The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962)
It’s a working class movie about a working class failure, with a chance for director Tony Richardson to show off his very theatrical film making talents -- with what became his trademarks: quick motion sequences, dissolves into graphics, and that jazz score that seems to improvise as the runner runs. He faithfully captures the hopelessness of working class life; it’s something I’ve never understood because I’ve always been hopeful. It’s part of my entitlement, and I’ve always felt that my entitlement was a good thing — even when it’s been hurled at me as a curse. Yes, but it’s a gift, one that is both given to me and that I give. I understand Tom Courtney’s mixed feelings when he gets to Ruxton reformatory; he is given every chance at success and finally kicks success in the face. I can respect that from afar; but have never really known it -- I’ve never been able to resist success if it waved at me from afar, but especially when it reared its ugly head in the sand right next to me, I would just go for it. My favourite moments in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner are the boys together -- stealing and then hiding the money, stealing a car and getting two girls to go to Skegness, kissing them in the sand. And then the brutal reality of Courtney’s mother waiting for his father to die so that she can spend his money; and in that working class way they are rich for maybe a couple of months, and then it’s over. And their dreadful little house; so pitiful what the poor call their own. Of course I wouldn’t want this poverty for myself, but when Courtney burns money (he literally takes a bill and burns it) — I love it vicariously. And I love it also when the boys are watching the politician on TV and they turn the sound off. It’s the world we live in now — and I guess we have always lived in — the voiceless pompous fart — like our own sanctimonious health officials today— is doing a lot of finger wagging and and shaking his head replete with stern reproving looks. But of course when all the boys sing Jerusalem in Church they sound like a choir of hearty angels. My rather used to give me money when I got good marks. Near the end of his life he would phone me -- and all barriers were down -- he would just out and out ask-- “what’s your latest achievement?”-- and I felt terrible if I couldn’t come up with one. All of my closest relationships have been with working class men. I met Sean at an orgy at my house. Yes I lived in a house that had orgies. It was the famous 60 Homewood Avenue; I still have people come up to me on the streets or in a bar (or they used to, when people went outside) and say: “Do you remember the Homewood parties?” Or :“I remember you from that party on Homewood.” I used to get up to some crazy shit. Once I appeared at our party in drag with a boy on a leash, which people seemed very impressed by. Then later, we would go upstairs the the attic room — totally lovely, and refinished, and there was a bed, and the deck, and there were sex toys, lubricant, and condoms. And people would be doing it everywhere in the dark. The night I met Shaun he dragged me up there I remember getting out of drag, laboriously, peeling off my fingernails one by one, because drag for me was not erotic, it was just fun and occasionally a tool to pick up men. Anyway after that I was in love with Shaun, and found out that he had been a hooker, and lived in England, and died his hair brown so he would be taken seriously. He was tall and lean and muscled with a tremendous ass and a beautiful front equipment (need it be said?). He was a masculine queen, there aren’t a lot of those, a guy who could be very dominant but then also was this really campy queen. He pretty much moved into my flat on Yonge Street. The most erotic thing we did was have sex in a crawl space in my apartment (I did it because he told me to. Period). Anyway, it only lasted about a year but I did meet his mother, who was the opposite of my mother, meaning she was generous, unpretentious, magnanimous, and full of non-judgemental love. She also tried to borrow money from me once, which was very disconcerting. She had given birth to Shaun ‘out of wedlock’ and raised him by herself, on nothing, no money. Shaun never had any money, so I suppose he was kind of a whore with me — but I knew I was more than that to him. I had been a fag nearly 8 years when I met him, but I had never really let loose. We were so different and he was a kind of fantasy. And it had to end. But Shaun was a survivor and found several sugar daddies after me. I still think of him; I’m quite worried he is dead because he had a drug problem. It was the kind of relationship where he could just show up on your doorstep one day and plunk himself down on the bed and be in charge, and there was kind of nothing you could do. I learned I was a masochist from him; which for me has always been about not being a success, not being in charge, not running a theatre. How nice it would be to release all those expectations now. My father has been dead for five years, is it time to say good bye to everything he taught me; to actually not be proud of anything? What would it mean to actually not care if anybody read anything I wrote? I know I pretend I don’t care but in fact I do, very much. My father taught me that if you can’t do it better than anyone else then it’s not worth doing. But I want to be Tom Courtney at the end of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and everyone is clapping and straining to see me, and maybe I can represent Ruxton at the Olympics, and I’m leading the race but I just stop and stand there, sweating and looking at everybody, watching myself disappoint them. And Michael Redgrave (the ‘Governor’ of the school) is crushed. What if the joy of life was the experience of life -- and not the experience of praise? I count my friends, my awards, my books, my newspaper articles, my orgasms. Dear God I have to stop counting my orgasms. Not everyone even has orgasms. Shaun hardly ever had them, he was just there with me, completely there with me, in a crawl space, naked, telling me what to do, and never was I so alive as when there was nothing at stake but love, and nothing to achieve but desire.
