notes

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===== Sexuality in analogue times =====

Haunted by experiences of possible future selves, as imagined years ago. Selves I haven't become or fully lived, yet they are still part of me. I didn't become gay me, or straight me.

My unexpressed sexuality is a little sneaky, a bit slippery, a bit creepy. 

I remember a mate telling me excitedly about his idea for Gay island. "I don't even think that we should kill them, why can't they all just go live on an island together? Call it gay Island." 

A lot was said at the time of the possibilities of moving from the analogue to the digital era, less about how confusing the migration has been for those of us who grew up on the other side.

I'm using digital media to capture the thoughts and feelings that escaped my body in the times before digital, especially pre internet digital imagery like biceps from the mortal combat in the video shop. Somehow that feels like a trace of the queerness that was invisible to me at the time, computer games represented an escape into a different dimension, there is an aesthetic connection between that early photorealistic 32 bit graphics and the neural net cellular automata I've been playing with to animate football kits.

The Internet being all around us acts as ether, catching stray desires, translucent, numbed parts of ourselves that slipped away invisibly in the before times. All those posts and videos, myriad genders and sexualities ready for us to see ourselves in. Hard to imagine a world without these mirrored nets, just think of all those stray longings dissolving off into the wallpaper.

In the 90s, gender and sexuality identities were still being explored, but in a far more ambiguous way, through looks, body language, music and TV film tastes. We didn't have the shared online discourse around terms and their meanings, it was much less about words and more about ambiguous signals sent in among hanging around each other, being in rooms together. It was much more opaque, our gestures and performances were much more enmeshed with the banality of everyday life. We were also missing the knowledge that schools and other educators could have given us because of section 28.

I picture thoughts about my sexuality from this time as ambiguous, undefined things, morphing sound and images from home movies, TV shows and photos of the time, characters who in hindsight I either kind of knew were queer, like poirot or who I was annoyed by because I was attracted to them like Tom cruise, or that I found sexy in a weird way like all the thundercats.

My experience of the analogue lad culture of the 90's was that it only offered binary choices for who you fancy and who you are as a teenager, gay or straight, in or out, lad or wierdo. So what happened to thoughts, feelings and desires that I couldn't recognise through that?
My senses and my fastest thoughts bring me a pandemonium of possibilities. These facial feature scout thoughts bring me partial images of boys features, pretty eyes, full lips, tanned cheekbones, hair, arms etc. They  meet desire filtering thoughts that were looking for pieces of pretty girls faces -  pretty boys, handsome girls and all between never quite made it to me. Normative lads and girls thoughts circle me with imagery of hyper gendered 80/90s men and women from tv/films and games.

Some foragers carrying handsome and pretty image features from lees face nearly get through, but are chased off, blanked out by analogue thoughts of my ladness and lots of blanking out staring at the sky thought, the handsome/prety thoughts are chased outside the circle of lads, to a gathering of gay thoughts away in the group - visual rrpresentation of gays in the 90s- erasure, allo allo, simpsons, then further away prison shower rape scenes in film.

One of the things I learned from therapy was that, although repression is the right word, I didn't so much push my attraction to men down, as push it away, into a distant  possible future. This is the danger of dismissing fleeting unexpected thoughts and feeling and of not connecting wierd little fantasies that pop up out of nowhere, with reality. It feels like there is some connection between this fearful pushing away of possible future or alternative selves and the angry policing of borders, attacking and repelling people different due to colour, gender, where they come from.

I saw those behaviours and identities that go along with them as being not for people like me, but either posher or much more caricatured effeminate gay men. 
I didn’t see any working class lads that i could identify with being gay, nevermind being bisexual.
I intuitively felt, without ever verbalising to myself that if i explored any of this, I could no longer be part of my group of mates, id have to leave them and find new friends and didnt want to.
I didn’t have much of a sense of who I was, other than being stood with my mates.
Metaphor of the lads stood in a circle, the 'gay' thoughts chased outside that circle by the autoimmune 'lad' thoughts, me hollow in the middle.

Its clear to me now that teenagers now have a whole spectrum of straight and lgbtq+ role models to look to. My analogue landscape had a completely binary choice, lads like Oasis or Ian brown or caricature gays. Even queer as folk & will and grace presented gay life as being totally separate to straights.