LGBT Book & Video Blog

Sexual suspects don't easily penetrate the clenched sphincter of US Customs. Professional bad boy Sebastian Horsley was denied entry recently for what the border cops called "moral turpitude," citing his arrests in the UK for drug possession and prostitution. The incident got the queerish Brit dandy a feature article in the Sunday New York Times. Just who is this velveteened, top-hatted, ultra-indecorous almost-fag? You don't know? Well, neither does he.

I was soon totting up the flood of aphorisms in this memoir and trying to recall who had said them already. "All art aspires towards the condition of music," is a paraphrase of Walter Pater. "It is not necessary to have relatives in Hull to be unhappy," is Groucho Marx shifted to Yorkshire. Oscar Wilde and Quentin Crisp make frequent pseudo-appearances. On the other hand, to say "self-destruction... is the quickest way to gain control over your own destiny" seems to be genuine Horsley.

Raised in a "soaring, rambling" manor house in the north of England, young Bash (a family nickname) made his mark early. At age five he crapped himself in school and was sent home "dripping with excrement." The trauma didn't deter him from peeking at the scatological William S Burroughs in his father's library. A dialogue on butt-licking from Naked Lunch ("Aw shucks, now it ain't dirty") set him trembling with desire. "I knew I was approaching the spot where the treasure lay buried."

At 18 daddy's trust fund kicked in. After a jaunt to Paris where he launched a narcotic habit, Horsley moved to Edinburgh and became friends with imprisoned Glasgow gangster Jimmy Boyle, a convicted murderer whose specialty was gouging out eyes. We learn that Boyle "invented the dirty protest," covering himself in his own poo to deter prison guards.

Bash seemed to be falling in with the wrong crowd. A mitigating factor was his roommate and best friend, Steve. In their Edinburgh flat one night, Steve came out to him — and Horsley began to wonder if gay life "was the way to enlightenment."  See Book review: Dandy in the Underworld