“Shirley”

Serial killers are not always lethal. I speak from experience having survived the thwarted hand noose of one who roamed my neighbourhood. His name was Michele Lupo and I was intended victim number five. Perhaps that is my lucky number but I didn’t know it then on that balmy summer’s night deep in the gay cloisters of Shirley Woods, affectionately called “Shirley” by those intimately acquainted. These were hallowed grounds, frequented from near and far across the counties and my local cruising patch. The old and young and everyone in between made pilgrimage here to worship in pagan ways at the feet of their gods, or whatever part of the anatomy turned you on. Enormous ancient trees lent Druid ambience and lots of leaf litter for added comfort. From dusk to dawn the carnal ceremony enacted. Local legend had it, if you couldn’t get laid in Shirley you may as well slit your wrists and give up. It could be considered the final sacrifice, ritually mingling forlorn blood on the vibrantly shot semen of more successful brethren.

The early visitors, known as carriage trade, were often enroute from work, many to their heterosexual wives and homes. They swung in to the car park any time after five. If they were lucky a line of cars had preceded them, their drivers already enticingly absent, either in the urinal pointing their dry pricks invitingly at the porcelain or further a field under sylvan canopies. These guys generally wanted action and release after a stressful day at work. I imagined many eyeing up their colleagues, bent over perhaps to refill the photocopier, cruelly restrained by office etiquette, only to relieve them selves here in unseemly haste. In deed, if you wanted a quickie this was the time and place.

Those of a more local, leisurely nature, who had first partaken of early tea and permitted time for it to settle, gathered whatever tackle they deemed necessary for the night’s foray and cruised in later. Lube and blankets were useful, even flasks of tea and vials of more potent stimulants. Some came in cars, others on bikes and the hardy few, or those wary of displaying licence plates, walked in. I recall a particular Adonis who regularly parked on the further side of the wood, stripped and sauntered down to the thick of things, naked but for his boots.

The gay delights of Shirley were not without risk. They ranged from insignificant thorn pricks to the potential ravages of STDs. There was the omnipresent danger of queer bashing or its legal counterpart, police entrapment. Emerging once from the shadowy sanctuary of bushes in to the flood lit car park, I found it void of all but one vehicle and two lusty looking officers handling their dogs. Little old ladies occasionally exercised their pooches unaware Adonis or equally carefree libertines wandered at will.

None of this of course compared to the exceptional threat of Mr. Lupo lurking with intent. He had apparently strangled four gay men and desecrated their dicks with his fine Italian teeth used in carnivore fashion. On the dark night we met, his young leather clad body lingered restlessly like a satanic phantom at the edge of a clearing. There was no one else about as our differing but equally deep passions drew us fatefully together. There seemed a strange intensity about him. Uneasy with our solitude, conflicting desires paralysed me like the memorized prey of a snake. He struck ambiguously. I thought his strong hands around my throat weird foreplay. His beautiful, chiselled face and black eyes stared straight into mine. Instinctively I didn’t panic but with a glance took in the erotic contours of his body so well defined in the tanned skins of other beasts. This menacing thrill wasn’t good. A snapping branch somewhere behind alarmed Lupo who released me from his grip and shrank into the shadows as I wandered off. Amazingly, an hour later, as the woods teemed with gay men, their phalluses springing up all over like a rash of rampant toadstools, I found him again. This time there was safety in numbers and consummation.

One week later his face blasted across most national newspapers detailing the deadly destruction of his nocturnal crimes and alerting me to my lucky escape. The stories related Lupo’s crazy lust, portraying him as an Aids victim seeking revenge on gay men. Years later I learned we had another connection, albeit tenuous. I am an admirer of the late Derek Jarman and had managed to correspond with him. In his journals he relates his sexual acquaintance with Michele whom he knew as the manager of the Yves St.Laurent shop at Hyde Park Corner. Nothing in their relationship suggested anything amiss.

Strangely, or so it seems now, I never kept the newspaper clippings. More recently however, when Michele Lupo died of Aids related illness in a prison hospital, I found his face staring at me one last time. I cut it from the tabloid page to paste forever in my memory.

According to some cynics, as though in righteous indignation, the great hurricane of the late eighties swept across southern England in to France and completely flattened Shirely Woods. Today there is no cover to conceal or camouflage nightly rituals. The new tramline runs right through the location and the urinal is long gone, with it the carriage trade. It has become a cemetery of trees about which only gay myth and memories remain.