Dr. Don Milligan today still committed to fighting for a communist future in his book The Embrace of Capital

SIDE TWO

IT - Okay, yeah, just carry on as before....

DM - So, yeah the Amsterdam thing was full of tension and difficulty but it was also a great laugh as well. Quite an astonishing place and I must say as a Stalinist, catholic, working class boy from Kilburn the bath houses of Amsterdam rather shocked me. I thought, we're going to be punished for this (laughter) and some would say that we have been. That was all fascinating living....l mean quite apart from the fact that Amsterdam was a very beautiful city, an astonishing place from that point of view, it was also quite remarkable to me as a foreign cleaning worker which is what I was, cleaning hotels and so on, that the social attitudes of the place were remarkably liberal. One could be openly gay. I had never experienced anything like this before. It quite stunned me. At the same time as I was stunned by the sight of seeing black men led along the Warmerstraat? In chains because of the repression against the blacks in Amsterdam. So always there is this striking liberalism set against these amazing kinds of repression going on.

IT - So, after Amsterdam?

DM - After Amsterdam I came back to London. Of course I was pennies and propertyless and, you know, I had my typewriter and a duvet I think or something like that. My father had died in 1980 and l had to come back from Amsterdam to go to his funeral. I went back to Amsterdam again but then l came back over quite quickly because I had lost my job as a consequence of going to my father's funeral. There's another aspect to the liberalism of Amsterdam. So I was finding it quite difficult supporting myself there so I came back to London. I didn't want to go and live in Cricklewood where my family lived so I ended up being interviewed by Colm Clifford and his household as to whether they would permit me to live in their household in the Gay Community squat. It was decided that I couldn't. Their household was obviously far too petit bourgeois and stable and secure to have anybody as stormy and disreputable as me there. So the upshot was that a place was found for me in one of the other houses. Now I can't remember which one it was, I lived in two houses there, One in Mayall Road which you lived in at one stage.

IT - Yes, it was 152 Mayall Road.

DM - And I lived at the one in Railton Road. I can't remember which one I lived in first.

IT - Sorry Don, I've just remembered something. Before I actually came down to Brixton I remember going to Bradford and there was a psychiatry conference or something. Dr. DJ West I believe was speaking. Can you remember anything about that because I seem to remember you addressed it didn‘t you?

DM - The criminologist. Oh yes, yes! There was an international conference on psycho-sexual disorders held at the University of Bradford. The local gay group....we decided that we couldn't allow this and we would have to do something about it. The conference was to last for a whole week and we thought how should we get into it. So we decided that we would picket it everyday and leaflet it and have a bookstall outside it to lull them into a false sense of security so that they would think that this is all that we are doing and so on. So that's what we did and then on the final day, the night before the final day, the Thursday night, we organised a big gay disco to which we invited people from all over the country. Loads of people came and I remember Louise Hart was in charge of organising Weetabix in the morning. Because she had to get everybody up at the crack of dawn before we broadcasted it?

We then went to unveil our plans in martial spirit about how we were going to invade the conference hall and occupy it. This is in fact what we did. The high court judge who was supposed to be chairing the session on psycho-sexual disorders and about homosexuality nearly bust a gasket. All the men were in frocks and the women were in various kinds of outfits except for lta Casey, I remember, who was an Irish catholic woman mother of several children, a wonderful dyke, who insisted on having a great mass of peroxided hair and a large patent leather handbag. Very conventional clothes. She always took down the details of all our meetings and activities in her catholic diary. It was there and of course in all her conventional clothes she looked like a man in drag (laughter). She was such a conventional figure.

I had a long, blue velvet gown with a sequinned top and a clutch bag and a fur cape. We broke up their conference and we zapped it in the sense that we addressed it. I made a speech at it and the delegates came in and they were furious that they had to participate. Our demand was that they suspend the agenda and discuss homosexuality with us which is in fact what they did do in the end. At the end of that session we then withdrew much to the chagrin of the popular press who were demanding that we should stay because they wanted us to be hauled out by the police and all the rest.

IT - So this was 1974 l would think because this is where l met Colm Clifford. There was a group of people form South London who had come up for that.

DM - Was he wearing his Earth shoes. That's what I want to know. He had earth shoes that I remember at that time (laughter).

IT - Oh, I don't know, really. Nothing like moon boots is it?

DM - No, no. Earth shoes had an interior setup in the sole where it was apparently like you walking on the earth in your bare feet. It was one of those kinds of conceits. They had strange kinds of soles. But they didn't look particularly....they fascinated me. That's what l really remember about Colm Clifford at that stage. Quite apart from at his funeral where they played Ella Fitzgerald and it's ruined that song ever since. Every time I hear the song ‘Every time we say goodbye i die a little....' I think of Colm Clifford's funeral (laughter) which is no doubt his intention.

IT - So, we've digressed, gone back a bit. But that's okay. So you were invited into the petit bourgeois household of Colm. Sorry, you were interviewed but you weren't invited and you ended up squatting at 155/57 Railton Road. Are we talking about 1979/80?

DM - 1980 we're talking about. The spring/summer of 1980.

IT - In that year a number of things happened. One was Gay Noise coming into being in 1980 and the other memorable event was Frank Egan getting arrested for his hatchet in his head. No. Not in his head. I mean in his head dress.

DM - His hat. It was a meat cleaver. Jim Ennis produced all those meat cleaver badges.

IT - Besides stilt walking.

DM - Absolutely, wonderful.

IT - How did Gay Noise come about? Was it a group of people who thought that we needed a radical, socialist gay Newspaper.

DM - I don't know. It would been one of those post ?? inventions if I said that I knew how it came about. I can't for the life of me remember really how it came about. Except that, you know, it was the sort of thing one would do at the time. It always seemed appropriate. Let's have a magazine or let's have a leaflet or a little bulletin or something. So, I was a prime mover in setting that going. I can't remember how I got going but l know that in a house on Mayall Road we made up the first issue of it on the kitchen table there. Typing with manual typewriters and sticking the bloody thing together. Jim Ennis designed the masthead.

WE THEN LOOKED AT COPIES OF GAY NOISE AND MADE VARIOUS COMMENTS ON THEIR CONTENTS.

DM - So it lasted until next to nothing didn't it. It didn't go much beyond this (issue 11). I remember at the finish up, one of the problems at the finish up, was that despite all the kind of political storms you can see them visually, the way the paper loses its, begins to lose its feel compared to the earlier ones. You can really see that. The interesting thing is that the feel that it had was from a large number of people participating and just being loosely kind of controlled and all that. Then getting more controlled. Ending up getting much more controlled with much less life in it. But the paradox of that situation was brought about by the fact that, as I remember it anyway, that there was a tendency among the Egans, Frank Egan, Jim Ennis, those sorts of people, there was a tendency towards wanting to drift essentially towards the commercial gay publishing. In fact money was offered by the people who owned Zipper. Money was going to be offered which led to me taking the view if I remember rightly that we should just have nothing to do with it. We should wreck the paper rather than allow those people to come in and take it over. Which is what happened. The paradox was that the paper was only really lively and vivid when Frank Egan and Jim Ennis and all that crowd were involved in it. They made it radical in some sense and gave it a certain elan.

IT - I was thinking that because from the first two issues, from small beginnings, it gets progressively more spirited as it goes along until, as you say, the other end where blocks of print replace the inventiveness.

DM - That's right, that's right and that's the effect over the whole thing of Milligan becoming more and more in control of the event. So that in the end I am completely in control with one or two other people. Completely in control of this thing which is now dying on its feet because it won't make the concessions to the commercial gay scene basically. So we lost all the real creative people that were involved in making it something very attractive. So it is full of that kind of paradox that those people would not have got it together in the first place I don't think in this sort of form, wouldn't have had that kind of coherence. Then, on the other hand, it was destroyed by political refusal to go down the road that they wanted to go down. That's my view. Do you understand the complications in what I am saying? It's not something that makes me happy thinking about it. But that's what happened to it. You can really see it there. You can see it from beginning to end. This is definitely ‘The Marxists are in control' (laughter). Look at that compared to this (i.e. blocks of print cf more inventive content).

IT - The paradox is you are actually right in a way because if you have sort of got commercial sponsors then you can see that the whole thing would alter and the whole campaigning edge would be knocked right off it. Gradually it would all go down.

DM - It would all go down anyway. it would go down anyway. It's rather like a repeat in my own mind anyway, it's rather like a repeat of the General Will story and that....Noel Greig in the finish up could have kept the General Will together as a professional company with a grant from the Arts Council and so on. But what was the point in doing that. Similarly we could have kept Gay Noise together with money from Zipper store and all the rest of it and carried a more vivacious and vivid input from more creative people in the community of South London but what would be the point of keeping it going? That was my sort of destructive view really at that time.

IT - Also I think it came at a time when Gay News was becoming more glossified as well wasn't it. I mean Gay News had died by then anyway. It was dead and buried but even so there is a sort of parallel there that it just becomes basically a glamour and shag mag without any sort of campaigning edge at all. Direction rather. Okay, so....

DM - I think we produced it every fortnight wasn't it for crying out loud?

IT - Yes, fortnightly.

DM - Why did these people believe we could do it (laughter). It's unbelievable isn't It? it's stunning that we believed that we could do it.

Don mentioned GRAFT the paper produced in Bradford and using the records at the British Library. My membership was mooted. Back to the questions.

IT - The feature about this is the insistence on showing solidarity with working class strikes and actions which you would not have got in any of the other gay papers because they wouldn't have seen the point of it.

DM - Well that was our communist input wasn't it.

IT - Yeah, it was. Okay, can I get back to these boring questions. This is sort of moving towards problems about trying to create a gay community. Can it be done? What are the obstacles in the way of doing that. Rather than putting it in that way tell me about where you were living there. What were the problems you encountered in trying to live with all these different people.

DM - l hated living there. I hated living there. I hated squatting and I hated living there because I was running round the town at that time. l was clearing the tables in the cafeteria at Debenhams and washing up and doing this kind of thing to survive for a lot of the time. Or working overseas Containers Ltd. as a temp clerk. Or going on a typing course at Pitmans. What have you. I was doing all these things and it was very insecure. When have l not been. But this was a particularly sharp period. I felt as if l was shipwrecked. l felt as though l was clutching to a bloody raft frankly. I was very, very insecure and l did not like the gay community in the squat at all. Most of the people all felt were extraordinary in the degree to which they had a conception about how people should be gay and what they should be like. If you didn't fit their conception of that then they were exceedingly intolerant. The interesting thing was l have always been politically intolerant and was at the time and they were socially intolerant. So, you get those two intolerances come together and people would pass each other. I was intolerant about one set of things and they were intolerant about another set of things (laughter). People passed each other.

l wouldn't say that l connected or gelled or whatever was going on. What has become subsequently clear to me is that most of those people were very bourgeois. Almost exclusively, l would say, solidly middle class if not upper middle class people. That led to a certain kind of blaseness towards material questions and a refusal to say, you know, what. . . .Colm Clifford and other people saying ‘What are you worried about. Why are you getting so tense about clearing tables in Oxford Street.' You know, so their small time literary activities or their small time pottery or their small time this, that and the other created an atmosphere, a certain kind of Bohemian ease, an affected ennui about the place that I simply couldn't participate in. Not out of any disapproval though l did disapprove obviously. l just wasn't able to participate in the easy ennui of it. l felt that their attitude concealed considerable political reaction which l think was subsequently shown at the time of the Brixton riots. There really were very sharp tensions that appeared. So much so that when Tim Lunn was arrested and jailed. l was accused of being responsible for this in some way. I remember....because of participating in the riot and therefore leading this young man astray. In some sense this seemed to be Barry Prothero's et als position.

IT - l am trying to remember that particular period because l seem to remember we did produce a leaflet supporting the uprising....

DM - We did and we put that through at a general meeting and the community kind of went along with it. Then, of course, it was mentioned in Hansard. You'll have to get a reference somewhere for that. So it was mentioned on the floor of the House of Commons and this of course then really did expose the political tensions in a kind quite shocking way. They devolved around the notion, not of a straight forward political argument as it wouldn't have been inappropriate for the people with a right wing position to simply attack the rioters and so on, but it focused around the idea of irresponsibility. Some irresponsible people had jeopardised the circumstances of say Tim Lunn or whatever. The fact that Tim Lunn was found in the house when the police raided it with photographs of himself posing by his burnt out car and so on....and he made a confession in Kennington Road police station and didn't seem to know how to present his case in the most positive light to the police, despite his expensive education, none of this was taken on board. The general view was that it was a product of irresponsibility and a kind of chaotic attitude to the event by a number of people notably me. That was the hostility at the time as l remember it.

lT - Can you remember any....| mean, l want to speak to Darcus Howe and l want to speak to some black activists who were around at the time because there were some black activists who actually said that Gay Liberation supporting the uprising was useful and positive whereas others reacted in quite a hostile way. One of the things l want to try and do is get other people's views of what they thought about this gay group who were living around Brixton. From an outsider's point of view. Can you remember any reactions at all, well apart from the police who raided us afterwards, from any black activists who were around’?

DM - l can't remember any at the time. I know that the poet, what was his name, Linton Kwesi Johnson, was always extremely polite in the street. He wore a wonderful hat and carried a cane and always tipped his hat and said good day in one of the most ceremonial of ways. l always remember him. He was very nice. The other people involved in the Race Today collective and so on I think in their own way were going through similar kinds of political transitions as we were. That resulted in Darcus Howe being on Channel Four (laughter) just the same as a number of people we know are now in Soho or what have you. The same political transition was going on in a more forced kind of way among the black politicos in the area in relation to Town Hall, in relation to various agencies, funding bodies and so on. Just as in the same way within the gay community various relationships at the time were beginning to sharpen with the local housing associations and so on. The whole attenuation of any kind of radical input. So I think that tensions at that time around 1980 when I arrived were well developed. The tension towards an accommodation with a different way of doing things in the belief that a more conservative approach, with a small c, was appropriate and that we could get more, we could get on better if we dropped the confrontational, liberationist kind of edge to what we have been doing.

IT - On that local level there was that switch over from squatting to becoming part of the Brixton Housing Co-op which meant that people put an awful lot of time and energy into going to these meetings and carving their little enclave within that. l remember Michael Cadette, a black gay guy, who was also connected to Race Today and he sort of became part of that, those meetings about the housing co-op. He was forever complaining that they just weren't political enough. At that time he was always saying things like ‘Well, where are your politics? Where have you gone?‘ I felt that from round about 1980, actually slightly before that, there was a considerable diminution in any kind of extremal politics like fighting for rights or whatever. There wasn't much of that anyway.

DM - That's right. So in fact the very strange things that had occurred, I think, had been going on for us all in every area. It had happened in Bradford. It happened everywhere round the place. Very strange kinds of accommodation were going on in relation to local authorities, in relation to the Labour Party, in relation to various beliefs that you could get further without confrontation. It was the diminution of that kind of confrontationist politics that l had been involved in that leads me to this supposition or the recognition that we were really just liberals and that we were outrageous liberals. Essentially the political difference between those of us who wanted to continue confrontationist politics and the people who wanted to abandon the confrontationist politics in relation to the gay question weren't sharply, the lines weren't sharply drawn enough. We weren't clear enough either about what the differences were. We didn't know what the political differences were. That's why we tended to think of them as being about style. About the lock on the back of Henry's door or about the earth shoes or the way in which people presented themselves. We tended to think they were about style or snobbishness or this or that or the other instead of trying to disentangle what the political problems were. I don't think any of us were very good at that.

lT - Yes, because I remember when I first got to Brixton in 1974 there was always this willingness to, first of all, there was this thing about we must have a Gay Centre. We should plant ourselves in the middle of a community in our own right as gay people. Unambiguously gay, not closeted, not part of the ‘straight’ gay scene or whatever. From that a number of things happened. We'd end up at Camberwell Magistrate's Court for refusing to pay the rates because none of the rates were spent on us so why should we bother. We would make a point of standing in court dressed in fur coats and god knows what. it was outrageous and it was funny and a little knock against bourgeois respectability. Doing that kind of thing. Not going there in suits and ties and pretend we are respectable. Fuck ‘em, we'll make a fight of it and if we lose then we lose. In the early seventies or '74 there was the feeling that you could do that sort of thing admittedly in a very limited way. Then you would end up applying to Lambeth Council for a grant for the Gay Centre which you would approach in a more conservative way simply because you want money off them. So you have to present yourself in quite a different way. You have to sort of say - well we do this, that and the other, we have so many people who use the centre - you have to make your case out. Then we had this ideas about creating a separate enclave, this separate lifestyle. Andreas (Demetriou) is very good on this because somebody did an interview with him 1980 and he said that his only regret was that we never fulfilled any of the things that we said we wanted to do (laughter).

DM - (laughter) Good for Andreas.

IT - He quoted as examples the fact the we never had any communal washing facilities, communal eating facilities, we never made any of the challenges to living individual bourgeois existences in separate houses. We were meant to have this communal situation. It's really good because in a way it does actually illustrate the impossibility of creating that kind of lifestyle when people are actually well off and going out and doing their lecturing.

DM - Like Diamond Lil (Alistair Kerr).

IT - Yes, like diamond Lil. It's not, whatever ghetto we lived in, it was not the product of poverty. it's not like the Jewish ghetto which was always poor. It was always about being together because you were seriously oppressed.

DM - You couldn't live anywhere else. You weren't permitted to live anywhere else.

IT - Exactly. Yes.

DM - This was self-selection. That's right, there are all these kinds of difficulties. I think the difficulties for us all in how we think about these things historically is that to go into the courts dressed in drag or to go into Bradford police Headquarters entirely in drag for a meeting with the senior police about the pantomime sit down against the National Front in Bradford, to do things like that took so much bottle and required so much courage in those situations to do it you couldn't really feel at the time that it wasn't hugely significant. l think this is the difficulty that it took so much out of one to do these things it also wrecked one's career and one's prospects very often for a lot of people anyway. They paid a high price for these actions. It was extremely difficult for people to grasp that despite how much they paid for these activities, despite how difficult they were this didn't add to their significance. That's something that needs to be born in mind. We can only be wise after the event about this. But it's clear that one's ?? of these things were so important because they were so hard and so difficult to do and so risky.

When I was standing there denouncing the high court judge in a velvet frock in front of the Vice Chancellor of Bradford University I knew that my career as an academic and a lecturer was not going to prosper (laughter). It was at an end really in that situation. That also sets up other tensions between people who didn't lose their careers or who didn't give up their careers or who had aspirations that didn't require certain kinds of institutional disciplines, who could than proceed as men without visible means of support like Colm Clifford as a writer. God knows how he lived, what he lived on. Those kinds of things.

lT - And Gary (De Vere) who had his bookselling business or whatever.

DM - Yeah, and so there were all those kinds of tensions that seem to me to be very important in terms of agency, in terms of believing, of how you believe that you change things. That's why it seems to be that people have to believe in some sense that they made a difference. Because it was so costly for them, so expensive for them, they have to believe that they made a difference. You know, instead of really struggling to be a bit more dispassionate than that and to understand exactly what a difference was made to them by these events which is perhaps the most effective way of looking at it.

IT - One of the things I like to find out about are the reasons why people decided to end up in Brixton with that particular group of people. Depending on who you ask you get varying replies. Some people went there as a desperate act...

DM - That was me...

IT - ...just to get there out of a rotten situation...

DM - Or the housing situation....

IT - Yeah, that's right. Some people went there because they missed a sense of community that they had already had at university where they could actually pop in and out of each other's rooms or they would have a gay group or something like that. They tried to recreate that kind of situation. Some people did have definite ideas about creating a separate community that would challenge the status quo....

DM - But you see Andreas‘ problem about communal living and so on was defeated for a number of reasons but I would think very largely in the first instance it would be defeated by architecture. There was a serious architectural problem. These were small, working class artisanal houses, most of them. Built rather cheaply, thrown up rather cheaply in the late 19th century. In fact there were no large spaces in them in which communal eating could take place, in which communal washing could take place. Unless extensive alterations had been made to the houses to permit the construction of Iarge dining rooms or a large laundry or whatever, then it would have been an extremely difficult thing to achieve. I mean I think communal eating and communal washing and those kinds of things would have broken down eventually through all kinds of social and cultural pressures. But they would have got started if the architecture had been different.

IT - Hence attempts to knock down walls to try and create bigger spaces. In fact at 148 Mayall Road where Henry (Pim) and Andreas lived, every now and then they would do this thing of inviting everybody over for this mass communal meal. Because he had created this big room by getting rid of the wall. But I think also it wouldn't have worked anyway because I think people were still, it was being presumptive in a way that people wanted that to change, you know, that they wanted to get rid of their privatised existence but I don't think that was....

DM - I think what they wanted was, not to put too fine a point on it, what they wanted was sheltered accommodation (laughter). The old person has a room where they can move a few sticks of their furniture in. They have access then to a wider circle of people, to a warden, to perhaps a dining room, they have access to a wider number of facilities, a local doctor and so on. On the basis of their initiative. They can go out of their room and participate in wider associations with other old people or with the authorities or whatever and then retreat to their own space. Shut their door and then they have their privacy. I feel in a way the desire of most people in there was about sheltered accommodation for homosexuals. There was a dual idea. There was the idea of having a private space and then having a wider access to neighbours. To have a certain kind of neighbourliness. But then of course the neighbourliness was always restricted really. I remember considerable tensions between different households. I was never there during the period when everybody appeared to get on or there were open, neighbourly relations between everybody. There didn't seem to be to me. There was David Simpson's house down at one end which was very posh and snooty, even snootier than Colm Clifford's house.

IT - Yes, who was I speaking to....Steve. Steve Ewart who lived at 146 Mayall Road with Alistair and Tony Smith and John Lloyd. I mean within one household there were tensions because Alistair was incredibly snobbish, very snobbish, to the point of being fastidiously concerned about not having an extra vegetable with his dinner because it would do terrible things to his sex life at the local sauna. Even within the same household there were differences. This is the reason why it is going to give me the most difficult task of all, writing about this particular section of the book about living together because it is not actually based on events. It's like a mapping exercise where you have to look at the contours and features of where people live and how that did or did not work.

DM - You see, that's right, there are all those kinds of problems but on the other hand there are the remarkable things like the household that...

END OF TAPE ONE

TAPE TWO

DM - Yeah, there were all these tensions but we should remember that there were remarkable things like the 50s kitsch household of Jim Ennis and Frank Egan where they had assembled all this detritus of 50s domestic objects and created a whole life out of it. One felt that their great desire was that some on the edge of radical style magazine

should come along and do a photo display on their household. This was really Frank Egan's desire to ascend from being the son of an Irish hairdresser into being a style guru in the Metropolis (laughter). This is what was going on. But they were subtle and inventive people and I thought that Jim Ennis was the real artist of that household. The person with the most kind of creative understanding in a performance art sense.

IT - I think Stephen Gee was probably the driving force behind a lot of theatre that we did. We seemed to do an awful lot. I mean we started back in 1974 with ‘Mr. Punch's Nuclear Family‘ or something. If you've got time to look at it I've started a section on theatre. I've written about the first two plays that we did. If you've got time I'd like you to have a look at it to see what it's like. But there were people who definitely had a great input of creativity and vitality that left most of us behind.

DM - But the interesting thing about Ennis was that Ennis was engaged in a kind of singular activity. It was very much to do with his person and his insights about the strangeness of the world, it was very much fielded by his own insights. So in that sense his was a singular activity. Stephen Gee was a very capable person in terms of dance and in terms of theatre and theatre presentations. But in relation to any kind of real striking images about the strangeness of the world I thought that Ennis was the artist of the outfit. Even though the theatre work didn't connect with the politics. It didn't connect with anything actually. That was what was so strange. Except I remember once we had a gay demonstration in Manchester that we'd organised against the bloody police chief in Manchester (Anderton). We organised this huge national demonstration with some people in Islington when l was in South London. There was some kind of national committee. Anyway, we got to Manchester and there we were assembling and the police's face and the face of the crowd as Jim Ennis ascended in this amazing gown....He must have been, I suppose, about 15 feet high with his stilts and his amazing own and he was eating fire. It was under this underpass, eating fire and walking along with this absolutely wonderful....And so there was a political deployment, he was certainly prepared to deploy his talents in that sense. Kind of, making a spectacle at an event. But there was the....

IT - There was no sort of didactic intention behind it. It wasn't like the plays where we were saying, this is our understanding of oppression, this is how we fight back against it. He wasn't doing any of that but, my god, what an amazing effect.

DM - That's what I meant in terms of artistic activity. It seemed to me to be a genuinely creative contribution in a way that....a lot of the other things that people were involved in were very good, valuable and interesting and served all kinds of functions at the time but l wouldn't, they wouldn‘t strictly speaking enter the lists as art (laughter). That's why I say that Ennis, I thought, was the only artist there. The Interesting thing is he was a quiet man in the way that he spoke to people and moved about and so on. He wasn't a person who made a great deal of fuss about himself. So it was quite a striking thing. It was clear when you saw him doing these performances that there was a great deal going on in there somewhere.

IT - That's the thing. He was never demonstrative about the things he was going to do. He just went ahead and did it.

DM - Yes, that's right. There was something very self-possessed about him therefore...I wouldn‘t want to romanticise him. I wouldn't want to say that he was a man without toughness or violence or discipline. He had all those things but they were all focused in a very charged way into his work.

Further reading (some of Don’s more recent work)

Coming Out and Communism: radical gay activists Tony Openshaw and Don Milligan in conversation

embraceofcapital.net

Don’s website (where you can find lots of his research)

Off the Cuff

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