"Brian’s other companion was Rita Harris, a NEMS employee. She’d been at Great Charlotte Street several months when a deep friendship dropped into place at the company’s annual staff dinner-dance, Christmas 1959. He seems to have confided in her from the start: “He was not a very happy person. He was so lonely. He said no one was really happy but that one should aim to be reasonably content. He admitted he was a homosexual and talked about it frequently: it used to make him very depressed. He hated himself for it, and never remembered being any other way.”
The intimacy of Brian’s revelations—his need to confide, and hers to listen—stirred something. Love developed on both sides, though it wasn’t consummated. He spoke to Rita of his private life using the record-business term “new releases”—he once wrote saying, “The New Release has stopped selling. Trouble is that having sold quite well for quite a time, it’s difficult to clear away bad stock.” (This sounds like a longish relationship—Brian had precious few of these.)
Through staff appointments, Brian kept friends close by. Ray Standing, another Great Charlotte Street employee, saw a pattern: “I think there were nine blokes working at Nems at one time and only three of us were straight. The Walton Road shop was OK because that was his dad’s store, but when Brian opened up in town that’s when they started to flock in, so to speak. - Tune In, Mark Lewisohn
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