“Then we watched Philadelphia” – Midland in conversation with artist and writer Huw Lemmey

To mark the release of his debut album, Fragments Of Us, Midland sits down with Bad Gays’ Huw Lemmey to discuss queer spaces, histories, otherness and togetherness

In December 2022, Midland (real name Harry Agius) touched down in Copenhagen, Denmark to play a four-hour set for local LGBTQ+ party Group Therapy and their World AIDS Day fundraiser. Taking to the decks, he opened with a soft, floating ambient work over which he layered a sample of David Wojnarowicz, influential gay New York writer and artist, speaking into his tape recorder, in 1989. 

At the time the recording was taken, Wojnarowicz was taking a road trip through the West Coast and the southwest of the USA. He had been diagnosed with HIV the year before. “Maybe people call things like this panic, but panic upsets me because it’s not that fucking simple – the idea of all this sensation being reduced to a word called panic is insulting,” he says in the emotional monologue. “I feel something in the pit of my stomach like it’s a rock – I don’t know if it’s anxiety, I don’t know if it’s something physical that’s real. Really, I just don’t want to fucking die.”

A fragment from the same sample features in track six, David’s Dream from Midland’s debut full-length album Fragments of Us, released on 4 October via his own label Graded. Across fifty minutes of fine-grained, emotionally rich electronic music, Midland pays homage and celebrates the queer voices and spaces that have shaped him. Crucially, the work foregrounds some of the most challenging periods of recent LGBTQ+ history, including the AIDS crisis and Section 28 – a piece of legislation passed in 1988 that prevented councils and schools promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality. These sound bites are a sharp reminder of the homophobic backdrop that many queer people grew up against, and of the resilience and community that formed in opposition to precisely these forces.

The surfacing of unvarnished queer (hi)stories is also core to the work of writer, critic and podcaster Huw Lemmey (a.k.a. Spitzenprodukte). Author of Chubz: The Demonization of My Working Arse – a horny fantasy fiction inspired by journalist Owen Jones – and the co-founder of the much-loved Bad Gays podcast, as well as co-author of the accompanying book, Lemmey’s work directly challenges the often clean, pleasing icons and hero narratives that dominate LGBTQ+ media and discourse. Agius and Lemmey first encountered each other a few years ago, staying in contact via an intermittent, pen-pal email relationship. 

To open up about their different-disciplined, yet complementary outlooks on art and queer culture, and to celebrate the release of the new album, we brought them together for a free-roaming conversation.

How did you first start coming in contact with each other, and what drew you to each other’s work?

Midland: I have a few mutual friends with Huw, including Ben UFO, and I’d been subscribed to his newsletter Utopian Drivel for a long time. I was in the process of getting into the nuts and bolts of writing the album and I reached out via email and we got talking. For me, it’s been really nice to talk with people who are engaging with gay life and our history, and the Bad Gays podcast has been a big accompaniment for my creative process over the last couple of years.

Huw Lemmey: That’s nice to hear. I knew Harry’s work through Ben UFO, but then he reached out and we had a few conversations. It was nice to have conversations with someone else who is producing stuff to do with the gay experience in creative ways. As someone who is writing and thinking about gay life in a way that isn’t purely factual or analytical, it was nice to have that interchange.

Harry, in your new album and 2022 Group Therapy set, you pay homage to some key artists and voices we lost to AIDS; and Huw, in your writing and podcast, you confront problematic LGBTQ+ figures. Why does exploring alternative histories and looking beyond sanitised queer narratives form such an important part of your work?

HL: To get down to the theory, I don’t regard homosexuality as a fixed, scientific thing. It’s a way of life that is cultivated and emerges from the existence of people who choose to live that life. What is a homosexual? Very simply, it is a man who has sex with men (MSM) or a woman who has sex with women (WSM). But that’s not it, it doesn’t explain what being gay is. It’s a slow accrual of meanings, values and experiences that people choose to associate and build on. That’s what I found so moving about your album, Harry – it focuses so much on homosexuality as moments of realisation, experience and living in your body as a gay person and how you connect to other gay people.

When we started the Bad Gays project, it was partly to talk about those other experiences that are less sanitised – that heterosexual-focused gay media doesn’t. There’s been an attempt over the past 50 years to try and find all that’s good in what’s gay, to justify our existence and fight for our rights. If you live in an abject social identity, you want to change that. But that identity does have very different, interesting other things going on, and a lot of that is created as the identity evolves – often by negative stuff. Bad Gays was an opportunity to talk about some of those dynamics, like people pulling a ladder up after them, [or how] masculinism was a desire to eradicate what’s feminine out of the homosexual identity as a sort of mode – there’s a lot of gay Nazis, for example, and their fascism is related to their sexuality. Those things are interesting because they’re intrinsic to the mesh of issues that make up what it is to be gay.

The first openly gay politician in the world was [Ernst Röhm], the leader of Hitler’s Brownshirts. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s fascinating because he regarded himself as so masculine that even the thought of having sex with a woman was disgusting to him. Some of that still exists within aspects of gay culture – the refusal of femininity, as a way of dealing with complicated emotions and how you fit into the world. So we started the project because we wanted to have these conversations. Because, in the last ten or 15 years as it’s become more acceptable to be LGBTQ+ by the mainstream, a lot of queer culture is being packaged and oriented towards the consumption of straight people.

Can you give some examples?

HL: The original Queer Eye on Bravo in the early 2000s. There were these five gay guys, and their job was to go into straight guys’ houses and make them acceptable to date women by giving them advice: this is how you cook for a date, this is how you do your hair properly, clean up your fucking house! It was really confrontational – they mocked these guys. They would go into the house and say: “How do you live like this?” and point out that bathrooms would have just a bar of soap. It was made for gay people and it was weirdly empowering. [Then] there was the repackaging of it, where they suddenly become almost sexless godmothers, and gay men become an aspect of the wellness industry and their lives are erased out of it. The confrontation that still exists between queer people and straight people is neutered because we don’t want our nice straight allies to feel too uncomfortable now.

M: The power dynamic shifted. These days, the joke between my friends is that it’s a lot harder to tell who’s straight and gay, because a lot of straight boys have moustaches now, or are fruitier, or are embracing camp. While I’m all here for masculinity to be softened, it feels like another way in which we have broken ground and been mocked for it relentlessly, only to have it slightly co-opted. One of the big realisations for me about being a gay man was there are all these stages to coming out. At the beginning, when I came out, I didn’t have any gay friends and I very much assimilated. I got married to my husband ten years ago, which happened for a number of reasons, but it was interesting to unpack why and realising that a lot of it was about validating our relationship for a heteronormative society.

I read this book called Gay Soul: Finding the Heart of Gay Spirit and Nature by Mark Thomson, which was a life-changing book. It was all these interviews with men in the 90s at the peak of the AIDS crisis, and one of the things that really resonated was this idea of the gay man performing the act of ‘the joker’, which is not about making jokes, but testing the fabrics of norms and societal expectations. 

How much did the memory and trauma of the AIDS crisis and Section 28 shape your generation and community? Do you feel that collective memory is being lost? Does that change how different generations relate to one another?

M: I’m 38, so the duality of the AIDS crisis and Section 28 shaped me in a huge way, but in silence. I didn’t even know about Section 28 until my late 20s, and didn’t understand the implications of it – not only for myself, but the gay people in my life growing up. There were definitely three or four gay teachers at my school, but it was never really spoken about and a big part of the album is filling that silence. One of the tracks deals with Section 28. I wanted it to be on the nose and force people to engage with this law that had been operating in the shadows.

HL: I’m the same age. I think there’s an interesting ten-year generation [differential] in the UK. I remember having a conversation with a gay guy ten years older than me, who said that I wasn’t part of the Section 28 generation. Section 28 was introduced in 1988, just when I was going to nursery, and ended in 2003, which was when I finished my A-Levels – it was my entire school career, so I’m exactly the Section 28 generation. The thing is, there was such activism when it was introduced that people who are older can regard that as the ‘real’ Section 28 generation. But there was still homophobia that was enforced in schools.

M: Though it ended in 2003, there was a huge hangover. In the same way that when homosexuality was legalised in 1967, it wasn’t just a magic curtain dropping. I think the hangover of Section 28 in education is still being unpacked today.

HL: For our generation, the time when we were probably becoming aware of our sexuality and maybe coming out, was after combination therapy [when the simultaneous use of multiple drugs to fight AIDS was approved] was introduced – after the idea that AIDS was implicitly a death sentence. In the same way, that information was well-known in the gay community. But If you were surrounded by straight people, the association of homosexuality with being a gay man with AIDS was super strong into the late 90s and 2000s.

M: There was no information. Even now, when you say: “Undetectable equals untransmittable” – [which is] when you can have sex unprotected sex with someone who’s HIV-positive – they’re like: “What?”. Even in the LGBTQ+ community, you might ask younger people if they’re on PrEP, and they say: “No, not yet”. There’s a kind of apathy, because it’s suddenly not a death sentence anymore.

HL: I think in our generation – as well as older gay men – there’s still a huge anxiety around sex because we came out of that, even though we know if you’re on PrEP, you’re safe. I came out at school, and all anyone said to me, even my mum – who’s very liberal about the whole thing – said: “You need to be safe.” I don’t think she would have said that to my brothers who are straight. Interestingly, during Section 28, I had a sex education class on homosexuality. 

I remember it clearly because the teacher said: “There are some men who have a woman’s soul inside a man’s body and some women who have a man’s soul inside their body – that’s what homosexuality is,” which is a sexology take from like the 1860s. Then we watched Philadelphia. I was already out at this time, so obviously everyone turned and looked at me – it was worse than having no sex education at all.

M: Funny you say that, because I had almost exactly the same experience. At that point I wasn’t out but had been outed without my knowledge, and we watched Philadelphia. It was like the room went dark and there was a spotlight on me. I stumbled out of that class completely punch drunk with not only what I’d seen, but how people were seeing me.

HL: There weren’t that many representations of gay men on screen.

M: No, it was Julian Clary and Graham Norton. For me, it created this fear of camp when I was growing up. When I look back at my early coming out, I would say to certain friends: “Oh, I’m not going to go to Pride.” Now, I take such pride in camp and the subversion of it. Like the irony and confidence of drag – it takes so much strength to drag up and go out. I think in our community there’s a mixture of people who think we don’t need to try any harder and we should be happy with what we’ve got, but then also people like Huw, who are not only challenging us to look at our history and where we are now, but keep moving forward and not accept this neutered, sanitised social position. I think connecting with my anger has been a huge part of my last three years, and people like David Wojnarowicz had this rage.

HL: Do you think that what turned you off about camp when you were younger was that rage? People say that what turns them off is that expression of femininity, which they don’t want to be attached to; but when you look at someone like Julian Clary, who manages to survive and be brave in an explicitly gay identity, it was with a sharp, targeted, progressive form of humour.

M: I thought it represented that femininity. But actually, it was incredibly pioneering, because it not only held up a mirror to straight society, but was attacking it in a way that was too advanced for the general public to actually engage with or understand.

HL: Like Julian Clary’s famous joke at the 1993 British Comedy Awards, which torpedoed his career. The whole set is like a graveyard of spooky gravestones, and he says to Jonathan Ross, who’s presenting it: “It’s very nice of you to recreate Hampstead Heath for me up here. As a matter of fact I’ve just been fisting Norman Lamont,” [who was then the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer] and the whole place erupts. It was a brilliant joke, so outrageous. But at the time, it was the height of the Tory ‘Back to Basics’ campaign, which was pushing Victorian morality, and a lot of the campaigning around Section 28 was extremely active. Gay men had been hypersexualised by the Tories as vectors of disease and sexual predators – a big part of Section 28 was that gay men were trying to convert your children, so to flip that round and hypersexualise a Conservative Minister was actually a super political act.

Given a lack of representation of LGBTQ+ people on screen and in culture, and how both of your works are potential entry points for younger people to tap into queer history, what were your own entry points?

M: My older brother is gay, and he’s 17 years older than me. He was living in London in the early 90s, and his partner was HIV positive. I spent a lot of time with him, his partner and his friends. But from then on, I didn’t really have any gay friends until 11 years ago when I met my partner. It was only through starting to play at queer parties and making friends that it felt like a huge trap door opening. I had a pretty awful time in my teens and ran away from my gay identity, so really, I had my brother then nothing until my late 20s.

HL: I think that’s a very common experience.

M: You come out and you’re that one gay friend in your friendship group. Sometimes you perform a role or just want to fit in. That’s why, when I came out, I said to my friend that I wasn’t going to Pride – it was justifying that yeah, I’m gay, but it doesn’t define me. I’m gay, but not gay like ‘them’. For so long, you pride yourself on not being gay like them and then you suddenly realise: “No, I’m so happy to be gay like them.” I used to say that if there was a red button that would turn me straight as a teenager, I would have pressed it. The horror of that now I look back on it.

HL: It goes back to what I was saying about homosexuality as a way of being that’s created, shared and passed down through culture. You can acknowledge that you like to have sex with men, but until you are given an entryway into what that actually means, it can be stifling to navigate. Traditionally, this was an oral culture and to me this is the real loss of gay bars – they were mixed generation spaces and there were a lot of freaks, because it was the only place you could go that was safe in your town, or the only place you could be tolerated by everyone else. When you’re in that period of life where you’re out there to have a good time, things maybe go wrong and you find yourself at the bar feeling a bit turbulent, and an older gay guy is there – they were transformative. He talks to you and introduces you to stuff. A lot of gay guys who are 21 years old on Grindr are not going to put themselves in a space with a 50-year-old gay guy, but that 50-year-old might pass down some important information.

I remember being at an extremely fun, extremely chaotic party. I was maybe 20, and I was still in the period of coming to understand a lot about my sexuality. There was a metal band playing in the living room and I went upstairs, sat on a sofa, and there were two guys fucking in front of me on a bed. This older gay guy was sat next to me and said: “Are you family?” As a way of asking if I am gay. I’d lost my mum a couple of years ago and had a difficult relationship with my family, so for someone to ask that was a way of feeling like I could belong. It got a lot of these things rolling for me.

M: Every time a queer space shuts is such a sadness, because when I was younger going to one was terrifying. It was too confronting and I’d also been imprinted with this idea that older gay men were inherently predatory. Now, [I think] that someone might want to just talk to you – they might also want to have sex with you, but both those things can exist and that’s fine. Whenever we go to a city nowadays, without fail we go to a gay bar or a bookshop and buy something, because they have to exist. And they are about having these transformative moments with strangers, who you might not even know their name. That’s what struck me so deeply about the AIDS crisis – when I spoke to [Horse Meat Disco’s] Luke Howard, he spoke about this bouncer at a gay bar who used to let him in for free, or tell him where the good parties were at, just sharing information. One day he turned up and wasn’t there, and someone said: “Oh, he died.” He didn’t even know his name, but he’d had such a big impact on him.

HL: And those people aren’t just passing down reassurances – when you go to a gay bar for the first time, you’re meeting people who have gone through things that no one else in your life has been through, like being bullied at school 20 years ago – but they’re also passing down a shared culture. I thought the fact that [secret gay language] polari was on your album was moving, because that’s a really interesting moment of a language that developed as a way of surviving, a way of having fun, and warning people of danger within those queer communities. It died out in the 80s and 90s, partly because of AIDS, but also because it became a bit naff and you didn’t want to be associated with the older generation. Now though, with the influence of American cultural imperialism, there is a shared queer language but it comes from the American Ball circuit, so it’s a very interesting moment. It’s strange to go to a northern gay bar near where I grew up in Carlisle, and everyone is talking like a trans woman in Harlem in 1982.

M: My friend Chris Cruse, who runs parties, created this website called Queer Maps, which is a map that slides [through time] and begins in LA with the very first known gay bar, and as you move along it populates with bars and meeting spots. Then it gets to the early 90s and all these venues drop off. You expect it to populate again, but then it hits app territory and drops off even more – that was shocking to me. I thought it was going to rise up, but it hasn’t, and that’s why I’m desperate to keep them alive.