Inside Out

I’m a Londoner born and bred. I knew deep down I was gay when I was about 11. But the 1950’s was a very difficult time to be gay. Obviously it was illegal, but more to the point, it wasn’t something in any way admirable - gay men were figures of fun, they were derided. Gay life at that time was very much literally subterranean. Gay men met in basements. Society as a whole very rarely came across them.

Having been born just after the war, I’ve been lucky in a sense to have crossed many different eras. I’ve gone from being not just closeted - going to a psychiatrist and wanting the ‘gay cure’ - to what could be described as, at one point in my life, a promiscuous gay man.

It was the glamour of show business that appealed to me in all of its forms. It seemed not only to be exciting but to be an escape from everything that was real. All my life I think I’ve just loved going out there in the spotlight and being applauded. I hasten to add that it didn’t always happen of course.

When I worked at the British Film Institute, it was a very stuffy institution indeed. It published an egghead quarterly that nobody read. Suddenly, here was a kid working for the BFI who actually loved reviewing commercial cinema and, especially, pornography.

I wrote about gay porn for a gay magazine and hadn’t come out yet. Obviously I was being driven from within to come out otherwise I wouldn’t have been doing these things. I wouldn’t have been putting my real name to the kind of articles that I was writing. I was desperate to come out but the time wasn’t right.

I was living in London and working in Soho, which was then the heart of the film industry. You couldn’t help but meet people who were going to advance your career. At that time everybody gathered in Wardour Street in Soho, and I started meeting people who wanted me to write screenplays. It really was as simple as that.

In the world in which I moved, people were making low budget exploitation films, and that meant sex, horror and violence. So I did more of those than anything else, but I’ve always been interested in all genres. I only regret the fact that I wasn’t offered the chance to try something else.

At one point there was almost nothing being made in the UK apart from these exploitation films. They were churning them out. It was a very exciting time to be working in the industry because you could go from one film to the next, sometimes working on two or three simultaneously. I feel very sorry for kids starting out in the industry because it’s not as easy as it was for me.

The Government removed the subsidy from the British film industry, and that was the end of the soft porn business as far as cinema films were concerned. Then later on, at the end of the ‘80s, there was a clean up of Soho which had become shot through with crime. When any kind of industry makes money, the criminals move in. Everybody, the British, the Maltese, the Italian mafia were all driven out of Soho, leaving a lot of empty buildings as a result. And that’s when all the gay businesses moved in and that’s how it turned gay almost overnight.

It still sends a chill up my spine even talking about that era (the early days of the AIDS crisis) because it was the most frightening period for gay men. Up until the 1980’s everyone appeared to be having sex of all kinds. It was a knock-on from the swinging ‘60s, everyone was enjoying a rich, full, sexual life and that suddenly all came to an end. To such a degree, people stopped having sex. We all thought we were going to die, there’s no two ways about that at all.

I gave Julian Clary one of his first jobs in theatre after he left college and we kept in touch. We had the same sort of humour based on innuendo. I loved crafting that kind of joke for him. It comes very easily with Julien.

I don’t want to exaggerate but the Kings Cross parties were the most exciting time of my life. I’d always been on the edges of this kind of criminal society looking in and there suddenly I was part of it. This was an enormous thrill to me. It went on far too long really. It started in 1998 and it went on until 2011. I was very very lucky the whole period I was engaged in drug dealing. I’m very lucky in that I’m a free man talking in the privacy of my own home because I could have been unluckier.

As we get closer to the launch the more I worry. I have been very harsh where some people are concerned. One of the first people to read the book was Julian. He’d already written his own autobiography. I said to him - ‘Were people upset by the things you said about them?’ And he said - ‘The only complaints I got were from people who weren’t mentioned’.

I tell kids today never regret anything you’ve done, only regret the things you haven’t done. I regret absolutely nothing. If I had my life over again I would do exactly same only bigger and even better.

‘Little Did You Know: The Confessions Of David McGillivray’ will be released through Fab Press in June before becoming available in bookshops this August.