Soho Read online

  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,

  just how did our gorgeous species survive the Parliamentarian’s drug-embargoing

  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

  But how many brothers sat in stripes after the celebrated law change? Sodomy,

  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-

  jostling alleyways, a treasure map of buried trauma. In you

  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