Me, My Naked Ass and Leigh Bowery.

The designer Leigh Bowery was a harbinger of today's "queer" movement. I saw for myself the nihilism at the heart of that culture ...while being filmed for a sex scene in his flat.

I won’t be going to Tate Modern’s exhibition about the 1980s fashion designer Leigh Bowery. Not least because I have no desire to see my ass on a giant screen. Call me old-fashioned.

Excerpts from the film ‘Hail the New Puritan’ are apparently being shown on a loop at the exhibition. Whether these include the sex scene in which my youthful bottom looms into view I’m still unsure. I might have to call the Tate and ask if a huge arse makes an appearance. Given the exhibition is about Leigh Bowery I may have to be more specific.

Here’s Bowery being a knob. Literally.

I’ve decided to write about how I was filmed simulating sex in Leigh Bowery’s grimy council flat not because I want to wax lyrical about my butt. Gorgeous as it undeniably once was. I’m going on a cinematic excursion because Bowery is being touted as a pioneer of “queer” culture and while this kind of anachronism is usually bogus in his case the claim is true. Though not for the reasons his fanbois at the Tate Modern and elsewhere imagine.

Opponents of Queer Theory -and the movement influenced by it- often trace its origins to such and such abstruse essay or writer. I’ve done that myself many a time. Bowery however is a reminder that what is now called … “queer” ….draws on another source, perhaps the most important of all: the pathological behaviour of a minority of homosexual men.

Fuelled by rage, misogyny and contempt for the values that hold liberal societies together these men (and a few gay women) set out to destroy social norms and shock the public by celebrating obscenity. Bowery was banned from performing at clubs after he sprayed his own enema over an outraged audience. His sort of nihilism has driven “queer” identity ever since and I want to understand why.

Let me take you back then to the strange world of this deeply troubled man. A world of heroin, swastikas and a pervasive amorality that, had we only known it then, was a glimpse of a dystopian ‘queer’ future that was heading our way.