Interview with Bob Cant
Q1: Patricia McCaw
Q2: Ellen Galford
A: Bob Cant
7 March 2005
Remember When Project Office, 14 Forth Street, Edinburgh
Patricia: The first time I met you was with your book and I was just trying to remember when that was.
Bob: Footsteps and Witnesses came out in '93.
Patricia: That's '93. Because I remember the launch and I remember it was the first time I had really come across or seen Edwin Morgan. He did a reading and I was very taken by this and thought 'he's a name to watch'. And since then I have become a total fan and absolutely adore him and he's a great hero in my life. But, obviously, the personal experience with Rhona, so that was '93.
Bob: He was a wonderful person to interview, just wonderful. Well, I'm sure you know what transcribing is like, what a nightmare it is! With him, he spoke in this beautiful language that just went straight on to the page. There were no 'ums' and 'aws' and grunts or anything like that. He just flowed out beautifully. I was quite amazed.
Patricia: I can well imagine. What was it that motivated you to do that book at that time?
Bob: Because I'd lived away from Scotland from really the late '60s until 1990, so most of my gay life was not Scottish, and I came back to Scotland in 1990. One of the reasons I came back was because I had started to see plays by Clyde Unity Theatre.
Patricia: Yes, John Binns
Bob: That's right.
Patricia: Binnie, Binnie.
Bob: And that was a really important influence on me in terms of seeing plays where people were both Scottish and gay. So I don't know exactly what I was expecting to do when I came back to Edinburgh in 1990, but I was very conscious of being gay and Scots in a way that I hadn't been for quite a long time. And then I'd done a book in London called Radical Records which was interviewing people who had been involved in lesbian and gay politics across the UK, but I noticed when I came back that there was no oral history book in Scotland and there didn't seem to be any signs of one being produced at that point. So I approached Polygon because they had done a book of articles - which was edited by somebody, Toni Davidson - and it was lesbian and gay people writing about whatever they wanted to write about: sometimes it was poems, sometimes it was autobiographical, sometimes it was other things. So I knew there was probably a market there as well as an audience and I approached Polygon because they were the ones who had produced the Toni Davidson book. So, it was a way of giving people a chance across Scotland to talk about being both gay and' first of all it was gay and Scots and then it became gay and in Scotland, really, because there were a number of people who had been born elsewhere, who were what some people would try and call 'not real Scots'. Somebody said to me 'It's a shame you had to have those folk in your book, they'd not been real Scots.'
Patricia: Ah! [laughter] So much for us, Scots by formation.
Bob: Yeah, the great inclusive Scotland. But, anyway, I suppose I didn't have very clear aims and objectives worked out, but when I began to do it I realised that really there were people who had very important things to say who had lived in Scotland for years and years.
Patricia: One of the things I do remember about Edwin Morgan was that he himself found it very hard to talk about his own sexuality for many, many, many years despite being in what one would have imagined being a friendly, liberal, intellectual, middle-class environment. And, contrasting that with some other people in the arts world, theatrical world, who feel that they were always able to be open about their sexuality. So even the arts itself seems to be very diverse in its acceptance. Have you any thoughts on that?
Bob: But I'm not sure that arts people in Scotland were really very open about their sexuality. I can think of a number of people I knew - not famous actors, but people who were involved in the theatre - who you might discover that they were gay at a party at 2am on a Sunday morning when they had drunk eight pints of heavy and 14 whiskies or something like that. There was an awful lot of' I don't know whether it was self loathing or desire to conceal, anyway, and so they finally would tell you things like 'of course everybody knows', but really only everybody knew when they began to behave badly.
Patricia: And this was in the early '90s?
Bob: That is in the early '90s, but also it goes back further than that.
Patricia: Would you say that that's changed? That now, 10, 12 years down the road, would you say that people, particularly the arts communities, are able to'?
Bob: I think so, I think so, yes.
Patricia: Do you see a big difference between Edinburgh and London then in its approach to'
Bob: Sorry, can I go back to the arts thing. I think one of the things that Edwin Morgan's experience illustrates is the difficulty there is in Scotland about words and even somebody like him, who is a wordsmith, a major, one of the most articulate people I would say in Scotland, still didn't have either the wherewithal or the courage or whatever to actually use words to talk about his sexuality openly until he was 70. That thing about words is a real Scottish thing: there are not words that people have. I've just been up in Angus at my brother's Silver Wedding, which wasn't preparation for this consciously, but it was just very interesting seeing people that I hadn't seen for 25 years. And that whole thing about' It is now known in that group that I am gay, but nobody, nobody said anything at all. And people had met an ex-partner of mine and nobody said 'how is he?' or anything like that at all. And that's not because they're nasty people, it's just because of that whole thing about there weren't words that you could use to talk about your sexuality. And I was thinking, too, when I was up there, that it's the same about illnesses: people on the East of Scotland, anyway, where I come from, don't use words for illnesses. So there was a woman I knew from that circle of people who were at the Silver Wedding celebration who is now dead. She died, she becomes very ill in her 20s not long after she was married, and folk would say 'Awful shame about Louise; terrible'. And I never knew what it was until, eventually, I realised that it was MS. And nobody could actually say 'She has MS'. I don't know what the explanation for that is, but it was the same with sexuality: we didn't have words. It's just amazing, too, when you think that somebody like Edwin Morgan didn't have words either to talk about his sexuality.
Patricia: Certainly makes you think we're very tongue tied, to say the very least. I really meant about London. Obviously, you can come back and forth to some extent, because your family are here, but you've lived in London previously and then you went back to London. Are there differences in the general trend towards a more open approach to sexuality? Do you see any differences, particularly through the media or through local arts organisations?
Bob: It's really difficult because my sense is now that there's much more of a politics about sexuality in Scotland than there is in London. There's groups like Stonewall and Outrage that are doing things, but these really have very, very small constituencies or support. And most people - big generalisation - but most people seem to just get on with their lives in a way which in one way is great but in another way it's actually quite complacent: there's no exhibition of awareness about how they come to be able to live their lives that they are now living. And when I come back to Scotland, maybe it's the people I know, but I sense that there's more of a politics of some level.
Patricia: Politics is the thing that can unite a lot of different communities. Would you say that there's a sense of one gay community or a whole number of different communities?
Bob: It's difficult because I think' I'm a bit reluctant to answer about now. But, certainly in the '90s, I thought that there were very strong pressures in Edinburgh to behave in a particular way, certainly as a gay man. There were some people who were in opposition to that kind of pressure, people who earned 10s and 10s of thousands a week as advocates, and they went to the New Town Bar on a Saturday evening and they - although they were wearing different clothes - they were still talking in the same power-tripping way. And then there were other places where this strong opposition to that way of behaving'
Patricia: What would be interesting to know is if they felt they encountered the same problems, if the advocate encountered the same problems, or the theatre director, compared with the man in the street: all of them are gay, but do they experience a similar sort of discrimination? I don't know.
Bob: I don't know how they perceived it. And I think some of them didn't even like to acknowledge that they experienced any discrimination at all, because they were successful white Edinburgh men with flats in the New Town, and I don't know how much they would have had things in common with youths from Muirhouse or Westerhailes. I'm really speaking from outside that sort of circle.
Patricia: I spoke to somebody who felt that they didn't have a lot of problems because they were in a pretty privileged position. But this person also said that the one thing - and there was a great deal of regret, I felt, behind it - that made him sad was that you didn't see two men, like middle- class men, going down Lothian Road hand-in-hand, or really any man, and that still seems to be the bottom line.
Bob: That's right.
Patricia: That the public isn't quite ready for public manifestations.
Bob: And I remember the first Pride march in '95. There were a lot of people I knew who I thought were out, but they were on the pavement waiting to see how it went. And I'm not talking about these mythical advocates in the New Town, whom I clearly don't like very much, but I'm just talking about people I knew who were just waiting to see how it went. And then there was a much bigger crowd of people, if I remember rightly, at the Meadows than there had been in Broughton Street. So I think there was still strong signs of nervousness about being seen.
Patricia: Do you think that's still around, some degree of internalised fear?
Bob: I'm sure it is.
Patricia: Can you see that ever disappearing completely?
Bob: I don't know.
Patricia: Do you think legislation's the answer?
Bob: No, no. Legislation alone is not the answer. While I have problems with the New Labour government, they have introduced an amazing raft of legislation to remove forms of discrimination from lesbian and gay people and transgender people as well - and that's phenomenal. But the whole business of how you make that legislation work and how you make it meaningful is up to lesbians and gay men themselves - and that requires different strengths in terms of challenging particular behaviour, say by your employer, or taking people to court, or just living a more open life.
Patricia: What do you think about it, the Civil Partnership Bill, what do you think about that?
Bob: I think it's a good thing. I find it very difficult because, coming from the GLF [Gay Liberation Front] generation, I still have this idea that marriage is something that is bourgeois, patriarchal trap, all that kind of stuff, so I would never have made that a prime activity for movement for change. And I don't know other people who did either. I know that people were interested in it, but it wasn't something that seemed to drive people that I knew. I go to Spain quite a lot and it's interesting there since'
Patricia: Barcelona?
Bob: No, but I've been. I'm more a kind of Madrid, Valencia, Alicante person.
Patricia: Sounds good to me. Sorry, you were saying?
Bob: And when the socialist government was elected last year - this is an amazing thing in terms of sexual politics and particularly about violence against women - they really tackled it in a big way. I don't know if they got it right at all kinds of levels - the police, legislature, education - but both with violence against women and with their support for gay marriage, not civil unions, actually marriage. There, that's to do with the role of the church. And the church before that election had said a terrible thing: they said that women who experienced violence were suffering the effects of the '60s [gasps] and if it hadn't been for the '60s there would not have been, there wouldn't have been, any violence at all.
Patricia: Dearie me!
Bob: And they also have people who go out and compare gay people with animals, which happened here in the '70s, but they do that in Spain. In Spain, I can understand in a way why there's a gay marriage thing because it's challenging this big institution, and I think that the marriage thing will go through, but it might even be that it's watered down to a civil union partnership, but I don't think it will be. In the UK, I'm not really sure what the drive is.
Patricia: It's maybe even its symbolic equality. If I can just pop in an observation of my own for a moment. Three years ago I went on this cycling holiday on my own in Holland and they were all heterosexual couples on the trip. We stayed on a boat at night; lovely people, various countries, very nice. Lorna wasn't able to come. Anyway, it was all terribly heterosexual. And when we got to Haarlem, cycled to Haarlem, people were going down to the SQA and down to the town hall and I said 'What are you doing?' And they said 'Oh yes, oh look, somebody there throwing bouquets, there's a marriage going on down there!' And I thought 'Well, I'm damned sure I'm not going down to see another pair of heterosexual people getting married.' So I stayed resolutely by myself with a coffee on the table. Then, later, as we were riding out, I was cycling alongside this German guy who spoke very good English, and there was a Beetle car and it was just covered, festooned in roses; it was purple and there was all kind of things all round it. And I said 'Oh yeah, look at that car!' He said 'Oh yeah, that's the car belonging to the wedding that was down there. Great, it was smashing, great fun. Did you go?' And I said 'No.' And he said 'Yeah, it was terrific: two women.' Well, immediately, I nearly fell off the bike.
Bob: And you'd been sipping your coffee! [laughter]
Patricia: 'Two women?' I said. There was such surprise in my voice, I think he wrongly assumed I was heterosexual. And he said 'Oh yes, they're getting it done in Holland, but we've had it for ages in Germany.' [laugher] What it was about, it just made me feel so good, and I wished I had gone down and supported it because, even if only 10% of gay people do it, it's good. It's about symbols. Talking about symbols, Bob, there's two particular major institutions I'd like your thoughts on: one is, you mentioned the church, churches and religion and spirituality; and the other is the media.
Bob: Can I just go back slightly before we go on to that. Also having been a trade unionist, I'm really interested in practical things that people should be entitled to, so one of the things that interests me and disappoints me about the civil union partnership is the issue of pensions. I think pensions is just a minefield anyway, but people who have paid in all their working lives and then, as often happens with people like teachers, they die within two years of retiring and their contribution just vanishes.
Patricia: Well, I think that is being addressed, isn't it?
Bob: But what I mean - hard-nosed East of Scotland man, as opposed to somebody who's more interested in symbols - I'm just thinking 'Well, there are these real pension issues''
Patricia: No, no. And the pension would be a big thing for me. We did our Massachusetts marriage because of pensions, because I also come from that generation, the bourgeois, patriarchal. Marriage has always been about property. And you get older and you think about inheritance tax and pensions. Anyway, I'm not intervening, I'm just taking notes.
Bob: Could I have some more water, please.
Patricia: Oh God, aye! Just thinking about the church and its role in all of this and obviously that horrible Spanish church, have you noticed or are you aware of any changes in the both Anglican church and the Catholic church and the Presbyterian churches in Britain, generally, over the last while towards homosexuality? Do you think there's any changes there?
Bob: I've known somebody who's been involved in the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement for about 20 years and I just don't know how he can do it. It's just so horrendous: the brutality that they have to put up with and the abuse from other people who are Christians. Yes, I'm astonished that people can keep working in the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement in the face of all that abuse from other people whom they believe, with whom they are supposed to, share values of compassion and so on. I admire it in one way, but I really feel for them being worn down by that kind of abuse over the years.
Patricia: It feels to me like one of the saddest things, actually, the attitude of the churches, like in Scotland: [Cardinal] Winning before and now Keith O'Brien damning with feint praise as it were and...
Bob: And a lot of the damage seems to me to target the young people in terms of the kind of influence that they try to have in education and'
Patricia: There are some - I don't know if you are aware of many of the theological figures around Scotland - but there's one that is generally posited as a good person and that's Richard Holloway, ex-Bishop of Edinburgh, and he is. But I do remember when I came to Edinburgh, and even as little as 10 years ago, he brought out a book on relationships and had virtually nothing to say. He has completely changed since. And I actually wrote to him about it and he was very apologetic - this was just a couple of years ago - and said that he really felt that he had been guilty of the most appalling cowardice and insensitivity and that it had only been very latterly he'd regained his ground. And I thought, well, if somebody like that - just like you're saying about Edwin Morgan, unable to say that until he's 70 - it really is an uphill struggle.
Ellen: Could I ask, did you come from a Kirk background yourself?
Bob: Yes, yes. We were never terribly holy or evangelical but we were a middle-class family that went to church very regularly. My father was elder in the church and, I suppose, that's where I first learnt about my politics with a small 'p', because he was always complaining about the other elders and they were always plotting with one another and all that kind of stuff. It would not amaze me at all now, but it's one of the first things I remember in terms of seeing people who I thought were supposed to be working for a common cause were actually more interested in working against one another. So that was a strong influence on my upbringing. And when I was a teenager I did think about becoming a minister because we had a locum preacher in our church for a while who was connected with the Iona Community and this seemed to me to be' it was a very novel interpretation of Christianity that he brought and he seemed to be interested in dialogue with parishioners. So that Iona Community thing, although I was never involved in it, was an important influence on me. When I was at university I went to Quaker meetings for a while.
Ellen: Was that in Edinburgh?
Bob: No, I went to St Andrews and I found that very rewarding as well, but for me it was a transitional thing on the way out of Christianity into whatever it is I'm in now. Also, at that time - that was in the mid-'60s - the Quakers were producing publications about sex and about sexuality. I don't remember much discussion within the Quaker meetings that I went to, but you just felt that it was a friendly place in that sense because that was at the stage when I was just coming to think 'Oh dear me, why am I fancying this man again?' It would have been much more difficult to engage with these thoughts if I'd been a practising member of the Church of Scotland.
Patricia: Could I ask you a bit about your own coming out, if that's all right? People say that for them it was more of a process than a sudden lightning moment. What was it like for you?
Bob: It was absolutely a process. When I was at university - at university I didn't' a particularly great time at St Andrews, I didn't know it was the most Tory university in the world - it was a place where I was able to think about things and reflect about things in a way that I hadn't been able to do in Forfar. So, I did begin to think about my sexuality and there were all these publications that were coming out in the '60s that I was able to engage with. But what I did in 1965, like lots of people, lots of gay men anyway, I came to work in the Edinburgh Festival for - I was here for longer than the Festival, I must have been in Edinburgh for about six weeks - and there were all these people around who were - and I still wasn't using the word 'gay', that wasn't being widely used - who were homosexuals, so this was really quite exciting.
Patricia: People in Edinburgh, like well-known people?
Bob: No, it was more people who were around the Festival and I don't know that I actually met anybody who was from Edinburgh who came into this category. And so the first sexual experience I had was when an American' I could tell you the address of the place, Regent Terrace, where I first had sex. And I didn't come out as such then, but that was when I really began to come out to myself. This sexual activity which I'd had, which I'd enjoyed, and the world didn't come to an end - so that was very important for me. After university I went to work in Tanzania and I had lots of sexual experiences there with' never with white men, but always with African men, which is of course a very well known route, as I now know, but I didn't know at the time. People like EM Forster and all those people who went to the Third World or developing world to have sexual partners and I didn't know that I was fitting in to that pattern. The big moment really was in '71 when I was in London and I joined, I became involved in, GLF. I wouldn't agree to saying there was one moment when I came out, but that was the nearest that there was when I actually became involved in GLF and started telling people.
Ellen: Just for the transcription, we spell out Gay Liberation Front.
Bob: Oh yes, Gay Liberation Front, sorry.
Patricia: But that was a men and women organisation.
Bob: It was, especially at the time when I joined it. It had been set up in 1970, the year before I became involved, and there was still a lot of minority, but it was a big minority, of women involved when I became involved. But then, a few weeks after, there was the first row about relations between gay men and lesbian women.
Patricia: Oh, really? Sexual relations?
Bob: No, no, not sexual relations: how they had engaged with one another within GLF.
Patricia: You mentioned EM Forster, were there any other literary figures or any people alive, anyone when you were a young man that you thought 'well, he's gay' and maybe became a bit of a guiding star?
Bob: There was nobody.
Patricia: Was that because you didn't know of anybody?
Bob: It's partly because I didn't know anybody, of anybody...
Ellen: You mentioned that you'd started reading some publications in the '60s, what sort of things?
Bob: They were very much things like Quaker publications that would say things like - it's difficult to paraphrase them after all this time - but they were very much written in a heterosexual voice. They were not saying 'we are lesbian, gay homosexual or whatever, and this is what we feel', they were saying 'it is understandable that a certain percentage of the population will be homosexual' and kind of liberal
Patricia: Oh yeah, non-judgemental. But there was nothing, there was nobody, other than...
Bob: I remember getting a prize at school. You were allowed to choose what book and I chose something like The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. I couldn't understand it. I don't know what I was expecting: something very explicit, and there wasn't. I couldn't get it, I couldn't get it at all.
Patricia: So you were quite hungry for some sort of literature that you could...?
Bob: No, I don't know that I was. I think I was more hungry for experiences and just in knowing other people who were interested in similar experiences.
Patricia: Did you feel lonely?
Bob: In retrospect, yes, but I don't know that I did very much at the time. But I think, also in retrospect, I feel that certain things just didn't develop, like when I was a teenager I began to be aware of being attracted to other boys and I remember thinking that Adam Faith and Billy Fury were very nice, although I didn't have a word for saying 'I fancy them' or anything like that. And when I got the Oscar Wilde collection I wasn't' I'm not quite sure what I was looking for, but anyway it wasn't' literature wasn't really the route that I was going down; Oscar Wilde was a sort of stop off on the way towards more experiences that would help me to fulfil myself.
Patricia: So when you started to have relationships' How long were you in Tanzania?
Bob: Two and a half years.
Patricia: And then you came back to London?
Bob: Then I went back to London.
Patricia: And the social scene presumably was opening out there?
Bob: It was and there were bars which were not terribly open and friendly, but there were bars. By the time I came I was ready to come out; that was when GLF was thriving, so I don't know how much I was influenced by the general ambience of things or what but, for me, being quite a political person, it was quite good that GLF was around at the time when I was looking for other things. I have some friends who are slightly older than me and when they talk about the way they felt - they had to relate to the gay scene in London in the late '60s - I just find that very hard, very class- dominated, very secretive.
Patricia: What about role playing? Because I know in the lesbian version, the Gateway Club in London had butch/femme. You actually had to declare what you were at the door in the early '70s. Was there anything similar happening in the male scene?
Bob: Probably there was, but I missed it. [laughter] And also these friends, who are slightly older than me, told me about' when they came to London they were pretty young things in their early 20s and there were these older men who would take them under their wing, so it's my sense that that was much more of a common pattern than the butch/femme thing.
Patricia: One of the things I wonder about is if young people today have even more questions than people of your generation. Then it may have been 'am I gay or am I not?' Now, maybe for quite a few men and some women, maybe it's more a question of wondering 'do I want to behave like a woman? do I want to dress like a woman or man? do I want to become a woman?' Do you have any sense of increasing multiplicity of choices or queries or confusions for young people today? Did that ever occur to you, for example, or people you knew, wondering about their gender identity?
Bob: The thought of it went through my head, just as an intellectual curiosity really, and I didn't know anyone else who was particularly interested in' And, of course, in GLF there was all that radical cross-dressing which'
Ellen: Right, tell us about that. Was it approved of or disapproved of?
Bob: Oh, no, it was very much approved of.
Ellen: And what did it' can you describe what people dressed like?
Bob: Well, my sense was, at that first meeting I went to, I thought 'these men are dressed like their mothers'. [laughter]
Patricia: And was that a subsection or was that... when they were all dressed like their mothers, was that a wee subgroup or something?
Bob: No, it was more than that. There was quite a strong strand of that radical cross-dressing within the main GLF. I'll always remember this one a friend of mine went to. You know, in GLF there [were] lots of zaps and there were 12 of them went to Imperial College bar and Imperial College wouldn't allow women to drink in their bar. I don't know what the rule was, but women were not allowed to drink in the bar. So this friend of mine and five men all dressed up as women, and they dressed up as women so that they would look like women rather than as radical cross-dressing. And there were six women with them who dressed up as men. So they went into the bar, all 12 of them, and asked to be served and it freaked the bar staff out because: who were [they] throwing out? were they throwing out the women or were they throwing out the men who were dressed as women? And there were lots of things like that that questioned gender. And there was a commune in Bethnal Green called Bethnal Rouge.
Ellen: I've heard of Brixton Fairies, but I never heard of Bethnal Rouge.
Bob: Have you seen the book by Lisa Power about London GLF? It's called something like No Bath but Plenty of Bubbles. It's very good and it goes into lots of detail about things like Bethnal Rouge and so on. But being from the East of Scotland, I was always too scared to put on a frock. There was the... that theatre group - what were they called? - that Bette Bourne was involved in?
Patricia: Bloolips?
Bob: Bloolips, yeah. And that was a group of men who very much did that kind of radical cross-dressing and they were given a hard time, I think, at the end of 1971 within GLF by women who felt that they didn't like what they were trying to do in terms of cross-dressing. It wasn't a conscious intention of Bloolips to mock women, but the women experienced it in a different way.
Patricia: I think a lot of women then, too, also found men changing sex to become women difficult as well; they were very inclusive in their approach. Obviously, things seem to have moved on quite a bit. What would you say are the major changes that have happened in the last 10 years or so, socially or just culturally, that feel as if they have changed? Or have we just come back full circle again?
Bob: No, no. I'm sure we haven't done that. It's things like... there are kinds of openness that are now much more easy than they would have been. And the more I think about it' I mentioned earlier the first Scotland Pride in '95 with people standing on the street not sure whether to join in, but I think Pride is all over the UK. [It] is a really interesting indicator in terms of loads and loads of people go on Pride things now. And I think it's interesting the way the media seems to feel it has to have lesbian and gay characters in plays and soap operas, and they don't always deal with them very well but they are there, so there is a certain kind of cultural openness which wasn't there before. But I think that it's also the case that' I don't know what politics people who only benefit from that cultural openness have, but I was really struck by that case of the guy who used the new European anti-discrimination legislation just in the last few months. He worked in some kind of office, in a cleansing firm or something, anyway, and he went to court and he won a very large financial settlement because of the way that he had been treated as a gay man. And he said 'and I'm not at all political, but I just thought this was important to do' and I wonder if that's the trend: that people are not involved in politics, like my generation would have done, but they're not having it.
Patricia: As an individual they're going to make a stand because I think that then produces a certain respect in people. They mightn't always like it but they have to acknowledge it and respect it. So, is society growing up, beginning to accept everybody, do you think? Or what further changes would you like to see?
Bob: These are two different questions really.
Patricia: Okay, answer them in two different ways.
Bob: The level of abuse and intimidation, and the climate of intimidation that used to exist around homosexuality, I don't think exists now in the same way. But I think one of the things that does concern me is the whole issue of lack of mental health amongst whole ranges of lesbian and gay people... amongst gay men, certainly amongst some of the ones I interviewed for my PhD. They were getting to 30 and they weren't as attractive as they used to be and their hair was falling out, all that kind of stuff. And they were getting worried about 'So, what am I now? I'm 31. And I'm a gay man. So what does the future hold for me?' And there's loads of people who have really quite serious mental health problems, amongst men, who've lived on anti retroviral treatments with HIV for a long time; there's a lot of mental health problems there.
Patricia: Is that because of medical side effects?
Bob: Possibly, but I'm thinking more about the business of when you live with a terminal illness for a long time and maybe your treatment isn't great, but you' it's more the psychological response to the illness and the treatment than the side effects.
Patricia: I don't know if you've much contact with young people and mental health problems, Bob?
Bob: I'm aware of that. I don't, but I am aware of it, yes.
Patricia: Because certainly some of the research I've seen recently indicates there's still huge levels of bullying among kids at school and very high proportions of truancy and homophobic remarks from teachers or at the very least not being supportive.
Bob: And self-harming as well. I think all those kind of' And then for older people, I mean people who are older than 31, the kind of isolation that these people experience, possibly when they retire or when their partner dies, or they don't feel like going out any more and they maybe haven't come out terribly thoroughly. So I think there's all these kind of mental health issues around.
Patricia: Obviously, that's touching on' the minorities discrimination is one reason people can suffer mental health problems; but the other, perhaps at the lower end of mental health problems, people can feel unhappy because they just simply don't feel valued, the culture doesn't value them.
Bob: And I would say that's more - this is completely non-evidence based - but my perception is that it's more a matter of not feeling valued than the actual discrimination.
Patricia: I think that's right. Do you think it's just a question of time or does something else need to happen, more exposure, more...?
Bob: It's not necessarily a question of time. There has to be some kind of engagement or struggle or something. I'm a bit reluctant to use the word 'communities', but I think the communities have to engage more with these issues to make sure that they are addressed.
Ellen: Could I just question that reluctance to use the word 'communities', can you elaborate a bit on that?
Bob: Yeah. I think it's something I said for my PhD' that was really about networks and I think there are certain ways that you can measure networks in terms of practical support, emotional support and so on that people give one another. And I'm aware of networks that I belong to and other people belong to and so on, but as to a community I'm really not sure, really not sure about it. I understand for political reasons why it's useful to say to a funder or a politician 'the gay community', 'the lesbian community', 'the LGBT community will not tolerate this any longer', those kind of things, and that's a kind of language that you have to use in those situations. As to a community, that of which we are part, I'm not sure.
Ellen: Do you think there's a difference in that, in England and Scotland, in Edinburgh, London? Or do you think' would you be equally unsure in both places?
Bob: I would be equally unsure about both. I think there are differences: Edinburgh is a smaller city and it's in Scotland etc; whereas London is much more of a global city with people passing through all the time; but I don't think there's a community in one and not in the other. I think the transition that people go through in terms of their sexuality occurs in both places and the lack of collective support that people sometimes get and the way - we've all done this at some time - you meet someone and you become so involved in that person that you actually forget about the rest of the world around you and there isn't always a... yes, so you often withdraw from networks at times like that. I think I'm not convinced that there is a community.
Ellen: We were very careful when we phrased the logo for the project about recording the history of Edinburgh's LGBT communities: plural. We wanted to hedge our bets.
Patricia: What about people at the later end of life, is it becoming increasingly more confined to their houses? Obviously, people with HIV/AIDS are unable to get out and about is a case in point. But generally getting older? Certainly a number of women in Edinburgh who've moved closer to one another to form a geographical proximity so that they could literally go and assist each other like a sort of extended residential community...
Bob: I would call that social network, you see.
Patricia: That's a social network, yes, that's right!
Bob: Not wanting to be imperialist about this but...
Patricia: No, no. I mean'
Bob: That's very interesting if that happens, but I fear that for lots of people that it doesn't happen.
Patricia: You particularly need to make an effort to make it happen.
Bob: And then when they actually become infirm or housebound, they then find that the services that they might be eligible to access are not actually gay-friendly at all and they don't even have close friends who can advocate on their behalf and say 'this homophobic person is not suitable as a home help'.
Patricia: Indeed.
Bob: So that's a kind of worry.
Ellen: Is there an agenda that those of us who are old activists might think about as we get into the greying phase, the building of those networks?
Bob: There's a very interesting story done by Andrew, sorry, Brian Heaphy and Andrew Yipp about all their lesbian and gay people. They did it in two or three cities in England. They got funding from the ESRC to do it. That, again, addresses all those kinds of issues about the kind of support that they have and the kind of support that they gave one another.
Patricia: What? Age Concern, voluntary organisation Age Concern?
Bob: I know that Brian did a presentation at that big Age Concern conference, that was two or three years ago.
Ellen: And Age Concern has been agonising around these issues; they've been doing preliminary research.
Patricia: I have a feeling, and I may have got this completely wrong, they were thinking of setting up in London, in Lambeth or somewhere, some kind of housing association for gay people; I believe it was going to be called something like Polari.
Bob: It exists, yes. I don't know if it's actually a housing' It's not, I know it's not a housing association yet, but what they're trying to do is that the three boroughs that they chose where they're trying to drive forward social policy issues...
Patricia: Is there anything else or anything that you would like to talk about that we haven't covered?
Ellen: Could I ask a question? Just about the process: when you came back and gathered material, your experiences of putting together Footsteps and Witnesses at the time you did, how you found people, how people reacted to being asked, just the experience of making that book? For me, I experienced that as a snapshot of LGBT Scotland or particular strands of it at that moment, can you tell us something about what that was like for you?
Bob: One thing I regret about Footsteps and Witnesses is that I didn't respect that process more fully in the introduction, because it is interesting. Having done one book before, Radical Records, and having a bit of confidence about contacting people, that was quite important in terms of feeling okay about contacting people, but I put' I wrote letters to certainly Gay Scotland and I think Gay Times as well asking if anybody would be interested and I got one response - this was the guy from Forfar, that was the only one, amazingly a Forfar person puts an advert in and the one person who responds is also from Forfar.
Patricia: Incredible.
Bob: So what I started to do was' I just liked to use my contacts that I knew and just phone up people and say 'I'm doing this book, do you know anybody?' That kind of stuff. I remember, for example, there was somebody in the Gay Outdoor Club in the north of Scotland who was really helpful and put me in touch with a Gaelic speaker - I never met this guy, I might be able to remember his name - and he obviously thought it was a great idea. It was just things like that. I had to be really pushy and phone people up. Nobody was certainly rude to me. Some people were more helpful than others. And then a snowballing process of finding some people and then asking them if they knew anyone else. That kind of process really went on for a long time. I started doing the interviews before I knew how many people I would have in the book, but I was very keen to get a geographical spread as well as gender equalities. I think it's slightly more women than men, actually. I wanted it to be sort of 50/50. There were several people in Edinburgh, for example - probably would have been the case in Glasgow as well - who thought it was an Edinburgh book, couldn't understand why I wanted to have people from Arbroath or something like that. It was just like being quite assertive and using telephone numbers that were in the public domain and just contacting people that way.
Ellen: And how did people react about being asked to contribute? Were there a lot of people who said 'No, no, not me'?
Bob: There were a number of people who said no. One poor man in Aberdeen, who had only lived in Scotland for about three years, and he was desperate to be included and I really didn't think I could include him; so he was the one who was the most upset. I think one of the interesting things was about the names that were used because I said to people 'you don't have to use your own name in the book'. And there was several people in Footsteps and Witnesses who used other names, names other than their own, but there were four people who once they saw the transcripts actually said 'I think I will use my own name' and that was really very nice. They actually felt positive enough about seeing their own story to have people recognise them by name. There was one woman in particular who lived in Fife and she was a taxi driver. You remember that magazine called Harpies and Quines?
Patricia: Oh yes, [edited by] Lesley Riddoch; I'm sure I either wrote for it or had stuff reviewed in it. Yes, yes.
Bob: Anyway, this woman, taxi driver from Fife, and she was the one who spoke most clearly in this Scottish dialect. I guess that was one of the reasons why Harpies and Quines had chosen it. So they had most of the interview published on one page and the taxi driver was there one day and somebody says to her, somebody who had read it up 'I think I saw your life story in that book'. [laughter]
Patricia: At least it was someone different to talk about...
Bob: But that was very positive that four people felt strongly enough to go ahead on that basis because the next book I did' and invented identities about people moving away, there were a number of people who took part in interviews - I think three were in who took part in interviews - and saw the transcripts and they got all the right control over the transcripts, anonymity etc and then they withdrew. And that was upsetting. In one case it was someone who I' she was quite old and there were all kind of family issues there that maybe she hadn't engaged with enough, and I can understand it. But the other two were younger women who told me what their problem was and that was really disappointing that they felt that they couldn't go ahead. And none of that happened with Footsteps and Witnesses: once people had agreed to be interviewed, that was it.
Patricia: Are there other books you would like to do or research in this area?
Bob: I don't think this will happen. One of the things I had thought about doing after my PhD was something about lesbians and gay men and chronic illness and the kind of narratives that people use to manage and cope with chronic illness. So, at the moment, that's in the deep freeze or on the back burner or somewhere like that. People's narratives are very important to them. Lesbian and gay people's narratives play an important part in the management of their chronic illness and the Department of Health stuff on expert patient management really doesn't engage with diversity at all. They do have 'and Mrs Freeman came originally from Montserrat' that kind of stuff, but they don't actually go down that route of looking at narrative.
Patricia: So the story for you really is the important thing?
Bob: Oh yes, absolutely.
Patricia: I've just re-read Helen Keller's life story. I read it when I was young and I got it out of the library the other day there and it was the very short volume she wrote when she was 23 and she'd been working with Annie Sullivan for quite a few years, since the age of seven. There is this bit where she manages to say - because of course she can't speak as well with the deafness - she says the word 'water' and for her that was just the beginning of full consciousness, even though she clearly thought before that and was very bright, in fact, and sensed and communicated a little bit in sign language and that, but it was getting the words out. It was then that she felt she really came into consciousness and that was at the age of seven.
Ellen: Can I backtrack a little? Two things I would like to get a little bit of elaboration on: when you came to Edinburgh and, as you said, got round the Festival. Were you involved in production, actually working in the theatre? What was the scene around the Festival geographically where you met people?
Bob: I was a dishwasher at the Traverse Theatre which, at that stage, was in the Lawnmarket and was a tiny little place. I worked amazing hours, but my big shift was like 10.30 until 2.30 in the morning, which was good in terms of seeing productions in the evening because I wasn't working in the evening, so I could see lots of plays that way. But it's that kind of thing where you don't know how you do it, but you do it. You must be giving off vibes that more experienced people were picking up on, because a lot of people chatted me up, one of whom was - somebody whom I'm not going to name - was a famous English dancer who I remember coming in.
Patricia: A man?
Bob: A man. Into the kitchen which I was in. I was doing the washing up at about 3 o'clock or something, I was nearly finished, and there was this big bowl of peeled potatoes on the table. And I was so terrified of this out, camp gay man. He wasn't getting very far with me at all; I was very much the Forfar boy. [laughter] And he went up to this bowl of potatoes and he picked up a potato and he bit it and said 'I just love raw potatoes, don't you?' And he might as well have been a Martian! So, there were things around the Traverse. And I went to parties. I couldn't explain to you how I got to the parties where I met people. And also what I discovered, too, was that there were pubs on Rose Street which were... I don't know what they were like most of the year, but'
Ellen: The Kenilworth?
Bob: Yes, that wasn't one of the ones I first discovered.
Ellen: Paddy's?
Bob: Paddy's. I used Paddy's a lot because it seemed to be, in the late '60s, it was very much a place where Festival-goers who were gay would go. And I remember somebody telling me about the Abbotsford and I walked [in] and it was like going into a pub in Dundee: old men sitting there, who probably weren't old, probably about 40, drinking. I thought 'no, no'. They weren't speaking to each other at all, just very gloomy. But it was all about finding yourself in a situation. I got this job through a friend who was working as a cook at the Traverse and then I met lots of people just through social networks.
End of interview with Bob Cant
Addendum to interview with Bob Cant
I particularly remember going into Paddy's bar one night during the Festival in 1970. I'd been to see a show and this was towards the end of the evening. After a while I noticed this guy making eye contact with me. I didn't know how to respond and I actually left the pub. But I must have left in such a way that he knew I wanted him to follow me. I didn't know the term 'cruising' but that's what we were doing along Rose Street and into Hanover Street or somewhere like that. It soon became clear that we both wanted to have sex. But there was a problem about where to go: I was staying with an aunt in Blackhall, who was in her 70s, and I didn't want to go back there; he was up from Kent for the Festival with three of his mates, but they didn't know that he had sex with men. I don't know what word we used - probably not gay, might have been queer - but he suggested that we leap over the railings into one of those squares that you get in the New Town. I didn't like the idea of that, so we decided to make up a story and go back to my auntie's in Blackhall. He was a mixed race South African - they were called Cape Coloureds at that time - he was also a nurse. I had just not long come back from Tanzania and so we decided to go back to Blackhall and tell my aunt that he was someone I'd met while working in a hospital in Dar es Salaam. Dar es Salaam is a long way from South Africa but I guess our desire made us believe that it was a credible story. My aunt did believe us and was very hospitable. She made up a bed for him on the floor of my bedroom and as soon as we were left on our own we got into bed together. The next morning we had breakfast with my aunt. I can't remember exactly what I was feeling but they were really charming to each other. Afterwards she told me that she felt really pleased that I had felt able to bring my African friend to her house. She saw it as a compliment to her hospitality. He phoned me a couple of weeks later and I don't know why we didn't meet up again but we didn't. But the strange thing was that he was using a different name from the one he'd used when we were in Edinburgh together and I never found out which was the real one.
A few months later I was staying at my aunt's again for a weekend and someone from the newly formed gay movement appeared on the screen. I hadn't yet started going to GLF meetings but I was fascinated to hear what he said My aunt, however, was disgusted. She was going on about Sodom and Gomorrah and how this was the kind of thing which destroyed societies. It confirmed for me that it would probably not have been a good idea to have been more honest than I had been the previous year.
Looking back, what strikes me particularly is the lying - we lied to my aunt, he lied to me about one of his names - and really I had no big problem about it. I knew that I wanted to have sex with this man and that was what I felt I had to do. The alternatives were no sex or sex in a public place and this was at a time when all homosexual male sex was illegal in Scotland. I know that I would have got used to lying, if that's what was necessary, which is why coming out, which I first began to do in 1971, was so good for me - it saved me from a lifetime of lying.
End of addendum to interview with Bob Cant