helen sandler | journalismMichael Arditti |
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Good Clean Fun Author Michael Arditti talks to Helen Sandler about bad karma, fantasy men and an ageist gay scene Not every author would open his first short story collection with a child's account of being sexually abused by his stepfather. But Michael Arditti had an agenda. He wanted to write a story from a child's point of view and, having settled on the subject matter, to counteract some of the rubbish that is talked about abuse. "You hear all the time, 'The child wanted it,' but the child doesn't want it," he says. "The child wants affection and takes it in the form in which the adult gives it. In the story, the boy puts up with the man's physicality but then goes mad." Arditti speaks forcefully but evenly in a rich voice marred by a flight-induced cough - he recently returned from the East Coast of the States where he lectured on a cruise, enjoyed a spot of discount designer shopping and interviewed Scary Spice for a tabloid paper. He is a man of varied interests. But in his three novels - The Celibate, Pagan and Her Parents and Easter - he has focused on gay men in public roles, the closet and hypocrisy, particularly in the Church of England. He has been anathemised by various evangelical churches and it is clear from the stories in the new collection, Good Clean Fun, that his own brand of Anglicanism embraces a rather broader set of moral values than theirs. A hustler who followed in his mother's footsteps is sympathetically portrayed in "Contentment", for instance. But these are still moral tales. "The great writers have a moral purpose," explains Arditti, naming Dostoevsky and George Eliot as examples. "I'm not putting myself up with them but I do try to emulate them. Yes, I think it is part of writing and for me it is a fundamental part. Basic beliefs about how you behave to other people, about your responsibilities, about the fact that doing something that hurts somebody else comes round and hits you - that mistakes are paid for. In the short story these themes may be more evident because in the novel it all happens over a longer period." His sense of responsibility is particularly strong in relation to the gay community. There are quite a few lonely and isolated queers in Good Clean Fun (the middle-aged man wanking over a magazine while his young boyfriend entertains in the next room; the virgin librarian forcing a snog on the star at a dance performance) and I ask the author whether he thinks things are as bad as ever for gay men. He answers that AIDS and gay-bashing are still with us and that the community is not as supportive as it once was. He cites ageism as one factor. "You only have to read vox pops in gay papers, including Gay Times, to see 30-year-old gay men saying dreadful things. You think, have they no sense that they will grow old or that they could learn from older people?" Arditti himself moved to London in 1986 and found a real sense of solidarity in the face of adversity on Gay Pride marches. "Now it is brilliant that a lot of the battles have been won," he says. "But young people assume that certain things are there by right and not that other people have fought for them. And there's a great deal of cruelty in the gay scene. I am a relatively well-off man with lots of friends and a bit of status, but if you are my age, early forties, and not affluent and you don't have status, you are invisible now. People write to me because of my novels and I am very aware of their isolation." Isolated he ain't; single he is. More time for writing, then? "There's more time for lots of things, some of which would be a lot more fun if I had someone to do them with." He laughs. "I should have phrased that more precisely." This brings us neatly to sex, which seems to be entangled with money and power in many of the stories. The author responds to this suggestion with examples where love wins out. In "Marriage of Convenience", for instance, a gay man and a lesbian marry for practical reasons and realise how much they love each other. In "Virtual Love", Craig meets his webcam fantasy man and is horrified by his brutality - which makes him appreciate his highly domestic boyfriend. "If Oz is actually in the middle of Kansas," says Arditti, "then happiness is with the chap who asks if you want courgettes or green beans for dinner." He deliberately uses humour to leaven the more upsetting stories. "While they are dealing with tough emotions," he says, "you're exhilarated by the humour so you're able to go with them in a way that you might not otherwise." The author has not seen the back of these tough themes. He has also written a book called Unity to be published next year, "a very complicated novel about the nature of evil, fascism and pornography," in which he features as one of the characters. With all this work behind him, Arditti unwinds by watching DVDs on the large TV that dominates his otherwise demure sitting room in London's leafy Primrose Hill. "It's like watching a little cinema," he says. "I got it because I had this back accident and for about six months when I came out of hospital I couldn't leave the house. A great friend of mine is a member of BAFTA and got all the new films to vote on. So she brought them round and I saw films before they were at the cinema." He is keeping up his consumption and a shuffle through the DVD cases turns up quite a range: from the prison series Oz to Basquiat, via Best in Show and Bergman's Hour of the Wolf. He has already said that reading helps him to understand all kinds of people he would never meet in real life. Perhaps the same is true of watching movies. Good Clean Fun is published by Maia at £8.99 This piece first appeared in Gay Times, June 2004 © Helen Sandler 2004 |
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