their own kind of processes – how does that work, what’s that like?

AD: Well, for me, particularly in the Phoenix men’s group, which has been going now for nearly two years, although the men going to it have probably, the majority would identify as straight, a couple bi… I think the men kind of begin to realise that actually homophobia is not just damaging to gay or bi men, it actually damages straight men too in the way men are kind of brought up to you have to be like this, or you should be doing this. It’s kind of… I wouldn’t use in a group particularly, but terms like patriarchal, but most guys kind of understand that y’know, they’ve had damaging relationships with their own fathers or… And this sometimes informs why men, y’know suicide is huge amongst men, biggest killer of men actually, more so than drugs and alcohol, more so than war or traffic accidents or cancer, whichever way you look at it. And also when men talk about their past using and why they drifted into drug and alcohol addiction, and then isolating themselves, is because, partly is because ‘I just cannot be what I’m supposed to be as a man’. So the weird kind of thing around most men is they tend to kind of become more able to listen, become more tolerant, become gentler in their approach, because all that kind of aggression stuff they realise is toxic. That’s particularly – I’ve always had an interest in men’s groups, y’know I’m kind of a follower, if that’s such a word of Edward Carpenter, who had a major kind of formative influence on me and things that I’ve been involved in over the years.

RH: How did you come across him and his sort of influence?

AD: Well I started to, when I was at college in Liverpool in the 70s, and started to explore – started to read Foucault and all that kinda stuff, but I think it was Jeffrey Weeks and Shelia Rowbotham, Socialism and the New Life or something, a book that came out in about ’75, ’76. And I was vaguely aware of Edward Carpenter I think from reading kind of biographies of like Bloomsbury Group and stuff like that, people referred to this Edward Carpenter, kind of weird person, vegetarian with his sandals, and I thought ‘ah, interesting!’ And I also loved poetry, so I knew Walt Whitman, and that I thought there’s this kindred spirit here, and back in the early 80s I was involved in setting up a gay men’s housing project – the idea was that we were going to kinda move into the countryside and set up something like Edward Carpenter’s place, but we ended up in Chapeltown! [laughs] But anyway we were trying to do something like that… We smoked far too much cannabis though, which kind of got in the way, but we did set up something called the Gay Men’s Weeks at a place called Laurieston Hall in Scotland, that was, the first one we did was in ’85. Out of that came something called The Edward Carpenter Community Trust, which is still going, I think, hundreds of members. I don’t think they do Gay Men’s Weeks at Laurieston Hall anymore, but they were running for about 30 years.

RH: What went on at the Gay Men’s Weeks?

AD: Oh what didn’t go on! Laurieston is an amazing place – I haven’t been actually up there for about 20 years, but it’s a kind of working – I think they’re taking a break at the moment – but it was like a massive big house in masses of grounds, with woods and a lake. So we kinda grew all our own stuff, pretty grand, not like Findhorn [spiritual community in Scotland], but it was a chance for like 60 men to go up there twice a year and just do all sorts of stuff… Boating on the lake, swimming, midnight saunas, in the woods. It was transformative to lots of men – somewhere I’ve got a lot of photos of it. There’s a site, you can look at, the Carpenter Community. Yeah, it was kinda my idea actually. I’m one of these characters who operates on the margins, and I’m always the kind of the naughty one, the one that drunk, the one that did far too many drugs [laughs] but, somewhere in a footnote I might be recognised when they write the history, that it was my fucking idea – sorry tape recorder. Yeah…

RH: What was the housing – did you say it was in Chapeltown? [inaudible]

AD: Yeah, we set up a housing co-op called Wild Lavender. It was a bunch of guys who came together – we looked at various places around the country where we might do an Edward Carpenter. We looked at so many wrecked barns here, there and everywhere, but actually an opportunity came up in Leeds – three of the guys lived in Leeds. There was some huge Victorian houses on Sholebroke Avenue in Chapeltown. They had a what’s called short life – they were gonna demolish it in three years – but we had use of this amazing house for about three years, and the personnel kinda changed but there was a core group of about six of us, and we lived there for three years. And that was kind of interesting because it was a bunch of white gay men, mixed in terms of class, which was good, and it became something of an alternative place to visit in Leeds. So we had kinda connections to GaySoc at the university… And we became a base for visiting activists and things – Gay Sweatshop, the theatre company, they would come and stay with us if they were on tour. What else did we do? [pause] We did a lot – it’s a bit of a dope haze as well.

RH: How many people generally lived there at any one time?




AD: Well it – I think at the most we had about seven, but I mean it was a big house, so there were communal areas, a library, we had a big archive and stuff, which has been dispersed now unfortunately.

RH: How did you collect stuff for that?

AD: Well most of us brought stuff, y’know. I’m a bit of a hoarder, so I had Gay News going back to issue 1, all the periodicals like Gay Left and Achilles Heel and Spare Rib, and it was an amazing collection of people’s books, it was a library, an archive in itself, but it’s all been split up now. And I’ve given lots away to other archives and things. It was good y’know, I mean you could take the piss out of it now I suppose, we used to have weekly house meetings y’know where we kind of sorted stuff out or not. We even had a sleeping rota at some point.

RH: A sleeping rota? How does that work?

AD: [laughs] Well it was kind of let’s experiment by all sleeping with each other and stuff. I didn’t fancy most of the guys there, so I kind of pulled out of that one pretty quickly [laughs] but y’know, people used to come and stay and we had a room that was just mattresses and stuff, so sometimes men would bunk up, that could be quite fun. Yeah and we were involved in a couple of men’s groups, which we set up, which were mixed sexuality-wise, they were kind of interesting. I think we even curated – there used to be a paper called… oh I think it was Achilles Heel we curated an edition of that. God, this is going way back. Yeah, but anyway, we had that house for three years and then we had to move because that side of the street was being demolished, I think it’s all new buildings now, and we joined – what was left of us – five of us I think – another co-op in Harehills called Tangram which still exists, but we were still known as, we had a house in Tangram, it was small, four bed, but it was always known as Wild Lavender. So Wild Lavender kind of dispersed – some of the guys went to London, set up another couple of Wild Lavender houses, one in Hackney, one in… south of the river. I stayed behind and kept it going until I moved to London in ’88. Yeah, so Tangram at the time was mixed, loads of lesbians living there, yeah, but not separatist. Leeds was really interesting at the time, there was a lot going on in terms of sexual politics, particularly in the women’s side of things. Yeah but Tangram still is, I’m still living – I moved back to Tangram; I’m still there. And over 40-odd adults living in Tangram, probably about a quarter to a third would identify as LGBT or queer.

RH: Why do you think people from that community or communities y’know want to live in a co-operative sort of setting?

AD: Well the advantages are low rents – we actually own all the properties, we manage them, we pay a worker, who in turn gets to participate in meetings. I’ve been very active in it and I’ve actually taken a break from it now, I go to the minimum number of meetings. But it’s still attractive – one of the houses in the co-op is communal, still, which identifies as queer. They’re at the other end of the co-op – I don’t know them very well, but they’re kinda young, Wharf Chamber kinda types, y’know identify as gender-queer and all sorts of stuff. I’ve made some contact with them – they’re kinda slightly fascinated by old timers like me. I’m slightly fascinated, and slightly jaded when I think ‘Jesus, you think you’re new stuff, I don’t think so’!

RH: Does that feeling come up a lot, that you think –

AD: No, there’s a bit of generational tension – real or foreseen I’m not quite sure. It’s kinda weird – I used to go, I was a member of Common Place for a while, which preceded Wharf Chambers. I’ve never actually been into Wharf Chambers, but what I hear about it doesn’t really pull me.

RH: In what way?

AD: [pause] Perhaps it’s a generational thing – I don’t know. I don’t know, I need to overcome my prejudice and…

RH: In what way does it sound different to places like Common Place or earlier models?

AD: I think there’s a lot of righteous kind of virtue signalling that goes on, and I just think ‘oh jeez, get over yourselves’. So when people rave about Wharf Chambers I just think ‘oh well’. And I follow some of the debates on Facebook, y’know, and I just think jeez y’know [traffic noise] There’s one of these going on at the moment about under-representation of BAME and it seems they’ve tied themselves in a knot, y’know actually [pause] Are you asking BAME people why they don’t wanna use it? I don’t know. But anyway, that’s their story, it’s not mine.

RH: Do you look back fondly on the years, the ‘70s, when you were living in Wild Lavender?

AD: Well it was the early ‘80s, Wild Lavender. Yeah, yeah – mostly, mostly. I mean, I’m certainly glad I did it. Yeah.

RH: Would you have changed anything about it, if you could have, while you were living there?

AD: [long pause] I’m not really sure, y’know. Would I have changed what I was doing, y’know? I was drinking far too much. But I was always passionate about what I did, y’know, even addiction… Y’know, when I look back – there’s some painful memories too… I mean, I’m in touch with some of them, or they got in touch with me on Facebook. Once they realised that rumours of my death [laughs] weren’t true. But I was actually still alive, so some were like ‘Oh Andy! That’s great! Y’know, I must come and see you next time I’m in Leeds’. Part of me just thinks ‘actually, don’t’. Too much water under the bridge since then. Others who I’m not in touch with – there’s no particular reason why not, but that’s my stuff, something about ‘my past is my past’. And I’m more interested in where I’m going now. Although actually it’s absolutely shaped who I am, y’know. But y’know I’m glad I did it. Yeah, and a lot of interesting things happened, and I’ve got lots of really good memories, I’m got some pretty good memories of that time, yeah. And I survived it as well.

RH: What’s the happiest memory you have, of that era and that situation?

AD: [long pause] I think sometimes, in the living room after a fraught kind of house meeting, which used to be on a Monday evening, we’d all roll some spliffs and watch Hill Street Blues, I remember Hill Street Blues [laughs]. And I used to think ‘oh yeah, forget the meeting, let’s just chill’. Because I was the youngest, I was the naughty one, y’know, and I was forever getting told off, but… [pause] it was fun, it was always unexpected, it was great when visitors came, because we did, we became something of a national institution that people wanted to come and visit. And I created something called a Merzbild, it’s a thing that Kurt Schwitters did back in the day so people, it became almost, it took over a wall – people were attaching photos and bus tickets and tab ends, and this big artwork just kind of developed and I love that, yeah.

RH: Did you have to turn people away who wanted to live there?

AD: [pause] Er, I can’t – I don’t think so. I remember there was one time we had a really bad bust up… which was quite traumatic, where we had to expel, get rid of a couple of people. But no, generally if a place became vacant then it would just seem to happen organically, that someone else would move in.


RH: Can you remember what sorts of things people fell out about, like the bust up that you mentioned?

AD: [pause] It was mostly over – if there was disapproval towards me, it was probably on the amount I was drinking, which wasn’t a crazy amount, but the other guys weren’t really drinkers. I’d always been a boozer, until seven years ago. The two guys who were kind of asked to leave, their drug use had gone absolutely crazy.

RH: Was that cannabis?

AD: Yeah, well all sorts of stuff, the shit they were doing, y’know… I mean, cannabis, we did smoke cannabis. I wouldn’t say I was an excessive cannabis user, but a couple of the guys were doing like [inaudible] and mushrooms, and it was becoming psychotic, then it became quite challenging, so... But one of those guys got back in touch with me, again, thought I was dead and then heard I was alive, so I just returned their call and said ‘I’m still here, how’re you, I’m doing fine, brilliant’. The other guy, I don’t know what happen to.

RH: Coming back to the present a bit, what’s the age range of the people who, particularly the LGBT people, who use services at The Space these days?

AD: Erm… I’m just trying to think. The majority of people who use the space I would say are in their 30s and 40s I think. And that kind of matches with – most people don’t move into recovery – a few start in their 20s, but most people, when things get really rough, start to do something, so generally kind of early to mid-30s, sometimes later. In my case I didn’t start in recovery until mid-50s. So, I’m just trying to think – the guys in particular at the moment [pause]. Yeah, yeah, 30s, early 40s I’d say, that’s kind of the range at the moment.

RH: What happens at a typical kind of group meeting?

AD: Well, a focus on the Phoenix group, as I say we do a mixed group on a Tuesday afternoon, it’s men and women; men’s group on a Thursday afternoon. Generally what we do, it’s dead simple really, we do things in rounds – we start off with a round of names, then we do a round of what’s called ‘big news’, which is we then check in something we’ve either enjoyed or achieved or moved forward in the last week. We talk about that. Then we have a check-in round, how am I, how’s life with me, if I’m carrying a burden it’s a chance to put it down and unpack it. If I’ve got ideas going round and round in my head it’s a chance to get them out and let them fly. It’ll be more big news. Anything at all, really. Then while we’re each checking in, what we’re doing is we’re not responding, what we’re doing is listening. People take as long as they want, generally about 10 minutes or so. Then we have a break, and then when we come back there’s a facilitator, and we do a little bit of reflection, summarising of what people have said. And then we start to pull out threads, kind of common – there’s usually around, it could be anything, there could be some kind of common threads and then we start reflecting and sharing. It’s all about – we’re not telling each other what we should be doing, it’s not about advice-giving, it’s about sharing from lived experiences: this is what I think, this is what I feel, this is what I’ve experienced. So it could be anything – relationships, parenthood, managing change, grief – whatever it might be. And then we kind of finish off with a couple of rounds – something you’re taking away from the group, a feeling, thought, intention, whatever that might be. And finally something we’re looking forward to next week. And that’s kind of it really, and it’s a formula that kind of works – people might arrive feeling pretty shit, they’ve had a really tough week but pretty much without exception people go away at the end of it feeling a hell of a lot better. So that’s really the focus of the Phoenix group.

Smart groups are slightly different, the focus is on finding ways and maintaining ways of being absent from any kind of addictive behaviour, whatever that might be. Mostly it’s drugs and alcohol we’re looking at, but sometimes it’s gambling. And sometimes, y’know, Phoenix and Smart – there is overlap there, so sometimes men in the men’s group might say, might want to look at kinda sex addiction issues or, in the context of a men’s group where they can feel safe to do that. It’s primarily about creating safe space for people to talk, or people listen to and respect, where people know they can be honest with themselves and with each other.

So it’s non-judgemental, and yeah, so – and I just see in the space, through the groups and the mentoring I’ve done y’know over the six years, sometimes people arrive like at the Project, they may have gone through treatment services but they’re so shut down, armoured, almost like they’ve built this armour around themselves, which has completely twisted and stunted them, and it’s a very, it can be a very slow process. The armour starts to come off, and they start to grow and change and become, sometimes, the person they were always meant to be. But transformation is what it is. I’m really interested in transformation. And some of the men in particular I’ve worked with, y’know what they’ve gone on, what they’re going on to do now is just brilliant, and I feel really privileged, just, mostly just by listening and reflecting, to help them to do that, and they’re starting to do it themselves, particularly with other people, and with other men – and this is the thing, this is where Carpenter comes in, that is what it’s about, y’know men can be warriors, there are times in my life where I’ve been a warrior, but actually we need teachers and healers too. And one of the other groups that I do, it’s called Striders, which is a walking group, and I fucking love that. It follows on from the Saturday afternoon Smart meeting, we just go walking.

RH: Where do you go?

AD: Well, this Saturday just gone – it was only a small group, six of us, because we live not far from the bottom of the Meanwood Valley Trail, so we walked up Woodhouse Ridge. Just a gentle stroll. We never do more than three miles, because some people when they move into recovery are just physically knackered, until they get stronger, which they will. So it was a hot day, we were in the trees, there was a bit of a breeze, and we ended up in Headingley at the Heart Centre, the café there. We were in the courtyard which was, I mean Headingley’s a bit mental, with the football and all, but it was nice and we were just chatting and talking. That’s the brilliant thing about going walking in nature, it’s good for the soul, and it’s fun just being with people to enjoy themselves.

RH: How far do you think your own sexuality has led on this particular life path, of wanting to help and connect with other people?

AD: I think it’s always been a need in me, to connect. I grew up in a small northern town, Darlington, [puffs out air] that was rough, where I thought I was the only gay in the village, y’know, this is late ‘60s, early ‘70s. And I kind of semi dropped out of school, so I had, the people I hung around with when I was about 17 where the ‘freaks’ in the town, y’know doing drugs, living in the pubs. But there came a point when I just knew I had to get out of that place.

RH: Did you connect with some other gay men?

AD: Well not there, it was only subsequently, later on, and I was bullied at school, on and off. It was kind of weird, when I was a teenager, because I was coming to terms with my sexuality… I wasn’t quite sure whether I was bi or what. It was the time of Bowie and glam rock and all, but I was also reading Gay News. There was a newsagent where they used to have about two copies, I don’t know – I never find out who bought the other copy [laughs]. But at the time Gay News was regarded as underground press, y’know I used to read Oz and Ink and It and all those kind of things as well, so I was aware that there was something else going on. And I kind of, what topped it off for me was I was 17, I got raped and that sealed it for me, I just thought I’ve got to fucking get out of this town, it’s not good for me. And fortunately I managed, just, to get enough A level grades to get me to college and I went to Liverpool, and I lived in Liverpool four years. The first thing I did, when I got – it was fresher’s week or something – I signed up to GaySoc, and by my second year I was president of GaySoc.

RH: What size organisation was it, at the time?

AD: Probably about 30 members. I was a bit pissed off I’d just missed the tail end of Gay Liberation Front. I had the badges [laughs] Where’s Gay Liberation Front?! I met some of the people who’d been involved with GLF in Liverpool. Because in my heart, y’know I was reading about GLF when I was 16 and stuff, and I think I’ve got some badges from that period, so but that kind of philosophy – and I’m reading stuff now actually about GLF days in the States, and I’m reading some of the history stuff now – Jeffrey Weeks’ Coming Out book about what was going on over here, in his latest edition of that book. And it’s like ‘oh shit, I did really want to be part of that, so I’d better do something with this GaySoc!’ So it kind of became a bit GLF-y. Yeah it was a social group, it was a group where people bunked off together and all as it should be, but it also had a political edge to it as well, y’know I made sure it linked up with the women’s group in the university, we did joint discos – this is before separatism reared its head. And we were involved in kind of abortion rights and things like that, and other kind of political stuff that was going on at the time.

RH: What happened when you finished university?

AD: I dossed around really, half-heartedly I was looking for a job, but I ended up moving back to the north-east actually. I stayed with my folks for a while and I was a social worker for three years in Middlesbrough. I was weird. I was mostly – I was a trainee social worker, I was a punk [laughs], Docs. I was mostly working with young males kind of 15 to 18 year olds, thinking creatively, trying to make sure y’know that they weren’t banged up, generally succeeded. Cops really hated me. [laughs] They wanted these lads banged up, and it wasn’t happening. There was this dive in Middlesbrough, this what passed for a gay club. The cops used to come in occasionally and y’know, glower at people, get free beer and then bugger off. But this guy – I think he was an inspector – followed me into the toilets and threatened to blackmail me. [inaudible] or I’ll tell your employers. Once I’d got over the shock I said ‘just fucking go ahead’. But it became really difficult and I did three years of that and then I burnt out. But at the time it was then I was getting involved with this bunch of guys who created this thing called Wild Lavender, which is why I ended up in Leeds in ‘81. And I thought ‘no more social work for a while’.

RH: Was there a gay scene in Leeds in 1981?

AD: Kind of – there was the Penny, there was a pub on Boar Lane, was it called Peel, something like that? Where the Trinity Church is now. The main bar was kind of straight but the saloon bar was kind of gayish. Then there were a series of clubs just, where are we, at the bottom of The Calls. There was one called Rockshots, which became pretty known as – I was – I loved the scene in Liverpool – I always found the scene in Leeds was really a bit naff, to be quite honest with you, so… Oh, and there was the Phonographique, which was on a Tuesday night down in the Merrion Centre. Tuesday night was a gay night, and it coincided with GaySoc, which was a Tuesday evening at the uni and I used to go to meetings there, then we’d all pile in to The Phono. That was alright! But when I went to London I was just: ‘wow!’ Y’know, the kind of club scene and stuff.

RH: Did you miss it when you came back to Leeds?

AD: I couldn’t afford to stay in London anymore. It’s too big… [pause] too atomised, really. I did get involved with a group called Gay London Swimmers, which was brilliant. In fact I took them all up to, most of them up to Gay Men’s Week, which was… There was about three pools in South Leeds – South London, East London and North London where about 100 guys would turn up. There was naked swimming which was sort of “wheee!” [laughs]. What was fu-, what was ironic, given my experiences with the cops in Middlesbrough, that another inspector, this time from the London Met, taught me to dive, which was [laughs]. So that was a cultural difference there. I was doing residential social work in London and working with people with learning disabilities, which was fine, but I kind of burnt out again, plus I was having a long-distance relationship with somebody in Leeds, somebody I met at Gay Men’s Week at Laurieston Hall. I think I met all my lovers in the ‘80s and early ‘90s up there. He was quite a significant person in the community here, and I don’t know if he’s appeared on your radar yet, a guy called Jason Wilkinson, no? Stunning guy, but it didn’t quite work out us being in the same city. I’ve got some photos somewhere, I didn’t bring them today. Jason was very involved, he was a hairdresser, he was involved in this salon called Cutting Camp, have you heard of Cutting Camp? Right, you need to research Cutting Camp. He was involved in a theatre company called Latex, have you heard of them? Okay, that’s a whole area you need to look at. And we were in Leeds ACT UP, ACT UP Leeds. Are you looking at ACT UP? Right OK, yeah. I was, when I moved back to Leeds I was kind of a little bit on the periphery, but I was involved in various actions in Leeds, like closing down Quarry House, closing down Leeds Hospital Fund and things like that. Never had an ACT UP Leeds reunion, as far as I know. The only purp- I mean I bump into people from that time, some are now dead, there are people I still run into. And there are some good memories about that, and some painful memories too, y’know people who’ve kind of – one of the other reasons I moved back to Leeds was, I realise now, was in London I found I was going to funerals every other week, people who died from, during the HIV crisis, and I just couldn’t take that anymore. So that’s another reason why I came back to Leeds, and I got very much involved in ACT UP. But some of us who survived the HIV/AIDS thing, like Jason, we, by luck or by safe sex or combinations of both we survived that, but then we started to die of alcohol and drugs, and I think there were a number of reasons for that. I’ve been to, in the last few years, I’ve been to several funerals of activists, thinking ‘shit – we should’ve been able to support each other in this and we didn’t’. So that’s quite sad.

RH: Jason that you mentioned, he’s still around?


AD: Oh no, no no. I went to – his funeral was in 2007 at All Hallows’, Hyde Park. Hundreds of people there. Gay Abandon sang at his funeral. I hadn’t seen him for about three years. He turned up on my – after we’d split he had a knack of turning up at my place about once a year usually absolutely off his head. [pause] So that was a difficult one, for me. Because it was at that funeral, and at that point that I made the decision that ‘right OK, me next’ and I went on a bender which lasted five years and… I ended up in intensive care. But that’s where my recovery started. Lots of fun memories about Jason, and you will, I’m sure as you get more into this history thing, he was very significant on the Leeds scene. He was in a band also, called The Fartown Fruits. Henry Tickner, have you come across him? His funeral was 2014, again hundreds of people came to that and Gay Abandon sang at that. Henry went right back to the days of Leeds GLF. And another guy called Harvey, who died back in the summer about two years ago. So that was an interesting scene to come back to, when I came back to Leeds. Most people remember me as kind of Jason’s boyfriend. But funnily enough I ran into one guy I hadn’t seen for years. We kind of looked at each other. We’d gone to see, what was it, God’s Own Country at Hyde Park cinema – love that movie – and he looked at me and says ‘Jason’s boyfriend!’ ‘Well, yeah: Andy.’ A guy called Chris, Christobel [?], Chris Vertigo [?]. And we had a brief chat and stuff, and we were both amazed that we were still alive [laughs]. The drugs and stuff that we’d done. I didn’t ask him if he was in recovery. He looked pretty well, actually, but jeez. So occasionally I see people from that time – Gill Crawshaw, who used to work at Volition who’s now an artist, she was very much involved in ACT UP. Yeah there used to be a really good y’know, I have mixed feelings about the Pride marches these days, but back in the mid-‘90s, round about World AIDS Day, there used to be a march in Leeds. I think it went in three – ’92, ’93, ’94 – but it was very political, very angry. MESMAC were involved, ACT UP, it was fucking angry, but also proud as well y’know, the politics was there.

RH: Where would you march?


AD: We generally would meet at the Art Gallery, march down the Headrow, then down – the same kind of route as we do now. A few hundred people, not the thousands you get now. Most people in leather jackets, they were the uniforms, they were pretty standard at the time [laughs]. With all these slogans, y’know: ‘People with AIDS under attack’, ‘What do we do? ACT UP. Fight back’. It was very important. That’s what I miss now, I mean I remember a couple of years ago, I think I was on my own, I thought oh I’ll do the Pride march and there’s me, walking along, dancing but also shouting at the top of my lungs the old slogans. People looked at me and thought ‘who is this mad person?’ So fuck off, y’know.

RH: Did anyone get it, did anyone understand?

AD: Possibly not, possibly not. It’s weird, I took a bunch of people from the Space to Pride a couple of years ago, we even did a banner: ‘People in recovery’, which people liked, the banner. The people I went with I think were pretty much all straight-identified; they loved it. I felt kind of… I enjoyed seeing Marc Almond singing in Millennium Square and it was good because Jude managed to get for Sage Projects, the Lambert Yard Café, so we’d prior arranged so that people from Space could use that as a chill out space. A good view of what was going on down here. I don’t feel censorious or moralistic about it, but I don’t want to be around that kind of, when it gets to about six o’clock and everybody’s just off their faces and it’s just like, been there, done that.

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