Why has my homosexuality been important?
I've asked myself this question recently, primarily because it ought to be wholly unimportant. Sexual orientation is not, or ought not to be, all consuming. It's a simple and single facet of a person and is thus only as important as we either allow it to be or as we make it.
Which means I also need to ask "Have I made it important?"
My expectations
I was raised and grew up as a child who had a total expectation of being a happy little heterosexual. Until I was thirteen I expected to have girlfriends, date, have sex (whatever that really meant, because we had no concept of it), marry and have children. I wasn't too sure what order that was going to happen in, but that is what I expected. Being homosexual wasn't even on the radar.
Sexual fantasies, such as they were before puberty had its way with me, were about girls. Not that I had any idea what to do with a girl except the technical aspects taught in our sex education class and in the Family Doctor Booklet that talked about banana fruit flies, but I knew it was what I wanted because it was what everyone wanted.
We had no idea about homosexuality, either in practical terms or in considering that we might actually be homosexual. Homosexuality revolted us, whatever it was. We were normal, inquisitive, smutty, grubby little schoolboys living in the harsh moral climate of the 1950s, a climate which extended well into the 1960s.
I was just a pretty ordinary little kid.
I was too shy to even be seen naked with another boy in private, let alone considering actually touching his body. It was rare to see another boy naked, and not particularly interesting, since we all looked pretty much the same. I was never naked with a girl, either, come to that, but that was taboo anyway. I never even played doctors and nurses, well, except a couple of times! And, since I knew no girls anyway, that was more like doctors and doctors!
So, all in all a normal upbringing for the period, giving me no clue what was to come next. And what a mess that turned out to be. I fell in love, and fell hard.
First Love
To that pair of questions in the opening part of the page, I think the answer is a mixture. When I was thirteen, I had newly joined Epsom College, and fell in love with John Bensted, the boy I truly only wanted to be good friends, with, I "was not homosexual." I was simply in love with a boy. And, as we are so fond of telling our kids, "this is usually a phase we grow out of," so I simply waited for the phase to end. That was 1965. Today, in 2009, I'm still waiting.
When I put the uniform on in the picture on the left I was not, knowingly, queer. I was just thirteen, and had not started my new school.
This was in the summer in the back garden in Worcester Park, posing for my parents who wanted a record of their little boy's new school uniform. I must have been queer, obviously, but I was blissfully unaware. And yet, six weeks later, in October 1965, I was so much in full romantic love with John Bensted, the boy in foreground of the picture below on the right (and taken four years later), that I could hardly breathe. I'd only met him halfway through September! Love takes no prisoners.
From my perspective he was perfection: happy, sporty, outgoing, self confident, good looking, everything I wished to be myself. My whole life revolved around seeing him each schoolday, and, of course, I wanted to be his and for him to be mine. He was thirteen, too, nine months older than I. I wanted to marry him, way before the concept of Gay Marriage had hit the mainstream agenda. Not that I ever told him, of course. And, just to be clear, I really don't imagine he was anything other than a happy heterosexual boy. At the time I hoped differently, of course I did, but I knew he wasn't like me.
I didn't make it important then because, though his presence or absence consumed my every waking moment, something of which he was blissfully unaware, probably, it was not important in any real sense . I'm sure he simply enjoyed the apparent hero worship. But it became important because I knew my parents wouldn't approve. I knew the school wouldn't approve. I was pretty darned sure John wouldn't approve. I was genuinely afraid he would hate me instead. And his hating me meant I would lose him.
Of course that was irrational. I never had him in the first place. Losing him was irrelevant. Anyway he was happily heterosexual, so how could it ever have worked? How?. But, at thirteen and in a haze of adoration, what do you know of reality?
I knew my family, whom I supposed to be important, wouldn't approve. And I knew with the certainty one has of knowing one's parents that they would have sent me off in a well meaning way to be probed, prodded, poked, and aversion therapied.
So it was not important in the normal sense. It was simply important in the sense that I dared not reveal it. "And anyway, I'm just in love with my friend John." So I wasn't homosexual. I was just the blond, shy kid in the picture on the left.
Even when I found a great many other boys attractive and had fantasies about them, too, I 'was not homosexual', so homosexuality was not important to me. I was simply waiting for the phase of finding other boys attractive to pass. Of course that only makes sense when you are at the centre of the logic. Anyone looking on would have seen a homosexual kid in serious denial. But, in the 1960s that is what so many of us did. We suppressed our instincts because of a higher instinct that of survival.
Some of us, me included, became homophobic in our outward expression. We hated queers with a passion. While I'm ashamed of that today, back then it was part of my suit of armour, part of what I truly believed to be necessary for my survival. I wonder how many others at Epsom College were like me, prisoners of our own minds and of the society of the day?
So, is it a phase?
I'd love to know whether this is a real phase or not. I've no way of judging. So, if you are heterosexual, please answer the poll below.
Please don't mess it up by being silly with it. No-one knows who you are, so please just be honest.
Role Models. Were there any?
To be fair we had very few useful role models. Julian and Sandy from Round the Horne were not the best role models at all. Ben Britten and Peter Pears were far too remote and somewhat other worldly, so they weren't relevant. Alan Turing was a little known irrelevance back then. Michelangelo was both sexually anonymous and also an artist, and artists do not count. Nor, come to that, did actors. Rudolf Nureyev was simply a fine ballet dancer. There were no captains of industry who were homosexual, but, and this is important, all Englishmen who became Russian spies were. So role models did not exist for us.
So I didn't make it important, certainly back then, because it could not be important.
University
Time passed and I obtained a place at The University of Birmingham. Gay Liberation started in the UK with 1967 and the law that allowed consenting adults (21 and over) to have sexual relations in private. The Stonewall Riots happened in New York in 1969 unnoticed by me or my friends, and I started university in October 1970. If I'd had any strength of character I might have chosen that date to find the Gay Society during Freshers Week and join it and reinvent myself. Instead I moved deeper into denial, and made a very serious attempt to get a girlfriend. I managed to get a couple of girlfriends, but I never managed either to stop loving John - a wholly pointless and self torturing exercise, as you will see when I get my book about my teenage years and my one sided romance published - or to stop finding boys attractive.
Which also leads me to a parenthetic note. When a man of my age finds girls attractive other folk say "Good for you!" and they make no comment about what age the noun 'girl' describes. But when a man of my age finds boys attractive the same people think of small boys and yell "paedophile!" without rationalising that a boy has the same age range for me as a girl does for them. Boys may be 19 or 90. So may girls. Most of us, heterosexual and homosexual alike, tend to prefer 19 to 90. So, if the word boy' makes you think of a pre-pubertal child in short trousers please get over yourself. I don't mean it that way at all.
So I stayed hidden.
Gay Liberation Front Annual Conference - 1972
I stayed hidden, no, hiding, the more when, at the start of the summer term in 1972 the Gay Liberation Front held its worldwide annual conference at the Birmingham University Guild of Undergraduates Union.
While this was an obvious opportunity to reinvent myself, the folk there seemed to me to be everything I detested about queers. I remember one in yellow tights with a skin tight yellow top and black crushed velvet hot pants. To me he presented a wholly alien figure from a wholly alien culture. I am not now and was not then comfortable in the company of effeminacy nor of strangely dressed men who seemed only to want to shock. I am an ordinary bloke, and an ordinary bloke who happens to be queer. The pink angora sweater and tight leather trousers are not for me. I'm a jeans and T shirt bloke, or would be if I weren't too fat for jeans nowadays!
That conference, a thing I was present during because I lived pretty much in the Union building, but was not part of, made me determined not to be queer. These were not 'my people', these fancily dressed self iconised creatures. If this was homosexuality then I wanted none of it.
If only I'd been able to see behind the masks and see some wholly insecure folk hiding inside outrageous clothes I might have identified with them more.
First job
In May 1975, having failed my degree gloriously the previous summer, I entered the world of work. And, since I was employed in a secure area of the Home Office, homosexuality was important. Or it was important not to be homosexual because you were then a security risk and would lose your job. Remember the Russian Spies? And, though he was insignificant to us all back then, what about the fate that befell Alan Turing?
So I denied my true nature even more and this started to make homosexuality internally important. Worse, I was living back at the parental home trying to save money to buy a house, and being homosexual there was unthinkable. They could no longer have me forcibly admitted for psychiatric care, but they could have made life unpleasant. I did my best to make it with girls. I did Ok with girls, probably because it never really mattered. I knew they were not what I wanted, and I was still in love with the ghost of John, the boy I'd last seen in 1970.
Second Love
In 1978, though, homosexuality became important. You need to understand that love, real love, transcends the sex of the person you love, and transcends orientation. Many men love other men to the extent that they will die for them, but sexual intimacy is nothing to do with that love. Many women are the same.
I fell in love with a beautiful, feminine girl across the sexual divide and against, if you like, my sexual orientation. I asked her to marry me and she accepted. And I told her very soon after that that I had been in love with a boy for thirteen years and that she could break the engagement if she wished, and that I did not wish to break it.
She asked what would happen if he came into the room at that moment and I gave her the honest answer that I didn't know. And she chose to marry me all the same. It's not that she was desperate! She's gorgeous enough to have had boys chasing after her and snapping at her ankles. She still is. The picture doesn't do her justice, not at all. But she chose imperfect and homosexual me, the boy who loved her despite his own imperfections. And we put it to the back of our minds for as long as it was possible to do so.
It might have lasted for ever if we'd had a daughter, but we had a son. Please don't even go there, that's just nasty. No-one goes down that road for heterosexual fathers of daughters, so please keep that thought to yourself.
Is that how you see yourself ?
When Al was 13 he had won a place at Winchester College as a scholar. It's a tough achievement. He wanted to go to boarding school and this suited him. But I found something quite unexpected. I found I was jealous of his schooling. I wished I could be living my school life again, finding a boy I loved and, this time, being able to tell him so and take the consequences. And I had what could easily be described as a breakdown. Bizarrely I also had a new job at Gartner as a salesman, and, when I was handed my office laptop it came with the amazing words "The last bloke who used this laptop left last month. He decided he was gay, left his wife and went to live with a bloke!" How scary is coincidence?
Suddenly homosexuality was back on the agenda in a big way.
I did, in the end, talk to Melanie. I made a hash of that because she was also having trouble because her role as mother day in, day out was gone. Al was at boarding school and didn't need her. My lousy news came at the worst time it could for her, and I let her down badly by not being the rock she needed. My job was to be there for her and I couldn't even cope with being there for me.
Despite my letting her down she coped with herself and with me. We had many long tearful discussions about it all and we're still very much in love and still together. She hates that I'm gay, but loves me. Love is a weird paradox and we're in the middle of it. But homosexuality became important the moment she asked me "Is that how you see yourself, as a gay man?"
I thought hard. I'm attracted to men but had obsessed over the ghost of John for so many years I wasn't sure. What I know is that I was able to function with girls before her, that I enjoy the company of girls, but that I do not find girls sexually attractive. She is the only one. "Yes," I said, simply.
Starting to come out
That was, really, the second time I had come out to her. But it was also the first in a true way, because it was the first time I had come out to myself.
She's pretty brave. She just hugged me, though she wasn't happy, exactly. It can't be optimal to find you are sharing your life with a gay bloke when you're a girl. But splitting up was not on either of our minds. Surviving was, and we worked hard at it and have survived. And we're tough and will survive as a couple until one of us dies. Why? Because we love each other and want to.
A couple of years later I told Al. I thought I probably ought to because he walked into the office room at home and must have seen the gay porn I had on the screen. It was pretty obvious stuff, blokes enjoying other blokes!
I thought overnight and came home early from work the next day and told him that his dad is gay. He said "So what? and hugged me. We told Melanie when she got home and she was really pleased with how he'd taken the news. And, since that day, he's teased me about being gay. Mind you, whenever he was unsuccessful with a girlfriend I've teased him about being straight.
Oh yes. Al says he saw nothing at all on the screen! But it was still both necessary and worth it to tell him.
Homosexuality became unimportant again, with patches of importance.
We rented the movie "As Good As It gets" when it was first released on DVD and watched it with my father in law and his wife. It's a fairly banal movie with yet another new premise for a road trip. One character is flamboyantly, camply gay. There's a scene where he sees the girl either in or preparing for a bath, and, from the father in law's wife came the immortal phrase "Oh look! She's going to cure him!"
I should ignore these things, I really should, but I asked if that means that she thinks that the love of a good woman can cure homosexuality, and she said "of course!"
We almost had a row. She was unaware that she was talking to a gay man, and one who has now had the love of a good woman, the same good woman, for almost 31 years. She and I will testify to her that it has not worked so far! But examples like this of the overwhelming arrogance of the well meaning and ignorant make homosexuality important again. That is what I mean by 'patches'.
Over the past few years I've been letting folk know I'm gay. It's an odd process. Often they don't believe me. I'm married, you see, to a beautiful girl. But they get the picture in the end. I don't think that means it's important, not really. It means that I am taking steps to make sure that it never is important ever again. Some of those steps are this page on this site, other steps are the occasional gay rights oriented article on my blog, often in a cluster of similar themed articles.
The wider family
Recently I decided to tell my remaining family. Some knew anyway, others didn't. Coming out is always an emotional thing, and I came out to them quite gently. I pointed them at three web pages by sending them this email:
The subject was "Sometimes I wonder at my own reticence and the body was:
Now you'll be wondering "What the heck does he mean. He's in your face, brash, outgoing, sometimes less than charming, takes no prisoners, teases unmercifully, can be rude as hell" and so much more.
Sometimes it's just time to peel back the outer shell, the armour, if you like, and let folk know what's on your mind. Some of you know already, others almost certainly don't. So I have some reading material for you. Do me the favour of reading it.
First and foremost, please read: http://tinyurl.com/cxruy4 Read it with some care and, if your mind was once set differently, consider changing that mind.
Then please read: http://tinyurl.com/lyq9xs to learn a little more
And then follow it with: http://tinyurl.com/lzgojj
So I've been somewhat reticent. Yesterday I realised that it no longer matters. I was the prisoner of my own mind and, as a kid, two of the weirdest parents you could ever meet. Trust me, if you thought they were strange then living with them and in their shadow was not pleasant.
This is no longer quiet, private, kept under the carpet. This is real life. Weird, ain't it?
I deliberately used tinyurl to shorten the urls to make sure they clicked them. Then I waited. And the great thing is that all except one have said "so what?" in their own manner. That one is a bit more challenging,
To my cousin Anthony Marfleet homosexuality matters a great deal. I'm not sure why it's so important to him, but it does seem to enter every conversation we've ever had with him. It seems to bother him a lot. He has a cousin by marriage who left her husband and lives happily with her female partner now. And he has a nasty habit of making unpleasant remarks about her and her orientation. I get the feeling from his unpleasantness so far that he's going to make the same nasty remarks about me. But I am bombproof, so he can try to do his worst, if that makes him happy.
Anthony's why I've written this screed. He asked if I'd thought about the effect this has on Mel and on Al.
Well, yes, Anthony, I have. They've worked out that some people are gay. And they've got over it. Maybe you had better grow up and do the same.
And what of John Bensted, the boy I once adored?
The answer is nothing. He's successful, well respected,and at the top of his profession so far as I can tell from glimpses on the web; and I hope enjoying his life. I wish him nothing but good things. I hoped to meet him to talk to him. He refused the meeting, so I told him by letter in May 2001 that I had loved him deeply. I wish he were brave enough, kind enough, to reply, but he has not been, so far. He's not gay of course, nor was he ever. Why would he have been? He and I will never meet, not even for him to tell me what a fool I was. That used not to be Ok, but it is, now.
In July 2009 I finally got over him. He was really very ordinary, just like I was. I just had the mixed fortune to fall in love with him, not something I ever wanted to happen at all. We should have simply been friends, but, somehow, I think we were not even that.
First I fell for him, then I imbued him with all the many virtues I wished he had, knew he had, and hoped he had, and created perfection, which he never was, and placed him upon an unattainable pedestal where he should never have been. Hormones suck! He was just a boy, after all. And, as Roy Orbison says in his excellent cover version of the Nazareth song, Love Hurts.
If you have not yet read it, you might like to read about what it was like to discover I was gay at 13 at Epsom College.
You should also read Throwaway Boy
And you might want to learn something, too.