CHAPTER THREE
After leaving Horris Hill Prep School, aged 13, I went to Wellington College. It was daunting to go from the top of the pile in one school, right back down to the bottom, as was leaving all my friends behind. I was fortunate in that, being twins, my brother Rupert and I were in the same year, and in the same boarding house. It was the same one – The Hopetoun – that my father had been in, back in the sixties.
With schools like Wellington, if you had a parent who’d gone to the school, it was felt you were more likely to get a place. As well as this, my father had been rugby captain, which held a certain cachet as Wellington was big on rugby. I clearly remember my first day there. The night before, I’d gone into my parents’ room, crying and saying I didn’t want to go. They told me to give it until half-term and see how I felt then. This placated me somewhat, although, looking back, I just didn’t want to go to boarding school. After Horris Hill, however, Wellington was like a holiday camp. We could wear our own clothes out of the classroom – so from 6pm in the evening and at weekends. There was a full-on sweet shop called Grubbies. We could listen to our music (music at Horris Hill was limited to three hours a week) and we were called by our first names.
Still, I found the first day terrifying; the older boys looked like full-grown men! And with thoughts of my sexuality always in the background, I was curious and nervous as to whether being gay would ‘stay with me’. Meanwhile, I, of course, developed crushes on some of the other boys. New students turned up a week before the rest of the school, except the top two senior rugby teams, who would train for the whole week. I remember on the first day, having an ‘orientation’ morning around the school. As we got down towards the rugby fields, I had never seen anything like it. I felt like I was watching the giants amongst boys, who actually resembled young men. Naturally my eyes went to the ‘young men’ who I found attractive. One of them, incidentally, went on to become a Calvin Klein model, so I suppose I had some sort of good taste. I felt utterly daunted and thrilled, yet also wrong, almost depraved, that I was attracted towards people of the same sex. It was like I inhabited a whole other world – an inner world – of desire, fantasy, love and attraction. It was a world that I could and absolutely would not allow ANYONE else to know. At times, I existed there completely, yet no one knew. It was comforting in a way, but thinking back, I was living purely in my head, and the utter commandment was that I always would be.
It was around this time that the internet launched (which makes me feel extremely ancient), and I realised that I could now get online and watch gay porn when I was at home. This was a revelation, but not always easy to achieve. Firstly, I would have to sneak out of my room at night and go to the spare room, where the computer and router were kept. Once there, I’d have to put a towel over the router because it would make a noise like a fax machine as it ‘dialled up’, which lasted for about 30 seconds. I cannot explain to you how excruciating those 30 seconds were; the noise that bloody router made was like a ghostly cat screaming through a fan. I would sit with bated breath, waiting for the horrific sound to finish, and then, as quickly as possible, search ‘gay porn’. Then in darkness, lit only by the glowing computer screen, I’d wank as quickly as possible. It was what you might call a danger wank!
There was, I suppose, a sadder side to it, in that I felt so terrified in case I got caught, as any teenager would. The truth was, I couldn’t find gay porn anywhere else, and didn’t yet have the confidence to walk into a newsagent or sex shop to find it.
Prior to my discovery of porn, stimulation had been scant, although there was the Chippendales video that my sister had been given for Christmas. The Chippendales were an American act made up of male strippers, who, during the eighties, became huge, selling out arenas. They were all oiled, with long, wet-look perms and G-strings. It’s not something I would find sexy now, but at the time it was very arousing. Again, it was all I could get my hands on, aside from a video copy of A Room with a View, starring Helena Bonham Carter. In the film, there was a famous homoerotic scene where three of the men went skinny dipping in the woods, and then ran around the edge of the lake with their knobs out. The sight of a young Rupert Graves – who, years later, I recorded a radio play with about a woman giving fake birth to baby rabbits – was too much for me, and I would slowly frame-by-frame move this scene on using the pause button. Afterwards, I would have to make sure I rewound the video back to the exact time-mark it was at to begin with. I chose not to share this information with Rupert Graves, which, I think, was probably for the best.
At that age, even uttering the word ‘gay’ was something I found excruciating. It was literally impossible for me to even formulate the word and say it out loud. The use of the word ‘gay’ was like uttering ‘Voldemort’; it was so wrong, and so dangerous, that the implications of saying it were utterly catastrophic. Even after coming out at university, I’d been so conditioned to the foulness of the word that it took me another ten years to get comfortable with it.
My first experience of telling someone I was gay was when was 16. I was at Wellington, and it had all been building and building inside me, to the point I was beginning to get depressed for the first time. I wasn’t in utter devastation, but it was noticeable that I was not my normal bubbly self. I remember sneaking up to my friend Andrew’s room, which was two rooms up from my and Rupert’s room, on the same corridor. Weirdly, I remember I was wearing a green Emporio Armani shirt, which eventually joined the long list of lost clothes I will occasionally mourn for. Once there, I told Andrew I had to tell him something, but it took me so long to get it out. I remember crying a lot, and getting super super hot and sweaty. I finally managed to get the words out, but thinking back, I don’t know if I actually said the word gay, or rather alluded to it. Andrew was invaluable to me at that time; the first person I felt wasn’t judging me. I will forever be indebted to him.
After that, we set about testing my sexuality, by seeing how I fared with various friends of his girlfriend, which now actually sounds a little bit creepy. It was a bit like a science experiment, I suppose. I remember the first party I went to, which was at Andrew’s girlfriend’s house. We turned up to find about seven girls, and we all sat around the sitting room eating pizza. I am not shitting you when I tell you that we watched the ‘Greatest Love Scenes from Neighbours’. It was one of the worst and dullest evenings I have ever spent. I ended up sitting in the dog-bed downstairs in the kitchen, with the family’s Dalmatian, who was adorable and, like me, had little interest in watching Kylie and Jason break up again.
Andrew actually did wonders for alleviating some of the pain and terror I had bottled up inside; it was a tougher job, however, to dig out the deep shame that had settled in my system.
By the time I was 16, everyone at school was getting a bit more sexual, and it was fascinating watching some of the boys I knew move slowly into their sexuality. Wellington only had girls in the top two years, and it was often the most unexpected of boys who would suddenly be dating one of them. There was a confidence that came with my peers as they paired off with various girl students, but it wasn’t just within the school that they’d meet. We had what we called socials, where one year of students would go off to a girls’ school and have a dance with them. Alcohol was, of course, always smuggled in, and someone would always get in trouble. I’d never go, but back at school, I’d be eager to hear all the stories of who had got with who, and how far they got. One of the Wellington boys ended up using loads of French bangers to blow up one of the girls’ lockers. After that, and possibly to this day, Wellington was banned from attending the socials.
During this period, I created a sort of character for myself, and, in a way, became untouchable. I felt like I had everyone under my control within my boarding house. I was suitably subservient to the boys above me, I respected the boys below me, so they respected me, and my housemaster adored me. Outside the boarding house, however, I was effectively mute. It was a strategy that worked. I wouldn’t talk to anyone and so gave them nothing on me. I still use this strategy sometimes. It’s better to keep one’s head beneath the parapet and let one’s actions do the talking. That is how I have approached my singing career, right from the beginning.
It was sport that initially gave me some kudos, enabling me to branch out from the boarding house. From the age of 13 onwards, I practised at the basketball courts constantly, and watched all the older boys playing. I learnt a lot, and slowly got better and better until, aged 16, I was in the starting five for my year. Suddenly, through basketball, I was allowed into the ‘cool gang’ (with a group who called themselves ‘the Asian Posse!’), where my sporting prowess gave me huge points for being ‘manly’. It was a brilliant coat of armour, but I also found joy in it. When I talk of my sporting capabilities, it’s not with an intention to brag; post-puberty I started to see that I was actually a good runner, my physique started to develop quite quickly and I became stronger and in turn more self-confident in my abilities in sport. It is, however, an example of how people’s narrow way of thinking about what a gay man could be allowed me to thrive, while also throwing potential bullies off the scent, so to speak. It was the narrow stereotyping from a heteronormative society that gave me the camouflage I needed. How could someone who plays a sport so well and so physically be gay? He couldn’t!
In the Asian Posse there was Emil, who was extremely wealthy, Deshan, Tayo, who was an incredible athlete, my brother Rupert, and me. At Wellington, basketball was a bit of an unknown. It existed in its own bubble, where I managed to create a protective oasis around myself. Firstly, due to the American cool factor that the sport brought, we were allowed to walk around in baggy shorts and vests. Secondly, the kind of game we played was rhythmic, flowed and, basically, few people could play it. The ‘lads’ in the school lacked the dance-like coordination required to play it well, which is why we were respected and, in a way, feared, because once on the court in inter-house matches, we had the ability to shine and make others look less-than.
The other protection I had was racial. People couldn’t really challenge the identity of my friends in the Asian Posse. Yes, they were in the minority, but it was very different to someone identifying as gay. This was race, and people were, without doubt, wary of and intimidated by them. Emil was the son of a sickeningly rich family. Nazif, another friend, was known for being very strong. Tayo was also from a hugely wealthy family, and Deshan challenged everyone’s limited views by being incredibly gifted in all three top sports – hockey, rugby and cricket – while also being very hippy-like in his approach to life. All four boys didn’t take any shit. Boys older and younger were wise enough to know that it would be foolish to go up against them. On the rare occasions when somebody did, they were quickly, and physically, shut down. I had unknowingly created an enormous protective buffer against anyone who might get as much as a sniff of my gayness. It was another opportunity to throw people off the scent and hide my shameful secret.
It wasn’t all plain sailing, though. On one occasion one of my own school friends shot me down in front of everyone, uttering the unspeakable.
This friend was was an incredible athlete: tall, lithe and rippled with muscles. He was also, I came to learn, a cruel and unpleasant character who preyed on people’s weaknesses. On that day I came into the dining room at school, aged 16, wearing my basketball vest. I was fortunate to have a naturally athletic figure, and knew my arms looked good in a vest. It might not have made me cool, but at least I could boost my self-esteem by looking in the mirror.
Anyway, I was just sitting down when he looked at me across the table and said,
‘You know, I think your parents must have been on steroids when you and your brother were born. You both have brilliant bodies and look ripped.’
So far so good, but somehow I knew it wouldn’t last.
‘The thing is, Will, you look all manly, like you could beat someone up, but then you open your mouth and this soft lisp voice comes out,’ he said. ‘It’s almost as if you’re gay.’
As soon as the words passed his lips, it was as if I’d been kicked in the stomach and had fallen to the ground. The feeling I had was utterly depleting; full of overwhelming shame. The notion that someone had seen through my disguise was terrifying, and from then on I walked on eggshells with the terror that someone might see the real me. The me who was absolutely repulsive to his core.
With this hanging over my head, I decided to tread a tightrope along which I would deftly walk, attempting to balance an outer projection of normality yet never completely throwing away my authenticity as a young gay man. It was exhausting living a lie, absolutely exhausting, and I can sometimes still experience this feeling when I am having an episode of anxiety or depression. It is a balancing act between containment i.e. not splurging out my emotional state at any opportunity, and also being true to myself at any one time. Mental and physical health, however, are very different to living in an environment that is fundamentally not safe and not accepting of my very essence and being. When I was a teenager, it was like living behind enemy lines. The truth being that it felt as though even my friends were the enemy.
Wellington College was a beautiful old building made up of lots of courtyard and quads, each with a different name. I lived on the edge of the school’s grounds, so after tea on a Friday evening, I would cross the lower Combermere Quad into the Back Quad to where the rugby fixture lists were posted, to see whether I was playing away or at home that weekend. I had another agenda, however, which was to see which of the other boys were playing on the away teams. Perhaps I would get a chance to see some of the boys who I fancied, naked in the showers. The trouble was, thinking like this would lead me to feelings of self-disgust, reminding me that I was living a lie and masquerading amongst my peers. I chastised myself, attacking myself as some sort of pervert. I took on the thoughts that all the straight boys would think of me: ‘Oh, when Will tackles boys on the rugby field, he’s obviously deriving some sort of sexual pleasure from it.’ I attacked myself endlessly. It must be horrific, I thought, that these poor boys had someone like me in their midst. I felt almost as if I was predatory. The thing that crippled me even more was taking showers with other boys while on away rugby matches. What would happen if they eventually found out I was gay? Surely they would be looking back on all the occasions I’d seen them naked, with anger and repulsion. The idea that I could move undetected in their midst, showering naked with them, and, even worse, getting sexually turned on by the ones I fancied. I was racked with conflict. On one hand I was following an urge that was completely natural to a teenage boy. Imagine if I was heterosexual and had the opportunity to go away with a whole selection of girls my age and got to shower with them. No one would see my excitement and sexual desires as anything other than natural. In fact, I’d probably be applauded for my expression of sexual prowess and development into becoming a man.
However, what if people knew that I harboured sexual desires and crushes on a certain boy? Or that I would masturbate back in my room with stored-up visions in my head of boys I had seen naked that day, soaping up their bodies. Boys whose willies and bums I had seen, before turning the images into my own secret fantasies. If people knew all that, it would surely be completely acceptable for them to cast me out, to beat me up, to insult and torment me. After all, it hadn’t been that long since being gay was still illegal.
I feel it’s important to stress that I don’t think of any of these things now as a 41-year-old man. What I mean is, I am not writing these memories, lasciviously thinking about 17-year-old boys. I am writing about how I felt then, and how my natural sexual desires played out. It’s in itself interesting that I feel the need to say this. On the one hand, it is entirely appropriate, but on the other it is perhaps a reaction to how gay men have been vilified in the past, and how being gay was often linked with paedophilia. Being gay often meant that one was seen as predatory to all males, no matter what their age. In fact, I believe the notion was that a gay man couldn’t overpower a straight adult male, but could easily prey on the vulnerable and physically weaker, who were young boys.
The other factor that didn’t help these blinkered and damaging views was that schools and the education system could be a breeding ground for gay men who were paedophiles. I certainly experienced some predatory men when I was younger, but it wasn’t always clear if they were men whose massively suppressed sexuality had compelled them to prey on young boys, or whether they were just that way inclined anyway.
At my prep school, the aforementioned Horris Hill, I I lived amongst some men who, though not paedophiles, clearly had issues with boundaries and whose behaviour made me feel extremely uncomfortable. It was an all-boys school, and there was one teacher who, whether he was sexually active with men his own age or not, took too close an interest in the boys. For instance, he would sit right by our showers after football games and openly look at our naked bodies even though he had no reason to be there (as he was not our sports teacher), let alone looking at us. Sometimes, in full view, he would look straight at our penises. When we had bath time in our dormitories, he would walk through the bathroom, which had a row of baths. By the time we got to the age of 12 or 13, we would all race to foam up our baths as quickly as possible, just to cover up our naked bodies, so he couldn’t gaze at us as he walked past. Sometimes, he would actually sit in the bathroom talking to us as he took in the scene. There was one boy who was a little more brazen about how he dried himself off, seemingly oblivious to the adult male who was staring at him as he stood there naked with his towel. The rest of us, however, would be even more coy than usual, making sure we stayed wrapped firmly in our towels.
As young children, unconsciously we are totally switched on to the adults around us, and our nervous systems can spot the ones to be wary of instantly. There were teachers who we were quite happy to have sit in on our bath time and talk to us about football, gossip, or what was on TV. When these teachers were on shower duty in the changing rooms, we’d all breathe sighs of relief. It was clear as day they did not need to be avoided. To grow up in an environment where it feels like there is a distinct lack of safety, and, in this case, an invasion of one’s privacy and one’s body, is most detrimental.
Worse than just looking, there was a teacher who was an alcoholic, and more evidently a paedophile. Years later, I ran into a fellow student who told me he’d ended up working on a council board who were investigating this very man. He’d left Horris Hill under suspicious circumstances and ended up killing himself.
At Wellington College, I remember getting to the dining room for tea one day, and seeing my friend unusually distressed and shouting at younger boys to get him water. He was usually such a calm and measured individual, so I went up to ask what was wrong. He said he had finished his last A level and had been invited for pizza by a teacher who had plied him with wine, and then started to ask him personal questions about how often he masturbated and how big his willy was. My friend made his excuses and left, but was shaken.
I mention these occasions because the teaching profession was one that unfortunately got a reputation for attracting gay men who were paedophiles. The result was that all gay man got tarred with the same brush. In fact, such was my shame that for years I carried a subconscious feeling that parents were suspicious of me around their children, girl or boy. It is sad that I carried the thought somewhere in my psyche that, because I was gay, people would put me in the same bracket as a child predator.
All the above said, my secret lustings after boys my own age was something that I harboured privately, and although I developed crushes on certain boys and sometimes got to see them in the nude, my thoughts, desires and furtive glances at my peers’ naked bodies allowed me to build up a case of utter shame and self-disgust.
I felt like I was being a traitor to my friends, my whole year, to the teachers, to my family and indeed the whole world. I was completely, whole-heartedly wrong and evil. I saw everything through the prejudiced eyes of the world, especially the distaste that my peer group would hold. For young straight boys, the notion of being gay was disgusting, because those young men were exploring their own sexuality, and needed to create and maintain a clear duality between what they were and what they were not.
If someone doesn’t like something and it makes them feel weird, their reaction will be dictated by a wider social narrative of what kind of reaction and behaviour is acceptable. Boys in the past have been allowed and guided towards a reaction of outward disgust, projected shaming and emotional and physical abusing towards gay people. The good news is this has changed, with the narrative moving away from merely the sexual attraction and sexual act, and towards that of gay sensibility and love. People are learning to respect the choice of who a person wants to love, even if they don’t necessarily agree with it.
Of course, at the age of 16, I was not sitting around musing on the misfortune of young boys being misled by society towards homophobia; I was sitting there thinking I was the devil incarnate, and all these boys would be so repulsed by who I was and the thoughts I had in my head.
So what changed and how did it change? A big step along the road for me was being able to come out publicly, and to reach the ‘second stage’ of the coming-out process.
I was in my friend’s flat in Victoria with one other person. His name was Jon and I’d had a crush on him for the whole summer. I would often drive over to his house in Windsor and we’d go out for a drink. We would talk late into the night, and I became his confidant. When we stayed in Victoria, we would sleep on the same sofa bed, and it felt good to know that Jon was happy for me to be his bedmate. On this particular morning, everyone had gone out, so it was just Jon and me at the flat. Suddenly, I heard whistles and music echoing around the streets. The flat had a balcony, so I went to see what was going on. It was the Gay Pride parade.
Suddenly, around the corner came this whole sea of mostly men, in bright colours, with rainbow flags everywhere and disco tunes blaring out of sound systems. Many of the men were topless, some just in pants. They were all smiling and dancing and singing. I couldn’t believe it. From having no visibility in my life of any kind of gay person, there were suddenly thousands passing directly under the balcony I was standing on. I had such an aching urge to join them. I thought perhaps I could sneak down, leave all my friends and join the parade, as if I’d run away and joined the circus. Something stopped me, though, and I was filled with annoyance and self-hatred that I wasn’t strong enough to do it. It was years of repression and not feeling safe. It was, however, a key moment in my coming-out process. It showed me that there were other gay men out there who were able to be visible, unashamed and proud to be who they were.
That summer, I started pushing the boundaries as far as I could. I noticed in the tube station in Victoria there was a newsagent that had gay porn mags. It seemed odd that this particular shop had them, as I had never seen them in a newsagent before. It took me a few weeks to build up my courage, but one day I went in and purchased three of these magazines. As I went up to the till, the feeling of dread I had was almost overpowering. I felt as though something awful was going to happen: the shopkeeper would make some comment or judgement, and people in the shop would point and stare at me. Even after buying the magazines, I felt that everyone in the tube station knew what I was up to. It was a mixture of terror and guilt. When I got to the train to take me back to the countryside and to home, I went to the loo and looked through the magazines. I went quickly through them and then squashed them into the bin before I got off the train so that there was no evidence. This became a routine for me. Each time before leaving London, I’d go to this particular newsagent and buy another magazine or two. Then I’d read them on the train, have a wank, and deposit the evidence in the train bin before getting off at my stop.
Slowly, I was finding my own sexuality through these magazines. The interesting thing was that it was done very much in secret and under a veil of guilt and shame, yet it was happening. I found phone numbers in the back of the magazines, and would often go to pay phones and ring them just to hear some super creepy recording of a man speaking about a sexual encounter he’d had. Basically, it was a recording of someone reading a raunchy gay story, and it cost a fortune! I would have to keep on throwing pound coins into the slot to get just a meagre two minutes of story, read by a creepy-sounding American guy.
As time went on, I became more and more frustrated, and I realised I couldn’t really hold it in anymore. It was the winter when I went off travelling to Australia for several months, before returning to retake my A levels. Somehow, I knew what I wanted was out there.