“You’ll love it,” said Tim, who I sometimes see down the park with his giant poodle, Tiny Tim. I bridled, and said – even though I knew it was superfluous – “But Tim, I’m not that gay.” “Oh, that doesn’t matter,” he assured me – but gay or straight, I wasn’t convinced I belonged at an event that was advertised to potential attendees as Tim had the It’s My Culture festival to me: “You know where the Fucking Tree is, don’t you?”
Thing is, he was being rhetorical; because while not actually knowing the precise spot where this colourfully named shrub is rooted, I do know its approximate location – as does anyone, gay or straight, who lives in north London (and indeed, considerably further afield), and who doesn’t have their head buried in the soil. A couple of years ago, out for a midsummer night’s walk with two young friends, we did veer into the cruising grounds in the area of Hampstead Heath below Jack Straw’s Castle.
It was a little outré of me, I concede, but my companions – one gay himself, but from out of town – expressed some scepticism that al fresco sex was being pursued in 2022 quite the way it was in the era before both Grindr and legalised gay marriage. Needless to say, the doubting Thomases and I were put to flight in quick time: within seconds, as we moved through the undergrowth, several men appeared clearly on the prowl for a hook-up; while, in depths of this sylvan scene, silvered by the June moon, so that receding trunks and boughs formed Gothic arches, we could see some bared suppliants to sensuality, who did indeed appear to be recumbent over what might well have been the aforementioned, um, tree.
The festival is called It’s My Culture, Tim told me, because many years ago the late George Michael was stopped by the police in the vicinity of the West Heath cruising grounds, and when one of these ambulatory butt plugs asked him – presumably with no trace of rhetoric – if he wasn’t ashamed, Michael – quite rightly – snapped back: “Fuck off, it’s my culture.”
Why do I say “quite rightly”? Because like every enlightened person who grew up in Britain in the 1960s and 70s, I regard Roy Jenkins’s ushering into law, in 1968, of the recommendations of the previous decade’s Wolfenden Report, that sex between consenting men be made legal, as the beginning of the end of one of the most shameful and savage persecutions our noble and immemorial government, together with its people, have ever engaged in.
I may not be that gay, but growing up during this era, I couldn’t fail to become aware that gay men occupied a powerfully equivocal – if not subversive – position: almost all the top light entertainers of the era were gay, and hid in plain view a love that the British public dared not say the name of, but would nonetheless titter obligingly along with, quite as much as at. The direct result of the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889, and the Wilde trial six years later, Britain’s punitive attitude towards gay men, had, by the late 1960s, become just another of the grotesque anachronisms that typified our polity then, such as, er, the monarchy, the unwritten constitution, the established church etc.
It’s worth recalling that lesbianism has never been illegal here, while in France, the only time there’s been any law against homosexual relations between consenting males was briefly under the Code Napoléon, during the Consulate. Anyway, there’s a large part of me – and what with illness, it’s no longer the bi-curious part – that says three cheers for It’s My Culture.
Why shouldn’t hundreds of gay people gather in the woods at night to witness nude oiled wrestling between dykes, and smash at a giant piñata shaped like Margaret Thatcher, until it splits open and hundreds of condoms and tubes of lube rain down on them? After all, a scant 15 years after gay men had emerged from that twilight zone in which they’d been imprisoned, vilified, and even given drugs to compel them to same-sex concupiscence, came the hell-on-earth of Aids.
So, it’s understandable that they in particular should retain a strong cultural aversion to anything at all that smacks of puritanism. Still, you don’t have to attend church picnics at which a piñata shaped like St Paul is rent open to reveal edicts condemning “men with men working that which is unseemly”, in order to find mass outdoor orgies a little de trop. Indeed, I’m sure there are plenty of gay men – and still more women – for whom the Fucking Tree has no place in their arboretum.
If It’s My Culture were a celebration of heterosexual promiscuity, I suspect many, like me, would find it just as anathema – if not more so, given the obvious potential such a situation poses for coercive sex, if not outright assault and rape. Anyway, this being noted, as Tim was insistent that the site is always scrupulously cleaned up, while never in its history have the police either been called, or seen fit to intervene, it does very much seem like a case of live and let live.
But my culture? Je ne pense pas.
