What’s sex got to do with it ?

“What`s Sex Got To Do With It?” by Dennis Dewsnap is a portrait of a gay relationship which spanned almost fifty years. Dennis and Syd lived and worked in England and Tangier in a very interesting time. They retired partly to Tangier, partly to Pattaya where Syd finally died. To give the readers of Sticky Rice an impression of the book we will publish the first chapter in several parts. If you are interested in buying a copy of the book for yourself, the price is 1000 Baht. All profits from the sales go to HEARTT 2000 and Tangier Creche for abandoned children. It is available in Pattaya at the following locations:
Amor Restaurant, Le Cafe Royal, Panorama Bar, Boyz Boyz Boyz, Splash, Top Man, La Cage, Simons Bar, Farang Services.

Chapter One

There are moments which change one’s life in an instant, when all one’s twee, preconceived notions of love are shattered forever and, like Humptey Dumptey, cannot be put back together again! Such a moment occurred to me when, one very hot summer afternoon in 1964, I walked into the bedroom of our Tangier apartment and found Syd, my lover of nine years, stark naked in our bed, making passionate love to a Moroccan hustler. “God!” I screamed at him “You bastard! How could you after all we’ve been to each other. It’s all over. I never want to fucking see you again!”, and slamming the bedroom door behind me I fled to the lounge to cry my heart out. Within seconds Syd appeared, still naked, sweating, and smelling of sex, totally bewildered by the situation, and looking at me accusingly as though I had found him in bed with a book rather than a male prostitute. “What the fuck’s your problem?” he shouted. “You!” I shouted back, “You’re the problem, fucking some whore when I thought you were in love with me. It’s all over. I’m leaving you!” Staring at me as though I were mad he retorted gently, trying to soothe if not appease me, “Of course I love you! You’re my life! Anyway, what’s sex got to do with it?” And there it was, Syd’s simple view that sex was merely an appetite, whereas love was an emotion, and that he could no more be unfaithful to me by fucking his boys than he could by eating a ham sandwich.

From that moment on our lives changed, for the better I’m sure. We matured emotionally. Syd began the first of his brief encounters with his ever changing ‘bed-boys’, none of which ever lasted very long, for he thought that boys, like cars, should be changed every other year before they developed expensive maintenance problems. Although during the subsequent four decades he grew older, and stouter, they remained the same, sleek, virile, street panthers of some 20 or so years. I now realize that although flowers, plants, animals and people grow old, one thing in this ever-changing world remains constant, the age of ‘trade’.

Whilst Syd felt genuinely attached to his hustler-boyfriends, and helped them in many ways, not just financially, they never posed a threat to our relationship, and never encroached on our love for each other. I, and our friends, accepted them as a fact of life, in much the same way as courtiers at Versailles acknowledged the presence of the successive Maîtresses en Titre of Louis the Fourteenth and Fifteenth, well knowing that they posed no threat the Queen regnant, but represented a mere diversion, the satiation of a physical appetite.

Syd and I met, as so many gay men of our generation did, in a toilet. It was entirely innocent and unplanned. We smiled at each other, but our eye contact was too prolonged to be mistaken. We knew that we were interested in each other. I remember every detail even now with all the clarity of an event, which happened yesterday. It was September 10th. 1956, during the height of the Suez Crisis. I was working as a copy-boy for the local newspaper, The Sheffield Telegraph and Star, and having finished work rather later than I had expected, I decided to visit The Newstheatre in Fizallan Square. But that is not entirely the truth of the matter, for I was seventeen, and desperately trying to come to terms with my sexuality. Perhaps I was looking for someone, to have sex with, to hold and touch, to taste and love. If so, I found that person in Syd.

I remember sitting in the darkness of the cinema, watching what seemed to be an interminable newsreel about the fall of Port Said, wondering when it would end, and what would happen then. The haughty tones of the Pathe reporter suddenly stopped, the cinema lights went on, and the audience stood respectfully whilst the ‘Queen’ was played. And then it began, that strange gay mating ritual of follower and followed, of checking for his reflection in shop windows, and looking over one’s shoulder, of quickening and slowing one’s step, and wondering if you had lost him, or if you had entirely misread the signals and he wasn’t really interested in you at all! An hour passed, perhaps two, before we eventually collided only to simultaneously greet each other with that most hackneyed and inane of clichés “Do you come here often?”, followed more honestly by “Do you have anywhere to go?”.

Neither of us had our own flat, nor an understanding friend who could supply one, and so we wandered through the streets, talking excitedly, but in hushed voices, until we came upon a bomb site, one of many which still scarred Sheffield more than a decade after the end of the Second World War. There, in a derelict building, we kissed and groped, and had sex. I do not say we made love, but we certainly had sex. We satiated our appetites, but as yet we knew nothing of that other love, emotional rather than physical, which, more often than not, manifests itself in gay relationships when sexual attraction has long since burnt out. Even now, almost half a century later, I remember that neither of us felt any sense of embarrassment or shame in the act, and we agreed to meet again the next evening. With the exception of National Service, we did not spend more than a couple of nights apart during the first twenty years of a relationship which lasted until his death, forty six years after our first nervous gropings.

Perhaps, taking Dickens’s David Copperfield as my example, I should begin the story of my life at the beginning of my life. I was born on November 14th, 1938, a year of universal disasters and wars and rumours of wars, in the East End of Sheffield, opposite Firth Browns Steel Works. Although my family was far from being what my friend The Honourable David Herbert would have referred to as ‘top drawer’, I certainly spent much of my childhood in a drawer, being deposited nightly in a chest of drawers located in our cellar, and which my parents believed made an adequate and ample bomb raid shelter.

Were I subject to paranoia I might well believe that the bomb which destroyed our home in 1942 was dropped on Hitler’s express orders, as he was never very fond of gays, but it is far more probable that the Luftwaffe was simply trying to destroy the neighbouring steel works which was turning out munitions for our own forces. For the first 18 months of the war, for instance, the only drop hammer in the country that could forge crankshafts for Spitfires was in the Vickers Works in Sheffield. Right across the street from our house.By the end of the war, Hadfield’s had produced 4.5 million bombs and shells.

Newton Chambers of Thorncliffe switched their production from excavators to Churchill tanks, making well over 1,000 by the war’s end (and also producing their Izal toilet paper with Hitler on it!) Cutlery firms throughout the region switched their production from domestic tableware to bayonets, fighting knives and components for guns.

Fortunately my parents’ faith in solid, ugly, mahogany, Victorian furniture, and the safety of our cellar, proved justified and we survived the bomb, albeit, thereafter, my mother professed herself guilty of provoking the attack by accidentally exposing a light during the blackout.

We were luckier than a lot more people in the city. In December 1940, when I was two years old, Sheffield received the might of the German Luftwaffe. The first part of Sheffield’s Blitz happened during the night and early morning of Thursday and Friday, 12/13 December. Conditions for bombing were perfect: there was a full moon, not a cloud in the sky, and the frosty weather had whitened the roofs across the city. The bombing went on for nine hours, with an estimated 300 bombers involved. Whether by accident or design, most of the bombs were dropped in the city centre or in residential areas. Uncontrollable fires raged for hours and by the Friday morning there were scenes of devastation everywhere, with tangled steel girders and charred timber silhouetted against the sky among a mass of stone and brick rubble.

Another heavy raid took place on Sunday night, 15 December, largely restricted this time to the industrial East End of the city. This is the evening we were to be hit. A bomb was dropped just outside our front door, demolishing a row of four houses, ours included. It was only nine days before my sisters and I should have been hanging our stocking up, waiting for some-one much nicer to come down the chimney. Altogether, the two raids resulted in the deaths of 668 civilians, serious injuries to 513 and damage to 78,000 houses.

We were soon rehoused, a couple of miles away, in the working class district of Pitsmoor which was, at that time, a filthy, run-down part of the city, almost if not quite a slum. Nowadays it is quite a different place. Since the closure of the steel industry in the 1980s, as a consequence of the rise of property values in the 1990s, it has, like so many of Sheffield’s blue collar suburbs including Brightside, Meadowhall, and Carbrook, been transformed into a pleasant residential area by that slow and relentless process of gentrification by which the bourgeoisie subdue all things onto themselves.

My mother’s maiden name was Bell, to which was conjoined the singularly unfortunate Christian name of Fanny, making her sound like some sort of bejingled, erotic, belly dancer. She was one of four siblings, her sisters being named Lizzie and Polly, and her brother Bill. When gathered together in one place, which was rare, as my mother was all but estranged from my Aunt Lizzy and Uncle Bill, they made a somewhat noisy and inharmonious peal of Bells.

Because my paternal grandmother had died before I was born, and my maternal when I was but three years old, I always considered and treated my aunt Polly Bell as an honorary grandmother. Her husband, Jim, was a pianist, and as a child I would spend hours by his side listening to him play tunes made popular in his youth in the music halls of the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras. To me, then, he seemed a virtuoso. It was only much later that I came to appreciate that he was really only what one might call a sing-a-long accompanist, or a good old pub piano basher who hit more wrong notes than right ones on instruments so out of tune it didn’t really matter. However talented he was or wasn’t, I have no doubt that it was Uncle Jim who first interested me in music in general, and in playing the piano in particular, and thus to his shade I pay a very willing tribute.

Aunt Polly invariably welcomed everyone to her home with the same plea of false modesty, “Oh you’ve caught me with my dirty pinny on. I’ll just go and change it.”, despite which it, she, and her home were, as they say in Yorkshire, spotless!

My mother loved her sister as intensely as she disliked her other siblings. She would say, having visited Aunt Polly, carefully enunciating each word, “We’ve just come from our Polly’s banquet, she gave us a royal banquet. You could eat off her floors. What a spread she gave. Snow-white starched tablecloth, piping hot tea, fresh bread, and real, yes, real best butter. She also put on home-made strawberry jam. What a spread, fit for a King or Queen!” And thus mom, who had feasted simply but heartily on tea, bread and butter and a spoonful of jam, made it sound as though she had been to The Ritz and had been served the all delicious delicacies for which the Palm Court is still so justly famous.

Uncle Jim and Aunt Polly had six children of whom Billy, the youngest, was already a serving soldier when I was still a child. But it was his brother, Jack, a Petty Officer in the Royal Navy, and as handsome as a god sculpted in chryselephantine by Praxiteles, who fascinated me! Despite the fact that I was only five years old, he was the subject of my first crush. I would watch Jack for hours playing the piano accordion, an instrument I have never mastered, awe struck by his looks, enchanted by his music, jealous of the caresses he bestowed on the keyboard.

Aunt Polly died in 1960, on the same day as her daughter, Fanny, lost her husband, Arnold, to cancer, a double tragedy which left the whole family heartbroken. Arnold was a genuinely good man who always treated me like an aberrant son. “Cam’ here”, he would say, “here’s somthin’ fir ya pocket. Go on, tak’ it, or ya’ll only say I was ‘skinny bugger’ when I’ve gane.”

My only clear recollection of the war is of V.E. night in April 1945 when the whole of Sheffield was ablaze with bonfires, and every street that had survived the blitz was decorated with bunting, and the venue for parties. My father came home about a year later, looking very smart in his R.A.F. uniform, to a house bedecked with homemade ‘Welcome Home banners’. And yet his coming home, to which we had all so long looked forward, is inextricably bound up in my mind with my mother’s illness, for it was then, or shortly thereafter, that cancer began to inexorably claim her as its victim. We watched helplessly whilst she suffered horrendously over the next three years, bravely and uncomplainingly, such pain as one would not wish on one’s worst enemy. I was eleven when she died, and my eldest sister, Lillian, was already married. My second sister, Joyce, married a few months later, and my third, Mary, left soon after to join the Women’s Royal Air Force, leaving me, a boy not even in my teens, to take care of the house and my father.

My father was a good man, an example of a type which in Yorkshire we used to refer to admiringly as “one of nature’s gentlemen”, but he was also profligate, more likely to back a horse or buy his mates a pint at the pub than to pay the rent or coalman. There were times when I must have sounded like an old fishwife, scolding him and trying to frighten him with the threat of our imminent eviction, and indeed my first sexual experience was directly linked to the financial chaos in which we lived.

Shortly after my mother died, when I was still two years short of my teens, a man from the Electricity Company called to read our meter. He was perhaps twenty five years old, and despite our mounting unpaid bill seemed friendly enough, ruffling my hair, and stroking my cheek. “By rights I should pull the meter out!” he said, and then, looking at the alarm on my face, pulled my trousers down and my cock out instead! I can honestly say, with my hand on my heart, that is the one and only time I was ever ‘trade’ and, excusing the pun, I was too sexually immature to find the experience electrifying!

In those far off days before high-rise tower blocks and huge council estates blighted working class life, people lived in real neighbourhoods with real neighbours who, although having problems of their own, and each being as poor as the next, tried to look after each other. I well remember how, following my mother’s death, every door in the street was open to me, and every housewife a surrogate mom. They showed their concern in a hundred different ways but without being patronising or, what is infinitely more disagreeable, publicly ‘charitable’. One neighbour might clean the outside windows, another polish the step, and a third clean the outside toilet. This was their way of being loving and considerate, and what a beautiful way it was.

Those were the days of economic poverty but richness of human spirit. I still remember an amusing story my father told me about one of our neighbours, Mrs. Townrow, a kind-hearted and stout lady who was a canteen server at my local school, and who used to load my plate with so much food I could barely manage to carry it. Every Friday she hauled the tin bath in from her backyard, and laboriously filled it with kettleful after kettleful of steaming hot water, in which she, then her three daughters, followed by her son, their dog, Rex, and finally grand-dad would all bathe in the same quickly chilling and darkening water. That’s simply how things were in those days, and I often think, without for one moment regretting the passage of such poverty, that it a pity that with hygiene and council houses, social security and the National Health Service, we have lost the innocence which made such misery bearable.

When I was thirteen years old, the headmaster of Burngreave School came into our class-room and asked, no, told us to stand up. “This morning, our beloved King Emperor George VI has died in his sleep” We stood for a two minute silence, and then we were told to go home and inform our families. It was 11.30 am, decades before Sky News would have informed the whole world within minutes. When I got home and told my sister, Joyce, the first thing she said was, “There’ll be a black line around the paper tonight” There was, and I remember the headline of the Sheffield Star that evening, saying: “King dies peacefully in sleep - New Queen flying home”. It was to be the start of the new Elizabethan era, and we all felt part of it. I do not think that people today have the same respect for the Royal family, perhaps, partly caused by their own misjudgements. Just as that memory of the Queen’s father dieing never leaves me, I feel sure that everyone remembers where he or she were during any historic, traumatic, moments, like President Kennedy’s assassination, Princess Diana’s death, and the eleventh of September.

I left Burngreave Secondary Modern School at the age of fifteen, and found employment as a copy-boy in the office of The Sheffield Telegraph and Star, at the enormous salary of two pounds five shillings a week. Arriving at the rear entrance of Kemsley House which, for God alone knows what reason, was known as ‘Hartshead’, I was greeted by a uniformed, officious and swaggering, ‘Gentleman from the Corps of Commissionaires’, or, in other words, a pensified doorman, who directed me to the office of the editor, who had the hysterically improbable name of Gooseman (although, I don’t think he did! But then one can never tell what wickedness people get up to behind locked doors). There, I was interviewed by his terrifying spinster secretary, Miss Jones, who invariably asked all applicants the same three rather odd questions. First, did they go to church or chapel? Second, did they change their underwear regularly? And, third and last, how many times per week they visited the public baths (as opposed to bath-houses, which, alas, in that era, didn’t exist). I answered her first question cautiously, diplomatically, and truthfully, that I attended church because I was obliged to, and chapel as I had chosen to be a member of The Boys’ Brigade rather than the Boy Scouts. My response threw her into a state of awful confusion for it was difficult to discriminate against so confusing a creature as an Anglican-Dissenter!

Fortunately my next two replies secured her approval, for I was able to boast that I changed my underwear no less than once a week, whether I needed to or not, after bathing at home, and that I visited the public baths several times a week; I did not of course say that a major part of the attraction for me, in those porn-free days of long ago, shortly after Dorothy reached Oz, was that it gave me the chance to oggle my contemporaries in the changing rooms. She was duly impressed. Anyone who was a practicing member of two Christian sects, changed their underwear weekly, and bathed regularly, might well be trusted to carry messages around a newspaper office. And so I got the job.

Although it never occurred to me at the time, what with her fetish for bathing, clean underwear, and sweet smelling message boys, it is entirely possible she was a closet Omo-sexual.

As I was leaving Kemsley House, after that first interview, an odd thing happened. The Commissionaire saluted me saying, “You get two salutes from me lad, one when you start work, and the second when you are sacked.” When I asked him how he knew I’d got the job, he replied, “She always likes to show them’ns out what she’s kicked out. Gives her a real thrill does that, lad.”

One of my most important duties was fetching Miss Jones’ tea, and, perhaps because I smiled at her gargoyle like face as though I actually liked her, or because my underwear smelt fresh, she took a great liking to me, a fact which amazed the sub-editors and reporters, all of whom lived in dread of her. Even the editor, Eric Gooseman, who was otherwise as self-assured as he was self important, was more than a little cowed in Miss Jones’ presence; but, having made this observation, I should say, in his defence, that the lady in question was indisputably one of the grimmest old cows one could have chanced to meet outside the dock of the Nuremberg trials.

Happy in my work, after six months, I was promoted to the dizzying position of Head Copy Boy, by virtue of which I exercised almost unlimited authority over seven underlings.

Continued in Sticky Rice3.