Why am I Gay? Lucky Me Being Me!

The fashionable answer to the question ‘Why are you Gay’ for any self -respecting queer is that one has no choice in the matter and that sexuality, along with eye colour and shoe size is simply predetermined by genetic make-up. I’m not sure however that for me it was quite so simple!

My route towards a preference for phallic and masculine erotic stuff doesn’t seem, on reflection, to have been a process of simply following a biologically driven Fixed Action Pattern.

My parents were strange socially aloof individuals and, although my mother was loving, my father was a gruff and emotionally distant disciplinarian. My much older brothers kept each other company and successfully bridged a link into healthy male social networks. Whilst they were out playing rugby and football, processing their adolescent testosterone drives along socially acceptable avenues, I was a six-year-old baby playing with my 8-year-old sister and learning the secrets of the feminine world. I was a girly boy. I liked to roller skate and skip with the girls. But most of all I loved it when they talked about boys. These remote sweaty masculine figures with deep voices and prominent Adam’s Apples; aggressive, unreliable and unfaithful; pulsating with muscles and veins and sprouting pubic hair. What deliciously and forbidden-ly tasty creatures they seemed to me!

I remember at the age of 7 or 8 hanging out with my sister’s friends as they were talking about boys and thinking that I would end up being a most unusual man when I grew up because of the very intimate understanding I was developing about boys from girls.

My dad was a Scout Leader so summer camps meant exposure to sex obsessed adolescent lads. They were bemused by the innocence of their Scout Leader’s 8-year-old son. I’d sneak off and hang around Eagle Patrol to get my daily fix of sex education. We'd stand around the campfire, the older boys caressing their private bits under their speedos and I’d listen wide eyed as they would solemnly and graphically describe for me ‘How I was Born’, ‘What is Spunk’, 'How to Wank' and the technicality, even, of conception as a consequence of a ripped condom [‘Being Born on a Bursted Johnny’].

After this I wanted to get closer to boys but I never seemed to properly get the way they thought and so they remained inaccessible, alien and a bit frightening to me. I eroticized the fear and the fantasies followed.

I longed to become sexually mature but it seemed to take forever. My relatively delayed puberty at 16 meant that I was cruelly exposed to 5 years worth of watching boys in the school showers gradually morphing into men. When yet another member of my year group dropped his balls I’d be filled with a mixture of dread and arousal- dread that this thing might never happen for me, and arousal at the steamy proximity of yet more naked man flesh!

I then learned to internalize society’s homophobia, acted as masculine as I could pretend, had sex with a man for the first time at the age of 20 and started the very slow process of coming out. I’ve spent the last thirty years chipping away at a subconscious fear of rejection for being different. Thankfully the shame is dissipating, I’m learning the joy of openly acknowledging my vulnerability and that therein lies the secret of true intimacy.

Why am I gay? It’s just me being me! And that’s really lucky.