In this conversation, painter Jake Fern invites Matthew Glamorre, an artist, videographer, and outspoken critic of the LGBTQ movement, to his home for the first of three chats recorded while Jake paints his portrait. Matthew describes himself as an “outcast amongst outcasts” and looks back on a childhood that swung from idyllic to chaotic: growing up in Hay-on-Wye among his father’s rock-and-roll friends, a farmhouse life in the Black Mountains spent close to the seasons, and a family fortune that vanished almost overnight in the 1970s oil crisis.
He talks candidly about growing up looking like a girl, being called “gay” as a schoolboy insult, and why he has never accepted that word for himself, preferring to call himself a “stately English homo.” He explains why he sees the rainbow identity as something that was quickly commercialised after the AIDS years, and why mediocrity and conformity are things he has always recoiled from, along with his reputation as a prude on the 1980s London club scene.
Underneath it all is a more spiritual story: the pull between the old ways of hedgerow, harvest and nature and the grandeur of high Anglicanism at Hereford Cathedral School, leaving home at 13 for London nightlife, and a sense of duty, as an elder now, to pass on a connection to the land that he feels others have been denied.
Follow Matt on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/glamorre/
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For more information on Jake Fern's art, go to https://www.jakefern.co.uk/ or https://www.therighteousbrothers.uk/