Mendez

And you’ve not colonised it and taken it over?

Well, I just don’t own any art, that’s the thing! That’s one of the problems with negotiating space with one’s partner, especially if you haven’t bought and decorated the place together. He lived here for 30 years before I moved in. So everything’s kind of in its place. And I have to just move in and use my hips to move a couple of things out of the way so I can get a little space.

When did you move in?

September 2018.

And when did you meet Alan?

February 2018.

That’s quite fast!

Well, I was living in quite unconducive living arrangements as far as my writing was concerned, down in Brixton. I was working in hospitality and had no money saved up. And then Alan and I met at a late-night library club. It was a sort of gay literary salon; they take over stately homes and the like and put on enactments of famous gay novels. And this was (Alan’s book) ‘The Line of Beauty’ and I was cast in it as Leo. When that book was published, back in 2004, that was the year that I moved to London to study acting and became a sex worker. It landed in my hands after it had won the Booker Prize, and it just felt providential for me. Because I was out to myself, and I was living a gay life, but I was still very much in the closet and still very shy. I didn’t have the access then to the books, the culture, the knowledge that I have now. As far as I was concerned, the gay scene wasn’t Black; gayness wasn’t Black. I grew up in a Jamaican household in a majority-white, working-class area, and you know, I also grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness. And as far as I was concerned, Alan’s work was just the right book at the right time for me, and the character of Leo just seemed to have so much in common with me in terms of being this young, good-looking Black gay man from a religious, West Indian background.

How did Leo’s character speak to you?

He’s just someone with their own sexual agency and their own sense of who they are and what they want. He did the dumping, he did the courting, and I’d never read a character like that in literature before, really. I mean, I’d read ‘Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone’ by Baldwin. But I guess that was a different kind of affirmation. Leo is very much the person that I was back then. So when I got the opportunity to perform him in a theatrical production, albeit non-scripted, it was quite immersive. I jumped at it, and then Alan was there, we met, I told him about my book deal, and he quickly became a mentor. And he’d just published his most recent novel, ‘The Sparsholt Affair’, a few months before, and he was doing the US and Australia tours to accompany that. So we just kept in touch long distance. But then when he was here, I came up and stayed. So it was the first time that I was able to be in a quiet space that was conducive to writing. At the time, I was just coming over to work on the sofa or whatever, sometimes on the settee upstairs in his study. And that’s where I wrote the first draft of ‘Rainbow Milk’. So he quickly became indispensable to me. I was a very messy person back then, and the discipline and daily schedule of writing that he shared with me is the main reason why ‘Rainbow Milk’ has become the novel that it is.

Well, Virginia Woolf did say one needs a room of one’s own. I think it’s quite sexy that the author of the book that inspired you 17 years ago is the man you now live with and love. It sounds almost like someone should write a book about that.

Well, I could do, but I don’t know what I’m going to write next, to be honest. I haven’t had the time to find that place. ‘Rainbow Milk’ has been optioned, so I’m going to be exec producing and writing a screenplay. So that’s the main project for me at the moment, and hopefully that will be commissioned and go into production, and then I can focus on writing another novel. But your book (‘Revolutionary Acts’) sounds fascinating to me even now. My novel focuses on two main characters: Norman, in the 1950s, and Jesse, in the early 2000s. I had to skip a generation because I literally didn’t have time to write characters over the timeline in between. So within the novel’s shape there’s a lost middle generation, many of them facing down the AIDS crisis. But I’m really interested in that generation: Black queer men who lived, loved, worked, collaborated, were creative and were activists during that period. So I’m looking forward to reading your book and taking some inspiration from it. I spoke to (HIV-prevention activist) Marc Thompson recently, and I learned so much about Black gay history in just half an hour of talking to him.

Well, the ways in which elder Black generations can recite their lives and tell stories about times and places is completely unmatched. So I’m pleased to take the stories of these elder Black gay men and shape them into a beautiful narrative about Britain. I suppose that draws some distinction between our literary projects. Your work, as I understand it, is semi-autobiographical, taking your own life experience and creating a story out of it. Is that right?

Yes, that’s basically how you’d define semi-autobiographical, which I just can’t really reconcile myself to. It’s something that the publishing industry imposes on a book of this nature in order to help it find its market.

That it has to be confessional?

Well, they have to package it as something that readers can hold on to, so they’ve chosen semi-autobiographical. But that creates a lot of problems for me. To continue to use Alan as an example, he writes about middle-class kids who have gone to boarding school, Oxford University, read English, have interest in novelists like Henry James, and then become scholars or literary critics or novelists themselves. Those are all real touch points from his life, too, but nobody then calls his work semi-autobiographical. My work is about a kid who has grown up as a Jehovah’s Witness in a white, working-class area and comes from a Windrush-generation descendant background, is gay, becomes a sex worker, and works in hospitality at times. I share all of those touch points, but every character is fictional. Every space is fictional. Beyond those touch points, I’m not using memory. My dad’s Black, but I’ve created a white adoptive father character for Jesse; I have no experience of that. But I thought it was an interesting way of looking at inheritance, especially of Black masculinity, and how being raised in a white-supremacist environment can have a detrimental effect on a young Black man.

I think it’s true that there can be so many projections onto your work. Even for my book, which is non-fiction about other Black gay men’s lives, because it’s guided by my voice and reflections, there’s going to be some pressure for me to be confessional and revealing.

For one of the first newspaper interviews I did, this middle-aged, white interviewer had read the book so literally, and was talking about how Jesse falls in love with his housemate Owen. And she was, like, “Is that Alan?” I just burst out laughing. I was, like, “What are you talking about? This is set in 2002, Owen is from Liverpool, he’s working class, he’s a poet. It’s just not Alan!” In terms of what you’re doing, I kind of understand why sometimes they want the personal in non-fiction, they want to know why you in particular have been chosen to write this book. What you’re doing is a little bit similar to what I’ve done with ‘Rainbow Milk’ in terms of Jesse’s story being couched in the earlier experience of Norman’s story, because it shows changes or not, in between the generations. And you’re a younger generation than the people you’re writing about. You’re helping them get the respect they’re due for the lives they’ve led, and for the activism they’ve been part of and instigated. But you’re in a sense a product of that, because they did that work, because they put themselves on the front line. That’s why we can be the way we are. And I think it’s important to reflect that; otherwise, it can just seem detached.

Have you ever thought about writing a non-fiction memoir yourself?

Well, ‘Rainbow Milk’ started as more of a memoir. But it just wasn’t an easy one to tell in terms of straight non-fiction, because I was writing about family, traumatic moments in my life, about sexual assault and stuff like that, where I wasn’t able to be confessional in that way. I just couldn’t do it. It just didn’t feel right. I was opening wounds that I didn’t have the psychotherapeutic abilities to help heal. So Sharmaine Lovegrove, my publisher, saw that straight away and said, “Look, you should try writing fiction.” And it’s a completely different set of skills, so I had to build the craft from scratch.

What was life like for you as a sex worker? How old were you when you started?

I was 22, and I probably thought at the time that I was very much in control. I’d come out as gay at age 21, living back in Birmingham after a few years away. And going out on the gay scene, the first guy I met was this 57-year-old man who took me home and made me his sex slave.

Did you enjoy it?

Yeah. I loved it. And he and I are still friends.

I ask if you enjoy it because it feels like there’s a lot of scorn about age-gaps in consensual gay sexual relations.

Yes, and it’s something that I always have to explain. It’s difficult to quantify something like that. It’s taste, that’s all it is. And people want me to “unpack” it, like it’s some kind of psychological disorder.

Well, someone previously asked me if I’m writing a book about older Black gay men because I’m into older Black daddies.

But what business of theirs is it anyway? Second of all, I think you’re doing something extraordinary. And not many people have, at such a young age, such a clear sense of what came before, the generations who came before, and that too little has been written about them. They’re a really important bunch of people. And I was thinking exactly the same thing about The BLK Art Group and the Black Artists Movement of the late ’70s, going through to the mid-to-late ’80s. There isn’t any non-fiction about them, while a million texts have been written about the YBAs, and fine, those were more important financially in a capitalist art world. But in terms of my heritage, and in terms of our sense of our Black Britishness, the older Black artists are super important, yet there isn’t a single book, as far as I’m concerned, that brings them all into that same arena. Some of them have then gone on to become very successful, like Lubaina Himid, obviously, who won the Turner Prize, people like that. But, you know, I want a book that goes into that scene. Wolverhampton 1979, the art scene at Wolverhampton Polytechnic that birthed the BLK Art Group. To me, that’s fascinating, because I grew up near there.

I think you’ve just pitched me your first non-fiction.

No, I mean, I do want to work with that material, but then, I think, it would probably be in the context of a novel. But I don’t know how that’s going to be manifested, because it’s kind of difficult to write in a fictional space about people who are still living. My first priority is to build my skills as a fiction writer.

So I want to circle back to you and this 57-year-old man…

Well, he really brought me out of myself sexually and turned me into a sexual person. I was working in Selfridges in Birmingham and he sent me to work wearing a cock ring, no underwear and tight jeans. We went out every Saturday night on the gay scene in Birmingham, and I started sleeping around with mostly older men, and I really enjoyed it. So when I moved to London to study acting, a colleague of mine at Selfridges put me in touch with a friend of his who lived in Dulwich. So I met him at Brixton Station on 6 July 2004, went back to his, and a couple of hours later a friend of his came round, a filmmaker who specialised in semi-erotic films about corporal punishment in boarding schools. And he asked me if I wanted to be in one of his films, and offered quite a good amount of money. So I said fine, it was just being spanked on camera. So I did that and ended up being photographed nude by several photographers. And one of them suggested: “Have you ever thought of sex work? You’re really good-looking, you’ve got a big dick, you could make a lot of money.” And the idea appealed. I was already having sex with that type of man, and there’s something about the bravado I had at that time as well, seeing myself afresh as this very sexual person with their own agency. And I was a top, as well. So literally who’s gonna fuck with me, right? One of the photographers helped me set up on Gaydar, a commercial profile, and I went online and immediately I could just pick whoever I wanted from these hundreds of messages that I was getting. And that’s how it started, I was always in control. I never picked anyone whose photo I didn’t see first. You know, we chatted for quite a while beforehand, so I could scope out this person. I’d say 99 per cent of the time, I had great experiences, with really nice men who just happened to be paying me for the sex that I was enjoying anyway. So it wasn’t your typical, if I can call it that, traumatic, desperate experience. I may have painted it a bit more like that in ‘Rainbow Milk’ but, obviously, for literary reasons. The sex that I’ve written in the novel is, again, completely fictional. All of those characters are completely fictional; I’ve just created situations. I tried to channel perhaps some of the emotional trajectory that I would have felt at that time. Because that’s really all I remember.

When you’re asked about sex work, do you feel that people are trying to project a “trauma” narrative on to you?

To be honest, Jason, ‘Rainbow Milk’ has been out for over a year, and you’re one of the first people to ask me about sex work directly. I think that’s partly because I’ve not been interviewed by many gay journalists or authors. I think there’s also still a silent judgement around sex work and sex workers, that people can’t quite address. But it’s at the centre of the novel: Jesse’s decision to leave the Jehovah’s Witnesses and become a sex worker, even though it wasn’t a linear decision in that kind of way. But that is at the centre of what I wrote.

Had you contemplated writing fiction before Sharmaine suggested it?

I didn’t think I’d have the ability to.

Why’s that?

I don’t know, I just thought that you had to do an MFA or one of those creative writing programmes. And you don’t see young Black gay men in fiction, really.

So you don’t have much by way of an academic background?

The acting course that I started in 2004, when I became a sex worker, that lasted for three months. Then I started a degree in humanities after that. My first degree, or the first degree that I started, was in automotive engineering when I was 19, down at West Kent College in Kent. It all failed, I just wasn’t in the right place to do it. I did really well at school, and people perhaps expected me to go on to do better things, but the Jehovah’s Witnesses discourage further education. So I always had this kind of tension going on. And after that I just never found myself in the right place to do anything special. When ‘Rainbow Milk’ was finished and I had handed it in, I didn’t think it was going to be successful. I just wanted it to be my little marker, my first little book, and then I’d go away, educate myself, and then come back with something that I really intended to write. So that’s when I applied to study at Goldsmiths, MA Black British Literature, which I’m on a break from at the moment because the book has been successful. It’s given me far too much to do.

How have you been dealing with the success of ‘Rainbow Milk’, emotionally?

It’s been a bit up and down. But my partner is very patient with me. And also living here helps because I have access to nature, and I cannot tell you how healing something so simple as going for a walk on the Heath can be.

It sounds like you’re prioritising your well-being.

Well, the reason I took a break from my studies was because I was starting to get overwhelmed. Once your name is on people’s lips, they stop doing the work in terms of asking if you’re the right person for a project. They just think “Mendez” because they’re looking for a Black person. I really wanted to turn down a commission from BBC Radio 3 because I was just so busy with the screenplay, the book reviews and the US launch of ‘Rainbow Milk’ coming up. But they really wanted me to do it. It was part of a series looking back at their old radio programme ‘Caribbean Voices’. And I realised that, although I have a disconnection to Jamaica – I’ve never been there; my parents have never been there – it is my heritage. And if I’m not part of the historiography, then it’s going to be taken over by people who don’t have that as their heritage and wouldn’t have the same reason to connect with it. So I took it on. And I was really glad I did it in the end, because I chose to focus on Andrew Salkey, the Jamaican novelist, who wrote what is probably the first ever example of Black British queer fiction, a novel called ‘Escape to an Autumn Pavement’ that was published in 1960 and republished by Peepal Tree Press in 2009. It’s an amazing novel, and then I was, like, “Why is this not being read by our generation? By us? Why is it that every 25 years or so, there’s a little bubble of excitement, but then it goes away again?”

Do you feel like we’re having “a moment”, as Black gay men?

I think we are. But I don’t want it to be a moment. I want it to just be normal that we exist, visibly. It’s a bit of a difficult one because, as Marc Thompson said in a recent article, as Black gay men, we’re used to being the bottom rung of the ladder. But actually, we’re part of the fabric of British society just as much as any other denomination. But with novels like mine, ‘The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney’ by Okechukwu Nzelu, ‘Hold’ by Michael Donkor, and on the US side: ‘Real Life’ and ‘Filthy Animals’ by Brandon Taylor and ‘Memorial’ by Bryan Washington – yes, there is a kind of new wave. And then you look at the stories being told on TV now, like ‘I May Destroy You’. I was just so gobsmacked when the character Kwame goes to that guy’s house, and they’re fucking on the bed. And it’s Black skin against Black skin, fucking on a bed. I’ve never seen that on TV before. So it was fascinating, and you see the BBC logo in the corner, and it’s just, like, “Wow, this is basically state TV showing Black gay sex, in the most acclaimed TV series of the year.” So, you know, it’s clear that, yes, there is a moment, but I’m hoping that it’s a moment that opens up into a lifetime.