|
Acting Serious, Living Rationally, Thinking Gay |
|
Currently appearing in As You Like It at the White Bear Theatre, London |
All Rights Reserved Text: World Copyright Martin Foreman Copyright of pictures acknowledged where possible Having problems viewing this page? It performs best in Mozilla Firefox. 
|
I don't think my private life is important, and I'm not very interested in the private lives of others. I don't know where Ralph Fiennes was born or how many wives he has had and I don't need that information to appreciate his talents as an actor. The fact that Eric Blair / George Orwell died of tuberculosis is incidental to the overwhelming power of Animal Farm and 1984. And you don't need to know whether I had a happy childhood to decide whether my work as a writer or - hopefully - an actor will have an impact on your life. I would therefore prefer to tell you nothing about my background but I am aware that to say nothing suggests I have something to hide or I am being pretentious and mysterious. So here is some basic information to satisfy the curious. After this, there's nothing more to say... I was born in Scotland in the 1950s and lived in Edinburgh until graduating from university with a second-rate degree in linguistics. I then taught English as a second language for several years, in Greece, London and Brazil. During this period I wrote many articles and short stories, mostly for gay magazines in the UK and US and mostly forgettable. My only claim to fame at that time might be a story published in January 1979 in the New York-based magazine Christopher Street about a gay man with an unknown, fatal disease without a cure - two years before AIDS first came to public notice in 1981. In the mid-1980s I wrote regular reviews for the New York Native and was literary editor of the reincarnated UK Gay News. In 1986 I began a 20-year period specialising in the social causes and consequences of HIV/AIDS in the Developing World. [I have to thank Jon Tinker, founder of the Panos Institute, and the late Renee Sabatier for giving me the opportunity to enter this interesting and challenging field.] Most of my written work during this time was on this topic, but I also published two novels, Weekend and The Butterfly's Wing, and two collections of short stories, A Sense of Loss and First and Fiftieth, during this time. The Butterfly's Wing owes a great deal to the travel opportunities that Panos and other development organisations offered me. (My partner at the time and I also produced a play from one of my short stories - a more amateur than professional production.) Always restless, I not only traveled widely but spent considerable time living abroad. After Greece and Brazil, I spent four years in Los Angeles and, latterly, Brooklyn, in the 1990s; from 2003 to 2008 I lived in Thailand. Also during this time, my HIV work took me to Central and South America, much of Africa, South-East Asia, Papua New Guinea and beyond. Around 2006 I realised that while my empathy for those affected by AIDS remained undiminished, my intellectual enthusiasm for the subject had died. In that year I made the mistake of opening a business in Thailand. It was not my first commercial adventure - I had spent two years in the early 1990s running a condom retail and wholesale business in London - but it confirmed that I do not have the personality to run a company profitably. When the business closed I moved back to London and was fortunate to have my Thai partner move with me. The mid-2000s also saw my interest in writing fiction come to an end. While I was becoming increasingly skilful as a writer, broadening my style and range of characters and situations and deepening my insights into the lives of those I wrote about, my sales continued to fall as I failed to break into the mainstream. Agents and publishers saw no commercial value in my work. People are unhappy in many of my stories, they despair, they observe death or they themselves die. A friend once complained that he had been so depressed by reading A Sense of Loss on the London underground that he went home in tears instead of happily to the party he had been invited to. Agents and publishers are not encouraged by such reactions; real life is ok in fiction, but there should be an upbeat resolution at the end - a resolution I frequently failed to provide. For a time my attention turned to religion and the harm it does to the world; I developed the website godwouldbeanatheist.com and comment regularly on religion on its dedicated Facebook page. Nowadays half of my working day is dedicated to my online business dealing in rare and secondhand books, primarily through Arbery Books. The other half is dedicated to a one-year project to see if I can gain employment as an actor and / or voiceover artist. My traveling days are not over, but foreign journeys are now a rarity and Scotland tends to be my destination of choice... 
|
|
|