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.

The Intimacy of Being

Last year’s Gay Men's Week at Laurieston: ‘The dance between power and intimacy’, set me off on a 12 month roller coaster journey of self healing, spiritual integration and joyfulness which climaxed in this September’s week: ‘Pleasure, Love, Joy, Light- The intimacy of being’

I’d like to thank all members of the Edward Carpenter Community for supporting this magically facilitative network of loving men. Without it I could not have allowed myself to become the person I now am!

So, what happened? Last September I felt sad and friendless. Forty-nine years old and locked into an erotic-free yet physically, emotionally and romantically close relationship with my long-term partner who had been plagued with physical health problems for 6 of the 10 years we’d been together. Prior to my relationship with him I had enjoyed a reasonably vigorous sex life but when we fell in love we committed to a monogamous life together. So by the sixth year of attempting to be sexually faithful to a sex-less relationship, always hopeful that the illnesses would remit but perpetually disappointed by his consistently absent libido, something was going to snap. I didn’t want it to be our relationship. I didn’t want it to be my mental state. I didn’t want it to be my own physical health- though preoccupation with aches and pains were threatening to colonise my consciousness and make me old before my time.

Without fully understanding why, I found myself on last year’s Laurieston September week and it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me.

By sharing my predicament in Heart Circle and Base Groups in the context of a programme of events encouraging openness to self and others, exploring the link between sexual and spiritual, I was able to discover that truth to myself lay in openly acknowledging my sadness. What had previously seemed to be a safe, powerful position of holding onto a mental armoury designed to project that I was a happily assimilated monogamous gay man, could now be seen as an obvious unhappiness-making mirage. I learned that intimacy in relationships grew from both trusting others to accept me in my vulnerability and allowing others to trust me with their vulnerabilities too!

With that important lesson learned as a foundation, I was able to return to my previously forlorn existence with a new lease of life. Could my relationship withstand some consensual, ethical, non-monogamy? Of course it could-and what a relief for both of us that we could actually talk about it! How would I develop my newfound fascination with the development of spirituality via sexuality? Why had these vitally important aspects of my personhood been perceived as mutually exclusive?

Four months later I’m experiencing the nature-bound healing spiritual Magick of a Faerie gathering at Featherstone Castle. Four months later I’m in community with beautiful Eurofaeries at Folleterre Faerie Sanctuary. Three months later I’m in Berlin for another week of Faerie frolicking in the company of queer folk allowing ourselves to be our very own unique selves! Two weeks later and I’m back at Laurieston focusing on Pleasure, Love, Joy, Light. Within days our community develops a deep physical, emotional and sexual intimacy allowing us to re-awaken an awareness of ourselves as sexual and spiritual pioneers. Learning the answer to the questions ‘Who do I want to be? What am I waiting for? What do I want to let go of?’

What have I learned in all this? Being brave enough to truly be myself (and this is not an insignificant piece of work in progress) is immensely pleasurable, gets me in touch with Spirit, inevitably invites genuine intimacy and generates joy in bucket-loads!

Thank-you to the organisers Shokti, Kevin, Adrian and Peter!

I’m looking forward to next year!

Pleasure, Love, Joy, Light!

Gay Community? Virtually Gone? Or Gone Virtual!

This is my third article for GSCENE and will appear in the JULY issue.....

Brighton’s Gay Community isn’t what it was!

Like all things in this world it is impermanent and will inevitably change. But those of us attached to how things were will mourn its loss. There was something cosy and straightforward about how it used to be.

If you were queer you were oppressed. If you could find your way through into the secret underworld of pubs, clubs and meeting places there was an instant community waiting for you based on the shared experience of “persecution out there” and “acceptance in here”.

Things changed with the advent of the ‘Pink Pound’. Our consumer economy realised that we were a lucrative demographic to be exploited. Gay culture in general and the gay scene in particular became commercialised and mainstreamed.

It is probably easy to idealise the community spirit which pervaded the scene in the old days but that sense of shared oppression went a long way towards helping people overlook their differences so they could develop caring acquaintanceships, friendships and even loving relationships.

Paradoxically with the advent of freedom comes the recognition by ourselves that we no longer share much in common. We are almost as different from each other as straight people are! Finding likeminded people to share our lives isn’t now as easy as walking into the nearest gay bar.

So what do we have in common now?

At least most of us still have a shared experience of what it was/is to grow and develop within an invalidating early family and school environment. This gives us all a range of emotional wounds we can share and compare.

Maybe because of our shared vantage point we will continue to be communally outraged about homophobia and transphobia in all its forms not just in Brighton or the UK but wherever rears its ugly head on our planet.

But none of this really amounts to much for most of us, yet, as a community newly released and blinking in the bright daylight of freedom, we are still vulnerable and in need of some kind of support from somewhere.

So where will that support come from? I believe it can come from two important sources.

Firstly, we all know how the internetification of cruising has revolutionized the world for our sexually active gay male brethren. But this is just one dimension of how the LGBT community has started to take advantage of cyberspace. If you check out here you’ll see how LGBTers are seizing this means of expression and using it to come out to the world in a more intimate way than ever before, connecting with others at a much deeper level than usual.

And secondly, maybe, just maybe it is time for our community to feel confident enough to get our strength and support by just signing up to the straight world- or at least the more gay friendly aspects of it.

So reach into yourselves and develop your sense of shameless self. And with the strength that gives you reach out to the straight world and let them see just how fabulous you really are!

Gay Wisdom-Handed Down the Generations-From Gaysocrates

Ok! So Brighton's very own Gay Community Listings Magazine-GSCENE - has kindly agreed to publish my musings as a monthly column!!

Many Thanks to the editor James Ledward

This is a sneak preview which will be published in the MAY edition...

 When my partner caught me googling “Gay Wisdom” he said “Isn’t gay wisdom stuff like NEVER WEAR CRIMPLENE TO A WEDDING?”

Hmm! Not sure entirely why, but about six months ago I started to crave something spiritual which wasn’t religious. I wondered if it would be possible to find an individual, or group who could help me ‘tend to the needs of my soul’. Now I’ve had some interesting debates with friends about whether there is a difference between mind and soul, and that’s for future columns, so if you can, just bear with me. I don’t mean soul in a conventional religious sense-whatever a turn-off that might mean to you. I mean soul in the sense of ‘who you truly are’ stripped of the expectations you have of yourself.

As the years go by and I grow longer in the tooth I’m increasingly aware of how difficult it can be to stay focused on being your true self. From birth most people are saddled with the hopes, dreams, expectations and vicarious aspirations of parental figures. Then come the rules and social expectations of school and friends. Most gay children will also have experienced the discomfort of growing up in the context of a homophobic religious belief system. Add to that the powerful messages bombarding us as adults from the media about what we should and shouldn’t be and do, the influence of friends and the expectations occurring within more intimate relationships and it’s not surprising that ‘who you truly are’ gets lost, confused, confounded and frustrated.

So I started to hunger for some guidance on how best to remain faithful to my true self!

I then became acutely aware that I was the oldest gay person I knew. There were no straightforward ways in my life to befriend any older gay guys who might be a source of that advice and guidance. At the same time I was beginning to feel more and more alienated from younger gay men who seemed to be coming from another world from me in terms of their attitudes and ideas. It was as if I existed in this hermetically sealed generation pod with little chance to connect meaningfully with gay men from younger or older generations and it didn’t seem right!

It seems that the scope for the giving and receiving of trans-generational advice within the gay community has become fairly limited for lots of reasons.

Sweeping legal changes and newly acquired relative equality before the law drives a chasm of difference between young and old. Media youth adulation reinforces a culture of ageism. The ‘internetification’ of social networking means that young and old will only cross paths if an old guy subtracts 15-20 years off his gaydar profile!

So in the absence of a forum I began to blog (check it out at tinyurl.com/gaywisdom)

Where are the Gay Sages of Brighton? Please speak to me!

And to Gay Youth I ask, “What do you need of your elders?”

Contact me at

Email me! 

12 Find yourself and become who you are!

Peter came down to stay for a few nights this weekend. I mentioned him last week-the friend who has just made a break from Brighton to make his way in London so as to get some space between himself and a difficult relationship but also as a way of demonstrating to himself that he can be an independent adult and stand on his own two feet. When he moved away I sent him a copy of 'The Alchemist' by Paul Coelo. It had been recommended to me by a friend and I'd just finished reading it. It's one of those books that 'changes peoples' lives'. An allegorical tale of a Spanish shepherd who dreams of finding treasure by the Egyptian Pyramids. He gives up everything in search of his dream and the story follows him in his adventures and shows how, through his meetings with an Alchemist, he learns the secret of true happiness. Peter had just finished reading the book and had been energized by it. For a long time after his break-up he had lost interest in the idea of relationships. Or rather, I think, he had lost his hope in the potential of relationships. I think he had made the fundamental mistake that most of us make when we first fall in love- believing that if we love someone unconditionally enough then all will be well and we will be loved in a way which is reciprocal and which dovetails perfectly with our own emotional needs. In the storybook this happens and everyone lives happily ever after. When real life kicks in, and love isn't returned, it's a devastating blow because you have given your heart away but it comes back to you-'return to sender', battered, bruised and neglected. That's where Peter was when he went to London- or rather round about 12 months into healing those wounds. But something happened this week. Maybe it was the combination of making a success of his move to London and just enjoying the freedom of having lots of sex with lots of guys and also reading this book which suddenly enabled him to feel a passion towards another guy. A passion he thought  he had lost forever. He told me that there was something in the book that had given him permission to open up and be himself that previously, would have made him feel vulnerable but now he felt he had a greater internal strength because of his newfound confidence. He said that he felt the key to all this was getting an understanding of himself and that this had only come about after a long hard struggle facing up to who he was and getting to see the links between the upsets in his past and the walls he had built around himself, closing him off from a meaningful emotional life. He felt that all his life he had been aiming at becoming an emotionally and financially independent young man. And now , for the first time in his life he was feeling that he had arrived, "It seems as though the way to happiness is finding yourself and becoming who you are" he said.

I couldn't agree more!