Remembering Myself

Recently I had the chance to reflect on my life and what I have accomplished as a designer. Where do I begin? Should I say the Yale School of Art, where I finally finished a full university degree and from which I set up the business that is still my daily home and workplace? Perhaps it is further back, when I ran away to Europe and found myself as a gay man who desired the love of other men. Or should I go back even further, to the real beginning, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where I was born at mid-century? It has been a journey over time and space. I am the sum of the parts of my life, the places I have lived, the people I have known, and the experiences that I have had.

Recently I was made a Fellow of SEGD, which is the professional association of designers who do the kind of signage and wayfinding work that I am known for. With this award, my peers have recognized my career and achievements. It was a splendid moment, fellow professionals saying that I had accomplished something significant, a room full of people gathered to honor me, David Gibson. It was my moment. How to describe the journey that I have taken to arrive at that very moment?

I have always loved biographies. This comes from two interests: my baser love of gossip and stories about people, and my higher love of history, the sweep of people and places and events. My library, which is finally coming out of boxes after a year in the closet, is filled with biographies, memories of my temporary companions, Bloomsbury, gay and lesbian notables, people in the arts, any number of people who adorn the walls of London's National Portrait Gallery. I have a particular love of English history. Despite this Anglophilia, last year I had my French period. Here's how it works: Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette lead me to Antonia Fraser's biography of the French queen, which formed the basis of the movie. I enjoyed the texture of Fraser's acclaimed telling of the life of this notorious and fascinating woman. This book lead me to Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, a fascinating account of Marie Antoinette's wardrobe, the clothiers who kept her supplied with gorgeous attire and her evolving image as the style icon at the center of French life headed toward the cataclysm of the Revolution. This overload of Antoinettiania left me wanting to know more about the dynamics and logistics of life at Versailles. Along came Versailles: Biography of a Palace to answer all my questions about the history of the French court, how it was built and how it was used, who lived where, all about the kitchens and toilets and salons of the huge palace. This is how my mind works, a book or movie opens the door to a world I didn't know. I find myself wanting to open other doors to learn more about other parts of the story.

Since I moved to Jersey City, I have appreciated my daily PATH train journey. I get on the train at the beginning of the line in the morning, settle into my seat, open my book, and find myself transported not only to New York City, my morning destination, but also to the court of Versailles and the minutiae of the queen's toilette or the layout of the king's apartment.

Recently my morning journeys have taken me to England—more precisely to London between the wars (World, not Iraq/Gulf). Remember I said I was an English history fan. It all started with Bright Young People, a charming account of the Bohemian aristocrats who dominated the gossip sheets of the Twenties with the outrageous costume parties and drunken country house revels, frothy stuff about a city and country clinging to many of the old values while also tossing others away amidst the social wreckage of World War I's aftermath. This naturally lead to Evelyn Waugh, a witty right-wing Anglo-Catholic novelist who wrote fictionalized accounts of his time as a bright young person. This quote from Vile Bodies captures the period:

"Oh Nina, what a lot of parties." (...Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John's Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris—:all that succession and repetition of massed humanity.... Those vile bodies....)"

The trail lead me to Anthony Powell, a novelist, journalist and astute observer of the London scene from the Twenties to the Seventies, a kind of English Proust. He knew them all and wrote about all of it in a twelve-book novel series and four volumes of memoirs. I found reading back-to-back Michael Barber's biography of Powell and Powell's abridged one-volume autobiography a great inside-outside view of a rich and fascinating twentieth-century life.

By now I was hooked and headed down the rabbit hole of London literary life. With Tom Driberg I hit pay dirt. This fragment of his Times of London obituary says it all.

"Tom Driberg, who worked for some years under the name of William Hickey and died under the name of Lord Bradwell, was a journalist, an intellectual, a drinking man, a gossip, a high churchman, a liturgist, a homosexual, a friend of Lord Beaverbrook, an enemy of Lord Beaverbrook, an employee and biographer of Lord Beaverbrook, a politician of the left, a member of Parliament, a member of the Labour Party National Executive, a stylist, an unreliable man of undoubted distinction. He looked and talked like a bishop, not least in the bohemian clubs which he frequented. He was the admiration and despair of his friends and acquaintances."

That is brilliant biographic writing, an obit as only the Brits can do it, a snapshot of this man in all of his complexity and variety. Yet again I headed for the autobiography (Ruling Passions) and biography (The Soul of Indiscretion) combo on Tom Driberg. His is the great story of a public life lived in and out of the shadows in Parliament and in public washrooms where he found sex on a very regular basis when being gay was neither accepted nor fully legal.

So back to that luncheon at the conference in San Diego where I was preparing to take the podium and accept my Fellow award. I had prepared a visual presentation of my own journey, an interweaving of the highlights of my life and the work I have done. I had a moment of real panic—what the hell was I doing going on about myself in this professional context? I was not hitting just the high points. I included my sojourn in Denmark in the Seventies and the Aussie porn (soft-core Seventies literary porn) star (well, maybe a "featured actor," as they say on Broadway) that I fell hard and fast for. It was weird to see his rugged, handsome face up on the screen at an SEGD event. I don't even remember his name. But I sure remember the excitement of allowing myself to love a man. OK, it was infatuation, but it was real and it was me. My fears about the talk melted as I took the podium and began to talk abut my journey, Montreal, Cornell, Nova Scotia, Yale, Two Twelve, New York, relationships, 9/11, travel, my book, on and on. I felt it, this was MY moment, the people was there to hear about me. It was all over in about twenty-five minutes. The applause was sustained, the audience loved it.

Over the next three days of the conference, many people told me they were inspired by my talk. I was surprised and delighted. People are not used to the mix of the personal and the professional that I offered up that day. I guess other people like biographies as much as I do. And I have lived an interesting life; I have a story to tell. This blog is my story.