biography of a kiss

Posted by Phil Hine in Pagan, Queer  |  February 14th 2019  |  About poster:

When you kissed me, my world turned around.

1986. I’d come down for a coven meeting, but I don’t remember the ritual. I just remember the kiss. You walked me to the station but I don’t recall the conversation. I just remember the kiss. As I boarded the train, you reached up, threw your arms about me, and kissed me. No gentle peck on the cheek, it was full-on lips to lips. That kiss turned my world around.

You took your time, as though it was the most natural, the most normal thing in the world. As though the other people on the platform, on the train, weren’t there. Or didn’t matter. And whilst the station was not exactly heaving, it was not empty either.

It was a scene familiar from a thousand movies and tv shows – the parting of lovers. A script I never thought I could participate in, at least not with another man. We were not lovers – but that first public kiss, in the warmth and heat of a summer’s day, turned my world around.

I sat on the train. It pulled out of the station. There was a guy sitting opposite me, his eyes wide as saucers like he couldn’t believe what he’d just witnessed. The whole journey back he kept glancing at me, and I reveled in his shock. And the funny thing was, as it turned out, this guy was at the same college I was attending in York – albeit in a different department, and for the next few weeks, I kept catching him staring at me in horrified – or perhaps jealous – fascination.

I’d grown up kissing other boys. In school, playing at “Stingray” I usually got to play the part of Aqua Marina, the silent mermaid, which gave plenty of room for kissing. It seemed natural, until one day it wasn’t, and the kissing stopped, and the name-calling began. I came out to my parents at age 21, to have the whole thing wrapped in a blanket of frozen silence. I’d shared furtive fumblings in the darkness of clubs and alleyways; explored the fringes of polymorphous pleasures but was still not confident or comfortable with my self and my desires as they always seemed to escape or confound any attempt at being this or being that kind of person. I certainly wasn’t “out” to most of my friends, although I suspect some of them were more aware than I supposed. Most of my friends, at that time, were occultists of one kind or another, and I was just beginning to get angry about the sweeping generalizations that were everywhere at that time – the “we don’t want any kinks in our circle ho ho ho” kind of comments or the flat declarations that anyone who was gay, lesbian or bisexual “couldn’t be involved in magic”. I knew there was a gay world separate to the occult – I just didn’t feel ready to be part of it. I hid and sought consolation in esoteric obsessions and fantasies of power.

But I remember the kiss. And that chance meeting, after 25 years of distance, brought it back. So I just wanted to acknowledge that. Because when you kissed me that morning, my world turned around.

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