“IT MUST have been one in the morning. Clapham Common was still, quiet, cold and very dark. But against the lights of the houses, I could see the silhouettes, some moving, some motionless. I could see the glow of a cigarette in someone’s hand, under the trees.”
This was how Matthew Parris graphically described the thrill of cruising, in his memoirs, where he confessed that the lure of brief encounters of a close kind was irresistible, even when he was a Member of Parliament — until one night when, out on the Common, he was felled by a blow to the jaw, kicked in the ribs and head, and left bleeding on the ground.
Queer-bashers (usually white men in gangs), remain the greatest danger in gay life, even though it is now 48 years since the Wolfenden report and 38 years since the liberalisation of the law on homosexuality.
This was brought home by the vicious murder last weekend of 24-year-old Jody Dobrowski, a Gloucestershire lad who had come to London to savour its freedom and tolerance. It was a horrible reminder that the threat of homophobic thugs is as menacing as ever.
The tall, blond, good-looking Dobrowski was funny, loved singing and dancing, hated any kind of confrontation and enjoyed the buzz of working in a really busy bar. Having dropped out of Cardiff University, where he was reading biology, he had arrived in London in 2001 to work at the Jongleurs comedy club in Clapham — one of the Jongleurs chain, a revered venue on the stand-up comics’ circuit.
This summer Dubrowski was offered a job as assistant manager at the Camden Lock branch. He had been there only a few weeks when last Friday night he went back to Clapham to see his old friends, leaving them at 10.30pm. Fewer than ten minutes’ walk away was Clapham Common.
Nobody knows exactly what happened next. The attack happened around midnight. He was punched and kicked so viciously that he died ten hours later in hospital — his face so battered that it was unrecognisable, even to his family. He had to be identified by fingerprints.
This week Jodi’s mother Sheri, his brother Jake and his stepfather Mike Haddock travelled from their home in Whitminster, Gloucester, to meet their son’s friends and colleagues at The Rise bar, attached to the Jongleurs auditorium. They drank champagne and told happy stories about him. They wanted to hear all about his London life and his new Docklands flat.
“There were no tears, because he would not have wanted that,” his colleague Julie Kirk said. In a joint statement yesterday Dobrowski’s family revealed that he had been struggling to “come out”.
“Jody knew he was loved and accepted. He knew that we knew. He was also a young man still discovering his identity and was facing the difficulty of having to ‘come out’ which straight people never have to face. The timing of this was up to him. He had very little time. He did not know that.”
Camden Jongleurs, formerly Dingwalls, is a crowded, noisy place with a vast auditorium, this week featuring a comedy line-up including Ricky Grover and Paul Thorne. My own son, who like Dobrowski is tall and blond and fond of jokes, worked in the bar there one recent summer.
The security man, known to all as “Scooby”, told me that it didn’t even cross his mind that Dobrowski was gay. The only thing that struck everyone was that he was the most engaging of colleagues.
“Madam, if you had met this gentleman, you would know him to be a fresh-faced young man who never said a nasty word to anyone, even to the drunks who came in off the street. That was his way: a kind, sweet guy. He touched me, and everyone. We would sometimes think, what is he doing in this business? My only problem with him was that he liked S Club 7. When we were told the news of his death last Saturday, the whole place just nose-dived. In seven years here I have never known anything like it. And people have been ringing up ever since to say they’re gutted, torn to pieces, so hurt.
“It’s opened my mind to a lot of things,” said Scooby. “I know now I wouldn’t tolerate a homophobic joke. I used to laugh them off, but it’s just not funny. Even if it was a close friend, I’d have to say: ‘change your tone when you’re around me’.”
The gay community may not be shocked by what happened to Dobrowski, because physical attacks and verbal abuse have been rising lately. Jody was the 141st victim of a homophobic assault in the borough of Lambeth in a year. But those accustomed to thinking of our city as an enlightened, unprejudiced place, are appalled. The whole point of “the only gay in the village” joke on Little Britain is that such prejudice happens in a distant elsewhere. And fundamentally Londoners suspect that the sadistic thugs who target the vulnerable have no particularly homophobic agenda, only a total absence of normal human feelings. They could strike at anyone.
Dubrowski’s family denied, in their statement, that he fled his home town to escape intolerance. They said: “It is difficult for same-gender partnerships to be openly displayed in Gloucestershire . . .
“We would not disagree that homophobia exists here as it does everywhere. We have yet to read a report in our local press, however, of such a horrific attack on someone thought to be gay in Gloucestershire. That happened in London.”
The mystery persists: why does a young man risk his own safety for a fleeting sexual encounter in this enlightened era, when there are pages of gay clubs and venues, and encounter listings (Men Seeking Men) even in The Times? Is it the attraction of the danger itself? Feasting with panthers was Oscar Wilde’s phrase. Ned Sherrin writes in his autobiography about how it used to be in the 1950s: the heady thrill of walking through London at night, seeing another lone walker, stopping at a shop window, glancing back. “There was always a chance it might be a policeman,” he writes. (But today, even the Metropolitan Police has its own gay senior officer, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick.) In the 1950s, London had a couple of gay pubs, but no clubs or discos such as Heaven, or pages of WLTMs. Sherrin adds: “Now of course there is the internet — or so I am told.”
When I asked Matthew Parris what he thought made Jody Dobrowski go to Clapham Common that night, when he must have known about the risk, he replied: “I think when you want something very much, you rather overlook the risk. And people don’t talk to each other.
“And I’m not sure that people understand the level of risk — or don’t until things like this happen. And there are all kinds of reasons, not just among homosexuals, that anonymity is such a huge premium.” And why did he suppose Dobrowski did not make use of the obvious gay venues or contact magazines?
“None of those is as anonymous as meeting someone in a strange place in the dark.”
Cruising on Clapham Common, he said, is a stage people go through. “And unfortunately this young man didn’t get the chance to come through that stage. I imagine that this way of meeting people is probably on the decrease.
There is a generation of elderly gay men who like to bray at dinner parties about how it’s not as much fun as when it was illegal and dangerous. But then something like this happens which shows how wrong that view is.”
Floral tributes now mark the wooded spot where Dobrowski died, including those from his friends (“Dancing in the living room will never feel the same again”) and the one from his mother.
It reads: “Darling Jody, my beautiful, bright boy and brave man. They can never extinguish your light. All who love you will carry that light now with endless love.”
Two held over killing
TWO men were arrested last night in connection with the murder of Jody Dobrowski. The pair, aged 33 and 25, were held in custody at separate South London police stations, Scotland Yard said.
Mr Dobrowski was beaten so badly that he was unrecognisable. Not even his family could recognise him and fingerprints had to be used to make a formal identification. A Scotland Yard spokeswoman said the man aged 33 had been arrested in the Clapham area of London and the man aged 25 in the Croydon area.
Detective Chief Inspector Nick Scola said: “This was a brutal attack, which left Jody’s face so badly injured that he could not be identified visually, even by those who knew and loved him the most.”
