London Tripytch started out as a short story entitled ‘Pornocracy’ that I wrote for a competition. I’d wanted to write about the secret histories of male prostitution for a while and that first attempt gave me the character and voice of Jack Rose. Oscar Wilde remains a figure of great appeal to me and a favourite writer, and it was through Jack that I found I could explore other aspects of Wilde’s life, aspects often only vaguely traced in the available accounts. Jack provided me with the perspective of one of the young boys involved in the Wilde scandal, and gave me the chance to imagine the lives of these bit players – the shadowy cohort whose fleeting appearance in the history books fascinated me. Who were these ‘panthers’ with which Wilde ‘feasted’?

          To say more than Jack’s story alone would allow, however, I needed other voices from other times, and so I formed the idea of three lives spaced roughly fifty years apart but overlapping chronologically. It made sense to counterpoint Jack’s exploits with a different, more mature voice, so I developed Colin. The early 1950s saw a great witch-hunt of homosexuals by the British press and the police, which included the arrest of Sir John Geilgud and the imprisonment of the writer Rupert Croft-Cooke (whose 1955 account of his prison experience, The Verdict of You All, is a wonderful read) and peaked with the 1954 scandal involving Lord Montagu and Peter Wildeblood, as recounted in the latter’s book, Against the Law. Colin’s worldview is shaped by that climate of fear. He feels imprisoned by society, but ultimately finds some kind of salvation, acceptance and recognition. I wanted art and love to be the source of those things.

          The third character, David, is a more contemporary voice; a man whose sexual freedoms, whilst having their precedent in Jack, are the fruits of late twentieth-century gay liberation. I wanted a voice from my London, drawing on some of my own experiences of the city, although David’s story is by no means an autobiography, although I’m aware that most writing is, in some indirect and alchemical sense, autobiographical. I agree with Jeanette Winterson that “There is no such thing as autobiography, there is only art and lies”.

          I use history to provide some kind of backdrop for the lives of these three men, and I use the city almost like a fourth character. As such, the city too needed to change. Jack’s London is not Colin’s, and David’s London is different again, not simply because our experiences of cities are mostly subjective, but because cities themselves are fluid, impermanent entities, grounded in a historical specificity that is in a permanent state of flux. For me, cities are also profoundly sexual and that sexuality is caught up in the anonymity they provide. There is a great deal of knowledge in the sexual, although it is often ignored, suppressed or opposed altogether. So it was crucial that this most sidelined and contentious aspect of urban life be central to the stories I was weaving. For Jack the city provides a way of having sex with men and making a decent living, without having to integrate such behavior into his overall sense of self. I wanted him to be uncomplicatedly libidinal. He represents a way of connecting with the body that is freer than, say, Colin’s; a form of sexual consciousness that is not shackled by psychology, nor by religious or bourgeois morality, all of which he has mercifully escaped, though he ends up as their victim, nevertheless. I reintroduced him within Colin’s narrative because I wanted to imagine how he’d change as he grew older.

          By comparison, Colin represents all that is destructive about the morality surrounding homosexuality – a morality represented by his parents, but also by the police, doctors and other people in his social group. For him, the city is a place to scavenge for visual scraps that he can use to populate his masturbation fantasies. For him Gore represents the antithesis of what he has come to expect from life, a kind of unimaginable sexual freedom. Like Jack, Gore is a mirror in which we see our own desires. Through Gore, Colin discovers another London, one that unsettles him as much as it fascinates him.