Queer and the city

Starbucks played Joni Mitchell; This Flight Tonight’, and I knew why I enjoyed queer city living!
Because you never know what the next song will be on Starbucks playlist. Or any coffee shop. That feels like living in the city, if you look for it then it can be unpredictable. For a June baby like me you don’t know whether your birthday month is going to be a Scottish sun month or a continuation of rain, soaking through your canvas Converse, determinedly trying to believe it is a summer month. It feels a bit like what retirement may be like.
I have always been someone who has cast more than a forward glance to my retirement. Worrying before the snow falls!
It was instilled in me as soon as I started work. A normative ideal that 40 years of white-collar work for the same place would offer a good pension with the outcome of a happy, content retirement in a suburban home with a hedge and driveway. Mind you, it was not always going to be white-collar office work. My Gran wished that I would become a mechanic because there would always be cars! I prefer looking at dashboards and the design of cars than at engines.
For 14 years I paid into a civil service pension plan and made additional contributions. Indeed I still pay into a pension plan. This is good for me because if you give me a £1 I will spend £1.50.
I do think that it is important to be independent if and when you retire but there are a few of us that don’t wish to retire completely. Something important to debate with yourself; where you see your senior years or third age, however you wish to define it, being lived!
Being gay and from a costal town I was not far away from a city that offered me a connection to the LGBT+ community. Initially pub/club based over the years different queer spaces have opened (and I have become older and realised that there are a plethora of other spaces to inhabit) and transcended the normative space that was offered in this city to the LGBT+ community. But how does a person decide to live their queer senior third age; city or town? An important question because it can contribute to your health and wellbeing in senior years. I find that it is important to think about my health and mind as I get older. I have no guarantee how long that will last, but I am free to live my life and will be very lucky to live to a good age.
When I go back to the country I feel very relaxed and have many friends who live in Ayrshire and around Scotland. Do I feel that I could live a rural life again after fourteen years of city life? I’m not sure I could. Maybe because I still feel relevant and the city feels relevant for me; a partnership.
I did think that as I aged i would come to a point when the city would be like the lyrics in the Abba song Tiger;
“The city is a jungle. You better take care…”
I do take care, but never feel out of my depths, drowning in anxiety of what may be round the corner. The city is much more accessible from the coast by rail or car, but there is nothing like having a 10 minute journey home or to have urban spaces and parks accessible from a short distance. Living away from the city can feel like losing the rhythm of how it functions.
Looking long term, could I see myself living back on the coast when I want to live a quieter life, when my disco dancing days are over and the city has become more intimidating and a young person’s game? Sometimes, though I see myself cutting a rug like Disco Sally at Studio 54.

I think this is because I have experienced city centre living. For a short period I lived in an area of Glasgow called Garnethill (not far from where I started writing this piece). It was an expensive rented flat but it had a parking space, easy access to work, the motorway and not too inconvenient for gentleman-caller-coffee-dates. As long as they didn’t drive! I never had any visitor permits for friends in the residents parking streets, let alone gentlemen callers.
The area is surrounded to the south by clubs/pubs, shops, coffee shops and cultural spaces. Not all queer spaces, but they offer a microcosm of queer Glasgow. After a night out it was a walk through hectic streets to a quieter residential space.
Surrounded by trees the block of flats felt like a peaceful urban space. It was while living here that I started to explore more queer spaces. If some in our society sees us as the ‘other’ (I know, I have been reading a lot of Simone de Beauvoir!) then I celebrate my difference and queer space.
Could I be the ‘other’ in a small town? There are small towns where everything is much more accessible than in the city, a smaller geographical area to cover to get to shops/supermarket/doctors. There is a thriving LGBT community either because they never needed to move away and found their habitus or became fatigued from a city that did not offer a fresh air perspective for their lives whence once it did.
Maybe it is the feeling that the people you meet in places like Garnethill are all a little bit queer. Deciding to stay in the urban village to live the best of their lives. If you have a small garden then what more do you need. The cost of renting or mortage is high and excludes a lot of people from experiencing this urban life, always under a constant threat of different types of gentrification or decay, or both as the decades kaleidoscope by.
Unlike a costal town, a city with an urban area like Garnethill may be queer friendly one minute and homogenous the next; edgy or dangerous. Sometimes you don’t want to know your neighbour that well and seek out some likeminded company to bathe in. Living in Garnethill I did not have far to go to get a different experience, all for the price of a coffee!
In a small town it can be difficult to be completely anonymous. Your history can be created as a short novella complete with shiny dust cover! Everyone is curious and some people wish for social interaction. In the city you can escape the gossip about stumbling home at 4am in the morning or the time someone threw stones at your window at 3am trying to get in. You can give shady looks to your neigbours because no one talks in the city…
I have a friend who lives in the Merchant City and have been encouraging them to fling their windows open to give adhoc performances to the current Merchant City Festival. They have not taken me on; even when I have offered to go around with a hat to collect the money for them!
In a town you would not make a coin with this kind of performance but probably have enough stones thrown at your window to make a garden rockery. Mind you, if you lived in other parts of this city you would end up with a few bricks, but I am sure there would be someone who could steampunk them into a Queernik lamp!
What is the normative queer thing to do? Live your days out in the city or retire, quiet but unbowed, to a town? Mostly and historically the habitus of the LGBT community has been to stay in an urban space, enveloped by a community created out of necessity. We have been the trailblazers for creating community in urban areas. Now more LGBT people move for a better life at the coast and create their own communities, have a garden to potter in and children the priority. This is all achievable in a city, but money is needed through good paying work or an inheritance from Grand Aunt Somebody-or-other that allows some decaying grandeur and to meet the cost of living.

I can’t know what my future holds, no matter how much I try and shape it. We are humans with existence. If I do move down to the coast maybe it will be by necessity and I will be thinking, “…turn this crazy bird around!”
If I stay and live in Garnethill again at an age where the hills are too much, well…I’m going to get cabs everywhere!
References
Mitchell, J. (1971) This Flight Tonight, Blue, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC.
Andersson, B. & Ulvaeus, B.(1976) Tiger, Arrival, Polar Music
