If I am self-loathing, how do I love someone who is "like me"?
I Swallowed My Tail is the story of a man who chases after gay love despite repressing it in himself. Michael – a lonely, skittish young professional from London – is reasonable. He is modest. And he is neither flamboyant nor loud about his desires for other men. There are times when he wishes he could be, but that sort of love seems gauche to him now. It's become almost intolerable, the way that some are unapologetically queer. Their accents, clothes and flag-draped bedrooms are a reminder of everything he has always shunned and buried within himself.
So when Michael hears rumours of there being someone else "like him" passing through London, he begins a long and restless pursuit of this mysterious "other man." He follows him with the hope and desperation of a man yearning for love, but what can he do, face to face with everything he dislikes about himself?
I Swallowed My Tail is a modern adaptation of "The Other" by Edward Thomas. The poem, written in the last months of 1914, follows a recluse narrator as he journeys restlessly across the English countryside. He is searching for a man. In fact, he is searching for a man he hears is "like him" - a man who stays at every inn he passes through, a man just ahead of him, a man who is "like [him] in general." Who is he?
For Edward, the "other man" is a repressed version of himself - another voice which taunts him, but from whom he cannot part. "[My head] is almost always wrong now," he writes, "– a sort of conspiracy going on in it which leaves me only a joint tenancy and a perpetual scare of the other tenant and wonder what he will do."
Thomas writes these lines in regards to his struggle with depression, but there is something so aptly queer about his metaphor. I Swallowed My Tail takes the melancholy, hunger and fear of something "other" residing inside oneself and applies it to the life of a lonely, gay man.