It’s a cliche that people go on a journey in their lifetime. But for Jonathan Blake, actor, gay activist, costumier, and the subject of a poetry collection, it’s got to be true. His journey has taken in the bath houses of San Francisco, TV and film studios, the coal mines of South Wales, and the stage.
“I was not a child performer though I had a puppet theatre,” he tells me. But sent away to school in Birmingham he met a wonderful art teacher. “She told my mother that I was creative and that she needed to feed my creativity. It was 1959 and Jonathan and his mother were at Stratford upon Avon watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the towering actor Charles Laughton as Bottom.
“Suddenly where there were walls a wood appeared. I loved it.” The second show he saw was Laughton as King Lear – “I was completely mesmerised and I said I am going to be an actor”. His mother pointedly said not like John Gielgud – “but I didn’t know what she meant – was she trying to tell me something?”. For readers unaware, John Gielgud was the leading actor of his generation alongside Olivier and was prosecuted for cruising, but the reference was lost on the teenager. So, the 18-year-old went to study at Rose Bruford, coming out with the added benefit of a teaching diploma.
In 1970 Blake was working at Derby Playhouse in two-weekly rep. “It was an amazing apprenticeship – you got 2/6d per performance if you acted – up to £8 a week if you were on,” – meaning playing a role. TV followed including in the Boer War costume drama The Regiment, and then in 1972 through guys he met on the gay scene it was off to the adventure of a lifetime in New York. “The guys wanted me to move there,” but it never happened and so it was back to the UK and an appearance as the slave of the lamp in Aladdin in Swansea.
When the miners went on strike and the country was plunged into a three-day week and a period of blackouts, theatres struggled. “We had lx for part of the week and we bought a generator which operated a single ships fog light giving us plain white light on stage,” Jonathan told me. In 1974 with his acting career going nowhere he went back to New York but could not get the green card his friends had promised him. “I worked in restaurants – it was an amazing time: the sex in the bath houses was amazing,” but after 10 months it was back to the UK and more work a day acting jobs.
Between roles he had a job waiting tables at Joe Allen’s restaurant. “It was an extraordinary refuge.” In 1981 he went to a female friend’s wedding in San Francisco – “I did the bath houses and then went back to the UK.” And then, as he described it to me, “Very soon every single lymph node in my body exploded. I was walking like a gorilla. On sick pay he went to see his GP and was referred to the Middlesex Hospital. “They were all over me – put me in a side ward. The doctors were intrigued at what was happening to me. They told me I had a virus, and they had no medication to help me. They gave me three to nine months to live.
“At 33 it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I was completely winded. I collapsed and cut myself off from people. It was awful. I knew I needed to be around people. I went to the gay bars and hid myself away in dark corners – with this killer virus as they called it.”
It was a time when Capital Gay magazine was beginning to uncover what was happening to young gay men in New York and San Francisco and the right-wing press was weaponising the issue as “a gay plague”. Jonathan told me: “you felt like a modern day leper. I thought I was going to commit suicide and then my mother‘s voice came into my head and she said – Jonathan clear up your own mess, so I decided I better get on and live like a good Jewish boy.”
In April 1983 an advert announced an antinuclear protest at Greenham Common and Aldermaston military bases. “It was my re-entry into society,” and it was where he met the man destined to be his life partner the poet and activist Nigel Young. The following day Nigel went to Jonathan’s home for tea. “He brought flowers and two jam doughnuts. He asked me to move into a squat – I thought why not?” It was two rooms in Mayall Road part of the groundbreaking Brixton Housing Co-operative.
And when the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners organisation was formed in 1984, “it was obvious we’d join it. It was displacement activity for me. It was very special to me because of my previous connections with South Wales. We thought the story would die with us.” But out of that story came the film Pride and Jonathan was depicted in the movie by actor Dominic West better known as Prince Charles in The Crown. Mayor Ken Livingstone decided in 1985 that anyone could do educational or vocational courses for £1 for a year. A tailoring course led to pattern making and for Jonathan a three-year City and Guilds course and then a job in the wardrobe department at English National Opera.
Jonathan got involved in the Grayson Perry Art Club and made a section of the 49th UK Memorial Quilt. A serious attack of shingles in 1996 led to Jonathan‘s retirement from ENO. It was not until 1996 that Jonathan started on medication. “It was like Lazarus rising from the dead – after four weeks treatment I felt so good I’d laid an entire patio in the back garden,” and more recently Jonathan has gone back to acting, aged 75, playing in an all-male gay version of Antony and Cleopatra.
And he’s about to be in the spotlight again this month when an anthology of poems by Brighton-based queer poet Simon Maddrell is launched covering Jonathan‘s medical treatment. Patient L1 – his designation at the Middlesex- will cast light for a new generation who did not go through the trauma of the 1980s and HIV/AIDS.
Asked if he had any advice to a young Jonathan, he told me: “I doubt I would have listened, but I’d say be honest and go with your heart.”
Patient L1 is published by Polari Press on February 11. Look out for my review in Scene magazine.
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