But as I looked at him, I felt a melancholy steal upon me. I feared that, without the support of a watching world—a couple of thumbs-up here, a “nice one” there; maybe some winks from a bus-driver—he would eventually find that the leaden lure of sweatpants and a Nike hoodie too great to resist, and just give up on being beautiful. There is a paradox in being cool, as I have learned over the years from interviewing pop stars, actors and sundry cultural beacons. They have all noted that one of the little sorrows of being cool is that similarly cool people are too cool to ever come over and tell you you’re cool—because that’s just not cool. And so, gradually, the entire point of being cool is being eroded.
What the cool people need, then, is some gawping, moon-faced, resolutely non-cool person to come and tell them that they’re cool instead.
To this end, I am about to order 1,000 old-fashioned calling-cards—string-colored, Verdana typeface, single-sided. They will read, “I just want you to know, I really appreciate your look.” And I’m going to walk around London, handing them out as, and where, truly necessary.
Part Two
HOMOSEXUALS, TRANSSEXUALS, LADIES, AND THE INTERNET
In which we demand employment quotas for women while using a lengthy analogy about a pelican, nerd out with the gayest sci-fi series ever—Doctor Who—and point out that the internet was invented by humans, and not dystopian robots, or Satan.
But first: back to me and Pete in bed again.
You might think there’s too many of these conversations. On that basis, you would immediately be able to strike up a cordial and mutally agreeable conversation with Pete.
FIRST TIME EVER I SAW YOUR FACE
It’s 11:38 PM. The children have finally gone to sleep. The foxes have not yet begun their nightly panoply of dumpster diving, bag-shredding and mad fox love. It’s the Golden Hour. It is peaceful. It is time for sleep.
“Pete?”
“No.”
“Pete?”
“No.”
“Pete?”
“I am asleep. No.”
“Pete—what’s the first thing you think of when you think of me?”
“What?”
“When someone says my name, or you think of me—what’s the picture that comes into your head?”
“Please remember that I just said ‘I’m asleep.’ Please.”
“For instance,” I say, turning over into my “Interesting Chat” position. I have intrigued me with this question. This is a good question. “For instance, when I think of you, straight away—quick as a flash—I see you standing at the kitchen table, wearing a cardigan, and looking down at a pile of new records that you’ve just bought. You’ve put one on, and you’re kind of bopping to it a bit, and you’re eating a slice of bread and butter, while you wait for the tea to cook. You might be humming a bit. That’s my go-to image for you. That’s your essence. That’s what I think of, when I think of you. In the kitchen, with your records, all happy.”
There is a big pause. Pete appears to need a prompt.
“That’s what I think of, when I think of you,” I repeat. “So what about me? What do you see in your head when someone says my name? ‘Cate.’ What’s in your head? ‘Cate.’ ‘Cate.’ What do you see? ‘Cate.’ ‘Cate.’ ‘Cate.’ ‘Cate.’ What you getting? ‘Cate.’ ”
There’s another pause.
“ ‘Cate’,” I say, helpfully. Third pause.
“Your face?” Pete replies, eventually.
“My face?”
I am hugely disappointed.
“My face?” I repeat. “I see a whole scene with you in it—I can even see what record you’re holding: it’s the best of Atlantic Psychedelic Funk. It’s a gatefold—and you’ve just got . . . my face?”
I am determined to make Pete see that he actually sees more than that. There’s no way all he sees is my face. We’ve been together seventeen years. I have blazed a cornucopia of images into his head. I’ve given him a visual love pantechnicon. The material is endless. Instance: he’s seen me dressed as a “sexy Santa,” falling off a castored pouffe. He’s got loads in there.
“Okay,” I say, patiently. “Look down from my face. What am I wearing?” I think this is all key questioning. I want to know what, in Pete’s mind, is my “classic era”—my imperial phase. Does he remember me most vividly from the early years of our relationship, when I was a young, slightly troubled teenager with a winning line in bong construction—but also the dewy appeal of innocence, and youth? Or does his subconscious prefer me now—a far more rational mother-of-two whose knees are going, and who says ‘Oooof!’ every time she sits down; but who will also never again wake him up crying because the central heating has come on in the night, and she thinks her legs have melted, and got stuck to the radiator?
There is another pause.
“You’re wearing your blue and white striped pajamas,” he says finally, confidently.
This time, I pause.
“Blue and white striped pajamas?” I am wounded. “I’ve never had blue and white striped pajamas.”
“You did!” Pete sounds a little panicked. “Once! Blue and white striped pajamas.”
“Pete,” I say, quite coldly, “I am a woman. I know every item of clothing I have ever owned. And I can tell you now—I have never had a pair of blue and white striped pajamas. Are you sure you’re not getting me confused with the boy from The Snowman?”
“It’s far too late at night for me to deal with you accusing me of imaginary pedophilia with a cartoon,” Pete says, despairingly. “Again. And anyway—you did have blue and white striped pajamas.”
“I once had blue and white Paisley pajamas,” I say, grudgingly.
“There you go!” he says, triumphantly. “That’s near enough!”
“No!” I say, outraged. “That’s not a memory. That’s not a real memory. You’ve made those pajamas up. You’ve just got this . . . fantasy version of me in your head, instead.”
“Fantasy version of you! I’ve hardly gone into my brain, cut out a picture of your face and stuck it onto a picture of . . . Carol Chell from Playschool,” Pete says, agitatedly.
“Carol Chell from Playschool?” I ask.
“She’s a very pretty and lovely lady,” Pete says, in a firm and non-negotiable manner.
“Carol Chell. Well,” I say, staring up at the ceiling. “Well. Carol Chell. We’ve learned a lot tonight, haven’t we? We really have learned a lot.”
I let a vexed air fill the room. Let’s see if you remember this, I think.
THE GAY MOON LANDINGS
Last week I was compiling a quick-cut YouTube montage of humanity’s greatest moments—what can I say? The kids are seven and nine now; weekend activities have moved on from cupcakes and coloring—and came across an awkward fact: there is no Gay Moon Landing.
There are single, iconic images for every other blockbuster moment in humanity’s progress: the Civil Rights Movement has Martin Luther King, giving his speech. The suffragette movement has Emily Wilding Davison, trampled by the King’s Horse. The triumphs of medical science: the mouse with the ear on its back. And the Space Race has, of course, the Moon Landing—Neil Armstrong making the most expensive footprint in history.
But there is no single, iconic news image for gay rights. There’s no five-second clip you can put in that marks a moment where things started getting better for the LGBT guys. The Stonewall Riots in ’69 are an obvious turning point, of course—but footage of it needs captions to explain what’s going on. Otherwise, it just looks like a lot of late-sixties men of above-average grooming experiencing a very unwelcome fire evacution from a disco, while a load of policemen hit them. Anyone who went clubbing in the rougher parts of the Midlands, or Essex, at the time will have seen scenes almost identical. It’s not particularly gay.
Perturbed by this lack of relev
ant news footage, I went on Twitter and asked what people would regard as a putative “Gay Moon Landing.” There were dozens and dozens of replies: David Bowie and Mick Ronson’s homoerotic sparring on Top of the Pops, John Hurt as Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant—dumb with lipstick, blind with mascara and brave as a lion. Seminal teenage fumbling/nascent emancipation in My Beautiful Laundrette and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Cindy Crawford—straight—acting all geisha, and slathering a beaming k.d. lang in shaving foam on the cover of Rolling Stone.
All of these instances crashed into people’s front rooms and started things: conversations; realizations about sexuality; imagining, for the first time, a possible future. In that way—millions of lights, sparking up in millions of minds—they were news events; albeit ones that never actually made it onto the news.
Because what was notable was that nearly every single instance of a Gay Moon Landing suggested was from pop, TV, magazines or film. The history of gay rights, and gay progress, has included keynote speeches, legislation, protest and rioting—but the majority of its big, watershed moments have taken place in the art world. It was good to be gay on Top of the Pops years before it was good to be gay in Parliament, or gay in church, or gay on the rugby pitch. And it’s not just gay progress that happens in this way: 24 had a black president before America did. Jane Eyre was a feminist before Germaine Greer was born. A Trip to the Moon put humans on the Moon in 1902.
This is why recent debates about the importance of the arts contain, at core, an unhappy error of judgment. In both the arts cuts—29 percent of the Arts Council’s funding has now gone—and the presumption that the new, “slimmed down” National Curriculum will “squeeze out” art, drama and music, there lies a subconscious belief that the arts are some kind of . . . social luxury: the national equivalent of buying some overpriced throw pillows and big candle from John Lewis. Policing and defense, of course, remain very much “essentials”—the fridge and duvets in our country’s putative semi-detached house.
But art—painting, poetry, film, TV, music, books, magazines—is a world that runs constant and parallel to ours, where we imagine different futures—millions of them—and try them out for size. Fantasy characters can kiss, and we, as a nation, can all work out how we feel about it, without having to involve real shy teenage lesbians in awful sweaters, to the benefit of everyone’s notion of civility.
Two of the Gay Moon Landings Twitter suggested were Queer as Folk, from 1999, and Captain Jack kissing the Doctor in Doctor Who in 2008—both, coincidentally, written by Russell T. Davies. Queer as Folk was cited as a Gay Moon Landing because, when it aired, it was the first-ever gay drama, and caused absolute, gleeful outrage. Conversely, the Doctor Who gay kiss was a Gay Moon Landing because it caused absolutely no outrage at all. The two were separated by just nine years. I would definitely call that another big step for mankind.
But then, perhaps I’m barking up the wrong tree here. Maybe I don’t need to look for a Gay Moon Landing, after all. As someone on Twitter pointed out, “The Moon Landing itself is pretty gay. A close-knit group of guys land in a silver rocket, make a really dramatic speech, and then spend half an hour jumping up and down? Please.”
Let’s put the “Gay Moon Landings” piece next to my piece on transsexuals—making a little LGBT ghetto within the book. These pages will have markedly better delis and bars than the delis and bars in the rest of the book, and feature a mini-cab company run by a drag queen whose Grease-tribute act goes under the name “Sandra Wee.” You can find me on these pages most Friday nights—wearing only one shoe and singing “Womanizer” by Britney Spears with a male nurse wearing a sombrero, and waving poppers.
WE ONLY HAD TWO TRANSSEXUALS IN WOLVERHAMPTON
In Wolverhampton in 1991, we had two male-to-female transsexuals, who would unfailingly be in the chip shop at the end of Victoria Street at 2 AM, sobering up on curry sauce and chips after a night out clubbing.
As I went past them on the 512 bus, I would feel a kinship with them—a kinship that I would try to project through the glass.
“I feel as if I were born in the wrong body, too!” I would think, loudly, at them. “You were trapped, unhappily, in the bodies of men. I too am unhappily trapped—in the body of a fat virgin with a bad haircut. I wish I could have an operation to sort things out, like you guys—I mean ladies.”
I was reminded of what a moron I was this September, when a ten-year-old boy returned to school after the summer holidays as a girl. As the media coverage made clear, some parents at the school claimed to be “outraged.”
“We should have been consulted,” one said—presumably imagining a scenario where parents regularly throw open the raising of their children to a school-wide committee of other parents; possibly via a Facebook page called “Penis or Vagina: YOU Choose Which One You Think Suits My Weeping Child Best.”
Then, last week, the Department of Education announced that it was considering that schoolchildren be taught about transgender equality—which was greeted, again, with a predictable series of complaints.
Margaret Morrissey, founder of campaigning group Parents Outloud, said: “We are overloading our children with issues they shouldn’t have to consider.”
This is an interesting stance to take on an issue—mainly because of its unappealing and extreme impoliteness. We have to remember that the descriptor “our children” includes both transgender kids (0.1 percent of the population), and kids who live in a world with transgender kids (the other 99.09 percent)—thus comprising 100 percent of all the world’s children.
With those kinds of stats, it seems to be a good idea to enable children in learning about it nice and early on—before they start getting the kind of weird ideas adults have. We constantly underestimate children in these situations. I recall, when I was a teenager, the suggestion of “lessons” in homosexuality being decried for similar reasons of “complexity.” A generation later, and I watch kids in the playground, arguing over who should play the bisexual Captain Jack Harkness from Doctor Who—who fancied both Rose and the Doctor. Not only do they seem to have got their heads around it quite easily—but they’re incorporating it into games involving time-travel, wormholes and paradox, too.
And, anyway, as a general rule of thumb, I don’t think we need worry much about overloading kids with interesting philosophical subjects that help them develop both understanding, and tolerance of, other human beings. That’s like worrying that the Beatles might have made Sgt. Pepper “too good.” That’s what’s supposed to happen. Carry on! Everything’s fine!
One of humanity’s less loveable tropes is an ability to get hurt, self-righteous and huffy about someone else’s problem. It’s amazing that “normal” people would turn on some transgender kid and go, “But what about meeeeee? What about myyyyyyy kids?” It’s a bit like those dads in the maternity wards who complain about being exhausted.
And as a strident feminist, I’m always saddened by other feminists who rail against male-to-female transgenders—claiming you can only be born a woman, and not “become” one.
Holy moly, ladies—what exactly do you think is going wrong here? Having your male genitals remodeled as female, then committing to a lifetime of hormone therapy, sounds like a bit more of a commitment to being a woman than just accidentally being born one. And, besides, it’s an incredibly inhospitable stance to take. Personally, anyone who wants to join the Lady Party is welcome as far as I’m concerned. The more the merrier! Anyone who’s been rejected by The Man is a friend of mine!
Anyway. Since I was an ill-shorn sixteen-year-old on the bus, I’ve found out that the word isn’t “normal”—it’s “cis.” In Latin, the opposite of “trans” is “cis”—and so most of humanity is “cisgender.” This opens language up to a subsequent possibility: finally finding the “otherness” in transgender fascinating, and useful. We’ll hurl satellites out into space, in order to find
new and enthralling wonders—but we could simply turn to someone next to us, and ask a question about their life, instead. We endlessly debate what it is to be a man, or what it is to be a woman—when there are people who walk the Earth who’ve been both. If transgender people didn’t exist, we’d probably be trying to spend billions of pounds trying to invent them. Instead, we won’t even tell kids they exist.
Is it time for my Lady Gaga interview? Let’s do my Lady Gaga interview—given that this is the gay ghetto of the book, and Gaga is the most gay-friendly pop-star ever.
Interviewing Gaga was one of the more extraordinary moments of my life—not just the night out with her itself, which is all in the feature, but the reaction to it afterwards, as well. I posted it on Twitter on the day of publication with the message, “I’m not being funny, but you really won’t ever read a better interview with Lady Gaga than mine.” This is mainly because I was drunk when I tweeted it—but also because it’s got the lupus exclusive, and a sex club, and her having a wee, and an empowering talk about feminism, and us getting hammered, and me exclusively finding out she didn’t have a penis, and me ruining a couture cloak. Everything you want, really.
In the three days following my tweet and the link to the piece, it got re-tweeted over 20,000 times. It went around the world. I lost count of the people who read it and told me they liked it—mainly because I have both very poor both long- and short-term memory. My favorite person who told me they liked it was some orange, handsome dude I met at the Glamour Awards in 2010. We were in the smoking area having a puff and, when I told him my name, he went, “Oh, you! You went to the sex club with Gaga!” and we had a lovely chat. Throughout our conversation, I was aware of an odd atmosphere around us. A semi-circle of women had gathered, and were watching us with expressions of what can only be described as “hunger.”