The photo precedes all: war in Yugoslavia; a life re-written to be a guide to the saunas of Western Europe; exile to the Canadian Pacific; and a memory of Nenad’s dainty fingers, which I was pained to recognise the other day on a boy queuing for cheap pizza behind me. It commemorates the beauty of loneliness in the dead England of my one British forefather, it catches the mien of an innocently hurt child ready to retaliate by breaking your 17th century vase – I had worked on it for hours before a looking glass. My hair is ever so silken (I had not dyed it even once yet), my white soft-collar poet’s shirt salaciously solemn against my black semicaftan. My eyes curve into an almond shape, underlined with barely noticeable teal make-up. I am twenty-three; the big life, and the world, are still before me.
The photo for the transportation ID, if I remember well, was taken in a booth at Hammersmith station on the Metropolitan Line. (I’d had one from Victoria station, when I first came, but thought it too plain.) Between the coarse jocundity of Earls Court and the ostentatious aplomb of Swiss Cottage, the borough was then packed with prosperous first generation Serbs and second generation Punjabis.
On this, the first of my merely two visits to England, I went to the coastal hamlet where my great-grandfather had lived his last quarter of a century – hoping that he had found a haven of peace in Peacehaven, the only achievement of which seemed to be that it lay on the Zero Meridian – and Brighton where he died and where my parents had shopped for all the cherished trivia of my childhood.
I spent hours daydreaming wild, and at the time still mostly unlived, flagellant’s phantasms. I bought a gay porn magazine and an Edwardian novel about public school discipline; quaint and detailed descriptions of angry red stripes on the rosy (lower) cheeks of ‘golden’ uppermiddle class English youth, blemishes inflicted with the sharp buds of birch twigs. I saw Another Country – the movie about Guy Burgess, not James Baldwin’s stuff (I was to see a play by a college theatre the following year at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival) and was reassured that I must forever stay in that beautiful land, since all Brits were exclusively into flogging. I went to the Dungeon of the Tower and spent the afternoon squeezing my semi-hard-on through my Bermuda shorts’ pocket, phantasising about interrogating my blond and athletic (ever so stereotypically Slavonic) high school mate, who was studying to be a gym teacher and whose low-hanging hairy balls, from years before in the locker room, I could never forget.
I was not yet familiar with the parallel world of homemade dungeons and the heavy smell of tanner shops that are a daily routine for some men. I was just aware of the allure of the swishing sound of a sapling, heavy with spring sap, cutting through the air before it gloriously explodes in a scarlet welt; I suppose the solicitation of a rod by naked buttocks was to me intrinsically related to horror vacui, the call of a white wall to be defiled with graffiti, the obligation of the scribe to scrawl line after line on a white sheet, until it is filled. True, there is a racial aspect to this enticement of ‘whiteness’: I grew up in Serbia where the few black people were almost exclusively temporary residents, guest-students from fellow non-aligned African countries, and an occasional East Asian a North Korean visitor. The first Chinese restaurants in Belgrade and Novi Sad only opened in the year I graduated from high school.
I also grew up with the awareness that there was an ancestor in England who wanted me to go there and stay with him while I studied at a prestigious university. Since he died while I was still at high school, burdened with the prejudice that the Belgrade University may not be regarded as good enough by the world, I chose to major in Serbian and general linguistics: the first obviously a subject of choice not to be outdone anywhere else, the second coming naturally, as the founder of the chair was Aleksandar Belić (ie Weiß), once of the Prague Circle.
With great-grandfather gone, there was no place in proud Albion to call home. So I stayed with a middle-aged couple: the wife trying hard to get me to work under the table at their bed-and-breakfast, the husband insisting that I should rest and enjoy myself. I had shown up with a letter for his mother from her first cousin and got free lodging for two and a half weeks. A Slovene girl and a Macedonian boy worked there and it was amusing to discern that my mother tongue, small even by European proportions, was the lingua franca in both the quaint pension where they put me in first and the shabby house where they asked me to move after five days, from the walls of which the paint was peeling, in the very heart of the British once-Empire.
On my first trip to the Gay and Lesbian Centre, I circled the block twice before I gathered the courage to enter and ask for ‘boys into corporal punishment’. The Cockney man in his late twenties at the reception was quite smug, unhelpful, and seemingly outraged that I would look for something so base. His young lesbian co-worker was more professional: she gave me a couple of phone numbers which turned out to be either out of service or for the wrong people. She, however, at least (pretended to have) tried.
The ‘fallen angels’, at a pub with that name, all acted very cool, to the point of being pretentious; also, I did not know then yet how to carry on a light conversation about nothing. – Now that I do know, I never do only because I choose not to. – The other time I ventured as far as Surrey Docks because an SM venue was announced there. It turned out to be straight housewives and pot-bellied middle-aged men. Boys at downtown gay discos (yes, discos, and so what? you don’t say you were exclusively jazzing it in 1985, do you?) were all way too fluffy for my taste, whereas at Skin Two you could never say who was gay: at six in the morning a most extraordinary eighteen-year-old, who had cruised me all night, was taken off on a leash by a woman with heavy make up. ‘This is just fuckinʼ London,’ she grumbled, ‘there is no place to go at this time of night.’
I found a Scottish antique book dealer married to a Croat and sold him half a dozen preWW II books in Serbian which I had picked up for reading aboard the plane. I seriously considered starting a business shipping him boxes of musty third-grade love stories (mainly translated from English) and statistical almanacs after I returned to Belgrade. If I were ever to.
I did. — The openness of the borders (Yugoslavia was then considered de facto more Westernised than the about-to-join-the-EC Spain and Portugal), the security of a steady job with almost two months of summer holidays (although I thought less and less of the teaching profession as time went by), the illusion of having a home as opposed to starting from scratch in England, a country to which I felt I belonged even less than to the one I had resided in and mostly hated (except from faraway, when I was vaguely indifferent), the conformity to a delusion of rootedness and thriftiness over a return ticket took me on a night coach ride across the Channel. Little did I know that a Vancouver laid in ambush for me.
The old lady who, twenty days earlier, had picked me up – tired and desperate on my way to England – In front of the Centraal Station in Amsterdam, had a vacant room again. I hurried to plunge into the dim lights of the sex metropolis before taking off, back to Serbia’s newly found libertinism (dictator Tito had died five years before). Clad in black leather, their hair cropped short, men just slightly older than myself cruised each other with poise. Oh, how I yearned to jump to the bait! And how terrified with the ‘big world’ I was at the same time! – Unlike the relatively tame (except in my imagination) London, Amsterdam seemed to be in-your-face vice incarnate.
It’s funny from this perspective, but at that time I decided to keep to myself for self-protection. The few people I spoke to were all from the catering industry and had that glitter in their eyes that I had grown to mistrust. I was aware that they were after my butt, my money, or both. Not that I was a porn star or stinking rich, no. But I was young, and youth is always beautiful. I had money to travel. I was quite sexy. (A Scorpio, so there!) And sex-starved. I was, however, not yet secure enough to go and grab what I wanted, hold it tightly in my claws. It came with time. And at what monstrous cost of being over thirty! Back then, I only dared jerk off in a porn cinema and was terrified that someone might wish to touch me.
Indeed, it takes good timing to acquire a taste for Amsterdam. This I understand from other people’s experiences: one goes too early in one’s life and thinks the city’s too old and tired, or one goes too late and all one sees are drug pushers, mugging and danger. I had the good luck of going again and spending two months when I was ready for it, in 1987, at the age of twenty-five. As Pluto was transiting my natal Neptune, I simply switched on and entered the miracle in which I have remained forever since. It was the peak of my experience to date, a holy moment when the door of perception opened wide. My fascination on subsequent visits has undoubtedly been less intense, but Amsterdam still never fails to take me in, into the land of the living, to give me a boost of energy. Whereas, on this first trip, the signs blaring SEX! LIVE! YOUNG BOYS! MACHO MEN! were in my head all mixed up with visits to Anne Frank’s hiding place, Rembrandt’s sketches and the old Jewish Museum, then still at Nieuwmarkt. DOK was to play an important rôle in my life much later.
Back to the present: enthralled with what I see (on my London City Transit photo ID), I wonder – from many years and many thousands of miles away – if I can discern in the pristinely lecherous glint of that attractive young man, several decades my junior and much more slender, an expectation of pleasures to come in the Gay Capital of Europe. Could he have possibly had a premonition of all the wasted years in migrating the world seeking refugee, months of loneliness, decades of purposelessness that were to come? – But, if he did, wouldn’t he have rather stayed? Even in England, to live as wildly as possible for a few years, die young and leave behind, if not an extraordinarily beautiful, at least a seemly corpse? Or was he ready to endure the silent martyrdom of being stuck in the mediocrity of a duck pond, eternally awaiting the fleeting swans of righteousness? Why have I betrayed him? How could I have let the world trick him? (How alienated from oneself can one be?)
When, æons later, a stranger within the gates wherever I happen to be: in Canada where I reluctantly immigrated just to get a usable passport and deserted it right after got it, Hungary where I went to get yet another MA degree just because someone financed my stay there for a year, China which despite spending just short of a decade there I could never like even remotely like Japan, since I had studied Japanese and not Chinese as a minor at university, Norway, nice but for the horrendous climate for 8 months of the year, or wretched Serbia, the purportedly closest being the ‘motherland’ that never did anything good for me in half a century – even in formerly much beloved and now a country I feel icy indifference to, Holland, most of the time – I glimpse in the mirror and catch that deliberately gullible grin (which happens seldomer and seldomer), I glean the segments of the broken shells and glue them skillfully together.
Empty, hollow, shallow – yes, but still, maybe… sometime… something… Therefore I postpone again my suicide attempt for a day or two. And so the story goes. Tumbles, that is.
On this, the first of my merely two visits to England, I went to the coastal hamlet where my great-grandfather had lived his last quarter of a century – hoping that he had found a haven of peace in Peacehaven, the only achievement of which seemed to be that it lay on the Zero Meridian – and Brighton where he died and where my parents had shopped for all the cherished trivia of my childhood.
I spent hours daydreaming wild, and at the time still mostly unlived, flagellant’s phantasms. I bought a gay porn magazine and an Edwardian novel about public school discipline; quaint and detailed descriptions of angry red stripes on the rosy (lower) cheeks of ‘golden’ uppermiddle class English youth, blemishes inflicted with the sharp buds of birch twigs. I saw Another Country – the movie about Guy Burgess, not James Baldwin’s stuff (I was to see a play by a college theatre the following year at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival) and was reassured that I must forever stay in that beautiful land, since all Brits were exclusively into flogging. I went to the Dungeon of the Tower and spent the afternoon squeezing my semi-hard-on through my Bermuda shorts’ pocket, phantasising about interrogating my blond and athletic (ever so stereotypically Slavonic) high school mate, who was studying to be a gym teacher and whose low-hanging hairy balls, from years before in the locker room, I could never forget.
I was not yet familiar with the parallel world of homemade dungeons and the heavy smell of tanner shops that are a daily routine for some men. I was just aware of the allure of the swishing sound of a sapling, heavy with spring sap, cutting through the air before it gloriously explodes in a scarlet welt; I suppose the solicitation of a rod by naked buttocks was to me intrinsically related to horror vacui, the call of a white wall to be defiled with graffiti, the obligation of the scribe to scrawl line after line on a white sheet, until it is filled. True, there is a racial aspect to this enticement of ‘whiteness’: I grew up in Serbia where the few black people were almost exclusively temporary residents, guest-students from fellow non-aligned African countries, and an occasional East Asian a North Korean visitor. The first Chinese restaurants in Belgrade and Novi Sad only opened in the year I graduated from high school.
I also grew up with the awareness that there was an ancestor in England who wanted me to go there and stay with him while I studied at a prestigious university. Since he died while I was still at high school, burdened with the prejudice that the Belgrade University may not be regarded as good enough by the world, I chose to major in Serbian and general linguistics: the first obviously a subject of choice not to be outdone anywhere else, the second coming naturally, as the founder of the chair was Aleksandar Belić (ie Weiß), once of the Prague Circle.
With great-grandfather gone, there was no place in proud Albion to call home. So I stayed with a middle-aged couple: the wife trying hard to get me to work under the table at their bed-and-breakfast, the husband insisting that I should rest and enjoy myself. I had shown up with a letter for his mother from her first cousin and got free lodging for two and a half weeks. A Slovene girl and a Macedonian boy worked there and it was amusing to discern that my mother tongue, small even by European proportions, was the lingua franca in both the quaint pension where they put me in first and the shabby house where they asked me to move after five days, from the walls of which the paint was peeling, in the very heart of the British once-Empire.
On my first trip to the Gay and Lesbian Centre, I circled the block twice before I gathered the courage to enter and ask for ‘boys into corporal punishment’. The Cockney man in his late twenties at the reception was quite smug, unhelpful, and seemingly outraged that I would look for something so base. His young lesbian co-worker was more professional: she gave me a couple of phone numbers which turned out to be either out of service or for the wrong people. She, however, at least (pretended to have) tried.
The ‘fallen angels’, at a pub with that name, all acted very cool, to the point of being pretentious; also, I did not know then yet how to carry on a light conversation about nothing. – Now that I do know, I never do only because I choose not to. – The other time I ventured as far as Surrey Docks because an SM venue was announced there. It turned out to be straight housewives and pot-bellied middle-aged men. Boys at downtown gay discos (yes, discos, and so what? you don’t say you were exclusively jazzing it in 1985, do you?) were all way too fluffy for my taste, whereas at Skin Two you could never say who was gay: at six in the morning a most extraordinary eighteen-year-old, who had cruised me all night, was taken off on a leash by a woman with heavy make up. ‘This is just fuckinʼ London,’ she grumbled, ‘there is no place to go at this time of night.’
I found a Scottish antique book dealer married to a Croat and sold him half a dozen preWW II books in Serbian which I had picked up for reading aboard the plane. I seriously considered starting a business shipping him boxes of musty third-grade love stories (mainly translated from English) and statistical almanacs after I returned to Belgrade. If I were ever to.
I did. — The openness of the borders (Yugoslavia was then considered de facto more Westernised than the about-to-join-the-EC Spain and Portugal), the security of a steady job with almost two months of summer holidays (although I thought less and less of the teaching profession as time went by), the illusion of having a home as opposed to starting from scratch in England, a country to which I felt I belonged even less than to the one I had resided in and mostly hated (except from faraway, when I was vaguely indifferent), the conformity to a delusion of rootedness and thriftiness over a return ticket took me on a night coach ride across the Channel. Little did I know that a Vancouver laid in ambush for me.
The old lady who, twenty days earlier, had picked me up – tired and desperate on my way to England – In front of the Centraal Station in Amsterdam, had a vacant room again. I hurried to plunge into the dim lights of the sex metropolis before taking off, back to Serbia’s newly found libertinism (dictator Tito had died five years before). Clad in black leather, their hair cropped short, men just slightly older than myself cruised each other with poise. Oh, how I yearned to jump to the bait! And how terrified with the ‘big world’ I was at the same time! – Unlike the relatively tame (except in my imagination) London, Amsterdam seemed to be in-your-face vice incarnate.
It’s funny from this perspective, but at that time I decided to keep to myself for self-protection. The few people I spoke to were all from the catering industry and had that glitter in their eyes that I had grown to mistrust. I was aware that they were after my butt, my money, or both. Not that I was a porn star or stinking rich, no. But I was young, and youth is always beautiful. I had money to travel. I was quite sexy. (A Scorpio, so there!) And sex-starved. I was, however, not yet secure enough to go and grab what I wanted, hold it tightly in my claws. It came with time. And at what monstrous cost of being over thirty! Back then, I only dared jerk off in a porn cinema and was terrified that someone might wish to touch me.
Indeed, it takes good timing to acquire a taste for Amsterdam. This I understand from other people’s experiences: one goes too early in one’s life and thinks the city’s too old and tired, or one goes too late and all one sees are drug pushers, mugging and danger. I had the good luck of going again and spending two months when I was ready for it, in 1987, at the age of twenty-five. As Pluto was transiting my natal Neptune, I simply switched on and entered the miracle in which I have remained forever since. It was the peak of my experience to date, a holy moment when the door of perception opened wide. My fascination on subsequent visits has undoubtedly been less intense, but Amsterdam still never fails to take me in, into the land of the living, to give me a boost of energy. Whereas, on this first trip, the signs blaring SEX! LIVE! YOUNG BOYS! MACHO MEN! were in my head all mixed up with visits to Anne Frank’s hiding place, Rembrandt’s sketches and the old Jewish Museum, then still at Nieuwmarkt. DOK was to play an important rôle in my life much later.
Back to the present: enthralled with what I see (on my London City Transit photo ID), I wonder – from many years and many thousands of miles away – if I can discern in the pristinely lecherous glint of that attractive young man, several decades my junior and much more slender, an expectation of pleasures to come in the Gay Capital of Europe. Could he have possibly had a premonition of all the wasted years in migrating the world seeking refugee, months of loneliness, decades of purposelessness that were to come? – But, if he did, wouldn’t he have rather stayed? Even in England, to live as wildly as possible for a few years, die young and leave behind, if not an extraordinarily beautiful, at least a seemly corpse? Or was he ready to endure the silent martyrdom of being stuck in the mediocrity of a duck pond, eternally awaiting the fleeting swans of righteousness? Why have I betrayed him? How could I have let the world trick him? (How alienated from oneself can one be?)
When, æons later, a stranger within the gates wherever I happen to be: in Canada where I reluctantly immigrated just to get a usable passport and deserted it right after got it, Hungary where I went to get yet another MA degree just because someone financed my stay there for a year, China which despite spending just short of a decade there I could never like even remotely like Japan, since I had studied Japanese and not Chinese as a minor at university, Norway, nice but for the horrendous climate for 8 months of the year, or wretched Serbia, the purportedly closest being the ‘motherland’ that never did anything good for me in half a century – even in formerly much beloved and now a country I feel icy indifference to, Holland, most of the time – I glimpse in the mirror and catch that deliberately gullible grin (which happens seldomer and seldomer), I glean the segments of the broken shells and glue them skillfully together.
Empty, hollow, shallow – yes, but still, maybe… sometime… something… Therefore I postpone again my suicide attempt for a day or two. And so the story goes. Tumbles, that is.
Miodrag Kojadinović is a dual citizen of tridenominational and quadriethnic origin who’s lived in five countries and taught at six universities. His writing has appeared in not just seven but 13 languages, though, in two dozen countries. He’s looking for marriage incl. of convenience to a Portuguese of either sex.
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