Pushed around and kicked around, always a lonely boy
You were the one that they’d talk about around town as they put you down
And as hard as they would try they’d hurt to make you cry
But you never cried to them, just to your soul
No, you never cried to them, just to your soul
Smalltown Boy, Bronski Beat (excerpt), 1985
And so, as the swinging sixties ended, and the seventies begun, with a somewhat more open & tolerant mindset than it had had, a decade earlier, at least in the UK. I, myself became a teenager. My family however, had by then moved to a small village in deepest Cornwall in 1968 and attitudes here were far less liberal on the whole, than those held in most of the larger cities. Whilst the changing attitudes in society over the past fifty years, were to have a substantial impact on my life, most of that which I have described so far, I was entirely ignorant of. Little of it would be conveyed to me in the next six years that I was to be at the local Grammar & then Comprehensive school.
Some of it I would discover by chance, during the next decade, some I would seek out and some would come to me by a very gradual ‘drip feed’ process, in which I recognised the importance of ‘difference’ in society from the norm and did not regard such ‘difference’ as deviance; some however, I would only come to learn and understand decades later. Indeed, some information very pertinent to its understanding, only became available less than a decade ago, with the widespread proliferation of digital media. There is a reasonable argument that suggests that I couldn’t have been taught a lot of this in this period from the late sixties to the mid seventies as it simply wasn’t available. For young people today, it is perhaps hard to understand just how difficult it was then to collect and assimilate ‘alternative information’; information that had not been filtered and ‘censored’ through a ‘mainstream’ cogniscence.
Some people were lucky at school and seemed to naturally gravitate towards alternative groups, where some acceptance and appreciation of difference was tolerated, even appreciated. This didn’t really happen to me, in any shape or form, until I reached the fifth form at my school, when I was sixteen, and so a good three or four years into my teens.
I found solace in the early years at Grammar School by getting involved with literature and books. I volunteered to help catalogue the school’s library into the new ‘Dewey’ Decimal system. Lunch breaks could be spent safely immersed in the library cataloging, referencing cross checking and encoding. I derived some benefit, some comfort in knowing that I was handling the world’s knowledge and hoped that I might glean something of its richness. By the third year though we were part of the new comprehensive structure at Falmouth, there was no library in my part of the school and I was out on my own, fending for myself. Luckily I was in Mr Holt’s class, a young geography teacher who I liked and I developed a passion for geography: specifically cartography and meteorology.
In particular, in those years I now look back on certain people and know I should thank them. There was the very wonderful Huw, who I now realise and recognise I had a ‘first crush’ on at thirteen, Ashley, who helped me learn about rigid conformity, recognise it and how to ignore it, James, who helped me understand that life is to be enjoyed, explored and invented at whatever age, Paul, who helped share my passion of the natural sciences (especially the weather), Peter who had me digging for old bottles, developing a lifelong love for ‘real life history’ and Philip, whom I recall as being a good looking lad and recognise now, retrospectively, was negotiating the same road as I was at that time. There was also a completely gorgeous head boy, Adrian, who literally and metaphorically held my hand on school field trips away and showed me there might be another way ahead. As with all our schooldays, there were people who really didn’t help me at all, as well: bullies, egotists, telltales and just not very nice people. I forgive you, wherever you are now but know that you caused me a lot of pain and knowing what I now know about life, I can’t believe that it really helped you either, in the long run.
And so, by the time I reached London in the mid 1970s, which is really where my ‘story proper’ finally begins, I was at least partially aware of the effect that all these cultural, political and social influences had made on society. I think London changed quite markedly even in the decade when I was growing up. Race, gender and sexuality were very much things that people had opinions on now and these issues were being discussed, even by then, in the mainstream media at the time.
None of this had come from my school work, which had not prepared me in any great way for any of the things which I was going to experience, in London, in the next few decades. Retrospectively, I came to regard this as a great pity, as it would have been very useful to have known more about the spectrum of sexuality, to have understood more of the alternative culture and history in the UK in that decade in particular and to have started to possess some kind of opinion on these things. Anything that I’ve mentioned so far, that has influenced me and the decisions I’ve made, in relation to how I’ve progressed my life, came from the explorations I made from curiosity: a need for enlightenment. In so many ways, my life hadn’t adequately prepared me for what was to come, or what I needed to know, to better understand decisions I’d need to make, indeed have to make, in what was to come in my life fairly soon.
A statistic that I didn’t know, until very much later, was how young gay men and lesbians have a proportionately higher rate of mental illness, depression and in some cases self harm and suicide than their heterosexual counterparts. In my bleak black moments, as a youngster, I often thought about it. Somehow I always had something in me, which brought me back from that edge: I can see something beautiful and be mentally and emotionally uplifted by it. Others were not so lucky. I have already mentioned the mathematician Alan Turing and the belated respect that the current government have awarded him. It seems slightly odd to name a educational scholarship award, replacing the much missed European Erasmus scheme in the UK after a man whose was absolutely, and completely failed by the educational and sociological institutions of the Government and State institutions of the time, to such an extent that he took his own life in 1954.
As Ruth Sutherland, the Chief Executive of the Samaritans, wrote on the NHS England blog page recently, suicide is still the leading cause of death, amongst men under 50 in the UK.
She said: Something called the ‘gold standard’ of masculinity puts pressure on men. It’s a persuasive little voice that whispers, ‘You’ve failed’ – unless you have gone out and secured that job, that house, that car, that woman, those children and that sunny family life.
‘You’re divorced? Don’t see your kids much now and don’t live with them? You lost your job? You can’t pay your debts, your rent, your mortgage, your bills? Your life is over, man!’
It whispers about anything that isn’t part of conventional ‘James Bond-style‘ masculinity: ‘You’re gay, you’re trans, you’re bi – what sort of life do you think you’re going to have? Don’t tell anyone, whatever you do.’ Feelings of failure and shame make it harder to open up because that will make things worse, won’t it?
And that is just where we stand in today’s liberated society, after a half century of some acceptance and change. Research, in the last few decades continues to find that the attempted suicide rates and thoughts of suicide amongst lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) young people is still significantly higher than among the general population.
They (the Samaritans) suggest that the laws that discriminate against LGBT people have been shown to have significant negative impacts on the physical and mental health and well-being of young people with depression and drug use higher in this group as a whole than the general population. Equally, in a positive finding, laws that recognise LGBT people as equal (for example in relation to their civil rights) tend to have significantly positive effects on the physical and mental health of LGBT youth. Remarkably, for example, in the USA, looking at the period between January 1999 and December 2015, research suggested that the establishment of positive laws relating to same-sex marriage was associated with a significant reduction in the rate of attempted suicide among children, the effect being especially concentrated among children of a minority sexual orientation (LGBT youth), resulting in approximately 134,000 fewer children attempting suicide each year in the United States.
Another key issue, which has been shown to be a contributing factor in many suicides, is bullying (and this is an issue which affects all suicide attempts in young people per se) but since a series of suicides in the early 2000s, more attention has been focused on the underlying causes in an effort to reduce suicides among LGBT youth. The Family Acceptance Project in the USA has demonstrated that “parental acceptance, (and even neutrality), with regard to a child’s sexual orientation” can bring down the attempted suicide rate. And these figures relate to a relatively recent period in our history, when tolerance and acceptance of LGBT people was rising in much of the Western world.
So, it is hardly surprising that things were even bleaker in the early to middle part of the last century and right through the period in which I was growing up, from the mid fifties through to the eighties. There was nothing -and I do meant absolutely nothing– that was remotely positive in relation to coming out as a gay man, and living a fulfilled life, related to my sexuality, that I was offered, when growing up and at school. Perhaps the art classes that inspired my creativity, at a push. In fact, I often think how remarkable it was, in retrospect, that I managed to cope as well as I did.
For me, very luckily, there were a few factors operating in my favour. I was actually quite an artistic child who, despite studying sciences, became motivated by being able to express myself artistically. Creating and assimilating things, that allowed me to vent my worries, concerns, anger (at myself for not adequately fulfilling the heterosexual role society expected from me and thus being ‘a failure’). Secondly, that I was posted up to London for my first job when 18, which, despite the initial ‘culture shock’ put me in the one place in the UK, at that time, where I could perhaps better understand myself, with like minded people around me and finally, that I had a love of meteorology, a passion if you like, (that was also my work) that I could ‘escape’ into.
These things ‘saved me’ in many ways. It is no surprise that so many gay men wanted to escape their localities and communities and ‘come up to or down to’ London. Both Jimmy Somerville and Neil Tennant (and others) wrote important songs about it, important because this ‘struck a chord’ with so many young gay men at the time.. and since. It was time to leave my childhood dreams , ideas, notions behind me and ‘set out my stall’. I had no real idea what that would look like, no idea how I was going to go forward but I would just have to ‘hope for the best’.
Now, I recognise that I was far from alone in having to do this: people who would become my role models, people whom I would meet, people I would counsel in the future; they would have all been there too, at some stage, in their lives.
And as I finally waved goodbye to my family at Truro station in the far southwest of Cornwall, one damp late September early afternoon in 1975 and sat down in the train, I suddenly felt very alone, very alone indeed. And yet also, somewhere, somewhere deep within me, there was a sense of freedom. Of escape. Of the adventure to come. And a place for me.
ON to Part 2 Sex, love and life (The Rituals): Introduction
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