Steve_Bamlett_blog

‘Talking about trauma was a vital part of the recovery process, … ‘.[1] I had opened up myself to be vulnerable, to allow myself to trust in someone else, …’.[2] Some reflections on why the exploration of vulnerability and response to trauma has become so prominent in queer life-stories. A blog in preparation for hearing a reading of new life-stories by Paul Burston and Michael Handrick at Blackwells, Manchester on Monday 3 July 6.30 p.m.  

PS: I have already referred to Michael Handrick’s book in an earlier blog, though that was mainly concerned with ways in which I tried unsuccessfully to align his story to mine. It can be read, for what it’s worth, at this link.

I am going to this event soon in Manchester. As usual I need to dress myself in the defensive armour of pre-thought about it. It feels in this case the more necessary touching, as it does, on themes close to my heart. The defence may seem intellectual, (and a key defence mechanism according to both Sigmund and Anna Freud is ‘intellectualisation’ of an issue that is at its core a thing of emotion and somatic sensation), but it is not so entirely: my interests here are also that bit metaphysical because they ask questions about who I am and how (by what kinds of evidence) do I know what I am.  It chimes with themes that emerge with aging and are, therefore the more prominent in Burston’s telling of his life tale than Handrick’s. First there is the sense of languor that comes with feeling that one has already said by now all that one might want to say about ‘being’, ‘growing up’ gay. Explaining his shift into crime-writing and less exclusively queer repertoire of characters in his novels, Burston says: ‘I’d written about the gay scene, gay celebrities and even gay marriage, – to be honest, I felt I had nothing left to say on the subject’.  The other though is as true of the latter-day feel too of Michael Handrick’s beautiful book, a book that talks to you rather than at you but about what makes you what you are, which isn’t JUST a gay male.

To be fair, of course, this is less an abandonment of ‘gay’ issues than a deeper dive into the issues which characterise lives outside his own (as well as his own) but in ways more structurally determined at the level of the psychosocial: such as domestic violence, militarism, and ‘toxic masculinity’.[3] But more to the point, it is also a dive that attempts to deconstruct the over-emphasis in the writing of gay life-stories on the validation of a peculiarly situated idea of what it means to be ‘gay’ and what, as Burston wrote in 1998, leads to, having avoided the surveillance of our lives by the disapproval of the heteronormative, led to being ‘required to pass successfully as gay by disapproving homosexuals’.[4] In brief this his new autobiography like Burston’s earlier work is also  ‘about the pitfalls of identity politics and the shameful ways we as gay men sometimes treat one another’.[5]

In this important sense, this book is, though written later than Michael Handrick’s, the space from which Michael could begin to explore harmful, traumatising, and abusive behaviours that lie entirely within the male gay community and depend on the policing of a gay identity that is as toxic an example of masculinity as many more obvious examples. In my earlier blog on Handrick’s book, about which I have some sense of shame but will let what I said stand to show that sometimes we change more slowly as the effect of a book than older people like me sometimes like to think is possible. Then I said, of the treatment of the genesis of abusive harm within some gay couple relationships, that I was:

… still working on whether I think the stress in the book on the theory of ‘trauma-bonding’ can be read as straightforwardly as Michael seems to read it or applied as widely as he applies it. As a theory, I guess I see it as much less conclusive or comprehensive about the interaction of power, desire, and emotional attachment than it seeks to be.[6]

That Burston finds a much deeper root of his own sense of the injustices done to, but also within, gay male individuals and gay relationships suggests that there may yet be much more psychosocial material than that theory behind our more general exploration of gay relationships and the performance of gayness at our own particular historical moment of existing. Burston’s book is about being a survivor of multiple kinds of abuse operating across the spectrum of the deep formation of personality as well as group, institutional and ideological relationships. The deepest ‘void’ and that hardest to evade, at least in later stages of aging, are the most formative and registered in behaviours that are continually repeated and based on created dependencies (on drugs, drink, celebrity and relationships) and the loss of conscious control over action based on those dependencies: following the death of a dear friend from AIDS, ‘I did what I had always done in stress, I turned to drink’.[7]  Then, in echoing Madonna, by ‘1993, I too was falling deeper and deeper – … deeper into self-destructive behaviour’.[8]

That these voids are cultural in clearly outlined and that the problem was not JUST the structural hegemony of the heteronormative but the fact that amongst gay men there was ‘denial that a lot of us are traumatised’, an in its place a culture of ‘false optimism’.[9] Imagine growing up in this double whammy of cultural disadvantage and the abuses it covers inflicted largely by homophobic hatred or dismissal but in turn by homonormative refusal that the gay identities were sometimes (but more than we like to think) built over a chasm so large  no substance could fill them. Or do we need to imagine, because Michael Handrick grew up in that world – one where gay identity might seem to be bought at the cost of lost associations to other potentially sustaining (or also potentially dangerous) identities like those offered by his working-class upbringing. It’s a world he tells us in his prologue where so ‘much of the abuse gay men go through is left unacknowledged, unknown or swept back into the closet’. So widespread is this that it looks like the story of the AIDs epidemic as told by Burston in recounting his time as an ACT UP activist. Handrick calls it ‘a largely unspoken epidemic, even within the gay community’.[10] Both Handrick and Burston see the gay male serial killers and the poor investigative work that facilitated their abusive , especially the case of Stephen Port, as a symptom of something ill in the construction and relationships between heterosexual and homosexual institutional culture, and the relationships between them. Handrick uses the word homonormative to show how gay cultural ideals are stultified by their mirroring of heteronormativity: ‘It brings a dichotomy between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ queerness’.[11]

This message goes down ill with some who must insist that the only problem for gay people is their invisibility experienced under heteronormative values systems and the actions such values covertly justify. Meanwhile, the world of something soft, fragile, and open to love between people irrespective of boundaries and barriers to loving is both othered and left to die by suicide. I never tire of my favourite phrase from Handrick of his views of Westminster from his route to the Southbank over a bridge: ‘The white and red and blue and pink of London’s lights, like fairies gently drowning in the black silky Thames’.[12] And this isn’t quite the way the ideas FEEL in Burston’s work for the author is older and has been more absorbed into a celebrity culture, even though he claims that his ‘“celebrity” is limited, to say the least’.[13] It tells on his narrative structure which is largely a sequential one with definite cycles of the beginning and ends of specific life-episodes and some telling repeated motifs, like that of the ‘mask’, that cut across these episodes. For instance, Paul tells us of becoming absorbed by the theory of the theatrical mask while at St. Mary’s College: ‘masks and their meanings in drama and in life’. It is an interest that takes him into that wonderful Mishima novel of a queer childhood revealing itself in modifications of traditional cultural forms Confessions of a Mask and its use in queer worlds and words such as in Oscar Wilde and the work of Lindsay Kemp.[14] These contexts revive in later instances, such as in the discussion of the choice between writing autobiographically or of a fictional character’s selfhood: ‘Wilde was right. Give man a mask and he will tell you the truth’.[15]

In contrast Michael Handrick makes the structure of story-telling itself a sign of the dysregulation of heart and mind and the sense of being a character in search of its author. The concept of a story beginning, end or in the midst of things is constantly made a problem, as the prose shifts from narrative to explanation; from beginning a thing self-authored to something that merely reproduces itself in different lives – stories that reinforce stereotypes rather than facilitate development or offer ‘a space at the table to tell a different story’. Take these statements, for instance: ‘This was the narrative given me as a gay man. …/ We didn’t know then that it was going to end, but there was only one ending for us in the movies, in fairy tales. All these endings are predestined, pre-written, inexorable’.[16] And there are positives in this for reframing events in queer lie-stories as individuate continua: open to change whilst they are happening, often over a duration: ‘Coming out isn’t the end but the beginning of the journey to becoming who you are and understanding how you got there’.[17] Self is always ever emergent, never over and done with. It is always a potential as is identity, multiple across space, time, and framing events. And the pursuit of style and glamour – the deep explosion of myths of the feminine and masculine as types – also plays in here, and in both books:

There’s a reason why I have always loved dressing up: it lets me become someone else, live a different story. I can create my own narrative and become a different person.[18]

For Burston, such selves are in part the people he becomes through narrating. Notice his treatment of Lily Savage who ‘urged the crowd to resist arrest’. Arrest is a final stilling and silencing of the self in a stopped state: ‘Pressed to give her real name, she replied, “lily Veronica Mae Savage”. Such is the stuff of which queer resistance is made. … These days, of course, lily is better known as television’s Paul O’Grady’.[19] Alas, no more! Rest in a continual shattering of stasis, ‘Lily Paul’. And I know my bestie, Justin, would resonate with how, without dominating this book, as David Bowie can do, Prince flits in and out starting off as the Sign of the Times in ‘a cautionary tale of a skinny man who dies of the big disease which had already claimed more American lives than those lost in Vietnam’.[20]

At this point, though there is so much more to say about the commonalities and difference between these books I ought to stop. They need to be READ these books by YOU. Except perhaps I ought to point out why a concern with experienced and recalled trauma is important in both books, as is an embrace of vulnerability, because these, in both (but under more cover in Paul Burston) is important. In my title I cite Burston summarising a therapist talking about his life as a process of recovery, but one that returns in a spiral as I moves forward, accepting the passive in oneself, even the awareness that we pass through victimhood sometimes. From Handrick I quote the application of his favoured theory of ‘trauma-bonding’ as based in moments when he allows trust of a lover into his life, However, isn’t he always here welcoming readers int his co-authorship of a queer life – for the future is participatory or it is nothing, a sharing of selves, even masks, between and within persons in dimensions of both space and time; geographical cultural domains and histories/herstories.

Sorry I could not do more. Really looking forward to Monday 3^rd July.

All love

Steve

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[1] Paul Burston (2023: 269) We Can Be Heroes: A Survivor’s Story Seattle, Little A.

[2] Michael Handrick (2022: 180) Difference Is Born on the Lips: Reflections on Sexuality, Stigma and Society Cheltenham, FLINT.

[3] Burston, op.cit: 282

[4] Cited ibid: 183f. Paul Burston, Queens’ Country, A Tour Around the Gay Ghettos, Queer Spots and Camp Sights of Britain, Little Brown, 1998. ISBN 0-349-11178-2

[5] Ibid: 183

[6] The full blog can be read, for what it’s worth, at this link.

[7] Burston op.cit: 126

[8] ibid: 132

[9] Ibid: 162

[10] Handrick, op.cit: 14

[11] Ibid; 109

[12] Ibid: 25

[13] Burston op.cit: 255

[14] Ibid: 66

[15] Ibid: 213

[16] Handrick, op.cit: 59

[17] Ibid: 139

[18] Ibid: 22

[19] Burston op. cit: 79

[20] Ibid: 69. Prince references on 77 & 304.