Exiliado: Andy Warhol Dreams.

I have booked tickets to every possible museum and art gallery I can think of. Lockdown may have ruined the economy, but it’s provided places of cultural interest with space. I am well aware that in London, this is a luxury that will soon disappear, so I am making the most of it.

Andy Warhol said of Da Vinci’s Last Supper painting that it’s easy not to think about it, because it’s always there. I felt that way about Andy Warhol. It wasn’t until I was confronted with his giant silkscreen artworks at the Tate Modern, that I began to really think about what he meant in my life.

More specifically, what the subjects of his paintings meant to me. Warhol’s paintings sell a dream I was desperate for when I was growing up in Gibraltar. Being on lockdown has given me a chance to think about my life, and the journey it has taken to get to where I can sit at home, the most stable I have ever been, and delude myself into thinking that it all ‘just’ happened. You reach a point in your life where you’re happy and fulfilling dreams, so why feel the need to get back in touch with pain or longing?

Except walking through these rooms was almost a retrospective for my own life. His early life in a small town, drawing sketches that are completely preoccupied with male desire and Christian guilt. The later aspirations summed up in brands and the myth of celebrity. As a teenager, I filled notebooks with diaries and poetry. Why do I push a part of myself away, in order to appear in some way untouchable, a stoicism that would keep me alive? I think now of the moments I have done that not only with my Queerness but with my language and with my cultural heritage. A way to remain uninjured. And how in the past few years I have felt strong and confident enough to explore these parts of myself again.

When you’re 12 years old, it’s easy to think of what you want and not the particularities of why. One evening in the late 90s, I raided my father’s record collection and found Madonna and Patti Smith. It wasn’t about considering why they made me feel a certain way, it was just that they did. There was freedom in that music, an idea of breaking rules that for a strange child who felt suffocated by rules, was a powerful idea.

The Gibraltar of my youth was a conservative one. I have seen, thankfully, Gibraltar (and the rest of the world…lest you think stereotypically of backward colonial outposts) move away from that somewhat. Catholicism loomed over everything. At least once a month, I would be pulled out of class so that I could attend confession. I struggled to think of things to say. Out came the usual: I had argued with my sister, I had lied to my mother, I had eaten too much chocolate. What did they want me to say? That I liked boys? That I listened to punk music and dreamed of running away? That I didn’t particularly believe in God? Those were not bad things to me, but I learned early on they were bad things to others, and I learned to keep them hidden.

School itself was no better. I was made fun of for being intelligent, for hanging out at the library and for reading too much. I was bad at sports and nobody thought it was something I could possibly learn. Like, because I was assigned male at birth I would somehow know all the rules to football, coming out of the womb knowing how to score a goal. I learned how to be quiet, how to be still, and how to live on the margins. This kept me out of sight from the bullies. Nobody ever beat me up at school and that was a miracle.

What I craved was new. We had satellite television, and MTV screened Total Request Live straight from Times Square. Everything was connected. I read books about Madonna, who told the taxi driver when she arrived in New York City to take her to the centre of everything, with 35 dollars in her pocket and a dream. The driver took her to Times Square. Patti Smith moved to the Chelsea Hotel and became a punk goddess. All the albums I couldn’t find or afford in the shop in Main Street. All the adverts for movies that would arrive in Gibraltar six months after everything else. All the food and restaurants that didn’t exist and I would never try.

The border with Spain had been open for barely twenty years but crossing it never felt like freedom. Rural Southern Spain wasn’t the future. I felt no connection to it either. Nobody taught me about flamenco, the civil war, the Mediterranean, my ancestry. Even England didn’t feel like the future. All I knew was Eastenders, and the stories of the evacuation during World War 2 my grandparents told me. My parents had moved there in the 80s and my mother painted it as a grey, unfriendly place where the sun set at 3pm and everyone drank too much. Morocco, barely 9 kilometres across the sea, never got a mention. It might as well have been another planet.

And what did I know about Gibraltar, and what it meant to be Gibraltarian? Those evacuation stories were happenstance. I didn’t know about the struggle. This was a bright new world of cars and Nike trainers, McDonald’s and 2Pac. Nobody wanted to talk about starvation, poverty, or the formation of a people. History class at school was peppered with cavemen and The Great Siege, lodged between Tudors and Victorian England. Spanish class was taught as a foreign language. I learned more in geography about Bury St. Edmunds than I did Gibraltar. People waved a flag one day a year.

My dreams were much further away. London was just a step closer to being at the centre of everything, and that centre was New York City.

Andy Warhol had the same dreams. I see this now, walking around the Tate Modern seeing this Christian child of immigrants make his way from Pennsylvania to the centre of everything, NYC. From bohemia to the mainstream, carving out what the world would like for decades afterwards, in his own image. Beautiful boys and beautiful girls and everything framed and blown up and replicated. Even the Campbell’s soup cans were an aspiration, a shedding of the watered down ketchup with salt he had to eat as a child.

I’d like to say I’m not as egocentric as Andy Warhol but it’s probably not true. Maybe I just don’t like people as much as he did, and don’t feel the need to start an artistic collective. Maybe I was born in the wrong time. Everything’s been done and calculated. I definitely don’t feel the need to dance on TikTok to be noticed.

Everything felt cheap and late and backwards to me, and in many ways I felt literally trapped behind a barbed wire fence, spinning around and around in the same two square miles. Spain felt no better, coming out of a dictatorship where the South had suffered the most. I remember camping in the summer and one of the women in the next caravan marvelling at this new thing she’d found in the supermarket that kept food fresh. It was cling film.

London, then. And from there, New York. Bright lights. Shedding my name and my skin and this life I had been assigned to so unfairly. Somewhere I would be embraced for who I was, and loved. A place where everything was new and famous people walked the streets and things were beautiful and men listened to Madonna.

My dream of flight was always a vocal one. Now that I walk through this gallery thinking of what I left behind, I realise how much pushback I had from others. Which is funny. More than one person told me that if I wasn’t happy in Gibraltar, I wouldn’t be happy anywhere else. That who did I think I was, thinking I was better than my fellow Gibraltarians?

Yet…you live and move in a society that oppresses someone for who they are, then attempt to scold and punish them when they try and assert themselves and want to be happy. In the narrative of my life, it was an easier story for everyone involved to say I ran away when the reality is I ran for my life.

I turned 18 in March of 2003. I’d watched the Twin Towers fall two years earlier, and the world felt a little smaller and a lot more dangerous. I’d taken a dip in Queer waters, but in Gibraltar what I found was secretive, twisted and predatory. At least I had found a kindred spirit for a while, a short-lived romance with a boy my age who taught me about Ginsberg and Stonewall (and then felt the powdery allure of the Costa Del Sol gay scene and left me sadly behind). So the dream remained. More than ever, the answers to the universe dwelled in cities like New York.

In September 2003, after receiving my A Level results, I stuck a photo of Jim Morrison in my journal and listened to Hole sing Malibu as I flew away to a world of drag queens, disco, and no more damn fences. I wasn’t thinking about studies or a career. I could barely boil an egg. Somehow, everything would magically sort itself out. I had a student loan and a dream. Cardiff isn’t quite New York City, but at least I was leaving. And it was anywhere but here.

As we took off, I gave the Rock of Gibraltar the finger through the plane’s window. I tried out new names in my notebook, more palatable to Anglo tongues. I was willing to destroy everything about myself in the process. Like Madonna said, and much as I protested otherwise, I just wanted everyone to love me, love me, love me.

I never considered that borders could be more than physical.

Exiliado will be a weekly series of pieces exploring what it has meant and still means to be a Queer Gibraltarian bilingual immigrant border-person living in the UK.

This won’t be a chronological memoir (spoiler, I never made it to NYC), but I thought the above was a good introduction to many of my preoccupations, and I’ll explore them in future pieces. Language, privilege, art, Queerness, men, relationships, what it means to be a border person, faith, Gibraltar as a nation, the binary way of thinking people can’t shake off, the ruins of the British Empire, and whatever else 2020 decides to throw at the world.

Bienvenido al exilio.