“When did you first realise you were gay?”
It’s the inevitable question that really shouldn’t be inevitable anymore, but it still gets asked. The woman asking this time is sincere, however, genuinely interested. It’s just her way of getting to know me, the man she’s been sat next to at a dinner party, and the three white wines she’s consumed in the past hour and a half have given her the confidence to put the question.
I have several stock answers. The easiest is just to give an approximate age. I usually say ‘when I was about 10’, which invariably elicits a surprised, ‘Really? That’s young.’ If I’m feeling a little more confrontational, I’ll reply with a question of my own, ‘I’m not sure, when did you realise you were straight?’ This inevitably causes so much confusion, the conversation briskly moves on. Or ends.
On this occasion, I go for option number two, not to be confrontational, but because I actually like this woman and I’m curious to know what her answer will be – plus I’ve had three glasses of red wine, so I’m up for a discussion. As I hoped, she takes time to consider my come-back, but then just agrees that it’s very difficult to give an exact time and date.
When I get home, I wonder what my answer would be if I were to really try and give a complex, honest response. The fact is, it’s almost impossible to pinpoint the exact time that you realised your sexuality – whatever the sexuality might be. I have a series of mentally recorded moments that I assume are relevant to my personal growing awareness that I was gay.
I remember one of the first times I was aroused by a sexual image of a man. It was when I was 12 and I found my first porn magazine in the Hollow Tree over the local park. I was with Gary Donaldson as I usually was back then. I don’t know why – he made it quite clear that if I dropped dead he wouldn’t really care. His gaze was generally void of expression and if the subject of friendship ever came up, he’d dismiss it with a curled top lip as if admitting to actually liking someone repelled him.
Even Gary showed some excitement at the find, however. He tried to grab the magazine from me, grunting like a pig with the exertion, but I was stronger than he was – not something I could have said about many people – and I held it tight until we were sitting in the belly of the tree.
The Hollow Tree was a stalwart feature of the park. It stood at the edge of a small copse – a thirty-second run from the play area in one direction and the tennis courts in the other.
That’s all it was, a dead tree with a hollowed-out belly, about head height to a 12-year-old, easy to climb into with a well-placed foot and a gentle heave upwards. Two small people could just about fit into the hollow, as long as they were happy to share each other’s breath.
Normally this wouldn’t have been such a pleasant experience – Gary’s breath stank of pickled onion flavoured Space Invaders. But with the magazine between us, intimacy was not an issue. And as we flicked through the sexually explicit images, neither was breathing much anyway.
‘Cor! ’ growled Gary, his usually dull eyes blazing through tortoiseshell rimmed glasses. ‘I’d shag her!’
The woman in question, spread across the page like a dissected biology experiment, looked like she might oblige.
Although I made the right noises and lewd comments, I found nothing attractive about any of the women featured in the grimy treasure. It didn’t stop me looking – I was 12 years old, and curious. But it wasn’t until a picture sent in by a reader, showing herself and her boyfriend posing boldly for an invisible photographer, both naked and aroused, that I felt a genuine surge of pleasure.
I tried not to stare too hard or for too long.
But was this claustrophobic encounter with an erotic image the exact point when I realised I was gay?
Or did my gay awakening start with a kiss - at the age of ten, on the seam where the hard playground of my junior school met the sports fields? I was running, William was chasing. Breathless, I had fallen and William, yellow-blonde hair hanging across his jubilant face – a face I can barely picture now – had fallen on top of me. And then came the kiss - just a rapid peck on the cheek.
‘Why did you do that?’ I screeched – because that was what you did when another boy kissed you.
William responded with a shrug. And then we were surrounded by other boys, clamouring for the game to continue, oblivious to the fact that my world had been set spinning.
When you try and recall every memory of someone, it’s surprising how few you actually have. Someone you think of as so significant has been filed away as a handful of snapshots, adding up to a few minutes or even seconds.
This is how I remember William.
I told him I was gay – although I used the world homosexual – and that he was the cause. So, maybe I’m right to give the answer to that inevitable question as ‘when I was 10.’ This was definitely the first time I told anyone I was gay. It was also the last time I told anyone for a very long time.
I remember clearly the moment I made the confession. We were on the path that led to one of the side entrances to the school. I had run after him, wanting to confess. He seemed to take the revelation in his stride. He was 10 – he probably didn’t understand. I only knew the word because I’d watched an episode of Penmaric, a TV costume drama where the term had been used to describe two men. My older sister had filled me in on the meaning and I had related it to my feelings for William.
But William just wanted to be a 10-year-old boy– kick a tennis ball around the playground with his mates; play kiss chase – with girls; talk about how much he fancied our teacher, Mrs Waterlake. If he fancied Mrs Waterlake, why had he kissed me? I don’t think Mrs Waterlake even liked William that much. I’m sure I saw her sigh once when his hand shot up for the tenth time in one lesson.
But one lunch-break I told him I loved him in the playground and he said he loved me too. I thought this was it, that William was finally admitting his feelings for me.
‘Don’t send me a Valentines card though!’ William laughed. I laughed too, although I didn’t see why not. The next day when I mentioned our joint declaration, William said he’d been joking.
I had a girlfriend at the time called Jane-Anne. Poor Jane-Anne was so earnest about our relationship. We would take her dog – an old mongrel called Joe – for walks over the park and talk about when we were married, how many children we would have, what we would name them.
I went along with it all, although I felt nothing – no pre-pubescent butterflies, or yearnings. Jane-Anne had dark, straight hair down to her waist, large hazel eyes and a mouth that seemed permanently pursed with indignation.
She sensed, I realise now, that my heart wasn’t really in our relationship. I failed every test. When she asked if I thought she was beautiful, I’d reply, honestly, that I thought the new Charlie’s Angel was beautiful, but that Jane-Anne was very pretty. I did like looking at beautiful women. I loved the idea of a woman who was both beautiful and tough. Wonder Woman took my breath away. But it wasn’t a lustful admiration.
But then neither were my feelings for William based on anything carnal; I was a genuine innocent, with a regular early bedtime that protected me from anything post-watershed TV might have had to offer – I’m not sure how Penmaricand its homosexual heroes slipped into my awareness, but even they were just two men who loved each other – I never really thought about them having sex. So, perhaps this wasn’t the beginnings of my sexuality taking form. Wasn’t it just a platonic crush, like millions of other boys have, who go on to be totally heterosexual?
It was an intense crush though. A lot for my 10-year-old brain and heart to take. I thought constantly about when I could return William’s kiss.
We were walking home in the dark from school when the opportunity arose. William’s younger brother, Andrew, was with us, but other than him the road was deserted – we’d stayed late to rehearse for the school play. I kept whispering that I was going to do it – and I don’t remember him objecting – not to the idea of the kiss itself, just the presence of his brother.
William lived on the corner of Brompton Road, less than two-minute walk from my house. As he and Andrew stopped opposite the entrance to his road, looking left and right as they prepared to cross, I planted the kiss on his cold, smooth cheek.
I turned and walked away the second my lips left his skin. My legs weighed nothing and I thought I was going to fall. I made it to the driveway of my house and glanced back. William was laughing and rubbing his cheek.
William had a birthday party a week later. I wasn’t invited.
‘My mum says I can’t be your friend anymore,’ William told me when I protested, ‘Andrew told her about you kissing me.’
‘You kissed me first,’ I hissed. Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe I just sloped back to my desk, already carrying the weight of loss, and hurt – and the taint of guilt and self- hatred that would mark me as an outsider throughout the remainder of my school life.
If my love for William was platonic, then maybe it wasthat porn magazine that ignited my early realisation that I was gay. I remember that we hid it under some leaves near to the Hollow Tree, planning to come back for another furtive flick through its charged pages.
And then we’d raced each other back to the road. And for a while, feet thumping on the hard, dry ground, wind whipping my face, heart pounding, I wasn’t queer or straight, I was just a 12-year-old boy running across a park.
And that is partly of the problem with giving anything close to a clear-cut answer. When I was 12, the last thing I wanted was to be gay. I wanted to be that boy running across the park, not the one furtively poring through the men’s underwear section of my mum’s catalogue. I spent years pretending I wasn’t attracted to boys, which makes pin-pointing the age at which I fully realised my sexuality almost impossible. Because even when I did know for sure, I was trying to convince myself I’d got it wrong and that one day I would wake up wanting nothing more than to make love to Debbie Harry.
Certainly, once I moved up to secondary school – a pretty rough all-boys comprehensive – the feelings I had for other boys became less platonic. Although, I was so naive, any sexual fantasies I had were pretty tame. And the romantic feelings never rose to the levels they had with William. They were transient yearnings, with one subject replaced with another within weeks. They were often intense though, and the effort of hiding my feelings from the boys concerned must have taken a constant effort. I obviously succeeded, as I don’t remember ever being called out for a lascivious glance.
But can I even say with absolute certainty that my sexuality had fully formed during this time. There was another major crush to come before my school life finished, and just to confuse the issue, it was on a girl.
After the fifth year at my secondary school, I progressed into the sixth-form college, which combined pupils from my school and the neighbouring girls school. It was exciting to be in mixed company again. I hadn’t always been the outsider I’d become in secondary school. In junior school I’d been popular, partly because it was mixed and maybe I found it easier to form friendships with girls, which in turn led to friendships with larger groups, including boys. In an all-boys school, this process hadn’t been possible.
My sixth-form crush was called Laura. She was full of energy and humour, and a bundle of insecurities, combined with an apparent boundless confidence. I loved her, I’m sure of that. When I found out she was dating another boy in the sixth-form, I was devastated. If I tried to talk to Laura about him, I couldn’t even bring myself to say his name, my jealousy was so acute. I wasn’t sexually attracted to Laura, but if she’d been romantically interested in me, I would have been delighted and I definitely would have dated her, maybe ended up in a sexual relationship, who knows, I may have ended up married to her. How often must that happen, that someone who knows they are gay forms a crush on a girl at an impressionable age, enters into a serious relationship, only to devastate her years later with the revelation that its other guys they actually fancy?
Perhaps that’s my answer. I genuinely knew I was gay at the point when I stopped separating romantic love and sexual love. Once I started having sexual relationships with other guys (later than most, at around 20), I stopped having crushes on girls. Once I allowed those lustful floodgates to open, my crushes were for guys only, and always a combination of romantic pining and lustful longing.
So, next time I get asked the question, ‘When did you realise you were gay’, maybe I’ll give a truncated version of this essay. Watch their eyes glaze over as I recall each crush, each early lustful dream, and analyse them before judging if they marked a genuine sexual awakening, or just another step towards one.
Or perhaps I’ll just ask them ‘When did you realise you were straight,’ and let them do the hard work while I eat my dinner and sip red wine.
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