Dancing Ledge

A Footnote to My Past

A F o o t n o t e t o M y P a s t When I started to write Dancing Ledge in a Roman hotel room (Croce di Malta) late in 1982, my worklife was becalmed, deserted by the funding bodies and the British cinema renaissance running hard for Mrs. Thatcher’s new Jerusalem— absolute beginners all. My own renaissance (Caravaggio made on the Isle of Dogs for £475,000 from the BFI) was three years away. Angry, Nico said why don’t you write it out. One thing led to another and what started as a book on the frustration of funding led to the writing of an autobiography at forty. I had so little to do in the daylight hours, I stayed up late unbuttoning Levis in back rooms. Fucking which had seemed so impossible when I was eighteen was now easy and the HIV virus but a distant shadow. I would fall into my bed and wake in a happy hangover to write my Past. Now a decade later my Queerlife is reprinted. For though it received only a couple of reviews, it has gradually sold out in a quiet corner of my friend Ian Shipley’s Charing Cross Road bookshop. The years since have seen the renewal and reinvention of my cinema (Angelic Conversation, The Last of England, and The Garden), the reclaiming of the Queer Past in War Requiem and Edward II, my move to Prospect Cottage, the building of the garden, catching the virus, and falling in Love. My body was thrown into the struggle, bringing me into a spotlight in a way I never expected or wanted. On 22 December 1986, finding I was body positive, I set myself a target: I would disclose my secret and survive Margaret Thatcher. I did. Now I have my sights set on the millennium and a world where we are all equal before the law. Derek Jarman 1991 ...