NAÏF IN THE UNDERWORLD

After all, shame is the distance between how we are, and how we would like to appear.

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(Photograph: Scott (Jockstrap) by Robert Mapplethorpe)

I always encourage my friends, when they are due to visit, to stock up on vulgar and salacious gossip. I want them to fill my ears with the most horrible things they’ve ever heard. It’s quite a bar.  

Recently Carlo and I decided to interview an old friend, a man a little older than me, who had led a fascinating and dirty life. Pursuing an art critic he met in a pub toilet in Earls Court, he moved to New York, living there from the mid-seventies to the early eighties.

My friend, from a wealthy Iranian background, was obviously pretty, since he was taken up by the denizens of the New York art scene, and had relationships - if you can call them that - with notable American artists of the time. These included Mapplethorpe, Haring and Warhol, the last of whom he didn’t had sex with.

The interviewee spoke freely about this fascinating period of American art history, about the bathhouses, clubs and bars of New York after Stonewall, a scene which developed when property in the broken, sleezy city was available to young people at a cheap price. It was a dangerous and fertile time.  

The friend spoke about visiting Warhol’s Factory, meeting Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal, and his bathhouse encounters. What an education it was, liberating him from his conservative background, where it was inconceivable to be gay.  

My friend also spoke about his affair at school with an older woman, the wife of one of his teachers. Later, he would have sex with women in their seventies, picking them up in supermarkets. He was bisexual, and found on coming back to London, after his New York sojourn, that he had contracted HIV.

The interview he gave was frank and enthralling, but - and here we can only guess - when he read it back, after our edit, it disturbed him. He wrote saying he wanted to pull the interview. It must have looked stark when we trimmed all the filler. What had he done during those years except have sex with famous people?

But that was the part that interested us; sex and art went together then, as they always do. Any modern art scene would have to include some form of progressive sexual ethic.

My friend wasn’t a painter, major collector or writer. He was an impressionable pretty boy looking for experience and to escape his family’s expectations; a voyeur with a privileged view on a decadent, flourishing time. But he survived AIDS where many of his contemporaries did not, and so it is a moving story.

We concluded, when he wrote to us to complain, that he was ashamed. After all, shame is the distance between how we are, and how we would like to appear. We wanted a funny, gossipy interview about his early life, but when confronted with the sleazy, depraved truth, he saw himself from the point of view of a strict super-ego. His time in New York not being the exciting adventures of a young man, but a squalid dip into the filthy underworld. He was now looking at himself from the point of view of his parents.

At my recommendation, Carlo is reading Sebastian Horsley’s excellently witty and sordid memoir Dandy in the Underworld, an account of the author’s life in the 80s and 90s as an upper-middle-class drug and sex addict.

It is in the tradition of other famous autobiographies, like De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Henry Miller’s adventures in Paris, Salvador Dali’s memoir, Anaïs Nin’s diaries, and other shameless truthtellers, those who have opted to tell us ‘everything’. They are a lot of fun to read. It is unusual for anyone to be so candid about their indignities, urges and failings.

In the interview, my friend let himself go by mistake, and on reflection, was perhaps shocked by his lusts and emptiness, by how little he had achieved, hawking his arse around. It might be reasonable to tell these stories in front of a friend or analyst – where speaking is the point – but to see it written down in print, and have it presented to the world, can be uncomfortably revealing.  

Humour is a step back from experience, defusing the agony of one’s disgraces, making them fun for others. That is catharsis, making the painful manageable, turning trauma into entertainment. Racism isn’t funny, but when I wrote The Buddha of Suburbia, it was an attempt to transform a painful history into a delightful, self-deprecating story. Look at Peep Show or the Office, comedy as tragedy in disguise.

We have all laughed at our parents who are funny because they are authorities. Comedy can be an attack on power. The comedies I grew up on tended to be set in institutions; the military, schools, hospitals, humour as rebellion. Authorities are afraid of humour - think of Kundera’s great novel, The Joke - concerning a young man imprisoned for writing a sarcastic postcard – but humour is never revolutionary.  

My friend isn’t an artist, someone who suspends their dignity in exchange for a deeper truth. That is the devil’s pact; to expose yourself, and sometimes others, to address an audience about human reality. My friend is like an undermined institution, unable to integrate the more lubricious parts of himself into a fuller picture. 

He is too insistent on his dignity to be amused by his historic escapades, afraid to see himself as a comic figure, an ingénue in a treacherous city.