Dancing Ledge

III: The Thaw

59 Ill The Thaw Life was to change for ever after my return from America in the autumn of 1964. By October I had discovered my first gay pub - the William IV in Hampstead; and shortly after, the La Douce in Poland Street and the Gigolo in the King's Road. These were two of a handful of gay bars which were the only haven in a city of eight million souls. From our flat in Priory Road I could walk to the William IV, but on several occasions went to the Gigolo, quite prepared to do the two-hour walk back to West Hampstead late at night. At the Slade things had not stuck still. By the end of the year I had met Patrick Procktor and Ossie Clarke, two artists who were establishing reputations. The Gregorian chant was put back into its sleeve and replaced by the Who and the Stones. On the literary front, too, old loves faded. From America, like a smuggler, I brought back Burroughs' The Naked Lunch and my own City Lights copy of Ginsberg's Howl, which displaced The Waves and The Years of Virginia Woolf. At the Slade I resorted more frequently to the Theatre Design room where there were sympathetic spirits. I'd brought some muscle mags, and I collaged them into the set for Stravinsky's Orpheus which I was designing that winter. This caused a minor contretemps with the Slade professor Bill Coldstream, who talked about the acceptable limits of art, citing his role at the British Board of Film Censors, while standing with his back to my set. In the theatre room homosexuality was accepted quite openly, while upstairs the atmosphere of the painting studios was fairly equivocal. 'Straight' painters were envious of connections made quickly through 'the gay mafia' with painters and gallery-owners. Also, many of them were affronted by our insouciant, happy-go-lucky lifestyle —a reaction against the deadening world around us. But who could blame me if after years of repression I found that homosexuality, far from being a disability as I'd been brought up to believe, led to an easy social mobility and with it incredible advantages?The homophobia of the art schools was mixed with a lot of plain jealousy. 60 In the garden at Priory Road, 1965 (Photo. RayDean] 61 For the first time I could view myself in the mirror —I became aware of how I looked and how I dressed. I discovered that I was handsome enough and with new confidence and sympathetic friends, I made some first faltering steps into the 'art world'. And as my own repressed past broke up like ice in a spring thaw, so did the old England which had produced it. B U I L D I N G F O R P L E A S U R E January 1965, Priory Road: Peter Cook was here to look at Dougal's work, and we fell into a row about modern architecture. It started off with some remarks I made about NYC, that once you're out of the lobbies of those skyscrapers you could be anywhere. The upper storeys are all the same, whether or not the architect is a Philip Johnson. I said I thought functionalism was totally crazy, unless you saw architecture as disposable. The function of any modern building is bound to alter after a few years from the original intention. And then you're left with something that's not only obsolete, but also probably ugly. Buildings should be designed for purely aesthetic reasons: form should respond to the demands of pleasure, the inward function. More often than not you'll find that an 'aesthetic' building is an adaptable one. During the course of the evening Peter Cook came up with the horrific notion of cities on stilts, which are to roam the world like vast praying mantises. I said I thought most people wanted to put roots down. Who wants to wake up in a location that someone else has decided for them? Presumably, someone drives the awful thing. Dougal was rather cross with me as Mr Cook is a current architectural hero. Architecture was as much a daily topic of conversation as painting. Perhaps more so, as nearly all my friends were either at the AA in Bedford Square or at the Poly. For weeks on end the basement flat at...