"Screwdo": Who did what to whom? With what? And where?

Back in the late 80s, I used to go to a Gay Youth Group in Newcastle Upon Tyne. The meetings were a bit desultory, a bunch of 18-year-olds waiting for an excuse to just go down to the pubs together, but we were young and benefitted from each other's support. "Screwdo" was something I originally developed as an activity for the group, though I ended up only taking around to a couple of friends' houses rather than to a meeting. It is, of course, a version of Cluedo, only here the aim of the game is to work out who did what to whom, with what, and where.

This was back in the days before the sort of home printing we take for granted now, so I made it all from coloured card, clear sticky plastic, Letraset (remember Letraset?), FIMO plasticine and a mixture of  perverse ingenuity and touching innocence. The now ubiquitous rainbow flag is absent here, as the only contemporary Gay symbols were the pink (or black) triangle and the "lambda" sign.

When I moved back home for a year and hung the board on my bedroom wall, my Mum made sure my curtains were left closed all the time "in case the Window Cleaner sees it." I made my Mama SO proud...

The Screwdo characters were (from left to right): "Master Bates", "Magenta", "Cuddles", "The Clone", "Walter Sports" and "Roger Rent". Young LGBT people just won't understand how pervasive "clone" culture was back then - I would go into some pubs and EVERYONE looked like Freddy Mercury.

 

I made all the cards for the game from telephone cards I found discarded in phone boxes. These images were all cut from either postcards or catalogues or covers of "Gay Times". The picture for 'Magenta' is an early shot of "Lily Savage" before Paul O'Grady became nationally famous. Here, she was a model posing next to hunks in underwear in a fetish catalogue.

These were the toys I made for the game. I was so new to the Gay world that I hadn't actually ever seen a dildo, so I got a lot of teasing about that one. I was pleased with my first stab at making the handcuffs - I used ring pulls from cans of Coke, but soon found a better pair elsewhere. I was very pleased to find a pink die for the game. Sometimes everything just comes together.

The remaining cards for the game. As with the board, these were made from layers of coloured paper and card and photocopied acetate (which I would colour on the reverse side). I innovated a write-on/wipe-off "sex menu" card, too. I don't know if the manufacturers of Cluedo ever thought of THAT.

The friends I showed "Screwdo" used to say that I should market it, but times were very different then and I knew that there would be few outlets and inevitable prosecution for copyright. In those days you would be arrested for holding hands with another guy in the street, never mind actually kissing him, and I was myself breaking the law having sex under the age of 21. "Screwdo" has remained in an old art folder for over 20 years until now.

I was telling some new friends about "Screwdo" on Sunday, and they suggested that the original game could be adapted into a bi-sexual free-for-all, with the Reverend Green tying up Professor Plum with the Rope, etc. I think that counts as progress.

post-human

A group of us, post-40 and bearded, stand in the dark yard to the side of the pub.

On the other side of a waist-high fence, a long queue has formed for a popular gay disco night next door. Everyone in the queue is oh-so-carefully coiffed and styled just-so. They look elfin and delicate and no-one is over 22.

Not for the first time I think of H.G.Wells' "Time Machine". Here before me are the Eloi.

And I have become a Morlock.

Bugger.

reading the city

After some years away, work brought me back to the city.

For all my mixed emotions on returning, my eyes gorged themselves on the cityscape.

I realised that I was like one re-reading a favourite novel, scanning familiar pages for landmarks recalled, and celebrating at once both my recall and the city's persistence. My eyes were frantic for detail. I couldn't open them wide enough.

Every street was a page indented by paragraphed turnings into side-streets. Parades of shops like stanzas in poetry.

The city was a vast Victorian novel with a cast of individually realised architectural characters all interconnected, the story arcs and plot twists mapped by these roads and junctions. Looking along just one street I could read the melodrama of the ten years I had been away: the relative fortunes of shops I remembered, the small grief where a business had disappeared, the fading of once upstart new architecture into a slightly shabby middle-age, the shock slide of some buildings into a neglected architectural dementia.

The city I loved had continued without me. It was naturally, and rightfully, oblivious to me. Others had far more claim to ownership. And yet... and yet I carried within me my personal version of this town, my own narrative of these streets.

faith = hope + trust

"Hope" and "Trust", by definition, depend on the real likelihood of being let down, of there being no basis for either.

The meaning of these words imply the possibility that the hoped-for or trusted-in may not be the case.

These are compromised words, compromised states.

As a society we elevate them to the highest echelon of honour - to hope or to trust is to exhibit the noblest behaviour.

We venerate fallibility. We celebrate the attempt that could fail.

What does that say about us?