VALENTINES SPECIAL FEATURE
One from the heart
A pounding heart, a quickening pulse and louping stomach — most of us are familiar with the tell-tale signs of love, or at least lust, at first sight. Kathleen Morgan asks a select few if they have faith in Cupid’s arrow.
.. Gary Jacobs, Glasgow borer and prospective WBA world welterweight champion.
‘l’ve been with my wife Linda for about ten years. It was a case of when I first saw her, I had to have it. A wee spoilt boy. as per usual. She worked for a friend of mine selling jewellery at that time. I kept pestering her — it was straight to the heart of the problem. It worked. The only thing I love as much now are my kids. It’s another chapter in your life — when they come along it’s different. Your outlook to life changes. It’s not going about town jumping about. Basically I never put myself about that way.’
’53 Lindsay Kemp, maverick performance artist and director .ofgothic operetta Cinderella.
o
w . ‘I always fall in love at first sight and absolutely believe in V it. Of course, it can be _ disappointing but it’s fun while it lasts. The first time, it lasted five years from the age of sixteen and led to me being expelled from school. I had fallen in love with a Cherokee Indian at the Victoria and Albert Museum. His name was Little Running Buck. I was gazing at Queen Victoria’s wedding dress and through the glass case I saw this beautiful bronze figure. At first I thought it was a statue. He waited for me at Waterloo Station. We were together until he returned to his reservation in Toronto.
‘The next one was David Horton. who I first clapped eyes on when he was playing an organ in Battersea. He left me for a younger bit of stuff and married a lady last year, but that leaves me free to pursue my game of falling in love. We’re still together, but we don’t make love any more.’
‘93
Jack Vettriano, the Edinburgh- based artist renowned for his dark, seedy images depicting the frustrations and yearnings of love and lust.
- ‘I don’t believe in love at first sight. I believe in a very strong physical attraction at first sight, but it’s only when you start to speak that you discover you like the sound of their voice and the things they say. You can’t ever know that just looking across a room.
‘I believe in love, it’sjust a very difficult thing to sustain over a period of time — for some of us. impossible. You can never recover the feeling you had in the early days. Everyday problems start to interfere with your relationship. Perhaps I’vejust been unlucky, but I don’t think so.
‘We’re reared on the notion of true love — that somewhere out there. there’s a single person who will satisfy your every need for all time. It’s quite absurd. You feel so guilty when you realise a number of people are fulfilling some of your needs for some of the time. And so you go on searching.’
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Monica Queen, singer with Thrum, and partner of guitarist Johnnie Smillie.
‘l was playing Mary Magdalen. quite the slut. in a production of Gal/Spell. It was an amateur dramatic thing in a Bellshill school. I was fourteen and dressed in a lacy see- through dress. feather scarf. high heels and fishnet tights — Jodie Foster mark two. Johnnie was sitting in the audience watching, obviously very aroused in more ways than one. He decided he had to get back stage to meet this girl. He did and soon found out I was boring. He was twenty. He always says he got the right singer and the
wrong girlfriend.’
Rhona Cameron, comedian.
stand -up
‘I do believe in love at first
. a”. sight. Mostly I thinkit’s interest
1 at first sight. then it develops ‘93. /.into love. I believe when you
have a really strong love with someone. often you feel you’ve met them in another life. You come back to meet them and work something out in this life.
‘Lesbians are more obsessed with love at first sight than anyone else. The whole struggle of your life is to be able to love who you want. Your sexuality becomes an obsession. In a way everyone likes the idea of meeting someone and being swept off your feet. It means you don’t have to be in control.’
4%
Alasdair Gray, author of A H istory Maker, inspired to write Something Leather after seeing a woman walking across Glasgow’s Central Station in leathers and stilettos.
- -. ‘I believe in love at first sight, but that doesn’t mean it lasts more than two or three seconds, minutes or years. All love is fleeting. If it lasts for a long time, it has been turning into another version of itself. I have been strongly attracted at first sight. There has been lust at first sight, but I have also thought: “What
astonishing beauty. Oh, how blessed I would be if I were with it forever.”
‘Like most men, I’ve always been interested by the frequency with which women dress up queer to make themselves more interesting than each other to men. Or maybe to other women. Let’s just say, they dress up strangely. They humiliate themselves by dressing up strangely. Somebody who’s basically timid like me, while feeling strongly attracted by women who do the whole dressing up thing, can only relax when they obviously don’t take it seriously.’
“‘33
Sydney Devine, Scottish country singer.
‘I’ve been married to the same woman now for over 35 years. In entertainment that says a lot. Her name’s Shirley and she’s , , from Aberdeen. I was a singer when I met her. She came to see a show. I saw her and she saw me and it was love at first sight.
‘Every song I’ve ever heard is either about somebody dying or love: sometimes a combination of both. You should believe in the stuff you are singing or not sing them at all.
‘When you’re young you fall in love 500 times a week. I would think it gets less as you get older, but if a day comes that a pretty girl doesn’t turn a man’s head, there must be something wrong with the man.’
4%
r. ‘I was working in a boring "j; office doing a boring job. He was a computer engineer. We ' had seen each other around the office and had exchanged the odd contact.
‘By accident an office communication turned into an e-mail friendship. It started off really jokey, but it got more and more steamy. It got to the stage where we were sending about fifteen messages a day. We would meet in the corridor and would be pretty embarrassed because we were getting really intimate electronically, but couldn’t face each other.
‘After two months it was too much and we decided we had to talk about it. We met and consummated our electronic relationship. I found out he was living with somebody in real life. It was something I had never done before, but when you get involved with someone electronically, it doesn’t seem real. It’s a different reality: you do and say things you wouldn’t in real life. I ended it after that. We had big arguments on e-mail when we split up.’
“‘1'; An anonymous 26-year-old 9 Edinburgh woman, fell in love “Vii, " on e-mail.
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The List 10-23 Feb 1995 7