Out

I grew up in a house where it was always ‘OK to be gay.’ I know that because my parents told me so, repeatedly, long before I understood why that was something that needed saying.

It was the 90s and it would be easy to forget that, even then, society still allowed plenty of room for doubt that this might be true.

A gay kiss on EastEnders was enough to send the tabloids screaming. The Daily Mail published, with fervent excitement, the news that a ‘gay gene’ might have been identified. The implication, I suppose, was that we could be safely eradicated.

If you think that is a slightly hysterical interpretation, I point you to the headline: ‘Abortion hope after ‘gay genes’ finding’. The date is July 1993. I am four.

Again, with it being the 90s, ‘you’re gay’ was top of the charts for playground insults. Whenever my younger brother said it, neither of us really knowing what it meant, my Mum would make a conscious interjection to tell us it was ok to be gay and that they [our parents] would love us no matter what.

This seemed incongruous to me in my ignorance. Similar sentiments weren’t expressed if my brother called me a durr-brain or shithead.

It was said casually but I always registered the undercurrent of intent. I knew it was not an innocuous statement, it felt planned, placed, meaningful. That’s why I remembered it long enough to, in a random moment of recall aged 24, suddenly realise what had been happening. That, probably from the moment I first put on my Mum’s petticoat and danced around the bedroom to Handel’s Water Music or did my first Mel-C (‘Sporty Spice’) high-kick, my parents had been carefully laying the groundwork for my pathway to self-acceptance.

I grew up in a secular, largely middle-class, milieu. For a term during Drama in Year 8, aged 13, myself and a bunch of other boys who have all ploughed a firmly heterosexual path, devised a retelling of Aladdin, as a forbidden gay love story. The homophobic Sultan, encouraged by the nefarious and socially conservative Jafar, has banished the Prince for falling in love with our eponymous hero.

You’d think the scene was set, but even sorting the pieces in my head was surprisingly complicated.

I have friends who grappled with their sexual desires at a much younger age, not always through choice. But I spent my teens in a curious vacuum. Present, respected, a bit aloof, but enough of an outsider that nobody would question why I wasn’t rushing to hit the regular, messy beats of adolescence.

I knew I had felt a certain way about my friend’s hot Canadian dad when I was very young before any feelings could be metabolised or explained. Enough of a feeling to suspect the Daily Mail might get their ‘gay gene’-day-in-the-sun soon enough. If it’s nurture rather than nature, then the nurturing in my case must have been swift.

But for a few years, feelings were slow to crystallise. I would think that I ‘fancied’ certain girls. But those thoughts were always marked with a giant full stop, and they were certainly thoughts, not feelings.

The first thing I can remember as felt was the aftermath of a yoghurt fight with a male friend over lunch. It was short and playful. Later that day, when I took off my jumper and caught the aroma of old, dried, strawberry yoghurt, my stomach turned over at the sudden flashback to lunch in a way that was strange, but pleasant.

But I didn’t come out in adolescence. Not in my teens at least.

It was obviously not a fear of rejection. That is a tale as old as time. The classic framing. The force pinning you to the back of the closet.

I’d been surrounded and embraced by emphatic, implied acceptance. I’d had a brief moment of worry when my Grandma decisively exclaimed that she ‘couldn’t stand Michael Barrymore’, but as an adult I can see the potential reasons for this are myriad.

What was holding me back was something murkier and harder to process. An unease with what it would demand of me. You say it, and then what?

There was no partner waiting in the wings. No boy to say ‘this is him’. In a gentler world, that is how I would have liked to ‘come out’. Just a casual human sentence: ‘This is my boyfriend’. And the rest follows from there.

Although to do this, as a gay teenager, in a not-small-not-large market town would require some negotiation. For both parties to be comfortable, ready, prepared for what could be wildly differing reactions.

But without that framework, it all felt strangely theoretical, focused on something much more pointed, and uncomfortably specific.

In 2009, even though acceptance was widely telegraphed, it was still an era where silence was met with a subtle mounting pressure.

I think this might be different now. I think in the best of circumstances, the ‘coming out’ moment has been rightly robbed of some of its power.

I hope that, at least some, young queer teenagers don’t feel like they spend their entire adolescence conscious that those around them are quietly, but industriously, yet mostly well-meaningly, constructing the stage for their big moment. Waiting, anxiously, for the moment they can turn on the spotlight, stage left, for your big reveal.

I had started telling friends much earlier. Even so, I remember the first time I articulated it out loud, deliberately choosing a moment before a two-hour ‘Pass Plus’ driving lesson. Coming out and mastering your first motorway on the same day.

I didn’t say it clearly. Just enough words, to a friend with whom I’d danced around the topic long enough to know that my childish ambiguity would be roundly ignored for the barely concealed truth.

It felt easy quickly, although I had been the fourth to do it. I can see how it might not happen as smoothly without precedent.

At university, it was always just who I was. And that came with a strange burden of guilt. I had entered a liminal space. My ‘complete’ self in all spaces, but one.

If it’s not fear holding you back, you’re not building to a moment of courage. All there is is a residual ickiness from the expectation to name something, in abstract terms, that everyone already knows. And you have to be the one who initiates the whole thing, just for people to say ‘of course’, ‘we’ve always known’, ‘we love you’…

…which is largely what happened.

Some old family friends visited from Australia for the Christmas holidays. The kids (I am 20 at this point and one of ‘the kids’) quickly rekindled our old bonds. But we were only together for a few days. Enough for some polite catching up and the novelty of discovering what our dynamic might be as young adults, but little space to stage my mini ‘coming out’ theatrical spectacular. A one-man play that is at some points in your life (the first day in university halls) comically banal and other points (your part-time job in a café where all your colleagues are in their 50s and one just mentioned her casual support of the BNP) thorny and awkward.

That’s nothing a little, or rather, a lot, of gin won’t solve. I came out to my Australian friend while still in the warmly tipsy phase. It was genuinely heartening, as these moments have often been for me. We immediately felt closer, I felt my shoulders could loosen a little, but the guilt that I still hadn’t said this to my parents ratcheted up a notch.

(As an aside, for me, one of the worst things about the times before you announce, is second-guessing people’s potential presumptions that your previous silence, the reason you haven’t told them, is that you haven’t accepted it yourself.

That it’s not that you’re just shy, embarrassed, awkward or questioning why your sexual desires need to be telegraphed, but perhaps you’re in denial or so emotionally repressed you haven’t even reckoned with it yet. I think that’s why the most accepting, compassionate people don’t ask, but the problem is sometimes that also translates to a transmission of unease around the topic, for the kindest reasons.)

Many gins later, with the aid of Apple Sourz as a mixer, I ‘came out’ about my guilt, about my need to say something, my inability to do so.

I have to channel a feeling of defiance about ending up a drunken, sobbing mess on my friend’s front lawn on New Year’s Eve in order to be able to sit with the memory.

I have to remember 20 is young, that even with an abundance of acceptance, the pressure was real and acute and although by then I had experimented and explored, I still felt light years behind, and as though this was a speculative statement rather than a declaration about my embodied self.

My parents took me home, I cried most of the night and insisted on playing Bach’s Magnificat to soothe myself to sleep, even though the house was full of guests.

Nothing much changed after the event. I carried a new shame for falling apart so spectacularly. There was an unfortunate transference of the old guilt to the new, which meant I didn’t really feel relief. In some respects, hostility might have been easier to cope with, defiance would have felt like a productive emotion, a story that would resonate.

Instead, it just left unspoken questions, and heavier expectations. Was there more to discover? Would my boyfriend be around for dinner later? These were never asked, but I felt the weight of the answers’ failure to manifest.

More shame came from feeling I had grown up in an environment where this should have been, comparatively, extremely easy.

But the crying, the Bach, the mechanics of my final performance, I can’t be kind to myself about it even now. I internalised a belief that the act of being seen was inherently uncomfortable and unsafe. With cruel irony, my ‘coming out’ became my ‘stepping in’. Please, no more one-man plays.