INEVER MET Derek Jarman in person. My one physical encounter with him was in May 1992, when he introduced a special benefit concert by the Pet Shop Boys at Manchester's legendary Haçienda nightclub. This was the first time I had seen Jarman films, which were screened as back projections for some of the songs. Several of these films had been used previously on the band's 1989 tour; two additional Jarman Super 8s from the early 1970s, A Garden in Luxor and Studio Bankside, were also set to Pet Shop Boys songs. I remember being especially taken by the haunting footage that accompanied the song “King's Cross.” Incorporating Jarman's trademark techniques of associative montage, the film takes viewers on an inconclusive journey through the ticket hall of London's King's Cross underground station, intercut with shots of people and buildings in the surrounding streets. The camera's view then switches to a train travelling into the mainline station; a young man (Chris Lowe) seemingly arrives off the train and wanders alone through the station concourse. The film possibly resonated with my own feelings of disorientation after relocating to Manchester to study for a degree in Medieval Studies. At the time, I was a lonely teenager – finding my way in a brave new world of city living, sexual identity, academia and the Middle Ages.

Here I am now, a quarter of a century or so later, writing in an office not far from King's Cross station – and, for that matter, just a short distance from Jarman's alma mater at the Slade. I've been thinking about how Jarman's queer art and politics have informed my own development as a scholar. What are the threads connecting my future vocation as a (queer) medievalist with the events that transpired that summer? How are my own medievalisms bound up with Derek Jarman's? These questions are ultimately unanswerable, of course, but certain patterns appear in retrospect.

When I began researching and writing on medieval sexualities, for example, I became increasingly aware of the existence of a scholarly double standard. “Anachronism” usually operates as a morally freighted category – the egregious error that every historian of sexuality should avoid.