CHAPTER ONE
Imagine being born into a world where, from the beginning, your true nature is under attack and ridiculed from the second you enter life. As you realise you are different to those around you, there is no place to find sanctuary. You become a prisoner to the constant barrage of shaming and disgust thrown your way. School is not a place of understanding; family holds the same negative views of who you are and the world itself holds no safety or place of refuge where you can be nurtured and supported. This is what it is like to be a young gay child in the world.
Of course, things have changed and I will not chastise every family by presuming they are narrow-minded. I certainly don’t hold unprocessed anger against my family; my parents did the best they could. They were progressive in so many ways and actually rather anarchic. I didn’t hear constant berating of gay people and I have forgiven any ill words they might subconsciously and infrequently have used. It was what it was. With all this in mind, I take a deep breath and ready myself.
In the beginning I was born. My first awareness of being different was my sensitivity. I wasn’t very sporty. I was very goofy and my knees knocked together when I ran. I was always transfixed by how beautiful my mother was, especially the smell of her perfumes and the sparkle of her jewellery. I would always notice the colour of whatever top or shirt she wore. She dressed well and I still remember her short hair, her African orange-stoned necklace, and the beautiful yellow sleeveless silk top she would wear with a long dark linen skirt. She was (and still is, I hasten to add) a petite lady; like Twiggy in the sixties. And to a little boy in the eighties, she was the most stylish and beautiful woman in the world!
I remember stealing one of her rings, which sat in a tin box with some other keepsakes. It wasn’t especially valuable, but I became obsessed with it. It was silver and had a square black opaque stone set on the top. It was fairly chunky, actually, and its box sat on the windowsill in the bedroom I shared with my brother. One day, I opened it up and squirrelled the ring away under my mattress. I would get it out occasionally and gaze at it like Gollum in Lord of the Rings. Funny, it all seems to make so much more sense now.
Anyway, the long and the short of it was, I nicked the ring and said I had no idea where it was. Later that day, it turned up, back in its box, with me thinking I’d got away with it. It’s only now, writing this, that I realise my mother, of course, knew exactly what had happened. It’s like when my sister told me recently how heartbroken she was to learn that our father was only pretending to fall into the little booby traps we would set for him amongst the hay bales in our barn as children. My sister is 43.
I was not very coordinated as a child, I wore National Health glasses because of a lazy eye and I had a propensity to fall into water a lot of the time. I also spoke with a lisp; an attribute my father was not pleased with. It’s strange because he isn’t really a typical alpha male. He’s tall and he has an incredible presence. He has a rich baritone voice and certainly has something rather mesmeric about him. He’s very clever and very good at sussing someone out, as is my mother. He was never pushy for me to be a lad in terms of sports. He didn’t play rugby or football in the garden with me. He didn’t try to get me to do things that most other boys would do, but instead just let us kids get on with it.
I suppose because he travelled a lot, we didn’t have as close a relationship as we could have, but when he was home my siblings and I would spend most of the time gardening with him. Daddy would tell me about what he was doing with the plants, and I would watch him for hours doing his thing in the veg patch. I would help with the mowing and dig up potatoes, sweep up leaves … hang on, was this simply child labour? Anyway, I really loved being outside with him and I learnt so much – things that have stuck with me, and remind me that I’m a country boy at heart.
I could be clever and say that what I was actually doing was trying to gain his love by being attentive to the thing he was passionate about. Perhaps he would feel pleased with me and forget about his displeasure at my lisp. I remember being in bed one morning; all of us sitting in my parents’ room. My dad was determined to make me say my ‘s’ clearly. ‘Say it properly,’ he would tell me.
I would try, but just couldn’t. I remember getting very upset and my mother telling him to leave me alone. I mean, I could hardly call the social services over this incident. It is, however, an example of how a parent can shame a child.
My propensity to clumsiness, plus being very sensitive and prone to crying, didn’t help my rather dim view of myself at that age either. In my mind, I was not a good boy. I wasn’t living up to the stereotype of what it was to be a tough and robust young lad. It is common for gay men to feel like they can never gain the love of their father, and that they are somehow letting them down by not being manly enough. I don’t have this. Aged five, however, I had no notion of sex or ‘who’ I was attracted to, but I was acutely aware that I wasn’t what was seen as normal in terms of being a boy. I wasn’t tough and I didn’t engage in rough and tumble. When I cried my brother and sister would call me ‘girl’, and my God it was hurtful.
‘Stop being such a girrrrrl!’ they would say to me. I can clearly see the staircase in our family home, where I sat crying onto the bannister. The feeling was one of such sadness, and a desperate desire that I could and should change. I couldn’t understand why I was so sensitive. I felt very ostracised. I remember feeling extremely isolated within the family system. I didn’t relate to anyone else. I seemed to be the only one who was scared of strangers. I clung to my mother, and was easily set off.
Although this doesn’t all necessarily relate to sexuality, it’s a great example of a child not conforming to the usual gender norms, and how that can create a swathe of shame and self-disgust from a young age. Of course, there are lots of gay men who, when young and in adulthood, do conform to the stereotypes of being male: strong, aggressive, sporty. This can lead to a different kind of shame, where, as adults, they don’t feel they fit into the gay community. As a boy who wasn’t ‘typical’, I became ‘atypical’ and ‘different’ by default; I was on the outside. The overriding emotion that I remember wasn’t self-hate, as much as it was confusion. I was terribly confused as to why I was the way I was.
It’s common for young gay men to feel a sense of being different to stereotypical boys, through their lack of conformity. One of the most common areas, which can become extremely shaming, is sport, but sometimes the areas where a young gay boy might excel can also be shaming. Well, of course you would be good at that because you’re gay! If you’re young and sporty, then you’re generally celebrated, but a boy drawn to more sensitive subjects – the arts, reading, theatre, dance etc – is often demonised. This can, of course, reflect society as a whole. Footballers and top sportsmen are lauded; they are our everyday heroes. Male pop stars who flaunt their heterosexuality are seen as the ultimate example of what it is to be male. Hollywood stars with rippling muscles, the guys who always get the girls, are seen as the pinnacle of success. The sensitive, weedy boy is always the fool; the one who gets picked on, the one who fails in life.
Aggression on the sports field is seen as fair play: ‘GO ON, TAKE HIM DOWN!’; STOP ACTING LIKE A FAIRY’; ‘WHAT ARE YOU? SOME SORT OF GIRL?’
These are the words that might be heard screamed from the touchlines by some parents, usually fathers, at their children. Even sports day can become traumatic for a child who doesn’t have the desire, coordination or natural ability to run, or to hold a flipping egg and spoon! Surely if there were an atmosphere of understanding, nurture and celebration of all types of abilities, it would be a different event entirely. It isn’t the taking part that’s necessarily traumatic, although that alone can cause trauma; it’s the atmosphere. In fact, an innocent school sports day can be an unsettling affair for a gay child. The overriding message for a boy who isn’t winning in that arena is one of embarrassment and humiliation. This can permeate between parents as well. As one parent congratulates another, the parent with the winning boy might be subconsciously saying, ‘It’s a shame you’ve got one of those boys.’ When the parents of the gay child are carrying their own prejudice about gender norms, this shame is swiftly passed on to their son, consciously or unconsciously. In fact, what a seemingly innocent sports day can highlight is that, as journalist and political commentator Owen Jones says, ‘The people who suffer the most amount of homophobia are straight boys.’
If a boy is perceived as sensitive, the underlying worry is often that they might end up being gay. It is seen as the first sign of difference and therefore of weakness. One of the biggest insults that’s used in the classroom is to be called gay.
Imagine if you are a young straight boy who, from an early age, is constantly called gay because he isn’t sporty or manly enough, or perhaps even looks too pretty or is too thin. Two things can happen. Firstly, the boy takes on the shame of being gay without actually being gay. Secondly, the fact that he is being called gay even though he isn’t can breed a deep homophobia within that child. The thinking being: ‘If it wasn’t for gays being so wrong and different, I wouldn’t have to stand this abuse’. How can a child who isn’t gay, but gets bullied for being so, ever grow up with a sense of pride and love towards gay people? It is seen as the ultimate defectiveness. The ultimate disability, and the ultimate crime. Of course, for young boys who are gay, it takes on a whole different level of shame and terror.
Even as I write, I have a sense of what that insult means. It is the end of the road. You can’t go any lower than that. To be branded as gay is like saying, ‘You’re so wrong, you shouldn’t even exist.’
This is how the chain reaction of thought goes:
If you are not fulfilling your gender norm, you aren’t a usual boy. You are an embarrassment to me and my security in my sexuality and gender, because you are a living example of what it is to be a wrong boy. The social implications and signs are that you might end up not just wet and weedy but also gay. You are gay. You bring shame on your family. You are a pervert. You’re disgusting, and you were made wrong.
I experienced this time and time and time again. One of my huge fears was to do with singing and my love of it. I was constantly worried that, because I had a high voice, and enjoyed singing soulfully, doing gospel-like riffs, people would see that I was gay. It’s why I didn’t sing properly until I was 22.
There is an interesting relationship between gender norms and gay shame. Anyone can suffer from gender stereotyping in childhood, as well as the humiliation that can ensue when you aren’t the ‘normal’ son or brother or school kid. It is a short leap from that to homophobia. Indeed, we see it in the playground that so often the quieter, shyer boys are fast-tracked to being branded as gay; whether they are or not is immaterial.
There has definitely been a sea change in the last few years. Parents think more about what they dress their children in. We think more about how we gender-stereotype our children at school, in the home, and in general society. That’s still not always the case, however. I went to a friend’s house a while ago, where I put on their daughter’s pink feather boa. She was seven at the time and their son was five.
‘BOYS DON’T WEAR PINK!’ both the boy and the girl crowed.
I so desperately wanted their parents to correct them. It’s funny, because I believe underneath the fear of putting your children in anything other than what they are traditionally ‘meant’ to wear is the terror that they might be gay. I often ask myself, what is that terror? Where does it come from? A lot of it will be the worrying protectiveness over their children being different and therefore going into a world where they will be attacked, marginalised or at a disadvantage because they are not the norm. Sometimes, however, it’s the parents dealing with their own prejudice towards having a gay child.
What will the neighbours think? What will people think of us? What will our family think? People at school? People in the street. Where did we go wrong?
The idea of visibility for a child who is in any way different to the norm sends some parents into a spiral. I get cross. They need to deal with their shit instead of putting it onto their kids. My cousin is friends with a family, who have a young boy who loves wearing dresses. I often see them when I’m visiting. His mother is an example of someone who totally has her shit together. She doesn’t walk around with apologetic eyes or a fearful look. Her son wearing a dress is completely normalised, and she doesn’t care about what that might turn out to mean. The other day, when we were both visiting my cousin, I showed him some pictures from the cover shoot for this book.
He said, ‘You wear dresses but you aren’t a girl.’
I said, ‘No, I’m a boy, and I like to wear dresses.’
‘Oh!’ He paused. ‘Could I see some more dresses, please!’
It’s clear that this boy has free rein to wear, do and think and say what he likes. He’s extremely well behaved and very comfortable. His mother shows us how a parent should be. As parents, we woefully let our children down by placing our own experiences of stereotyping onto our kids. By allowing young people to play with whatever they want to play with, wear whatever they want to wear, and be whoever they want to be, we let them live freely and express themselves. We sometimes get so confused and tied up in our own bigotry or terror of how our children will turn out, we forget to truly let our young people live.
Fundamentally, I feel that sexuality, and being gay, is still not being addressed in education, because, even now, people don’t want to be seen to be pushing young people into a life of homosexuality. It’s often still seen as a choice. On top of that, many parents simply aren’t happy with the idea of their kids being taught about gay lifestyles or gay sex, as the 2019 picketing by parents of a school in Birmingham demonstrates.
According to the Alum Rock Community Forum, some parents temporarily removed their children from Parkfield Community School for ‘undermining of parental rights and aggressively promoting homosexuality’. A year before, I had interviewed the deputy head teacher of the school, Andrew Moffatt MBE, who, a gay man himself, explained that he had simply introduced a programme called No Outsiders. The ethos of the programme allowed kids to see diversity and difference, and helped them learn to respect it, even if they didn’t necessarily agree with it. Within that, it promoted LGBTQ+ equality, and challenged homophobia.
I loved the idea of it, because the more children are shown difference in others, the more we all learn to embrace our own differences. You don’t have to be gay to feel different; you might have additional needs or only have one parent. There are all sorts of reasons why a child might feel like they’re not like everyone else in the classroom. You might be the only one who likes Brussels sprouts! It was the case, however, that the only thing that was covered in the media was the LGBTQ+ element of the programme.
The problem is that many parents just seem to concentrate on the sexual aspect of being gay. We’re obsessed with sex, whereas six-year-old children are not. However, by ignoring the entire topic of LGBTQ+ people, we are lacking the initiatives to protect young gay people in schools. We are still not taking the issue of homophobic language seriously enough; it’s often dismissed as ‘boys being boys’ or ‘kids being kids’, and that is not good enough.
It’s quite simple. If a boy likes girls, and someone brings up the idea of kissing someone of the same sex, he might think it disgusting. The best thing to say to that boy is, ‘Don’t worry, you don’t have to do it. You just have to respect the idea that someone else might want to.’ I mean, I might find liver disgusting, but I wouldn’t deny somebody else’s right to eat it.
If a child uses the word ‘gay’ in a derogatory way, they might not think they’re being homophobic, but the fact that it might be offensive to some people needs to be explained. Often, it isn’t. The word gay, as an insult, and other homophobic language, is still rife within schools, and, unlike racist language, which is, quite rightly, stamped upon, it often goes unchecked. Parents sometimes argue that their children are being berated or punished when it comes to these issues, but in truth, they are simply being educated.
Where can a gay child feel truly safe? In the home, where they are different to the rest of their family? Out in the world, where they are at odds with the norm? In education, we need to make sure all kids are safe and recognised, especially the ones who are different. At the moment, the conversation around sex education and LGBTQ+ issues is at the discretion of the head teacher, but wouldn’t a clear initiative be more useful?
Despite how far things have progressed, the issues around sexuality and being gay are still not taken seriously, so there are LGBTQ+ children who don’t know what to do, and who are desperate for information and a way forward. Consequently, the percentage of young gay people with mental health issues is much higher than straight kids, with The Trevor Project (an American-based organisation providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ+ people under 25) stating on their website that LGBTQ+ youth are almost five times more likely to have attempted suicide compared to heterosexual youth.fn1
In 2018, UK-based LGBT rights charity, Stonewall, found that 52% of LGBT people said they had experienced depression in the last year, while one in eight LGBT people aged 18–24 (13%) said they had attempted to take their own life within the last year. Shockingly, almost half of trans people (46%) had also thought about taking their own life within the past year of the studyfn2. These figures are of epidemic standards and yet government response in the UK is woeful at best.
The process of my coming out was quite the journey, with failed attempts at sharing with people, and then going back into the closet again. It was actually a process that lasted 14 years. When I eventually got to that place of identifying as gay ‘publicly’, I was still not really out to myself. What I mean is, I wasn’t comfortable with who I was, or my sexuality. I carried the yoke of shame for a good ten years more, at least. For me, coming out happened in three stages.
First, there was the realisation that I was gay. I did the maths, so to speak, noticed who I was attracted to as I grew up, and, as I became more sexual, I knew in myself that I was gay.
Second, there was the public declaration and sharing of my sexual preferences. It’s weird writing this now as it seems so small. It’s just one part of me; who I choose to love and who I am sexually attracted to. Yet this second part became a huge admission – and it really was an admission (although I don’t like to use that word), such was the toxicity, guilt, self-hate and disgust boiling up inside me between stage one and two. It was tantamount to telling people I was a leper. A young boy who was defective in every way. For me, the nurturing that occurs in that period from stage one of coming out to stage two is crucial. If the person isn’t shown that the world they occupy is safe – their family, friends, school, things they see around them in the greater world – and if these things don’t resonate and vibrate with a frequency of love, acceptance and support, young gay people move into a fearful state, which can be a breeding ground for self-hate and loathing. The environment within which stage one and two happens is essential to how that coming-out process will go.
The third stage of coming out is what I call the ‘integration stage’. It’s where our inner and outer worlds merge and flourish. We need to feel the love of the world and experience our own inner love. It’s an old simile but a good one.
After the egg, the butterfly has three stages: the caterpillar, the cocoon and the butterfly.
It is important to point out that these stages can happen very quickly. Someone could realise they are attracted to the same sex, come out publicly about it, and, dependent on their sense of support and self-love, might integrate all of it at once. I have to say I was not one of these people. My process from caterpillar to butterfly was more of a very slow undressing; taking off various items of clothing, while painstakingly making my ‘carnival outfit’ of wings with a Pritt Stick that didn’t really work. Not only that, but I kept deciding to change the design as I went along.
I feel sad as I write, with tears running down my face. I can recall the feeling of desperation, hopelessness and fear, and I feel such empathy for myself back then. I feel empathy for all people who, through their sexuality and self-knowledge of that, have stirred up this infectious hateful potion inside that leads them to feel utterly alone and unaccepted by the world.
Thankfully, I now have my home, I have my job, I have my friends and, although I still find relationships hard due to past traumas as well as having a very dodgy nervous system that thinks it’s about to be eaten by a tiger most of the time, I am at peace with my sexuality.
I realised I was gay aged around eight. It was all to do with Bobby Ewing in the American soap opera Dallas. He was the heartthrob, and I felt attracted to him while watching him on television. In my head, and also from what I saw all around me, I was clearly, as a young boy, meant to be attracted to his wife, Pam Ewing, but I realised that this wasn’t the case.
It’s interesting to me now how this had already started to become a hugely internalised thinking process. There was never ever the remotest idea that I would share with anyone, inside or outside my family, the information that I fancied Bobby, not Pam. The admission that I had a bit of a crush on the cowboy not the cowgirl. (I actually think my next album might be called Bobby not Pam.)
These days, it’s hard to imagine being so withdrawn, and living this secret life with my sexuality at such a young age, but thinking back, I can really taste that climate of fear and confusion. The feelings of dismay at the growing amount of evidence that I was more than likely gay than not gay. Now, I want to be clear, I’d quite the burgeoning relationship with women. Between the ages of 5 and 7, I had kissed Sophie, a girl in my class, behind her parents’ sofa. I then declared my love to Jessica Hanbury, who I told everyone I was going to marry. I was also going to have a Range Rover, be a vet and have Labradors. I was certainly performing to type in other areas of my middle-class life.
With Jessica, I think I would have been marrying above my station anyway. The Hanburys lived in a massive house outside our local town, Hungerford, and you could have fitted our whole house into their sitting room. Still, I take some solace now that they may have been richer than us, but their house was right next to the M4 motorway.
The wedding, thankfully, was not forthcoming. Once I started to fully get into the dramatic twists and turns of the Dallas plot, I knew that Jessica and I would never had worked. How far would we have got before I shared with her that I was more swayed towards double denim and a Stetson, over a pink off-the-shoulder full-length dress with frills on the sleeves? It would have been a disaster! So near yet so far from a Range Roger, five Labradors and a veterinary practice.
I’d trodden the ‘normal’ path of a young boy until Bobby Ewing. Now, as I look back on shows like Dallas and Dynasty, I realise it wasn’t just the leading man I was interested in. The fights between Krystle and Alexis in Dynasty filled me with delight too, and the high camp of the show resonated with me.
It’s funny, the question of what makes something camp and why it might naturally appeal to some gay boys. The answer still eludes me, but it illustrates how there is more to being gay than simply fancying the same sex. There are, if you will, certain traits and tastes that come to the fore. I’m generalising, of course, but I’m going to run through a few of them, things that I was already enjoying as a child.
I enjoyed pretty things, and what a woman was wearing: her perfume, her jewellery. When my mother was going out of an evening, normally a Friday night, she would come in and kiss me goodnight, and I would love the smell of her Chanel No. 5. She smelt so exotic. On one occasion, she had a short haircut – eighties Annie Lennox-style (it was the eighties so it makes sense!). She was wearing a mustard-coloured sleeveless top of fine silk, and a large African beaded necklace. She never wore make-up and looked beautiful. I was transfixed. From an early age I loved women’s clothes and the way women looked. I would often buy my mother clothes for her birthday when I was a teenager: going up to London, looking in the shops, and buying things that I probably thought I would wear if I were her.
When I was at school, kids would have Pamela Anderson pictures on their wall, yet I cut out pages from Vogue and put them up in a handmade frame I’d rustled up in the art department. It was a clever ruse actually, because, like other boys, I still had women who I thought beautiful up on my wall yet I was more adoring of the clothes they were wearing, how their hair looked, and the general beauty of the art direction. I still remember now – Linda Evangelista in a Max Mara striped full-length dress, shot in the desert. As a teenager, I knew the names of all the supermodels from the nineties; not because I fancied them, but because I was transfixed by their beauty. I was amazed by how different they could look and also what they represented. These were women who became so powerful, famous and unstoppable. Cindy Crawford adorned many of the boys’ walls in her Pirelli calendar shots, but I was more interested in Linda, Naomi, Kate, Yasmin Le Bon, Carla Bruni and Helena Christensen. They were siren-like, and swept the catwalks, descending like goddesses from on high. When George Michael shot the video for ‘Freedom! ’90’, featuring all the supermodels, I could have died and gone to heaven!
Music is another trait that gay men can have in common and something else I loved. Especially the divas! Women who could properly sing, like Annie Lennox, who was an icon for me. She wasn’t doing what other women artists were doing. She tested gender and the idea of how a woman could look. At the time, I never considered how ground-breaking she was; how she didn’t represent the norm – but I think it must have seeped into me through her music. Her first solo album, Diva, wrapped me up and took me to a faraway place. I sank into the lyrics and the music of ‘Why’. And it was Stephen Lipson, the man who produced that album, who was to produce my own first true album, years later.
Aretha Franklin was another diva I loved. Her duet with George Michael, ‘I Knew You were Waiting’, rocked my world. Joni Mitchell’s more obscure albums Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm and Dog Eat Dog were on repeat on my Walkman, and I was a member of the Kylie fan club from day dot.
Books! I read a lot as a child, which is weird because I really don’t now. I went through the obligatory Famous Five, The Secret Garden, Charlotte’s Web etc. Then one day I stumbled across the Palomino Horse collection of books and no one could stop me. I raced through those books like a thoroughbred. It wasn’t usual for a boy to read pony books, yet I did, and the fact I then moved on to Charlotte Bingham novels was even more interesting. Charlotte Bingham is predominantly known as a writer for a female audience. The weird thing is, I picked her book out myself, in a bookshop. My parents must have known, and, bless them, they never tried to edit my reading material.
My other fascination was also horse-themed: the TV show, Black Beauty. For those not old enough to remember, Beauty was a stunning black horse owned by a young girl who lived on a farm. Similarly to Shadow the sheepdog, Gentle Ben and Lassie, Black Beauty seemed to constantly sniff out troublemakers and, through some sort of magical symbiosis with his owner, managed to thwart any lurking danger. He was stolen, privy to bank robbers, thwarted loan sharks, and even managed to stop a gang of gypsies. (I’m not sure now if it was actually the most politically correct of kids’ TV shows). I think there were even Russian spies involved in the plot at one stage, so the show was clearly doing its bit to fight the Cold War through children’s programming, and subconsciously influencing a new generation towards a cultural bias aimed at the East. Black Beauty was also an Arabian stud, so quite how he managed to end up with an impoverished farming family was anyone’s guess. All this aside, I loved Black Beauty. In fact, I always wanted to have that magical relationship with animals. I would go for walks and imagine my black Labradors were giant black horses, whispering to them about the secret goings-on of the Berkshire countryside. Hiding in bushes, I’d spy on the farmer as he went past on his combine, telling the dogs of his Russian heritage and intentions to take over our house. There was a time, however, when I moved from wanting a horse to actually becoming one.
My love for Black Beauty did facilitate an amusing (though not at the time!) story from my first year at my hideous prep school, Horris Hill. We would play on the bottom football pitches, which lay either side of the long drive heading up towards the main school. There were many days on which I would imagine myself walking up that drive and away from that hideous place, gazing longingly at it while waiting for my mother to appear in her black Ford Escort xr3i with red stripes down the side.
On this particular day it had been especially wet, and we were playing football. The pitches were at the bottom of a hill, so would get easily waterlogged. In fact, such was the poor drainage, it would often be like playing in a marsh.
It was a rare event that I managed to get the football, but that day I found myself at the halfway line with no one in my way but the poor, shivering boy in my opposition’s goal. As I plodded along, tapping the ball towards the goal, the Black Beauty theme tune entered my head. I suddenly became the horse, trotting along, whinnying gently to myself, as the theme tune got louder and louder in my ears. As I arrived in the penalty box, I delivered my coup de grâce and swiped at the ball with my foot as people cheered me on. I completely missed the ball, but the momentum of my kick swept me off my feet and I landed squarely on my back in the muddy penalty box. The wind was knocked out of me, and I was left struggling for air and looking up at the grey sky, as the theme tune slowly died away. Black Beauty had failed me.
All these incidents from my childhood have helped formulate my opinion that being gay isn’t just about fancying the same sex; it’s often about having certain sensibilities. Fashion, women, smells, the arts, divas – you name it. Perhaps it’s because these things are usually seen as girlish, and, being gay, that one’s feminine side is more prominent. For me, this adds a richer inner layer to what it means to be a gay man.