AT YOUR OWN RISK BY DEREK JARMAN
Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman (31 January 1942 – 19 February 1994) was an English film director and writer. His book At Your Own Risk: A Saint's Testament, a “distillation of his philosophy of life” (as the dustjacket introduces it), was published by Hutchinson in London in 1992. Presented here is everything in it of Greek love interest.
How Davide Turned my Head
In 1946, my father was posted to Italy. Overnight home was transformed from the bleak wartime married quarters with their coke stoves and mildew to a villa on Lake Maggiore.
Villa Zuassa had beautiful gardens. There I chased lizards among the enormous golden pumpkins that grew along the gravel paths, played hide-and-seek in alleys banked with camelias, or crept off to the gatehouse where a little old lady in the blackest mourning fed armies of silkworms on trays in the gloom of her front room. She would give me caterpillars and cocoons to take home, and I would be driven back through the woods by her grandson Davide on the handlebars of his bike. He would stop and hoist me on his shoulders to pick a particular flower.
Davide was my first love and the love was returned. He stripped off and rowed me on the lake as summer storms blew in from the mountains. This love was my great secret. If only this innocent idyll could have continued. But after a brief summer we left for Rome. [p. 13]
The School Satchel [1940s]
First sexual encounters have an arbitrary nature about them. Freddy told me that at sixteen after school he would cross the park in Richmond past the gents. One afternoon he was stopped by a policeman:
“What are you doing here son?”
Freddy blushed bright scarlet and mumbled some excuse.
“Don’t let me catch you round here again, son.” The policeman took his school satchel from him and instructed him to meet him after school the next day at the station, when he would return it.
Freddy, terrified, arrived at the station where the policeman was waiting in a car wearing civilian clothes – “Jump in,” he said, drove Freddy home and fucked him before giving him his satchel back.
In bed, many years later, Freddy told me it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him. [p. 14]
Schoolboy 1950
I am a schoolboy with nine inches - meet me here tomorrow at 4:00 (SERIOUS). [Graffito, no further details given; p. 17]
Sex at Nine 1951
I was aware of my sexuality at nine, which makes a nonsense of an age of consent of twenty-one and of the ideas of CONVERSION, PERVERSION and CORRUPTION of youth.
I was unsuccessfully trying to fuck the boy in the bed next to mine - quite unaware that I was doing anything out of the ordinary - when the sky fell in as we were ripped apart like two dogs by the headmaster’s wife; and from that day and all the days of my childhood I waited in vain for a man to carry me off and initiate me - rescue me from suburban conformity.
This happened to my schoolfriend Robin who had a wild affair that started on his fifteenth birthday - how I regret that I wasn’t seduced.
Ian said he told his mother he was a homo at the age of five, and Jimmy told Michael that at twelve he was hanging around Glasgow bus station hoping some man would “shove it up him” - a youth intent on corrupting the middle-aged. (p. 18)
Destroy this evil! – The Sunday Chronicle 1955
[…] Our youth is menaced by these perverts, it is a sin against God and mankind.
- Writes Barbara Cartland.
[…] Of law reform she said:
Nothing more sinister than this tolerance can be imagined. There must be a ruthless check-up on schoolteachers to check the hydra-headed monster of masculine perversion. Heaven knows how many boys have been permanently ruined by the ghouls of perverted sex.
Step forward the Duke of Kent and Lord Louis Mountbatten for dinner with Babs.[1] [pp. 18-9]
Milford 1953
What is the world coming to when a peer of the realm can’t bugger a commoner?[2]
The trial of Edward Montagu from the News Chronicle:
A fourteen year old boy scout’s account of a serious offence alleged against Lord Montagu of Beaulieu was described yesterday by a forensic expert as extraordinarily impossible. “I’ve studied the boy, he was strong, well built, and if there was any resistance this offence would have been impossible.”
Lord Montagu is the first peer of the realm to stand trial for felony before a judge and jury since the privilege of peerage was abolished in 1948.[3]
The fourteen year old boy was in the witness box for two and a quarter hours. The judge said that the boy’s story had changed.
“I wasn’t sure, Sir,” said the boy.
“Are you sure now?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“What made you change your mind?”
“I don’t know, Sir. I didn’t know Lord Montagu was like this man as well. If you’re in the presence of a Lord, one thinks you are fairly safe.”
My best friend Hugh lived with his parents in an old house next to Palace House in Beaulieu where the twenty-seven year old Lord had offered the fourteen year old a cigarette.
In 1953, I was eleven, and looked with excitement tinged with fear at the walls of the wicked palace. [pp. 21-2]
[…] After lights out, the boys jerked off in a competition to see who could come first - it makes you blind and saps the moral fibre and did you know it can make you can grow hair on the palms of your hands?
Already the dormitory was divided into three groups: those who would report you - future guardians of morality; those who enjoyed themselves - myself; and the rest, frightened by their own come, who were probably destined for the cloth. [p. 22)
Cold Baths
The threat of corruption, a dark sea of depravity lapped in the minds of the boys creeping up the very walls of the institution. The first sign of weakness was masturbation which blinded you on the football field and led to own-goals. Sex had to be turned off like the central heating. Outside the school grounds, the tabloids lurked in the shrubbery waiting to pounce on the naked men who locked you in their beach houses to perform their unspeakable perversions on your body. [p. 24]
[…] My father, as C.O. of Abingdon, would never have known that Johnno, his batman, used to give me rides on his motorcycle round the married quarters, my hands in his pockets playing “pocket billiards”. [p. 24]
God Save Queer Children from Straight Parents
Discussing the HIV infection with journalists I have found that few of them discussed sex with their children. They say ‘oh my daughters are only thirteen’, but many thirteen year olds are sexually active - just look at the figures for teenage pregnancies - so they are at risk. The age of consent should be lowered to fourteen or abolished and problems sorted out on an individual basis. We don’t grow up to fit the laws.
So many kids lie about their age, as they are under threat if they are sleeping with an older man. I saw a letter recently from a sixteen year old boy which confirms this:
The whole concept of childhood is suspect. I was having sex at twelve. As a child I had no rights. I was seducing people in my school by the time I was thirteen.
A scenario for disaster! As a twelve year old you become HIV+, and then you fuck the whole school! The epidemic is potentially uncontrollable. The only solution is discussion rather than censure. [p. 25]
Nascent Sexuality
I have talked to many young men about their sexual experiences. One fact emerges quite clearly. Boys who’ve had the good fortune, at fourteen or fifteen or even earlier, to meet older men are nearly always more at ease with themselves sexually. The old Greek way of men and women initiating adolescents of their own sex, helping them to discover their own sexuality in an atmosphere of responsibility, contained much humane and practical wisdom. I’m unconvinced that any boy’s ‘natural’ inclinations are ever altered by contacts of this kind. The only damage that can be inflicted is the threat of exposure by a ‘morality’ which outlaws innocent and uncomplicated desires, uproots affection at least as valuable as family ties, and affronts the basic freedoms of everyone. [p. 26]
When I Was Young The Absence Of The Past Was a Terror
St. Aeldred wrote:
While I was still a schoolboy, the charm of my friends greatly captivated me, so that among the foibles and failings with which that age is fraught, my mind surrendered itself completely to emotion and devoted itself to love. Nothing seemed sweeter or more worthwhile than to love and to be loved.
- Corpus Christianorum, Hoste and Talbot –eds.
[…] I wish I had been given instruction, both physically and mentally, by an older man. That is what teaching is about; it has to have a sexual element. That’s what I like about Tuke. You can see he was in love with his boys. This doesn’t have to manifest itself physically; celibacy can be very radical especially same-sex celibacy. [pp. 27-8]
One Last Look Around the Fifties
I was first aware of my sexuality at nine, but I was very isolated. If only I had met someone who could have helped me through my adolescence. I had one schoolfriend who had the fortune (he’s now married with four kids!) to have a long affair with a schoolteacher. This affair continued right until his mid-twenties.
I was abducted by Heterosoc. When I was thirteen, I changed schools; the next school, if anything, was more violent about sex. It is a myth that all-male boarding schools are the centre of jolly sexual activity. I remember putting my hands down a boy’s trouser pockets and touching him up, but that’s all. I might have surreptitiously brought him to orgasm but I can’t remember.
One schoolboy was hauled up in front of the headmaster for writing a love letter to another boy, he was expelled. Love was a worse crime than sex.
I had sexual fantasies about some of the boys. There was one night when two of the boys retired under a bed in the dormitory. I’m not sure what they were up to. I hardly dared look. The rowdiest heterosexual boys were able to have these homosexual encounters, whereas the queer boys were frightened because it was the centre of our sexuality. We didn’t dare make the advance.
All the way through School I had hopeless crushes. [pp. 30-1]
Are there any parents with their eyes open?
At nine, I was caught in bed with Gavin - thrown onto the floor by the headmaster’s wife, lectured publicly and whipped. Frightened by this unexpected outburst, I was to have no physical contact for thirteen years. I lived my adolescence so demoralised I became reclusive. [p. 31]
Did You Ever Know A Nicer Boy?
Talking of families, one of the strangest encounters that I heard of was from a friend of mine, Gawain, who picked up a young man, who introduced him to his brothers and his father. The father was sleeping with his sons and the sons were sleeping with each other and Gawain and his boyfriend were asked to join in! They shared a holiday and an enormous communal bed. Everyone was very happy. [p. 57]
Tarnished Silver
How compromised have you been in your film work?
I would have loved to have had real fucking in my films - I would have got off on it. Imagine all those teenagers jerking off in bed over their portable televisions. [p. 74]
5th November 1991
Meeting a young man on Bonfire Night:
He seemed happy to meet me. We talked about film and then he told me his story.
“I’m a miner’s son. It’s been difficult coming down from the north to London.”
“Well, I know a bit about that. People are less friendly down here, aren’t they?”
“Yes, that’s certain.”
“What was life like up there?”
He laughed: “I fucked all the boys in my school, every single one of them. They are all married now except for me - my father joined in! Isn’t life strange?” [p. 90]
[1] Prince George (1902-42), Duke of Kent, was promiscuous with both men and women. On the claims that his second cousin, Mountbatten, had sexual liaisons with boys see the article Earl Mountbatten of Burma, 1900-79. Barbara Cartland (1901-2000), a prolific author of frivolous historical novels, was a friend of the latter and claimed to have had an affair with the former.
[2] In what was the biggest British sex scandal of the 1950s, Edward Douglas-Scott-Montagu, 3rd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu (1926-2015) was tried and acquitted for lack of sufficient evidence in 1953 of sex with a 14-year-old boy scout in his beach hut on the Solent, but convicted and imprisoned the next year of “gross offences” with an RAF serviceman.
[3] The privilege of peerage referred to had been the right of peers of the realm to be tried by their own kind rather than by a judge or jury.
Comments powered by CComment