A diary can feel arrogant and pointless.
A diary can feel arrogant and pointless. Arrogant - asking someone to spend their life reading about yours. Pointless - spending your present typing up the past. Hoping for what? Money? Attention? Someone hot sliding into your DMs? A benevolent reader in a chateau in France?
Diaries can also be beautiful, can be telling, can be hugely entertaining. Perhaps I’ll aim for that, lucky you.
Twenty years ago, hiding under a thin duvet at boarding school in England, I remember reading Edmund White with a torch, his autobiographical books in which teenage boys “cornholed” each other, rolling around in tanning oil.
Diaries can offer sunshine, or someone to show you the ropes. Perhaps you are reading this in hiding right now. Diaries can offer company. Perhaps I am living your dream. Perhaps you are learning from my mistakes. Perhaps you are obsessively plotting my demise, looking for something to sink your nails into.
But today my friend Holly, the comedian Holly Burn, was like “Jack you should get a Substack”, she thinks I can monetise my thoughts, she is a Sagitarius and she wants me to join her, firing arrows into the sky, which for her take the form of Tik Tok sketches and irreverent podcasts. I am old school. I like words. You can hide so much in text, especially when your enemies are lazy and stupid.
And so today, leaving her house on Roupell Street, I decided to please her. Right now I am sitting in an empty office, we just had a meeting about celebrity drag queens endorsing air fryers (I run a drag queen agency to pay my bills) And then everyone left, but I lagged behind, went to the toilet and then circled back, and here I am - all alone in this boardroom - stared at by a towering vase of tiger lilies. And I did it. I registered a Substack. This is it.
I sat for a minute just watching the cursor flash. Dirt smeared across the white glow of this tired old Macbook Air, this laptop that has teched so many drag shows. I bought this computer in cash back in 2017 - following my first pay day from the Clapham Grand, a Victorian variety theatre turned nightclub, that used to pay me in ten pound notes from the bar till. My job was to help build the venue’s publicity and sort of make the place gayer in keeping with the times. Two tasks that I achieved before Covid struck us all, and they decided to soldier on without me. That was nearly eight years ago - pretty good for an Apple product. Many fall apart after eighteen months I’ve heard. Eight years. That’s a lot of wanks. Although these days I’m more likely to be caught playing bridge on my laptop.
But this machine did catch the tail end of my druggy years and sit through all manner of lurid parties. Watching me, moist and depressed on a comedown, scrolling through the same old porn crap. “Blond Hunk”, “Muscle Orgy”, “Rugby Lads”, “College Boy”, “Outdoors”, how we humiliate ourselves - typing these slimy fragments of trauma into search bars. Search. Such a sad, noble word.
In my thirties I discovered the diaries of Denton Welch. An old uni pal Matt gave me a copy of ‘In Youth Is Pleasure’ - a book which sounds dodgier than it is, don’t worry, it’s a Penguin Classic (whatever that means). A beautiful, funny, sharply observed, outrageous little novel, I was shocked to learn that its writer, Denton Welch, had died young, aged 33, in 1948. His diaries are still with us though, and they are so funny, so fresh. Diaries are a record, and I see Denton as a friend.
He never met me of course, nature wouldn’t let us, and maybe if we did meet we wouldn’t like each other. That’s another nice thing about writing, you offer friendship to strangers, to people you might snub a little if you crossed paths in reality. But he is often with me, Denton, in diary form, on public transport, on winter evenings, or walking along the canal between drag queen meetings.
Maybe you see me as a friend. Maybe you are in the future. Maybe I’ve brightened your day. And so it goes on. The boarding school I went to all those years ago was called Oakham School, and their motto was ‘Quasi Cursores Vitai Lampada Tradunt’ - Like runners in a race, we pass the torch of life.
So in this diary, this “Substack”, we are going to leave London for a few weeks and go to Vietnam, from where I have just returned. I made daily notes while away on Microsoft Word and I am going to sculpt them into a Substack shape. We will start in Hanoi, then down the coast, to Da Nang, Hoi An, Nha Trang, travelling from seedy masssage parlour to basement gay bar, until eventually we wash up in Ho Chi Minh and its giddy, thumping, underworld. Then we will cross into Cambodia to see the temples, those magnificent temples, and then further on we go, across the land border into Thailand and finish with a wild week in Bangkok - perhaps my favourite city in the world.
I mostly like gay bars, old buildings, boys, pop music, and exploring, I like meeting new people, rummaging in the margins and kicking around in the back streets. So this diary will be a lot of that - highs and lows etc. That classic gay paradigm - splendid ornate culture, and evenings that flirts with the unspeakable. Without wanting to come across too 'kooky, sometimes I might go to a place and never actually see any of the main attractions, but spend the entire time on a man’s balcony or in his spare room. To be briefly at the centre of a stranger’s life, up close to his secrets, is a beautiful way to pass a day. It’s why gay men are always a threat to “international security”, we make friends against the grain, we actually connect. The shared love of football has nothing on our frenzies and furies, our undiluted love. At other times I lead myself on a wild goose chase - start off in a coffee shop and end up running away from buffaloes across a rice field at night. Let the universe take her course. Enjoy the world. Just when you think the path is straight ahead, turn left.
I’ll try not to give you a tedious diary, “and then I did this. And then I did that”, what I ate, what I shat, like a child’s holiday homework. It will be more like episodes and scenes that compelled me, accounts of people, of visions, of strange observations, and candid tableaus, funny little things that ocurred to me. My private thoughts which, for whatever reason, I am now turning inside out, like trouser pockets on the counter at the dry cleaner.
There it is. The flashing cursor. Egging me on, begging me to ‘Stack more.
It reminds me, this flashing cursor, of creeping across my grandparents’ kitchen at night. I would sneak back into their house after meeting men in the car park of the local library. The only light at night in their kitchen was the flashing timer on their 1980s oven, and Grandma had a fridge magnet that said “Fridge Pickers Wear Bigger Knickers”. I would see this tiny mantra flashing green as I carefully removed my shoes, and tip toed down their hall, trying not to knock things over, jars of buttons, and musical boxes filled with pills, and the breakfast tray with its cling-film covered muesli that Grandma always laid out before bed.
Years after they were both dead, their house stood empty and derelict with its coveted view of the English channel. The property developers who bought it off my uncle, two acres on the Dorset coast, left it abandoned for several years. The walls began to crack and collapse, the empty swimming pool filled with leaves and squirrels and grass snakes, and eventually men in hard helmets bull-dozed some of it down. I took a lover to see the ruins, and we climbed over the wrought-iron gates that I remember one summer I was forced to help re-paint. And we waded through the dead geraniums and buried gnomes, and walked right into the old kitchen - not through the door but through a giant hole in the wall - and there it was, exposed to the elements, standing in the middle of the shattered kitchen, the little 1980s oven, it’s timer no longer flashing, but the fridge magnet still there, proudly on its white metal chest. Fridge Pickers Wear Bigger Knickers.
There. I’ve made a start.
I promise to write a proper start next.
TOOT TOOT!