My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Edith Piaf (1915): A Share of Pain

69 Edith Piaf A Share of Pain Gregory Woods My mother owned a small collection of records to play on her deep-throated Black Box gramophone. We lived in a characterless modern villa near the mouth of a brown river that flowed into the Gulf of Guinea from the heart of darkness. Our large garden, although not really wild, made gestures toward exoticism: mango and banana trees, pineapples, large red land crabs, the occasional black mamba that had slithered in from the bush. We kept pet cats, but these disappeared from time to time. Unlike many colonials, we did not have a radio on which to listen to the BBC World Service. My parents had left England 70 because they wanted to leave it, so there was little point in pining for its distant voice. But they had left England for Egypt, not Ghana, and, through the spectacular incompetence of British foreign policy during the Suez crisis of 1956, we had been thrown out of Egypt. So Ghana was a kind of exile after all. Neither of my parents liked it much. It had none of the sophistication and few of the amusements of Cairo. Although already a great port, Takoradi could not compare with Alexandria—or Alex, as the British affectionately called it. Some books, but not many, brought a touch of refinement to that bleak, concrete functionary’s house. And then there was that music collection: some popular classics (Beatrice Lillie’s narration of The Carnival of the Animals), a little trad jazz (Louis Armstrong , Jack Teagarten), two musicals (Oklahoma! and Annie Get Your Gun), a couple of Sinatra albums, some Bing Crosby, Eartha Kitt, Noel Coward in Las Vegas and Noel Coward in New York— and an album of Edith Piaf. If this were a man’s collection it would look distinctly queer, but as a woman’s it was not so far off the mainstream. There were three of us children—I have an elder brother and sister—but I do not recall being significantly different from the others in my tastes. We could all sing along to many of the songs my mother played. I was no more likely than my brother—who is heterosexual—to ask for Piaf or Kitt. Nor, when either of these women was singing, did I ever feel I wanted to be her. My main difference from my siblings was my shyness. I followed the others. If taken on an adventure by them, I was adventurous. Only when reading books, I think, was I fully independent. I do not believe my interest in Piaf was yet at all queer. If there was a particular moment when this changed, I cannot place it precisely. It recurs in my memory of an image in black and white. I was watching a television documentary about Piaf in my early teens—which would place us in the 1960s. My father had retired and we had moved home to England. At some point in the telling of her life story, Piaf appeared with one of her husbands or Edith Piaf 71 lovers: much taller, much younger, and wearing only swimming trunks. This is my moment. It is at this point that I start to connect the Little Sparrow’s life—and her myth—with my enjoyment of her work, which then intensifies as a result. Pricking up my ears, I hear about her addictions, and these I connect with what I have already deduced from her voicing of the songs: her loneliness. Our lives as colonial children had involved frequent changes of school, with consequent changes of friends; and my brother and I were now being sent to a Roman Catholic boarding school near Oxford, with the consequence that we had no friends around us when we went home to the south coast for the holidays. Add to this my growing sense of myself as becoming both bookish and “queer,” and you can see that I was involuntarily making a major personal investment in loneliness. The square-cut swimming trunks of Piaf’s young man were iconic. I kept thinking back to them. Even if I never wanted to be the singer, I did rather want to have what she had. Although every note of her music made it clear that men were trouble, such men as this were beginning to seem a trouble worth taking. But it would be...