Lauren John Joseph reveals a remarkable and moving story of love, death and enduring friendship
put the book in the post with a note that said, “I know that once you’ve read this you may never want to speak to me again, but please know I couldn’t but write it.” The envelope slipped into the postbox and landed with a muffled thud atop a heap of hopes and squabbles and council tax rebates. My stomach quivered at the thought of what I’d done. In a day or so he would have my book, a novel that was as much his story as mine, testimony to a love we shared, and shared the loss of.
We had all grown up in the long shadow of Section 28, in a wildly queerphobic society where even the most milquetoast manifestation of gay love, two white men holding hands and fighting for marriage equality, was an insane provocation. We had so much internalised homophobia, femmephobia, how could we ever hope to articulate what we were feeling in this strange triangulation of love, desire and jealousy? My friend was looking for something like respectability. I wanted a nebulous queer utopia.
Of course we kept in touch, I sent my friend postcards from Japan, Brazil, Norway, all the places I fled to. But he acknowledged them with dwindling frequency. He invited me to see performances of his work at galleries in east London, at the Southbank Centre, only I was increasingly unable to attend, previous commitments you see. We tried a few times to hash it out, clear the air, to say how we really felt, but we didn’t get anywhere, we didn’t have the vocabulary.
In the back of a notebook I started to write to our departed lover, quite without design. Maybe fresh heartache had reminded me of unhealed hurt. Perhaps it was the fact I’d felt his spirit at my shoulder since the day he died. I couldn’t say.
And I felt the same. In writing it I had the chance to revisit the early days of our friendship, the dancing, the exhibitionism, the shoplifting, the celebrity run-ins. We had shared so much, and renounced it so quickly, and over what? A bloke? We both realised that this didn’t cast us in a particularly flattering light, meekly acknowledging, yeah, we could’ve handled that better. Our early friendship had spanned the most formative period of our lives.
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