Orienteering

In 1973, I guess, I was working at the Edinburgh Film Festival for the summer, and one of the films launched there was The Wicker Man. This was a fairly weird movie by any standards, and has since become a cult, valued in retrospect much more than its lukewam reviews and limited box-office at the time would have suggested. There was a press screening one day, attended by one of the actors in the film, Lindsay Kemp, who had a 'character' part as a Scottish innkeeper (if I remember). Lindsay was one of the features of the Edinburgh cultural scene, leading a mime troupe that I had first seen perform at the Richard Demarco Gallery in 1968.

After the screening several of the EIFF team went out to a nearby pub for a drink with Lindsay, together with Jack Birkett (Orlando) and others of Lindsay's group. In the chat, someone asked Lindsay, who was about as camp as they come, how he knew he was gay. 'Well', replied Lindsay, 'it's very simple. Women don't give me erections.' Now, I'm sure there are all sorts of experts in sexual orientation who would say it's a lot more complicated than that, but to me that was about as useful a test of which way one was swinging as any deeper psychological study. On this simple premise, I was able back then and since to confirm that I was in a different -er - camp from Lindsay.