Posts tagged gay

Today in London it’s Gay Pride. Along with this and a few twitter conversations I’ve recently been having with @ninepinkbears I decided to refresh and post my own experience with coming out.

For every gay man there is a different coming out story. Every experience is unique and often filled with deep emotional turmoil.

Here is my story.

If ever there were signs that a kid was going to turn out gay, I think I exhibited almost every one of them. From my first day as school I can remember being in awe at the lead boy of the school play. There was something so magical about him. I wanted to be like him, friends with him, anything to be around him and bask in his intoxicating aura. I was five or six at the time and so clearly had no idea why I was drawn so deeply and passionately to certain boys. This never, ever happened to me in relation to girls.

During the rest of my primary school days (5-11) I was a reasonably popular boy at school but during the first half of my time spent there about 80-90% of my friends were girls. Not only that but I would happily join in with their play time. Ever heard of French skipping? It’s when you have a huge strand of elastic cord wrapped around tow people’s legs and someone else jumps over and on them. We would sing the words, “England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, in-side, out-side, in-side, ON!”. You can view a really bad demo of it here. Typically only the girls played it……. oh and me.

It wasn’t long before the “teasing” started. Of course everyone knows now it’s actually called bullying. I didn’t even know what the term gay meant as I’m sure the other boys who were shouting it didn’t either. They just knew that I was different and somehow instinctively pigeon holed me into that category. Which of course looking back now, they were actually spot on! But at the time I was hurt and chastised for something I didn’t understand. I even made a great escape one lunch time and “ran away from school”. I didn’t get very far I just went home and watched day time TV. It wasn’t long before the school noticed and called my parents. After some gentle words and a visit to the head master with them, I returned to school a lot more cautious than before. I stop playing skipping with the girls and started to try my best at soccer. Which I hated with a passion and was laughed at frequently for my inability to grasp the basic concepts.

Outside of school there were just as many indicators that I could turn out to be a gay man when I grew up. Ever since that first school play I loved the thought of acting myself. Somehow I ended up joining an amateur dramatics group. I loved it and through there actually ended up doing some professional acting. At the tender age of 12 I was performing in Shakespeare’s a Winters Tale, at the Old Vic in Bristol.

Along with the acting I also had a talent for dance. This was no surprise to my parents as they themselves were part time Ballroom dancing teachers and had even entered many competitions at the famous dance halls in Blackpool. So to encourage my dancing genes I was taken to tap dancing lessons. For some reason I sucked at tap even more than I did at playing soccer!

There was however another class that I asked to try instead. Ballet, in my eyes it was a great strength building type of dance and would give me great big muscular legs! This is what was going around in my head at the time, that my legs were skinny and doing Ballet would make them big and strong. I think that’s two gay hints for the price of one there!

Not only did I want to do Ballet, but I was good at it. Damn good at it! I was even awarded a local scholarship with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).

At the age of 13 my childhood came to an abrupt end. My mother, quite literally dropped dead in front of me from a massive cardiac arrest. She had been the one who allowed me to explore my talents and provide me with the unwavering support that only a parent can give. Olive Mary Bailey was just 45 years old when she died. My father did his best to raise me but for some reason there was never the tight bond between us that I now sorely lacked. I felt alone, so terribly lost. I stopped acting, dancing and everything else that allowed me to grow and express myself. I spent most of my time in my room playing on my computer. Occasionally I’d hang out with some friends from school but there was always something missing.

I managed to convince my father to buy me my first modem. This was of course before broadband was available so dial up was the only way to get online. At the time the main thing people used here in the UK was a service called Prestel. It was like the text service you can get on TV the graphics were all chunky and basic but I loved being able to dial up, log on and have access to a whole world of information and also people. It wasn’t long before I was discovering Closed User Groups (CUG’s) where people would hang out and chat. One of these groups was for gay men. I was far from being a man at the age of 15 but I was drawn to it. During my time chatting on there I can specifically asking one guy if he was really gay.

“Yes” his message came back, “are you?”. This two word question was all it took to make me realize who and what I was all this time. It just made perfect sense. There was no internal mental struggle for me. I was asked the question and I intuitively knew the answer.

“Yes, I’m gay”, I replied. Had my mother been alive at the time, the next few years may have been completely different. I’m not saying that things would have been better or worse as ultimately things turned out OK, but I’m sure that if she had been around I wouldn’t have been able to get away with the things I did next.

I began to meet men from the internet from various parts of the country. Some would come to my home town and I’d meet them. Sometimes I would get a train to London, telling my father I was staying a school friends for the weekend. I even started to date a 22 year old man from Kent for a while. Looking back now I was either really streetwise or just damn lucky that I didn’t end up in a body bag somewhere. Eventually, for better or worse, probably better, my father found a series of train tickets to London in my laundry. He went absolutely mental but stopping at the point of actual physical violence. Eventually to stop him from calling the police and sending my “boyfriend” to prison, I agreed that I would see a Psychologist. A few days later my brother was home. He also went mental, but unlike my father he didn’t stop himself and did resort to physical violence. So I was shipped off to the Doctors as agreed. During his questions I just tried to be as honest as I could and was actually grateful for the chance to finally talk to someone about it properly. I remember his calm soothing voice telling me

“I don’t want to make your mind up for you, I want to help you decide for yourself.”, it was like the penny dropping again, I don’t think I saw him again after that. I knew I was gay and it wasn’t a decision, it was a fact. After this my sister who had recently given birth to her first child, informed me that she didn’t want me touching her daughter. After everything I’d been through this didn’t seem to make any difference it was just another experience to chalk up. My relationship with my father remained distant and so for some desperate search for insight I read his personal diary. He wrote about how disappointed he was and that he felt he had let his deceased wife down.

After a few months, my father took me on holiday and asked if I’d like to take a friend with me. I invited Sam, who ironically was the person I used as my cover story when I was actually enjoying my secret trips to London! During the holiday I went out of my way to prove something, I’m not sure what, but I decided to “get off with” a girl. Really it was just making out, snogging, french kissing, whatever you want to call it. Sam was stunned at the good looking girl I had managed to pull and enjoyed telling my father all about my conquest the following day. That was the last time I kissed a girl, well like that anyway.

Time passed and my father started to date women again. Eventually he met a wonderful Irish woman who had spent most of her adult life living in and around the New York area of the USA. With her help my father slowly began to come around to the idea of having a gay son. I even recall my first birthday dinner that Dad and Bernadette took both me and my first real boyfriend on. It was a little awkward, but it was a start, the olive branch had been offered and I was only too glad to put the previous experiences behind me. Once Bernadette had worked her magic on my father it was only a matter of time before the rest of the family came around. My sister had rescinded on her “don’t touch my child” policy and shortly after had her second child. She asked me to be God Father to Lucy, which I gracefully accepted. Another hatchet was buried. As for my brother, he also came around and when he married I was his best man.

All in all the whole experience took about 3 years to settle down completely. I realise now that I could have handled things oh so very differently, just as the rest of my family. Hindsight is a great thing isn’t it!