Self-help - 1. My story

To come out is to make a personal declaration.

Maybe you’ll enlighten only yourself. Maybe it’ll become general news. Or, perhaps, you’ll choose to tell a select few friends or family.

Whatever happens, many queer people see coming out as their chance to live an authentic life. That it’s still a thing says a lot about the societies in which we live. Why should sexual orientation or gender identity be so defining? Is one set of characteristics really so much better than any other?

In an ideal world, it wouldn’t happen. Who you’d like to take to bed or how you see yourself would be choices for the individual (within certain limits, of course). In most societies though, it matters a heck of a lot. Deviation from the norm -- the cis-het imposed norm -- provokes a response. Yes, it might be positive. Even loving. There is still plenty of work for queer charities such as akt (Albert Kennedy Trust) though. When a young person, in particular, decides to act on who they are, the result can see them shoved out on the street, disowned by the people who should care for them.

Many people have the option to choose their timing; others don’t have that luxury. And there are some in the public eye for whom it appears to be an exercise in reputation management. Or enhancement. Whatever the route or reasoning, coming out involves an individual baring a part of themselves. A part which the cis-het majority don’t even have to think about because to them, theirs is the default setting. Maybe even the only setting.

In today’s world, to come out also needs knowledge. The knowledge to label yourself. To understand that label. Or indeed, to take the conscious decision to defy categorisation.

To anyone under the age of thirty-five with regular access to a digital device, the idea you might’ve had to come to your understanding of yourself in isolation, in spite of near total ignorance, is mind-blowing. Yes, the internet can be a cesspit, a never-ending cock fight, or whatever other descriptions you’d like to employ. It is also a revelation.

Anyone who is different can find information, kindred souls, help, and feel part of a community. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the only [fill in the blank] in town; there’s always going to be someone else out there. Someone to make the world feel less lonely and less strange.

I know this from recent experience. I lived that shit.

This summer is the third anniversary of me finding myself. My label.

You could say, it’s taken long enough.

Maybe that’s true, if only partially so.

I grew up the rural north-east of England in the 1970s. It’s a glorious part of the world, though hardly at the forefront of diversity and sexual emancipation. I spent my teens knowing at some basic, inarticulate level that I was different. Yes, I was a musician, a bookworm, and possessed the social skills of a hermit, but the difference extended way beyond that.

That amorphous gut feeling was never defined. Never given a name. Partly, this was due to a sexual ignorance which, I hope, is almost extinct nowadays. Even back then though, I think I would’ve recognised a straightforward attraction to either sex. OK, I might’ve had little enough idea what to do with that knowledge. Instead, everything was muddled, and I lacked any means to put it into words.

Looking back from a position of belated self-confidence, I ache for my younger self. For some people, going away to university or college can turn into a sustained period of finding out who you are. Discovering your identity, away from family and school and childhood experiences. It was so for me to a limited extent. However, my attempts at romantic relationships were scuppered by crippling anxiety. It’s difficult in the extreme to be receptive and engaging when you have no idea who you are sexually or why you’re attracted to a particular individual.

To know that you’re gay, or lesbian, or even trans is a certainty which can define your life. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is self-determination. At least that’s the theory. Yes, such self-awareness might affect your life in every-which-way. Some people find the clarity threatening or overwhelming. Others use it to come out and then wish they hadn’t done so.

On balance, to have these basic building blocks of your personality and self firmly established must, I think, be a positive move. Knowing who you are means you can interact with other people from an initial position of truth and confidence. It won’t necessarily make you a nicer person. Or someone who has to fend off hordes of admirers. It must give you a better chance though.

After having my own laptop and internet connection for several years, I started to explore online queer spaces. I felt drawn to them. If you’d asked me why, you wouldn’t have got a sensible reply. Because it feels right. Because this gets me off. Because there’s a connection I can’t find in my real life. These would have been some of my responses, and none of them really answer the original question. I still wasn’t in a position to do so.

Spring 2016 found me joining GA. Although its sense of community was welcoming and for the first time ever, I joined in, a growing sense of frustration clouded everything. What that frustration was rooted in still puzzles me a little. I was saved by a new friend who gently pushed me to write.

Writing can be an end in itself. Something that gives pleasure and a profound sense of achievement. And maybe, if you’re very lucky, an income. Turns out it can be a vehicle for so many other things besides.

When I was promoted recently to Signature Author, I wrote to the same dear friend. Here’s part of what I said:

That flow of words has... saved my sanity? It sounds hyperbolic, I know, but that untapping has definitely changed me in so many ways.

To possess the ring of truth, writing must come from within. I don’t mean it has to be overtly profound or wear the author’s heart on its sleeve. Good writing grows out of an author’s experience. Their worldview. And to have that worldview, you must first know yourself. Of course, you can produce writing without that knowledge. It’s more likely your readers will complain of cardboard characters though. Those ones we all know about with paper-thin emotions, inhabiting a two-dimensional world.

I find it cathartic to acknowledge elements of myself in my characters. Particularly things I’d otherwise shy away from or beat myself up about. To see these elements elsewhere (even if it’s fiction) is to see they’re part of the general human condition. Plus, if I have to get a character out of a corner, it may well be a solution I too would be sensible to employ.

Yet, one element, the most important, still eluded me.

Writers spend a lot of time wandering around the web, researching who knows what. A typical Ugandan man’s name. Attitudes to homosexuality in late Victorian England. Offbeat ideas for wedding cakes. Music for piano duets. Plus all the detours in between. If you’re anything like me, a lot of what you read and see online appears to seep into your mind like a weird kind of osmosis. It lurks in the background, awaiting its moment.

This is what happened one day in June 2019.

I was pretty much minding my own business at home one morning when a thought popped into my head. Not a question or a proposition or a ‘What shall I do today’ but simply a statement. A statement which answered so many questions. I remember turning the thought over briefly. More from surprise than anything else. It didn’t occur to me to question it.

Why? Because it felt so damn right. Because it gave me my label. Because I could now make sense of my world.

In this special anniversary year for GA, I can’t help wondering whether I would’ve found my own inner peace without this site and everything that followed.

Maybe. But then again, maybe not.

Thanks, GA, for everything.