our gallows road. Tyburn tree casts a lengthy phallic shadow over
Soho tonight. Look up to watch the queer fruit hang, swing!
And what of the fifty-seven silent martyrs, names blotted from the
ledger in the reign of bloody Victoria? What of gay king Eddie
pokered by his own desire? What of horny Henry’s bloodthirsty
Buggerie Acte? What of enforced penance, of
breaking rocks, of the sharpened Judas Cradle? Oh my Soho,
my tongue’s untied by trauma! We’re a people robbed of
ancestors – they were stolen, hooded, from us. We’re born of
citizens yet penned in our prime postcode under pix-
elated surveillance. Surrounded by smiling agent provocateurs,
plain-clothed pretty coppers at the pissoirs, gangs of aggro
potent lads, the bisexual terrorist – his bag-blast of nails.
Oh my Soho, my haven, my bunker, my West Central
Bank, take me back to the black vaults of Heaven where the medieval
leather daddies shine like ripe aubergines and I can
slow dance with martyrs under strobe. Within the popper-fog
their scarred bodies jolt like illuminated script.
V
Before Sunday jazz at COMPTONS was the sickly SWISS TAVERN.
Its bruise-dark windows, boisterous backroom, posters of
symptoms bearing photocopied lesions – the Rorschach of K.S. and the
new scare-lingo PCP, LAV, GRID. So is illness our ancestor?
And how many times have I queued for a prick in the shadow of SUBWAY, sub-
woofing birthplace of the UK virus, to feel made clean? I have
touched genocide with my tongue again and again and somehow
learnt nothing but fear. And how many of us wasted on
AZT, on silence, on blood-hysteria before express clinics set up their
lunch-hour prick ’n’ go’s, before Truvada-whore became a hashtag?
Oh how far we’ve come since the silver nose of syphilis, since the Santa
Maria’s cargo’d gonorrhoea! Oh my Soho,
slaughter? The proxy-diagnosis? The segregated blood-drives?
The censored sex-ed classes? The NHS’s test and detain orders?
The government’s waning funds? The GP’s apathy? Ignorance.
VI
These days we homos are held under glass while the warm geneticist
prods at our nature. Are we nothing more than chemical
enzymes? Rainbowed dots dividing under the sanitised glare of 4×, 10×, 40×?
Behold chromosome marker Xq28, our root, our cocky code
shining on a slide like the rosy hues of St Bartholomew’s stained-glass flayed chest –
scarlet, fuchsia, carmine – patinating the Rupert
Street pavements. And always a young homo sloping by, scratching at
scabs, spots, scars – piecing together last night’s happy hour,
the beer-blur of boys, the what-went-where, the who-did-what-to-me?
Oh my Soho, my teaming Petri dish, my ER, my graveyard!
So many of us born at the foot of that televised tombstone. So many faggy-
foundlings orphaned on your gum-pitted kerbs.
VII
Oh My SO HO! For centuries your name meant kill the animal, the heretic, the
revolutionary. And yet no one is screaming – we are dancing through the slaughter
as your name pulses from within the bass. An epigenetic
earworm. An open wound. And Crispin’s beloved
BLACK CAT, Oscar’s KETTNER’S, the CARAVAN CLUB and GOLDEN CALF
are razed – rebranded gastro-pubs to serve reclaimed chitterlings, sweetbreads, faggots –
are pre-fab condos with plate-glass views, are PRET A MANGERS.
Even viral SUBWAY has been bricked-up, vaccinated!
We, too, are not immune to this shameful progress; us homos are no longer revolting!
Too busy sending dick pics and I saw Saint Peter Tatchell shirtless, bruised under L.E.D.s
at G-A-Y. Colours moved across his scarred chest like jellyfish stingers
as he dreamed of his bisexual future, his post-homophobic Elysium.
VIII
our lusty labour of love, was a pastime only for those with
domestic privacy – doors, walls, curtains – but what if Soho was your
house? And how did they feed us this hoax of legality
when thousands of comrades still throng the sex-offenders register? Cottaging,
cruising, innocent importuning – even open-mouthed
kissing sent us to the dock, postured in shame. Oh my Soho, your
neon labyrinth became our plain-sight priest-hole.
And who were these sheathed men – helmeted, rubber-gloved – raiding bars,
saunas, WCs – our disorderly houses enema’d one by one?
Even holding hands could mean, can still mean, a hospital visit –
body in splints. And who am I to write ‘us’? Legal
ever since I was born – POOF, FAG, BUM-CHUM, FUDGE-PACKER,
the occasional fist – my only hard labours. Such
ripe fanfares for a boy-deviant, a back-row punching bag in the
biology lab when Section 28 was making us sick, sicker.
Oh my Soho, am I being ungrateful? All this almost progress – 2017 and
we’ve zipped from mental illness to supposed equal
in only one hundred and forty-seven years. Contrary sexual sensationalists
to citizens worthy of a lifestyle. But did we down our placards
for the sake of a good party, our very own GHETTO? Oh my Soho,
spin me back to your parades, your protests, your pride –
when a rainbow flag was a sigil and a cocktail was flaming!
Oh my Soho,
was there ever an invulnerable queer body?
IX
Oh my Soho, my omphalos is your plague-pit of cross-rail diggings, the bleach-
stink of your newly rinsed tarmac, your 2for1 WKD deals,
your tatty rainbow flags, your porn shops, your cottages!
Warren’s cup transforms from dirty secret to prize exhibit but I
am like you my Soho. I’m chock-full of shame, riven with dark man-
I have spent my life – drunk, poppered up, tarnished, tear-stained, corroded, Eros-
like. Oh my Soho, unfurl the chiselled leaves of my fruit
family tree. Give me my batty-birth rite. Baptise me with pigeon
shit, cheap lager, cum. Oh my Soho, my urinal’d
utopia, my Mary-Jerusalem, my homo-land – may I call you my
daddy? You teach this queer continuation on the breaking
wheel of pansy progress so I still take my body into dungeons, cubicles, alleyways –
flesh to the grindstone – my only weapon against normativity!
Oh my Soho,
your hunting cry rallies within my hot-pink veins. Familial
voice calling us home to reseed History.
About the Author
Richard Scott grew up in London and studied at the Royal College of Music and at Goldsmiths College. He has been a winner of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize, a Jerwood/Arvon Poetry mentee, and a member of the Poetry Trust Aldeburgh Eight. His pamphlet Wound (Rialto) won the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2016 and his poem ‘crocodile’ won the 2017 Poetry London Competition. Soho is his first book.
Copyright
First published in 2018
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
Th
is ebook edition first published in 2018
All rights reserved
© Richard Scott, 2018
The right of Richard Scott to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–33892–4