Homosexuality drove experimental band Coil's creativity, yet they rejected the demand that they either embrace performative homosexuality or
today i would be 63 years old. .. rest in peace GREAT Geoffrey Nigel Laurence Rushton
(born February 16 1962, Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, England - died November 13, 2004)
Nick Soulsby's mesmerizing anthology of interviews with the patron saints of unsettling alterity, Coil (published by strangeattractorpress, one of my favorite purveyors of titles under the subject heading "Old Weird Albion").
Proud to have my 1987 interview with Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson included in the Roll Call of Heroes.
Conversations With Coil, I spent two years hunting down interviews with John Balance and Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson. In that time, digesting hundreds of extant pieces, private letters, unseen material, and long-lost recordings day after day, a tragi-comedy became clear. Coil repeatedly expressed that their lived experience as gay men was the creative force underpinning their work…Only to be faced with a blank absence of response.
Ossian Brown – for a time, a member of Coil – states it plainly in his book Haunted Air: “Coil were the first resolutely queer group…” echoing Balance’s words in a mid-90s interview: “for a long time we were the most out on a limb or experimental gay group, for sure, in England…” He went on to shrewdly point out how people were more comfortable politely pretending ‘gay music’ only existed as a ghetto of flamboyant disco, something safe and ignorable, that when the media talked of gay music, it was always some “little thing on disco and it’ll include so-and-so and so-and-so, Jimmy Somerville and Bronski Beat will be the most far out…” Christopherson added: “we would never consider that we promoted a gay lifestyle particularly, in the way that some do, but the thing is we deal honestly with the things that are important to us.”
It isn’t that anyone denied that Christopherson, Balance, Thrower, Brown or Thighpaulsandra were gay. It was simply deemed ephemeral, not worth engaging with, easy to brush aside by declaring Coil a ‘magick’ or ‘drug’ band. Somehow, contrasting starkly with Coil’s homosexuality, those definitions aroused no discomfort or debate, being easier for the dominant heterosexual culture to swallow. This was the difference between Coil’s honesty and overtness versus the squeamishness they faced.
Certainly, this was more down to discomfort with the topic of sex or a desire not to typecast queer individuals, rather than untoward motives, but the effect was to not acknowledge the creative impact of queerness within Coil. There was no ‘outing’ of Coil, nor a celebratory coming out, because they were simply calmly and contentedly gay in a way public figures were not meant to be during the ’80s or, indeed, the ’90s. Their music featured neither the de-gendered lyricism nor the acceptable wink of campness that came with Freddie Mercury or Elton John; nor did they allow themselves to be corralled in the disco dancefloor space like much of what was deemed the acceptable face of gay nightlife and music. Balance and Christopherson rejected the demand that they either embrace performative homosexuality or remain discreet and closeted.
In the ’80s, with grotesque homophobia daily fodder for British tabloids, in which the British government was actively colluding with bigots to legislate in ways that insisted homosexuality and paedophilia were synonymous, it was perhaps unsurprising that early interviews averted their gaze from Coil’s homosexuality. This was usually done either by quoting “the accumulation of male sexual energy” phrase from the How to Destroy Angels EP’s liner notes without comment on its overtly queer significance or by making reference to ‘sexual extremity’ as a euphemism obviously meaning ‘gay sex’ to those in the know, but veiled because this was a society that deemed ‘it ‘gay sex’ a swearword to be censored.
It’s readily forgotten that the decriminalisation of gay sex in the UK in 1967 only permitted such acts between men over the age of 21. This meant that normal adult relationships between homosexuals, the normal experiences that anyone who had come of age would experience, were criminal. It was only in 2001 that the age for homosexual and heterosexual sex was finally aligned. Balance and Christopherson lived the majority of their lives in a climate where their love was considered something abnormal.
