It’s a Sin

24 October 2022

Hiro and I ventured out to a big concert a week and a half ago. The opening act was the DJ Paul Oakenfold, and the headliners were the Pet Shop Boys and New Order.

I think I first heard Pet Shop Boys during my college years. MTV was on all the time in the living of Garfield House, a mock Tudor pile where I resided for both my sophomore and junior years at Williams College. (Somewhat sadly, Garfield House is no more but the memories of my first co-ed bathroom experiences, not to mention the string of fire alarms at 3AM in February of 1986, will live on.)

But it was my years in Japan where Pet Shop Boys (and Erasure, if I’m honest) became integral to my identity.

When I arrived in Japan in 1988, there were three books and six CDs in my luggage. The books were Rubyfruit Jungle, by Rita Mae Brown, The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, and The Interview With the Vampire, by Anne Rice—in retrospect, a very gay reading list.

The six CDs? George Michael’s Faith, Tracy Chapman’s eponymous debut, Thomas Dolby’s Aliens Ate My Buick, the soundtrack for Bright Lights Big City (a movie I never actually saw but the songs on that CD kicked ass, including New Order’s True Faith), Erasure’s The Innocents, and the Pet Shop Boys’ Actually.

The first stores I needed to scope out in Tōkyō (an hour away by train from where I lived) were, as you might guess, were book stores and record stores. Kinokuniya was biggest bookstore with the most English titles, and it was also conveniently located in Tōkyō’s most exciting hub, Shinjuku.

For record stores, however, I needed to stay on the Yamanote Line for a few more stops to Shibuya (to this day, I amaze myself by the number of stops on the Yamanote—the loop line that circumscribes central Tōkyō—I still remember). Shibuya was home to both Tower Records and HMV.

Funny story: for years I thought that HMV was a British company and the initials stood for Her Majesty’s Vinyl.

Trips to Shibuya allowed me to start padding my Erasure and Pet Shop Boys collections. Every album and every single was purchased. And when, in November of 1988, I met another gay American on the Japan Exchange & Teaching (JET) Programme—the program that brought me to Japan—we started comparing notes.

Cameron, his name was, introduced me to a lot. Some bad (he always smoked menthol Virginia Slims and I quickly learned to never forget my Dunhills in his presence) but the overwhelming majority was good. In addition to my first tour of Shinjuku’s Nichōme (the largest of Tōkyō’s many gayborhoods) and to International Friends (the group that met monthly, providing a social framework for non-Japanese gay men to meet Japanese gay men away from the bars), Cameron told me about Byblos, the bookstore in Tōkyō’s Takadanobaba neighborhood (sadly, that bookstore vanished when Seibu department store built a new shopping and entertainment complex where Byblos once stood). Byblos was where I bought books by Edmund White, Ethan Mordden, and James Baldwin, deepening my edu-gay-tion, as it were.

Cameron and I shared some musical tastes, too. He wasn’t a fan of Erasure—too pop, he said—but we shared our Pet Shop Boys CDs back and forth and he introduced me to Romanovsky and Phillips. Together with Boys Town Gang, R&P were an unapologetically gay group out of San Francisco in the mid-1980s, and I ate them up. Listen to these lyrics and you’ll know why.

Throughout my ten years in Japan, I would come back to songs on Actually time and time again. Two in particular spoke to me as I recovered from Catholicism, It’s a Sin and What Have I Done to Deserve This? And then Rent, oddly enough, helped me recover from a manipulative relationship where indeed I paid someone else’s rent. I think it was the fact that Saginuma, the man who manipulated was very unlike a rent-boy (what the UK refers to as male prostitutes). He certainly told me loved me in exchange for a place to stay, but that was the extent of his emotional/physical engagement (and perhaps that was all for the best, as you will discover when my memoir goes to print).