Dolly Would

Thirty years ago, or so, I wrote a romcom. It was a gay romcom, set in a karaoke bar, called Dolly Would. It was a musical gay romcom, all the characters sang country songs, when they fell in love, or when their man done them wrong, and broke their heart (which happened a lot). I wrote is as a film script originally, it morphed out of another script about rent boys and working girls in Brighton. That script, Fairy Tale, had a producer attached for a while, but the deal fell through, and I lost my way with it, put it a drawer for a few years and forgot about it... until I fetched it out and re-worked it into that county+western themed love story. Eventually, as in years later, it got re-written again, this time as a novel. It changed a lot in the transition, but I always felt that it lost more than it gained, so I put it back into that drawer, where it remains; the drawer where many of my favourite stories go to die.

I mention it here because I made a momentous decision about it this week. It was a painful decision but, I think, the right one. I've decided to let it go, forget about it, put it to rest, leave it alone, leave it be, bury it, move on. I'm very sad about this because I loved the story (in each of its versions), and I especially loved the characters. I've been living with these characters for, literally, decades, I know them really well. I won't say they're friends because they aren't real people, I invented them, and we all know where that road leads - making friends with imaginary people. What I'm most sad about is that I couldn't get their stories out into the world. I felt I owed it to them, and I let them down.

The reason I decided to walk away, and it's a sobering one, I had to be really honest with myself, is that I'm too old to write it now. It's the story of 20-30 year old gay men, and when I first wrote it that's where I lived, smack in the middle of that bubble. So I could write from my experiences, weave my own story through the narrative. I knew these characters, where they lived, where they went dancing, what they drank, how they spoke, how they loved, and how they hurt. But now, all these years later I have no idea how young gay men live their lives, what matters to them, what drives them, what they love and what is just a nonsense and an annoyance to them.

Of course, I know that human emotions don't ever change, haven't changed at all through history, regardless of when a life was lived. Laughter, tears, love, and hate are universals and everyone knows how they feel. My dilemma isn't writing about those and how they affect people, my problem is that I have no knowledge of the environment, the culture, the practical pressures that would trigger these emotions in young people today. Again, there would be universals but there would be specifics as well. How would two young gay lads even talk to each other these days, what vernacular would they use? How does social media, and especially dating apps, affect their Saturday nights out? How do they negotiate sex, safer or otherwise?

Of course, it's hard to admit to yourself that you can't do something anymore because you got too old to do it. But I looong ago gave up on clubbing, because, well, it was clubbing, and I had no regrets about that decision. The term 'gracefully surrendering the things of youth' springs to mind (can't remember who coined that). I can move on from Dolly Would. I can love it and move on from it. It's part of the fabric of my life, and I'll always count it amongst my favourite things that I've ever written, but I think it's time to let it rest in peace.