Confession: I am not a musical person, at least not in the traditional sense. I neither sing nor play and, although I do listen to music when I write, to block out distractions and set the mood, the idea of sitting alone and listening to music for pleasure makes me restless. I rarely go to hear music performed live; I blame this squarely on the friends who took me to a Simple Minds concert at Gateshead international stadium in 1991. I have never quite recovered.
But I also blame school and the eternal pressure to like the right kind of music. In 1990, that invariably meant spending the late afternoon in a fetid teenage bedroom with the curtains closed, listening to The Wall by Pink Floyd and trying to get high by snorting Lynx Spice. Everyone at school had their song, it seemed, apart from me. Unlike Dee-Lite, I hadn’t yet found the groove in my heart. I was also realising that it wasn’t just my music tastes, or lack of, that made me feel different.
There was no Athena poster of a tennis player scratching her bum on my bedroom wall, although that was mainly for taste reasons. I thought John Inman in Are You Being Served? was a role model. And I was obsessed with a guy in the sixth form.
How can I describe him? He was a rugby player, but with an artistic bent: buff, yet sensitive. Imagine Jonny Wilkinson presenting Front Row. I blushed if he looked at me. I looked at him, a lot. The tension between us was unbearable. At least, to me. To this day, I am not sure if he ever noticed. Yet, I had to connect with him somehow and show him that I was different. Maybe he was different, too!
Perhaps I could express my desire by playing him a song? After all, if a British upbringing had taught me anything, it was that there was no need to talk about your feelings honestly when you could run away and lose yourself in a displacement activity instead. If only I could find the one song that would painlessly reveal my love. But in the local Our Price, faced by racks of cassette singles, I flailed. Erasure’s Blue Savannah? That sure looked gay, I had to admit. Was it … too gay? Surely not. Then I saw her, in the compilation section.
Judy Garland.
I knew nothing then. I had seen The Wizard of Oz (obviously; I’m not an alien), but that was it. I didn’t know about the abuse, the quaaludes, the breakdowns – yet somehow I knew, from a mangled process of cultural osmosis, that, along with Michelangelo, Oscar Wilde and Grotbags from the Rod Hull and Emu show, Judy was a “gay icon”, even though I had no idea what that meant.
Later that night, listening to the cassette on the headphones of my Sony Walkman under my duvet, I discovered my song. It is from one of the great movie musicals, Meet Me in St Louis. This is the one where Garland is dressed in furnishing fabrics from start to finish, and appears to be wearing a wig fashioned from a red setter on her head. The Trolley Song is a romantic, funny and rousing ode to … picking up strange men on public transport. It plucked at my heart and echoed with a code I was beginning to understand.
I never played it to my crush in the end, which is lucky, as he is now married with three children and we are still friends, so please don’t tell him.
It didn’t matter. For the first time, I had my song to listen to, that spoke to me. Later that year, I felt able formally to come out to my classmates, and let’s just say that surprise was not the main reaction. But I felt lighter, freer and happier with who I was. I moved on. So, thanks, Judy, for the loan of that trolley.
The Lost Magician by Piers Torday is out now. His adaptation of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights is at Wilton’s Music Hall, London, until 6 January
Read more stories of change in the G2 special issue A new start on 31 December
