Brut, Boys, and the Green‑Bottled Semaphore

There used to be a shop in an 18th century building the Binnen Oranjestraat, a side street close to where I lived in central Amsterdam the window of which was to look through the entire living memory of fragrance history. The shop is closed now, but curiously, whilst it was open, I never went inside. Maybe I was nervous that the smells might awaken memories that were best left sleeping.

Besides, I could still virtually smell the fragrances through the glass of the shop’s window. I can still smell them now, men’s colognes of the 1960s and 70s. They were bold, musky, swaggering things, with a wink of machismo that now just seems camp. They were the smells of uncles, neighbours, teachers; part and parcel of male life. Brut, Hai Karate, Old Spice, Aramis among others were the shorthand for what a man was supposed to smell like, and what a boy like me was supposed and wanted to grow into.

Brut was the king of them all. Boxer Henry Cooper told us in television advertisements to ‘splash it all over.’ And we did. We didn’t apply Brut with delicate dabs; we deployed it like a weapon. A green-bottled atmospheric event. Walk into a room and the oxygen tightened like a sadistic sergeant-major had barked orders at it. Pillows and clothing absorbed and remembered it for days.

Yet beneath the swagger, Brut carried a deeper promise of attention and awakening desire. For a teenage boy like me, wired with possibility and longing, that was enough.

So many gay boys of my generation did the same thing. We wore Brut For Men, or rather we wore Brut for men. It was for allure and as a lure, in the hope that a man might read something in it. In a world where there was much you couldn’t say out loud, scent became a kind of coded broadcast. A green‑bottled semaphore. We spoke Polari and smelled of Brut. There was no mistaking boys like me.

I can still see the boy I was. Getting ready to go out; excited, nervous and lonely, standing in front of a mirror, dousing himself in Brut as if subtlety were a personal insult. Grateful that he looked older than his years yet still hoping he would get served at the bar and that someone, some man, would notice and see him. And sometimes, someone did.

“Has anyone ever told you that you have come‑to‑bed eyes?” I heard that more than once. I loved it every time, and it worked every time. And then, afterwards, they’d ask, “How old are you, anyway?” and then nearly pass out when I told them. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. Not legal until twenty‑one. But I wasn’t thinking about being a crime-breaker, that was just something you got used to living with. But I was thinking about being wanted.

I never felt scandal or shame, either then or now, despite the judgment of my mother and teachers who tried their best to make my life impossible, which prompted my leaving them all behind  as I escaped to London at 15 years old. I never doubted my homosexuality. I never had problems connected with it except those caused by the very people who were supposed to be my guardians.

I feel tenderness towards that boy in the mirror. He was naïve but he wasn’t foolish. He was improvising ways of surviving a world that gave him no language for what he felt. If I could speak to him now – that boy with the too‑tight shirt and the Brut halo, eyes too old and too young at the same time, I wouldn’t warn him or scold him. I’d just steady him. I’d tell him to stop worrying so much about being caught out, hold his head up, and just keep going — that one day he’d look back at all this madness with some affection.

I would tell him to follow his instincts, to continue without making any plans, that plans usually fall by the wayside as life takes over. And I would give him one of my favourite misquotes from Bette Davis in ‘All About Eve.’ “Fasten your seat belt. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.” Except he wouldn’t hear about Bette Davis and all those other gay icon divas until he had been taken in off the streets of London and cared for by an older generation of gay men who had made the same journey themselves a generation earlier.

And I can picture that boy perfectly – the tilt of his head, the half‑flirt, half‑challenge, the bravado covering the need.

He would look at me, take it all in, and say, “Can you lend me a fiver?”

Of course he would. And I would give it to him – because he needed the feeling that someone older, someone safe, someone who understood, could give him something without taking anything in return.

“Oh”, I would say. “And ditch the Brut.”

Koekjes

When I bake koekjes – and I still hesitate over that word – I’m never entirely sure what I’m making. Are they koekjes? Biscuits? Cookies? The naming feels as malleable as the dough itself. My version is simple enough: squidge everything together, roll it into small balls, press them flat, bake. It’s the kind of recipe that leaves plenty of room for thinking, and I always seem to end up thinking about the words as much as the baked things they’re meant to describe.

Maybe this is why I’ve always been drawn to the in‑between — the place where you’re translating yourself even when you’re only reaching for something sweet.

Even after twenty‑five years as an ex‑Brit turned naturalised Dutchman, I still have to mind the linguistic fault lines if I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with one leg in Kent and the other in Noord‑Holland. Take the humble baked thing you have with a hot drink. In Britain it was a biscuit. In America it’s a cookie. Here it’s a koekje. In our house, the word changes depending on who reaches the tin first. Biscuit, cookie, koekje — three names for what looks like the same object, but each one drags a whole cultural worldview behind it like a tin tied to the back of a wedding car.

Biscuit is the word I grew up with — crisp, dry, slightly embarrassed about being sweet at all. Even the indulgent ones pretend to be medicinal: Digestive, Rich Tea. A British biscuit is built for dunking, engineered to survive a brief baptism in hot tea without collapsing into sludge. It’s not a treat; it’s a pause. A biscuit breaks with a small, decisive snap — the emotional equivalent of clearing your throat before saying something you’re not sure you’re allowed to feel.

The Dutch koekje is something else entirely. The diminutive does a lot of work here: koek becomes koekje, and suddenly you’re in the realm of the small, the polite, the gezellig. A koekje is not about appetite. It’s about choreography. You’re offered one — exactly one — with your coffee, and the koekjestrommel clicks shut with that unmistakable Calvinist finality. It’s not stinginess; it’s order. A koekje is a social object, a punctuation mark in the ritual of visiting. You’re not meant to indulge. You’re meant to belong.

And then there’s the American cookie, which is what happens when the Dutch word emigrates and discovers feelings. Soft, sweet, generous, often the size of a small plate. A cookie is not a supporting actor to a cup of coffee; it’s a hug in carbohydrate form. It’s childhood, nostalgia, reward. It’s the opposite of British restraint and Dutch moderation. It’s abundance made edible — the permission slip you didn’t know you needed.

The cross‑cultural misunderstandings are almost slapstick. Brits say “biscuit” and Americans picture crackers. Americans say “cookie” and Brits hear something meant for children. Dutch people say “koekje” and both sides get it wrong — it’s neither cake nor cookie, but a tiny piece of social architecture.

If you boil it down:

Britain: the biscuit is about ritual and restraint.

The Netherlands: the koekje is about hospitality and social order.

America: the cookie is about emotion and indulgence.

Three cultures, three psychologies, one baked good. And me, somewhere in the middle, still trying to remember which word belongs to which version of myself. Maybe the word I choose says less about the baked good and more about the man I’ve become. Some days I’m still the British biscuit — crisp, dry, pretending not to want too much. Other days I’m the Dutch koekje — small, polite, rationed. And then there are the days when I let myself socially appropriate the American cookie, soft in the middle, unembarrassed about sweetness — the days when I allow myself to want more than one.

A Queer Inheritance, Dusted Off

When I lived in England, I spent weekends wandering through National Trust houses, those great monuments to respectability. I’d trail behind the guidebooks, past the red ropes and the cardiganed ladies who guarded each room like benevolent sentries. I knew, even then, that my ancestors would have been more at home below stairs than drifting through marble halls. What I didn’t know – what the guidebooks never quite admitted – was how many of those houses were shaped by people like me. Aesthete bachelors. Paired ‘lady companions.’ Lives lived in plain sight and yet politely erased.

This book restores them without drama or accusation, but with a kind of domestic patience – the same patience it takes to translate a painting into thread. As one line in the book puts it, “once we were illegal; now we’re being written back into the places we always were, from country houses to quiet corners of the National Trust.”

Reading it, I felt something shift quietly, like the soft click of a door that’s been stuck for years.

It reminded me of the long, uneven journey of that word – queer. In my northern childhood it was a warning hissed in school corridors, and later it was shouted from pavements as we marched with the Gay Liberation Front. Years after that, I still thought queerness belonged to other people – the flamboyant, the radical, the ones who looked the part. I’d been a drag queen and a leather queen, but somehow never a queer one.

And then, slowly, the word returned. Through books. Through other people’s courage. Through the quiet work of living long enough to see history catch up. Now the stories that were once footnotes are being placed back into the rooms they always occupied.

What I appreciated most about A Queer Inheritance is its gentleness. It doesn’t shout; it simply restores people to the rooms they once occupied.

There’s something moving about that — the way a life can be returned to its rightful place with nothing more than careful attention and a refusal to look away.

And then there’s the wry pleasure of it all: the quiet acknowledgement that behind so many manicured gardens and chandeliered dining rooms were the stately homos of England, shaping taste and landscape while remaining politely unmentioned. It feels good to see those stories finally being named out loud.

Maybe that’s the real inheritance the book offers: the reminder that queer history isn’t a scandal or a footnote. It’s part of the architecture. It was always there. The record just needed dusting off.

In the end, the book left me with a simple, steady truth — the kind that settles into the room like evening light.

It’s remarkable how a word that once wounded now helps us understand the past.

A quiet reclamation, after everything.

Dancing Through It

During my husband’s cancer treatment, when the days were measured out in appointments and blood counts and the strange, suspended time of waiting rooms, I found myself stitching three embroideries at once. It wasn’t planned. It was simply what my hands reached for when my mind couldn’t settle.

One was Cézanne’s Skulls; a blunt little memento mori, because death was suddenly no longer an abstraction but a visitor who might or might not come inside.

A second piece was the two hands from the Sistine Chapel: creation, re‑creation, the possibility of being remade.

And the third was Renoir’s La danse à Bougival — life, movement, colour, and the stubborn insistence that joy still exists somewhere, even if only in thread. (In my head, my inner 15-year-old who survived the ’70s still insists on translating it as The Dance at Boogie Ville.)

My hands rotated between them like a tarot reading for our future, pulling the thread of death in the morning, creation in the afternoon, and the dance at night. Holding all three threads at once because we didn’t yet know what the prognosis would be.

Renoir painted his dancers in 1883, all flirtation and whirl, the world blurred around them. A moment of pleasure caught mid‑spin. The Belle Époque loved that kind of scene — the fantasy of effortless joy, untouched by illness or fear or the price of survival. A world where nothing truly bad happens, at least not on the canvas.

But I stitched my dancers in a very different world.

Embroidery is slow. It’s repetitive. It’s the opposite of a sweeping painterly gesture. Each stitch is a small decision to continue. A tiny act of faith. Renoir’s dancers move quickly; mine accumulated over weeks, in the quiet hours between scans and consultations, in the evenings when we didn’t yet know which way the story would go.

Somewhere along the way, the embroidery stopped being about Renoir at all. The dancers became us in meaning, two people trying to keep moving while the world tilted. Two people holding on to the possibility of life, even when life felt precarious.

Queer life has always been lived in that tension: fragility on one side, insistence on the other. We have a long history of caretaking in the dark, of building sanctuaries when the world outside feels indifferent. We make beauty in the middle of fear. We build domesticity not as an idyll but as a shelter. We create altars out of ordinary things — a stitched picture, a kitchen table, a quiet evening when nothing dramatic happens except that we are still here.

The AI‑generated room in which I placed the photo of my embroidery makes it look like a shrine, which in a way it is. The surrounding space is minimalist, immaculate, and stark, mimicking the quiet, clinical suspension of the waiting rooms we left behind. But in the centre sits this dense, textured artifact of human touch. A small domestic altar to survival. A reminder that while we waited for news that could have broken us, I sat and stitched a dance.

Renoir painted the moment before the world intrudes.

I stitched it while the world was already intruding, and somehow that made the dance matter more.

My husband survived, and the dance went on. The embroidery became less a shrine to fear and more a reminder of what we carried through.

Life didn’t return to what it had been: illness like that never lets you go back. But we went on, into a different life, one we’re still learning how to inhabit.

Two Widowers, One City

A reflection on widowhood, Amsterdam, and the quiet ways love continues after loss. What happens when two men who grieved husbands they had lost in the same city—one deeply rooted, one completely uprooted—find each other in the steam?

We didn’t meet as widowers. We met in a sauna – two men in the steam, stripped of everything except the moment. No biography, no history, no catalogue of losses. Just two bodies in the same warm room, noticing each other without knowing why. Our pasts arrived later, quietly, when trust had already begun to take shape.

Only then did we discover that we had both grieved over lost husbands in the same city, but in very different worlds.

My first marriage and widowhood unfolded in Amsterdam, but in the fragile ecosystem of expat gay life – warm in good times, thin in crisis. My current husband’s widowhood, also in Amsterdam, was held by Dutch family, Dutch friends, Dutch steadiness. Two men widowed in the same place, but not in the same way.

His widowhood was rooted. Mine was uprooted.

His first husband had been part of a Dutch family network that closed ranks around him when illness came. Friends, neighbours, colleagues – the whole Dutch web of kinship that grows slowly but holds firmly. When he tells the story, there is grief, yes, but also a sense of being carried.

My story was different. My first husband and I were British in origin, but our life together was Dutch. When he died of ALS through euthanasia, the gay circle that had once been lively around us thinned almost overnight. A few stayed – the ones who mattered – but the wider circle evaporated. After the funeral, the phone went quieter than I was prepared for. Expat friendships are like that: bright, warm, and often temporary. Grief exposes how few roots you truly have.

And then there was the legal shadow. A British relative-by-marriage, shaped by a very English racism and a soldier’s certainty tried to challenge my status as next of kin, arguing that because same‑sex marriage wasn’t yet legal in England at the time, our Dutch marriage shouldn’t count. It didn’t work, but the attempt left a mark. It was a reminder that even abroad, the old country can reach out with cold hands.

So there we were: two men who had lived through widowhood in the same city, but in different worlds. One surrounded. One pared back to essentials.

When we eventually found each other – not as widowers, but simply as men – we didn’t compare losses. We recognised something in each other. A kind of steadiness. A kind of clarity. Widowhood does that: it strips away the trivial. It teaches you what matters and what doesn’t. It teaches you how to stay.

His widowhood taught me what it looks like to be held by a culture.

Mine taught him what it means to survive without one.

Together, we built a life that carries both truths.

We don’t dramatise it.

We don’t make it a banner.

But it’s there, quietly, in the way we move through the world.

In the way we hold hands on the sofa.

In the way we cook pies together.

In the way we understand, without needing to say it, that unless we die together, one of us will be widowed a second time.

That knowledge doesn’t darken our days.

It sharpens them.

It makes the mornings brighter, the arguments smaller, the shared life more deliberate.

It reminds us that love is not guaranteed, and that the ordinary is worth treasuring.

Two widowhoods in one city.

Two men who met in the steam.

Two lives that learned, separately, how to endure.

And one marriage that holds all of it: the rooted, the uprooted, the past, the present, the quiet, the everyday.

This, to me, is what queer elderhood looks like.

Neither tragedy nor erasure, nor even the lonely stereotype people might imagine.

But two men, after everything, building a home that honours the worlds that shaped them.

The Scent of Being Looked After

Today, a pronunciation exercise. Warm up vocally first, otherwise you’ll end up with a truly twisted tongue. Now say: Trichlorophenylmethyliodosalicyl.

We ex‑Brit boomers know it affectionately as TCP  –  the cure‑all antiseptic no English household was without. And even though it was brought out only in cases of soreness, pain, or injury, the smell carried a powerful, almost paradoxical sense of comfort. It meant intervention. It meant someone had stepped in to clean the wound, protect the space, and keep the chaos of the world at bay.

Mention TCP, Dettol, or IZAL to any Brit of my generation and a whole landscape of care springs up – so specific it’s practically a cultural artefact. And the fact that I still keep a bottle of TCP in the first‑aid kit after twenty‑five years in the Netherlands is its own kind of imprint: the olfactory equivalent of still knowing the words to God Save the Queen (King, since I left), even though I haven’t sung it since the 90s, and even then I didn’t always sing the non‑treasonable version.

Growing up, the scents of care weren’t lavender or talcum powder but the sharp, medicinal signatures of TCP, Dettol, and the strange, tar‑clean austerity of IZAL toilet paper – products designed less to comfort than to assert order.

Even if you never knew the sting of TCP or the brown‑paper smell of IZAL, you’ll know the feeling: that mixture of care and discomfort, of being tended to in the only way the adults around you knew how.

There was the reassurance of the medicinal sting – the scraped knee being dabbed, the adult blowing on it to make it stop hurting. The scent that said: this hurts for a second, but it’s making you better.

And then there were the institutional smells of hospitals: industrial floor polish, rubbing alcohol, laundered sheets. For some, anxiety; for others, the relief of handing over responsibility. That moment when you’re officially the patient and allowed to lie still while someone else takes charge.

IZAL toilet paper deserves its own footnote in the British psyche: that medicated, coal‑tar‑adjacent scent; the glossy, non‑absorbent “slip ’n’ slide” texture; the collective trauma of school loos and outside toilets. It was the epitome of post‑war, no‑nonsense utility – not soft, but certain. A product that cleaned by sheer force of will. It doubled as tracing paper, or a makeshift kazoo when wrapped round a comb. I mostly played with it rather than used it, and avoided my grandmother’s outside toilet whenever possible.

Wright’s Coal Tar soap lived in the same family – smoky, medicinal, oddly reassuring. Years ago I was smeared in coal‑tar paste as part of a successful campaign to eradicate the psoriasis that covered my scalp and face. You can’t even get it now – one of those things that kept us going but is now deemed “unsafe”. It was my first real lesson in the harsh economy of healing: I had to smell ruinous to feel beautiful. But it worked. It gave me a perimeter of safety, and the confidence to finally walk out the front door. You don’t need a scabby face when you’re nineteen and it’s the 70s and you live in Chelsea.

These were the smells of boundaries – a sensory line in the sand that said: inside this perimeter, you are safe, you are clean, and you are being watched over.

What strikes me now is how rare that feeling becomes as we age – especially for queer people who learned early to take care of ourselves, to anticipate danger, to tidy our own wounds before anyone noticed. The smells of being looked after become memories rather than daily realities.

It’s taken me years to learn how to look after myself in ways that don’t sting, ways that don’t smell of hospitals or school loos. But somewhere in me, the instinct remains: the urge to clean a wound, to soothe a fever, to care for the body I live in.

Perhaps that’s what those old medicinal smells taught me. Care was not always soft. Sometimes it was a sting, a scrubbed surface, a clean towel, a door closed against the cold. Sometimes it was simply the knowledge that someone had noticed the wound and decided it mattered.

These days, I try to make that kind of safety for myself without quite so much punishment in it. A friend checking in. A pan simmering in the kitchen. A living room I’ve vacuumed because we’re worth the trouble.

And lately, I’ve been making my own fragrances from a ridiculously huge collection of essential oils, so our bathroom now smells less of TCP and more of 1960s heart-throbs with hairy chests, moustaches and smouldering eyes.

A Small Act of Rebellion or The Constituency of a Cake

A half‑century ago, when English schools still believed that boys should saw bits of wood while girls learned how to feed a family on a post‑war budget, I insisted — stubbornly, cheerfully — on taking cookery. The only boy in the class. The mid‑60s. A tiny domestic rebellion disguised as timetabling.

Our first task was the Victoria Sponge Sandwich. It looked harmless enough, sitting there in the textbook like a well‑behaved child. But according to the tedious little woman who “taught” us, it was practically a moral examination. Cream the butter and sugar until pale. Paler than that. Eggs beaten in one drop at a time, as if the fate of civilisation depended on it. Fold the flour. Fold it. Don’t stir it. She inspected my bowl as if she were checking for signs of delinquency.

I liked to wind her up.

“Is this the right constituency, Miss?”

“You mean consistency.”

“That’s what I said, Miss.”

I could have kept it going all day if the bell hadn’t always rescued her.

What I didn’t know then  –  sweating over a bowl, performing femininity badly and masculinity worse  –  was that the Victoria sponge has always been a cake obsessed with rules. Britishness loves a rule, especially one that can be enforced in a kitchen. The sponge is full of them: equal weights, no peeking in the oven, use only jam according to the Women’s Institute. A whole culture of correctness baked into something supposedly simple.

No wonder my teacher treated it like scripture. She was only passing on the faith.

The myths around the sponge are almost as airy as the cake itself. People like to say Queen Victoria invented it, or that it cured her grief after Albert died. She didn’t, and it didn’t. She simply ate a lot of it – which, to be fair, is the most relatable thing about her.

The real architect was Anna Russell, Duchess of Bedford, who in the 1840s found herself faint with hunger between luncheon and an 8 p.m. dinner. She began inviting friends for tea and a light snack. Victoria adopted the ritual, and suddenly the sponge – already in existence – became the star of afternoon tea at Osborne House. A royal endorsement before the concept existed.

I sometimes think of that when I remember myself in that girls’ classroom: the Queen adopting a ritual invented by another woman, me adopting a ritual reserved for girls. All of us, in our own ways, slipping into rooms where we weren’t expected.

The earliest sponges were often just jam. No cream. The Women’s Institute still insists on jam only, because cream is too unstable for judging tables. My cookery teacher would have nodded and turned it into a threat.

And before baking powder, making a sponge was an athletic event  –  eggs beaten by hand for up to an hour. The Victoria sponge as we know it only exists because Alfred Bird invented baking powder in 1843 so his wife, allergic to yeast and eggs, could enjoy raised breads. A love story disguised as chemistry. I like that. It makes the cake feel less like a rulebook and more like an act of care.

By the mid‑19th century, the sponge was a symbol of middle‑class respectability. A neat, well‑risen sponge at afternoon tea meant refinement, leisure, aspiration. Working‑class families made heavier cakes; the sponge was a social climber. I didn’t know any of this at thirteen, but I understood instinctively that the cake mattered. That it meant something. That it was a test — not of baking, but of belonging.

Decades later, a Dutch baker – the first winner of Heel Holland Bakt — wrote, “Put it all in a bowl, mix it, put it in the oven.” And what do you know. It worked. If only I could go back to 1967 and whisper to that teacher, “The constituency is far easier to achieve than they’d have you believe, Miss.”

Looking back, I realise that what I was doing in that classroom wasn’t just baking. I was testing the boundaries of who I was allowed to be. The Victoria sponge, with all its rules and rituals, was the perfect symbol of the world I grew up in: polite, rigid, convinced of its own correctness.

And yet  –  like the Dutch baker said  –  you can just put everything in a bowl and mix it.

Sometimes the simplest method is the truest rebellion.

The Retroactive Double Entendre: A Guide to Reading Sideways

My bookshelves veer wildly between the respectable and the ridiculous. The historical aristocracy sits upstairs, while down in the basement lurks a spectacularly unfortunate 1930 boys’ book called Scouts in Bondage by Geoffrey Prout. It sits innocently on the shelf—a battered hardback that has survived more house moves than any sensible person would admit—and it still routinely makes visitors choke on their tea.

To make matters worse, Mr. Prout’s other famous literary contribution is a book called Trawler Boy Dick. You truly cannot script this level of accidental filth.

Recently, while reading Agatha Christie’s 1920 murder mystery The Mysterious Affair at Styles, I stumbled across a line where the narrator notes that a gentleman “stood abstractedly fingering the ornaments.” Instantly, my inner twelve-year-old giggled.  It made me wonder: is this reflex just a personal maturity flaw, a uniquely British affliction, or does it actually have some genuine value for the queer reader?

To be fair to the dead, we aren’t actually misreading these vintage texts; we are looking at them through the warped lens of modern slang. Words shift, innocence curtsies into innuendo, and a neutral verb from a century ago accidentally becomes a massive wink across time.

When Christie wrote her line in 1920, she merely meant Captain Hastings was nervously touching the knick-knacks on the mantelpiece. Today, “fingering” and “ornaments” carry heavily sexualized anatomical connotations.  Similarly, when the real-life Geoffrey Prout—a decorated World War I veteran and earnest English boat builder—penned Scouts in Bondage, he was using “bondage” in the old-fashioned sense of a binding legal obligation. The actual plot involves a troop of wholesome Boy Scouts tied to a business deal to dig up a chapel for a professor.

Prout’s book is so famous for this semantic drift that it routinely tops lists of the most unintentionally hilarious book titles in British history, comfortably sitting alongside other adventure stories like Drummer Dick’s Discharge by Beatrix M De Burgh, academic medical texts like The Resistance of Piles to Penetration  by Russell V. Allin and instruction manuals such as Single Handed Cruising by Francis B. Cooke, sometimes accompanied by The Danger of Cruising by Charles Sutton. We can only assume that he must have known.

But Scouts in Bondage also belongs to a wider comedic phenomenon where the innocent language of gentler ages acquires ‘nudge-nudge, wink-wink’ overtones over time. We see this linguistic divide clearly when American titles cross the Atlantic; Troy Hitch’s Night of the Willies (meant to soothe a child’s fear of the dark) or Jack Vance’s 1969 sci-fi novel Servants of the Wankh both provoked such relentless schoolyard giggles from British readers that Vance’s publishers eventually had to rename the alien race to “Wannek.” Furthermore, the title of the novel and Netflix film Our Souls at Night didn’t work in the U.K. because, when spoken aloud in many British accents, it sounds like ‘arseholes at night’.

Is the joy of this purely an English thing? Highly likely. The specific flavour of giggling at unintended filth is deeply rooted in the British ‘saucy seaside postcard’ tradition (see example below).  For the uninitiated outside the UK, British humour has historically operated on a single, glorious rule: take something completely innocent, find the naughty second meaning, and then play the national sport of desperately pretending not to notice the thing everyone in the room has clearly noticed.  These postcards were traditionally aggressively heterosexual, making the modern queer appropriation of that exact same ‘nudge-nudge’ humour a delicious irony.

When we read British authors of the 1920s and 30s, we are playing right in the delivery room of the modern double entendre. The humour comes entirely from the grand, hysterical canyon between how desperately earnest the author was, and how thoroughly ruined our modern minds are.

But for the queer reader, this reflex goes far deeper than a childish chuckle. The humour lives exactly where queer reading has always lived: in the margins of language, hearing the unsaid, the unintended, and the accidental resonance.

For generations, queer people had to become expert code-breakers. We were trained to read sideways. We had to notice tone, implication, and gaps because the straight world’s primary meaning was never meant to include us in the first place. For decades, being open was illegal or dangerous, so looking for alternative, hidden meanings in mainstream texts was a literal survival strategy.

Long before many of us had ever heard of formal queer theory, we had this muscle memory of marginal reading. In the UK, a generation grew up listening to Julian and Sandy on BBC radio—two camp characters who smuggled Polari (an underground queer slang used by gay men, theatrical performers, and seafarers to communicate safely in public) into mainstream teatime broadcasts. They ran absurd fictional businesses like Bona Drag (good clothes) or a Private Detective Agency delivered with limp-wristed flair. The joke was never the flimsy business itself; it was the way the straight host blundered into double meanings he pretended not to see.

Even the word ‘queer’ itself mirrors this evolution. Throughout The Mysterious Affair at Styles, upper-class characters constantly remark, “It’s very queer,” simply meaning strange. The trajectory of that single word perfectly tracks how language betrays, preserves, and rewrites its own history.

There is immense, joyful utility in reading old books with a modern mind. It grants us a sort of linguistic time-travel superpower. We get to appreciate the innocence of the past while simultaneously bringing our modern, sex-positive, queer joy to the table.  By taking rigid, old-fashioned, highly disciplined mid-century structures—whether it’s Agatha Christie’s upper-class manors or Geoffrey Prout’s wholesome, knot-tying Boy Scouts—and completely subverting them with a modern queer gaze, we reclaim the narrative.

It turns out my inner twelve-year-old wasn’t just being immature. He was flexing the very same tool that taught a generation how to decode subtext, survive the straight world, and laugh in code. 

From Scouts in Bondage to accidental filth in Agatha Christie, here is why giggling at vintage double entendres is actually a brilliant queer superpower.

Listen: Take a trip back to the BBC light entertainment airwaves with the masters of the mainstream double entendre: [Bona Male Models – Julian and Sandy (YouTube Link)]. Originally broadcast on Round The Horne, March 24th 1968

Starry Night, Slowed Down

Some images refuse to stay in museums. They slip into living rooms, onto mugs, into cross‑stitch patterns, and onto the quiet surfaces of kitchen tables. Van Gogh’s sky – once a storm of paint and urgency – becomes something smaller and steadier when translated into thread. The turbulence softens. The night becomes patient. A masterpiece becomes a domestic object, stitched slowly in the pauses of a day.

On the table, my embroidery gathers its own weather. Scissors, a thimble, numbered skeins of blue and yellow – they orbit the little canvas like minor moons. The whole thing looks less like a craft project and more like a still life that’s been caught mid‑breath. A famous sky, reduced to a handful of stitches, sits there as if it has always belonged among the bookshelves and the patterned rug. As if the cosmos has agreed, just this once, to come indoors and behave itself.

Thread doesn’t copy a painting; it translates it. Every stitch is a decision about what to keep, what to simplify, what to let go. Van Gogh’s spirals – made in a fever of colour and memory – settle into neat squares of Ultramarine and Cadmium yellow. The cypress, once a dark flame licking at the sky, becomes a softened silhouette. The stars glow without shouting. Turbulence becomes tactility. The night becomes something you can hold in your hand.

It’s strange, the way certain images follow you through a life. Starry Night was once the sort of thing I saw on posters in student flats, or on the walls of bars where the jukebox played Don McLean and everyone pretended not to be heartbroken. Later, it turned up in unexpected places – on tea towels, in museum gift shops, in the background of conversations I barely remember. And now here it is again, stitched into fabric on a table in a quiet Dutch room, as if it has been waiting for this moment of domestic calm.

Maybe that’s what happens with the things we think we know. They return in altered forms. They ask to be looked at again. They become gentler with age – or perhaps we do.

Van Gogh painted his sky from memory, a view out of an asylum window at a world he wasn’t quite part of. I understand that more than I’d like to admit. I doubt he imagined it would one day be recreated in thread by people who find solace in the slow, repetitive work of making. There’s something comforting in the idea that a painting born of restlessness can end up as a small, steady object on a table – a reminder that even the wildest nights can be translated into something gentler with enough time and enough thread. Turbulence doesn’t last forever, but the marks it leaves can still be beautiful.

On the table, the stitched sky waits. The tools rest. The room holds its breath. And in the quiet, the night becomes something else entirely – not a masterpiece, not a symbol, not a cultural shorthand, but a small, steady reminder that even the wildest storms can be softened by time, by labour, by the simple act of making something with your hands.

A slow, starry night, after everything.

Queer? What? Why now?

When the original UK television series of Queer as Folk launched in 1999 it felt like a messy revolution. I was already done with the gay commercial scene by 1999 (or so I thought, but that’s another story) but Queer as Folk resonated in several opposing ways.

The scene of my adolescence was a northern English industrial town, surrounded by steelworks, the sky lighting up red as the slag was tipped, the sirens sounding across the town when the worker’s shifts changed. There’s a saying up there, dating back hundreds of years: ‘There’s nowt so queer as folk.’ Which translates roughly into ‘There’s nothing as strange as people.’ People would tut and roll their eyes at some perceived misdemeanour and smile and say ‘There’s nowt so queer as folk.’

But then queer was used in other contexts. It was a hissed word in school corridors, a warning, a way of being told what I was before I knew it myself. A warning to keep out of the way. There was nowt so queer as me.

I did get out of the way and like hundreds if not thousands of provincial gay boys rejected from their families I got to London and started building a life at age 15 with an illegal sexuality. I marched with the Gay Liberation Front wearing the infamous purple fist badge in the early 70s and learned to accept myself as ‘Gay’. I’d only ever heard ‘Queer’ – never as identity, always as insult.

And even on those Gay Liberation Front marches we heard it again from spitting onlookers ‘Dirty Queer’. We tried to tell ourselves that ‘Gay’ stood for ‘Good As You’. It was the kind of slogan we repeated until we almost believed it. I’d only ever heard ‘gay’ in the context of Bright Young Things in the 1920s and though I was having a gay old time it wasn’t all costume parties and champagne.

Queer as Folk gave a narrow, sex‑heavy, issue‑light portrayal of gay life, foregrounding club culture, casual sex and hedonism. I didn’t associate with that either.

Years later, I was still having problems associated with being queer. I thought queers had to look queer, behave in a queer way, and in fact I was looking at queerdom in exactly the same way the uninformed looked at homosexuality in the 70s.

And then I looked at my bookcase: ‘Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis 1918-1957’, ‘A Queer Inheritance’, ‘Straight Acting: Shakespeare’s Many Queer Lives’, ‘Some Men in London: Queer Life (two volumes covering 1945 to 1967), among others, and it slowly dawned on me. There was no getting away from it. Reading queer lives through a modern lens was an eye‑opener. I mean, I’ve been a drag queen and I’ve been a leather queen, but even then I never saw myself as queer. Now you can enrol in Queer Studies courses at the Universities of, among others, Amsterdam and York.

And now here it is: Queer After Everything, printed at the top of my own site, quiet and unapologetic. I didn’t reclaim it in a single moment. It returned to me slowly – through books, through other people’s courage, through the long work of living. This blog begins, I suppose, with the question of how a word can wound you and still become the one you choose to walk with – and what it means to live a life after that.

These issues possibly only arose as a native English speaker. In my mid-forties I upped sticks and left England for the Netherlands where I had to get used to the perfectly respectable use of the word ‘homo’. But that’s a story that belongs to another corner of this unfolding life.