Big Sexy Catharsis
OLIVER SPEER
“I’ve killed so many men, but I saved one,” Lydia Lunch says as she puts an arm around me to pose for a photograph at The Piper. She’s just torn through an incredible set with her band, Big Sexy Noise. Lydia’s energy is powerfully, seductively feminine, but she’s still out to break your balls.
The trio, consisting of Lydia on vocals, James Johnston on guitar and Ian White on drums, cranked out a tremendous primitive cacophony. Knocking back shots of whiskey, Lunch devours and torments the crowd. In Ballin’ the Jack, she intones, “It’s not what you got, it’s what you’re gonna get. Careful what you ask for, cause I’m just mad enough to give it.” And she absolutely does give it.
As a long time fan of Lunch I never expected to see her in my hometown. Especially now, twenty seven years on from our first encounter. In fact I never even expected to live this long. Perhaps then I should return to the start of this story.
On Tuesday May 25 1999, aged 21, I had a ticket to see my first Lydia Lunch gig. I also had an appointment at the sexual health clinic that day, a follow up for a scare I had when two condoms had ‘gone missing’ inside me during sex three months prior. The man I had sex with was HIV Positive, so I’d gone for a test immediately after. He had apparently lubricated the inside of the condoms to make them come off.
A DEATH SENTENCE
This was before the availability of PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis) which minimises the potential of infection after contact. My first blood test was negative but I was told to return three months later. Three months on, I was stunned to learn that I had contracted HIV. This was a death sentence as far as I knew. I was in such a daze that at first I wondered if I should go to see the show that night.
Lydia’s poetry had been a great comfort in the run up to my diagnosis, in particular a tape a friend had given me of a 1988 spoken word performance titled Oral Fixation which ends with her screaming the words, “WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE A FUCKING BLOOD DISEASE?! WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE IN MY BLOOD?! IT’S IN MY BLOOD! IT’S IN MY FUCKING BLOOD!”
Returning from the clinic to my East London Uni bedroom, I blasted the tape at full volume and howled my eyes out, rocking back and forth. I could either stay there that night feeling sorry for myself or get out and experience the gig. What I needed was catharsis, and that was absolutely what I got.
Much of that night at The Garage in Highbury is a blur. But I hope I can evoke something of that night. I remember that I made it to the front of the stage where I clung to the barrier, weeping. Her band were bluesy and raucous with a screeching jazz saxophone. Lydia at the helm taunted the audience. Launching into the track Solo Mystico, a distinctly Spanish vibe set to bolero trumpet, she intoned,“In the beginning before they had invented god, there was simply woman. Some say the devil is a woman. If there’s a devil, no doubt she’s a woman.’
As the song progressed, her devilishness manifested itself. There I was, standing at the front, overwhelmed with emotion, black eyeliner and mascara streaking my cheeks with the constant flow of tears. “You see him there?” she declared, pointing right at me, “after the show, us women should drag him backstage and” – she then described a sexual act involving me and a broken-off chair leg. I was stunned and weirdly flattered.
Lydia’s subject matter often comes from a place of personal trauma and nihilistic rage with men as the frequent object of her disdain. This was very relatable to me: having long been a target of toxic masculinity, a certain amount of misandry was always a comfort. I remember, as a child, how my mother and her friends used to say “All men are bastards.” It was a disturbing thought, “But mummy, won’t I be a man when I grow up?” The reply was fateful, “You won’t be like them, Oliver, you’ll be different.”
After the show I wrote a little note on a piece of paper. “Dear Lydia, I’m the one at the front who was crying throughout your gig. I was diagnosed HIV positive today. Thank you for a powerful and memorable night.” I handed the note to a bouncer at the back door who took the note to her. Within moments she came out, took me by the wrist and pulled me backstage.
Half anticipating an encounter with a broken chair leg, I listened as she talked intensely. When her monologue had exhausted itself she said, “So fuck off kid, I’ve got to go,” then paused and added, “How d’ya get it then, was it drugs?”
TRAUMA INTO GOLD
“No, it was sex,” I replied, “the guy I had sex with lubricated the inside of condoms and they came off inside me.” Realising at this moment that I was gay, her demeanour started to soften. “It’s okay,” I said. “You can’t be expected to be everyone’s saviour.”
She grabbed me by the shoulders, looked straight into my eyes, shook me and said: “Save yourself! … SAVE YOURSELF!!!” At that we melted into a deep and comforting embrace and after planting several lipstick marks on my cheeks (which I kept for as long as possible) she sent me on my way, feeling somehow elevated. Much as Lydia’s songs embody the alchemical process that transforms trauma into gold, she left me feeling that my life could have meaning and purpose.
The following summer I was hospitalised with AIDS-defining complications that were later found to include tuberculosis and pneumonia. At this time, a doctor visited to let me know that I was very close to death and was within my rights to turn down the medication and effectively end my life. I was unaware that it was possible to make a full recovery from the state I was in, bedridden, skeletal, unable to walk or breathe properly; I remembered Lydia’s words and decided to do all I could to save myself. I looked back at my life, so brief and insignificant. I decided that if I were to live another few years, I would write a book and maybe even form a band.
LAZARUS LOVES AGAIN
In time, the nurses and doctors landed on effective tuberculosis and anti-retroviral medication and I went through what’s known as the Lazurus effect, where I transformed from a living skeleton to someone who was healthy, alive and walking again. I wrote that book and I formed my first band at the book launch, three years to the month after my discharge from hospital. So much of my fight-back stemmed from Lydia’s words and attitude. As Lydia says, you must “create your own universe.” I did. Thank you Lydia. Thank you.
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