Off The Fence: Party Poppers on the Heath

And we celebrate Gilbert & George

Dear Readers,

Good morning – for once – and welcome to Off The Fence, a chirpy newsletter from The Fence magazine. Issue 23 is very much in production, in conjunction with Studio Mathias Clottu. We have a staggeringly stellar line-up this time around, not just among our writers, but the artists doodling on our pages – more soon.

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This week’s Off The Fence is brought to you amid garlands of lavender. We’ve got an elegy for Skype and Gilbert & George making an arse out of themselves. But first, like a room full of Jane McDonalds, we’re going cruising.

Let’s Go Outside

‘CRUISING FOR SEX?’, asked the posters stapled to trees around Hampstead Heath last month. ‘HOMOSEXUALITY IS LEGAL. USE A HOOK UP APP LIKE GRINDR OR SNIFFIES & GET A ROOM.’

Homosexuality certainly is legal – and so, under the right circumstances, is sex in public. But erecting posters on Hampstead Heath? Well, as per the 47 bylaws governing Hampstead Heath laid out by the City of London Corporation, the medieval entity which governs the Heath’s 800 acres: that’s just not on.

The posters were removed within the day, with the anonymous flyposterer’s call for ‘DOG WALKERS & RESIDENTS’ to ‘TAKE BACK WEST HEATH’ sparking reproach among horny arboreal gays and their myriad allies. Cruising has been happening on Hampstead Heath for at least two centuries, after all: do dog walkers have a stronger historical claim for ‘taking back’ the Heath than those who use it for sex?

So it was that, this Sunday afternoon, 40 men, femmes and thems – and a number of police officers – assembled at Jack Straw’s Castle to ‘officially re-open’ the area as a cruising ground. The Castle, now a luxury series of apartments, was once a public house, featuring in the narrative of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It stands at the highest point in inner London, opposite a Georgian mansion – called, conveniently, Heath House – that has been shrouded in scaffolding for over 20 years. The property’s Saudi Arabian owners have been unable to sell the demesne at an acceptable price.

Gay sex on Hampstead Heath mostly happens in an area of dense woodland far from the runners, buggies and day-trippers. It takes place at all hours, but reaches its peak after dark around the Fuck Tree: a louchely reclined, living tree that offers a natural surface against which you can lean while getting fucked in the ass, or what have you.

To mark the Heath’s re-dedication to queer sex, the organisers brought painted banners, a loudspeaker, hundreds of condoms for distribution and even a ribbon to be symbolically cut. They did not, however, bring any scissors, so in the event ‘The Angel of the Heath’ – a very glam lesbian who strutted in late wearing a purple jumpsuit and wings – used a lighter to do the job.

The protestors I spoke to stressed that cruising happened on a proportionally tiny section of the Heath and that it wasn’t hurting anybody.

‘This is our heritage,’ one of the organisers told me. ‘And the British are very keen on heritage.’

No one had much of a guess as to who had put up the signs.

During the re-opening ceremony, a speaker contrasted sex among the foliage with chemsex, a type of group sexual encounter usually organised via Grindr and generally held in apartments under the influence of GHB, mephedrone or crystal meth.

‘The last thing that we need is to take away the face-to-face interaction of coming out in the sunshine like we're all doing today and meeting each other in real life,’ they said. ‘That's like a lifeline for some people. It's important. We need that.

‘Not to say it doesn’t go on on the Heath, but at least you’re fucking outside.’

The event was planned by longstanding HIV/AIDS activist group Act Up London and This Is My Culture, a collective best known for the eponymous party they throw on the Heath each year to mark the birthday of its most famous cruiser, George Michael. The group take their name from an encounter Michael had with a News of the World photographer while out walking the park: ‘Are you gay?’, Michael recounted asking the paparazzo in 2007. ‘No? Then fuck off – this is my culture!’

The popstar loomed large at Sunday’s event. Symbolic re-opening complete, the crowd began a march down toward the Fuck Tree while the loudspeaker flared up with Freedom! ‘90 – incurring the immediate displeasure of the five Hampstead Heath Constabulary officers then in attendance.

‘You can’t play music,’ they instructed, while insisting they were sympathetic to the viewpoints being advocated. After some haggling the music was turned off.

‘It’s fine, we’ll just sing!’ called out one marcher.

‘You’re not allowed to sing.’

This state of affairs lasted until the cart carrying the speaker was far enough in front of the officers that it could be turned on again.

As the group proceeded, they took a route partly encircling the cruising zone, taping up new posters that read ‘This is a cruising ground. Enjoy yourself.’ These, too, were immediately taken down by passing cops.

The police presence grew weightier with the arrival of three Met officers shortly before the march got going. ‘All of these crimes happening – some of them by their own members – and they're policing a walk in the park!,’ said one organiser.

The marchers, carrying banners with slogans such as ‘The Sodomites Walk,’ ‘Let’s Go Outside’ and ‘Take Me To The Fuck Tree’, smiled and greeted the assorted families and strollers as they went by.

‘Lovely day for a walk!’, said one marcher.

‘It is!’ responded a mother with a pushchair.

This is not to say everyone was thrilled: most passers-by looked either curious, baffled or annoyed that the footpath had been taken up. But there were a few shouts of support, and I heard no umbrage voiced.

Once assembled at the broad clearing around the Fuck Tree the organisers began a hazily-planned game they dubbed ‘Whose Bum is it Anyway?’. The precise rules changed between rounds, but the central challenge was that a person in a blindfold was given a bum to feel (‘ten seconds, no entering’) and then asked to pick its owner out of a lineup.

One of the Hampstead officers – the Met had shuffled off after ten minutes – approached from the treeline as the game was about to begin to warn players they were at risk of committing an offence. If any passers-by were offended by seeing the bums, he said, the bum-displayers could be prosecuted.

This is the same legal situation under which cruising itself is permissible: sex in public is allowed as long as there is no intent to alarm anyone and no one likely to take offence sees it. (This does not apply in public bathrooms, where sex is always illegal.)

So the organisers called out to the clearing: ‘Will any of you be offended by this?’

None of the marchers, nor the handful of public onlookers at the margins, raised a complaint. In both rounds of the game I watched, the correct bum was guessed on the first try.

From there, the event devolved into a party. I didn’t see any of the attendees slink off into the bushes to indulge in the acts under dispute, but it seems affairs continued as they have done for centuries.

‘That was an interesting afternoon!’ one user wrote on a popular cruising forum late on Sunday.

‘Apparently there was a bit of a standoff between the police and the organised walk at midday.’

But by the time they had visited a few hours later, they wrote, order was restored.

‘A party was going on by the Fuck Tree and it was busy. I did 3 loads 😜😜😜.’

Bron ‘King’ Maher is on TWFKA Twitter and its discourse-driving successor, Bluesky.

Hello, Can You Hear Me?

This week we got the sad news that Skype was to shut its whimsically bubble-fonted window one last time. It’s been a torrid few years for the former world leader in videoconferencing. To be honest, that’s putting it mildly. It has, in fact, been nothing less than a scintillating marvel of failure.

How, precisely, did the company which had been doing videoconferencing since 2003 – and was so ubiquitous in the culture that it was listed as a verb by the Oxford English Dictionary by 2014 – fumble the bag at precisely the same time that all other communication was made illegal?

As is often the case with the 21^st century tech landscape, this intriguing question has a very boring, very familiar answer: it was bought by a big company who wrecked it for stupid reasons. In this case it was Microsoft, who hollowed out to make way for their other products, which were also terrible, and thus were completely outpaced by Zoom during the COVID pandemic, which was a terrible economic environment for everyone except those people whose business profits from enabling people to work from home.

And so, Skype will soon live on solely as a salutary tale of the rot economy that tramples through every corner of our lives, one that will likely be studied by GCSE Business students for the rest of time. For now, however, we permit ourselves to raise a toast to the most baffling bag collapse of all time. To Skype, the Pete Best of videoconferencing.

Insider? I Hardly Know Her!

Some of the best pieces published in The Fence over the years have been fantastically written, salaciously detailed insider pieces from a smorgasbord of industries not often represented in journalism (and thus, ones whose secrets are rarely revealed). We've heard from a probation officer revealing the grim nature of post-prison life and from a publishing industry worker bee forced to engage with Russell Brand at the height of his vile booky-wook aspirations. In our upcoming issue we have a fantastic piece from a sex worker navigating the British class system.

And still, we hunger for more. If you'd like to write an anonymous article telling us what it's like working in an industry we've never covered before, please do that. Email editorial@the-fence.com and we’ll do the rest.

Life of Grimes

As a lonely teenager in rural Ireland, the writer Gary Grimes invented for himself another life; one squinted at through the lens of the Big Brother eye. He became – there is no other term for it – a veritable forum prodigy, a posting svengali. Writing on the BB forums in the days of the early social media era internet, Gary re-imagined himself as a 17-year-old transplant from New York to London with a stack of insights and strident opinions about the Channel 4 behemoth. Until the older brother of one of his 11-year-old classmates from his Sligo secondary school stepped onto the site. Read his catfishing saga in Issue 22 of The Fence, which is online too and has just been celebrated by our friends across the water at Longreads.

In Case You Missed It

Who is responsible for Kemi Badenoch?

Imogen West-Knights hobos around California for the FT.

Zadie Smith dissects Trump’s AI Gaza video.

One from the archives: Richard Stratton interviews ‘Bonecruncher’, the most terrifying guard at America’s deadliest prison.

John Phipps hangs out on a Honduran island with Silicon Valley’s favourite economist.

The cannabis farm scandal: Sirin Kale reports on a letting agency that allowed itself to be shrouded in smoke.

And Finally

The artists, Gilbert and George, are now both in their eighties, and are at the apex of the cultural establishment. (You might even say that they have made their version of ‘whose bum is it anyway?’ more lucrative.)

Their Instagram account is pumping out the classics, and in this interview from 2008, you can watch George sonorously declare ‘we don’t have a kitchen because it is against our religion.’

Regrettably, the best G & G docu available online is the work of Alan Yentob, and can be seen here.

We’re sure that some of our readers will have had some memorable encounters with this pair of naughty geriatric boys. If you’ve met them out and about, do drop us a line.

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That’s it for this week, if you enjoyed it please drop us a ‘like’ and a comment below. And if you’d like to speak to us regarding an order, you can do so at support@the-fence.com. Spring is very much here and we hope you’re all enjoying it. Much to look forward to.

All the best,

TF