The Aesop Queer Library

I only have a handful of other saved numbers in my phone, and, sandwiched between the names of girls I’ve met through work or dating apps, there’s Juliet. My best friend. We’ve been tight since school, and even though we haven’t spoken for a couple of months, she’s the one person I know I can always call. Before I have a chance to think about any outstanding awkwardness or what I’ll say, she answers the phone.

‘Elsie?’

‘Um, hi J.’

‘What’s wrong?’ Her intonation flutters with worry. She knows me too well.

‘Are you busy?’ I sniffle.

‘Elsie, where are you?’ Her voice grows in seriousness and concern. She lowers the music playing in the background. Sounds like she’s with a client.

‘I’m sorry to have to ask but there’s been a bit of a situation . . . Can I please stay with you? Just for a little bit and –’

‘Of course, you can.’ She cuts me off. ‘Always.’ 

This chronology of ‘Black gay activism’ begins not with ready-made spaces dedicated to advancing the interests of those who faced the double jeopardy of racist and homophobic discrimination, but with the presence of individuals within separate gay and Black liberation movements. It begins with the story of a man whose growing consciousness of both societal prejudice and state oppression, from his childhood to early adult years, matured into a life of political advocacy framed explicitly through Black gay liberation: the story of Ted Brown, our first sprig of lavender.

Ted Brown is a veteran of the Gay Liberation Front, one of the earliest recorded activist collectives of openly gay men and women in Britain. It is preceded only by the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, though that group leaned more towards political lobbying and bureaucracy while the GLF preferred to take to the streets with beautiful, campy recklessness. Narrating Ted’s origins helps us trace the early constructs of gay activism in Britain from the early 1970s, a movement which is the precursor for the out and open organising activity of successive waves and generations of lesbians and gay men, Black, white or any other ethnicity. And in being one of the only Black men within the Gay Liberation Front, Ted is able to recount a monumental period of British gay activism both from the position of a core participant, and from the racial margins. 

Thatcher came up again a few days later on one of my errands to Khan’s to collect the day’s offal for Jason the cat’s dinner. There I came across Ghaez Khan, Hooriya Jaan’s husband. Worn out by his five boys, his newly grown beard showed signs of greying, and his skullcap was hidden under the yards of fabric he had wrapped round and round his head to create his lungi. Gigantic turbans were part of our heritage, but his was one of the most gigantic of all. I walked in midway through a conversation between him, the butcher, Ali Khan, and another man.

‘I go every day to the Job Centre, and now they want me to go to the classroom to learn English.’

Silence and nodding of heads. No one looked at me.

‘What am I going to do? Go an’ look at the white walls? I can’t read at my age. I’m over forty. I am completely illiterate, like a blank white sheet of paper, completely unlettered.’

Another pause. I waited, not wanting to interrupt.

‘They said if I don’t go to these classes they will stop my unemployment benefit.’

Ghaez Khan was now angry, shuffling from one foot to the other, looking straight at the butcher. ‘They invited me to come to this country when they needed labourers to sweep the floors. Now how do they want me to learn English? I know some words, but when did I have time to go to school? I can’t even read or write in my own tongue, how am I going to learn English?’

Ali Khan looked on with quiet sympathy as he smoked over the carcasses of meat, then picked up a newspaper from the counter. He pointed at the faces on the cover. ‘Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan’ was written on top. Ali Khan smirked: ‘She’s made out of iron – the Great Iron Lady and her boyfriend.’

It was his son who finally served me and handed me the cat’s dinner, wrapped in last week’s newspaper. I said my salutations as I walked out.

On the way back home, I passed the newsagent’s and stared at Thatcher’s face on the same paper in the newspaper stand. When I had first seen her in a rare glimpse on TV, she looked very important, with her pointy face and her power suits. The more I heard about her, the more she began to preoccupy my thoughts . . . She was a very strict woman, and her suits had the widest of shoulder pads, worn over silky pussy bows, somehow softening the strictness. To finish off her look she always wore a glistening set of pearls or big clip-on earrings.

But it was the hair, I realized now, that made her the Great Iron Lady; her hair must have given her special powers. The colour shone and glinted, but it was not blonde or dark or red or grey. I had only seen that colour in films or pictures. It was the colour of a helmet, a burnished dark-gold helmet. I looked at it some more. It was coiffured in a way which made her look much taller, just like Uncle Guncha and his karakul, though Uncle Guncha had cut off his hair and replaced it with a beard.

How was her hair so perfect? I decided she must have set it in her Carmen rollers every morning, back-combed it to add the lift, and sprayed it into shape before she was ready to face the world. Her hair was her armour!

After that, I kept an eye out for her. Every time I saw her picture in the papers or on television her hair never seemed to move, even when she got in and out of cars.

In the meantime, I was confused. She had a husband called Denis. He wore thick-rimmed glasses. So how was she allowed to have this boyfriend, this President Reagan she kept meeting? And didn’t her husband mind her being pictured in the paper with her boyfriend? Did Denis beat her up when he was upset?

Everyone knew that the Great Iron Lady had closed down all the factories, while also ushering in a decade of excess for the yuppies down south through the 1980s. Yuppies, ‘money, money, money’, leg warmers, David Hasselhoff, neon, Big Hair. She did all of this.

But there was no end of recession, no ‘money, money, money’ for us in the middle of England, in Balsall Heath; nor could the men, with all their prostrations to God, turn themselves into yuppies. God wasn’t listening. Dad and his friends’ endless journeys to the unemployment office couldn’t change them into yuppies, it changed them into Bushmen instead.