Chapter Seven: I would rather you were dead than a homosexual

In his loneliness Phillip found a friend in Adrian. Adrian was two years older than Phillip but they were in the same grade. Adrian was very camp, direct and confrontational and this made Phillip afraid. When the other boys teased him he would lower his head and walk away. Adrian however would scream at them in a frightening falsetto, “F**k off and die you baby making p***y lovers.” To Phillip’s amazement this seemed to work and while he continued to be harassed daily, Adrian was given a wide birth.

They were both members of the chess club and that was where they became friends when Phillip discovered that they both wrote poetry, found expression for their fears in language and communicated their desires in the written word. He found that when Adrian was not threatened he could be gentle and kind and now when they were together no one dared to tease Phillip because they knew that ‘the crazy queen’ would fly into a rage.


Adrian’s first lover had been the nineteen year old domestic houseboy, Moses. Adrian’s parents had lived in Nairobi until political unrest and bloodshed had forced them to leave. In Kenya it was common to have a ‘boy’ as a servant rather than a ‘girl’, because they were much more useful and could be put to work in the garden as well as in the house. They were capable of more physically challenging labour than the ‘girls’.

Adrian had watched Moses mowing the lawn one day, from the kitchen window. He wasn’t wearing underwear and Adrian could clearly see the shape that swung pendulously beneath the thin fabric of his hand-me-down shorts; it was barely concealed. Even at twelve, Adrian had been excited. When the ‘boy’ came into the kitchen Adrian had dropped to his knees and pressed his face against that enticing bulge. Moses had been hesitant at first, but hadn’t dared to object, and it wasn’t long before he was participating fully and was allowing this young white boy to pleasure him on the cold kitchen floor.

Because Adrian knew that what he was doing was forbidden, it made it even more exciting; just as Moses’s size, smell, colour and the fact that, unlike Adrian, he was uncircumcised, intensified the eroticism of this first, shared sexual experience.


One day Phillip came home to find his mother sitting on his bed, reading a letter that had arrived for him while he had not been there. It was from Adrian and described in detail a young boy that he’d seen on the beach. His description was vivid and erotic, carefully detailing how he’d like to touch this youth.

Through her tears Dorothea pleaded, "Please tell me that you’re not a pervert like your friend; if you are, this will be my Gethsemane."

At that moment he would have done anything to stop his mother’s tears and the words that he anticipated from her mouth, “Wait until I tell your father”; and so he lied. He denied his reality in order to spare his mother’s pain but also to save his own hide.

His mother’s last words on the subject for the next twenty seven years were, “Think about what this will do to your father Phillip. It would kill him. What would his congregation think if they knew that he’d spawned a homosexual? I’m not even going to talk to him about Adrian’s letter; I’m scared he might beat you to death. Personally I would rather that you were dead than a homosexual but it would destroy your father’s life and I won’t allow you to do that.”


Adrian and Phillip were movie and book junkies. They both needed the escape that could be found between the covers of a book or in the celluloid fantasy world that allowed them to temporarily disappear and live in the lives of others. They had no role models so they looked to the silver screen and books for characters they could emulate.

The first movie that Phillip and Adrian saw together was Camelot. In the story of Sir Lancelot’s tragic love affair with Guinevere, King Arthur’s wife, Phillip discovered the image of The Hero; The Knight in Shining Armour that would enter his dreams and drive his relentless search for love in the arms of strangers.

The instant that Sir Lancelot appeared on the screen, standing on the battlements of his French castle, Phillip’s enchantment turned into adoration. His face was impossibly handsome; chiselled, angular, strong jawed, sensitive lipped and the bluest eyes. He couldn’t sing to save his life but he bravely battled through an impossibly facile song. Phillip didn’t care, he never wanted that awful song to end; his eyes devoured the image of his Knight in Shining Armour on a white horse. He was in love.

Phillip cried when Lancelot told Guinevere that he needed to leave, but couldn’t, and the raw sincerity of his voice suddenly became the most beautiful sound that Phillip had ever heard, the words of that song staying in his head, being replayed over and over as though Lancelot had sung them to him:

If ever I would leave you
it wouldn’t be in summer
seeing you in summer
I never would go…
Oh no, not in springtime
summer, winter or fall
no never could I leave you
at all

When Adrian wasn’t around on weekends or holidays Phillip spent lonely days at all day cinemas. There, for the price of one entrance ticket, he could waste an entire day watching the same two or three movies over and over again and disappear into an imaginary world where loneliness was drowned out by repetitive fantasies.

One day, when Phillip was thirteen, a stranger of about thirty sat next to him and, during a break in the film, he bought him a coke and began to talk to him. He asked Phillip questions and listened to what he had to say as though his words mattered. Phillip felt as though he’d suddenly woken from a long dream, that he’d become alive, that he was no longer alone in the world, that he was no longer invisible.

The Stranger was smartly dressed but his clothes were slightly wrinkled, as though he’d slept in them. His handsome face was unshaven and he smelt of cigarettes and Old Spice.

He told Phillip that he was a pilot and offered to take him on an air flip over the city. Phillip and The Stranger sat at the sidewalk café of a beachfront hotel and he bought Phillip a coke and lit him a cigarette. Phillip felt grown up; suddenly sophisticated and not shy. A radio was playing and Sinatra’s voice sang, ‘Strangers in the night, exchanging glances, strangers in the night, what were the chances, we’d be sharing love, before the night was through.’ His new friend smiled and said, “They’re playing our song, we’re just strangers passing like ships in the night.”

‘Can it be real,’ Phillip thought, ‘I have a friend and we have a song.’

They went back to his hotel; a place that looked like a boarding house. The room was clean but sparse. A wind chime hung incongruously in an open window that overlooked a dingy courtyard where white sheets flapped from a washing line in the morning breeze. Phillip examined this trinket as his host showered in preparation for the promised flight; it was made of tiny silver angels that tinkled against each other when it moved.

Phillip’s heart was fluttering like the wings of a caged bird eager to be freed, excited at the prospect of flying, but something more; an inexplicable premonition that his life was about to change.

The Stranger came out of the bathroom wearing only his underwear, vigorously drying his wet hair he pulled back the covers of the bed to expose fresh, crisp sheets and lay down, propping his back with the white covered pillows. His body was dark and hairy and Phillip’s heart was wild now, ready for flight. He patted the sheet next to him, “Sit with me for a while before we go, I have no friends, please be my friend?”

Something in his words made Phillip’s heart go crazier still. He sat down on the cool white sheets that The Stranger’s hand had touched and listened to his words about loneliness and his longing for a friend. They hypnotized Phillip and he hardly noticed the man’s hand on his leg. All he could concentrate on was the sound of his voice and the tinkling of the wind chime; that sounded as though it came from a memory or a dream.

Phillip felt the warmth of The Stranger’s hand on his shorts and in that moment something dormant; some evil impulse buried deep inside of him; a feeling that he’d left in the dark chasm under the house of his birth, rose up and consumed him. It was a moment that seemed to last forever. A frozen eternity from which the voice of his father emerged, like the voice of God; “Never allow a man to touch you like that, it’s the worst sin imaginable and the Bible calls it filthy and vile and deserving of death. It will enslave you forever and follow you into the fiery pit of hell.”

Phillip lunged from the bed and ran to the door but it was locked. The Stranger came over to him, trying to persuade him to stay, “Please don't go, I promise I won’t hurt you, please don't leave me?”

Finally he unlocked the door and stood close to Phillip as he edged past him to escape and Phillip felt his breath on his face as he whispered urgently and angrily; "Go, but you'll be back, I know this is what you really want."

Wind chimes sounded in some trapped breeze as Phillip ran through the streets without direction. Miraculously he reached home and flung himself onto his bed, his heart still pounding; knowing that he’d really wanted to stay.


When Phillip saw Adrian again and told him what had happened his friend wanted details, asking if he’d had a good look at the man’s body, “Did he have a big dong, did you play with it; did he play with yours?” Adrian, by then, had already experienced sex with older men, giving Phillip blow-by-blow accounts of these contacts.

Phillip was sanctimoniously aghast at this reaction and embarrassed that anyone would think that he’d even want to do these things, but late at night in the secret darkness of his room, he was aroused by thoughts of what that encounter could have been like. Fantasies of touching and being touched by this lying stranger were his wet dream, until he met Robbie.


One day after school Adrian and Phillip drank a bottle of wine that Adrian had stolen from his father’s collection. They grew dizzy and in their intoxication spoke more openly, than they had dared to before, about their desire for other boys; comparing, with exaggerated gestures, the attributes and attractions of the jocks at school, Adrian describing in detail what he’d seen in the showers after physical training.

Phillip had never been allowed to play sport at school, ostensibly because of his asthma, but he knew in his heart that his father did not want the other kids to see the welts and bruises that he sometimes left on his bum and back.
After the wine was finished they lay, fully clothed, on the bed and kissed. Long luxurious kisses that seemed, to Phillip, to begin with his lips and sink deep inside of him, stirring up sensations that he’d never experienced before.

After some time Adrian began to fondle Phillip and it was this gesture that turned his sudden sense of relief and freedom into panic. He drew away from Adrian and in a slurred voice said, “I can’t do this, you’re too much like a sister to me.” They both laughed hysterically but something in

Adrian’s eyes told Phillip that the feeling was one sided and that the joke was at Adrian’s expense.


When Adrian was very young and listening to the fairy tales his mother read to him, he wanted to be The Hero; The Knight in Shining Armour, the one who saves the damsel in distress and slays the dragon. But fate had blessed him with effeminacy instead of courage.

And later, when he watched Camelot with Phillip, he knew that his friend pictured Lancelot as his rescuer, imagining being carried away on his Knight’s shiny white stead. He expressed the same desires to Phillip but in his heart he wanted to BE Lancelot, and be adored for his courage.

When he first allowed himself to be used by an older man, and submitted to his abuse, he had felt powerful because of his youth. He’d continued to search for, and find others, who wanted his body. ‘Make no mistake’, he kept telling himself, ‘this is what I want’, until he believed it. Little by little Adrian buried The Hero in himself so deep, and ignored his pleas for so long, that now he can no longer hear his voice.

But when Phillip was around he felt courageous, bold, worldly wise, capable and experienced. He wanted to be Phillip’s Hero; save him from the vicious claws if Christianity and what it had done to his head; educate him about sex and sexuality and show him the pleasures that he had experienced. He saw Adrian as a fallen angel, unable to return to divinity and unwilling to commit to what he really was. He wanted to save him and protect him so that he would become completely surrendered to the ownership of the powerful Knight in Shining Armour. He wanted to possess him and in so doing possess himself.