Questioning

Hello again!  It’s been a while.  The last few months have been pretty busy, as I suspect they have for most teachers, but Year 11 have gone off on study leave and it’s given me some time to sit and do some typing.  And what better time to write a blogpost on an LGBTQ+ blog than at the beginning of Pride month? 

What with, well, everything, it seems like an important time to celebrate Pride as loudly as possible this year.  I should start with a confession, though: I’ve never really celebrated Pride before.  Never dressed up, never painted my face, never adorned myself with a single sequin or speck of glitter.  I have attended two (2) Pride parades, all of them hidden at the edges of a crowd, dressed like a heterosexual person.  I am very, very bad at Pride.

The Great North, a show I have raved about before, has introduced a character that I think would understand.  I’m onto the fourth season, and – mild spoiler alert – they’ve introduced a lesbian auntie.  Aunt Dirt, voiced by the excellent Jane Lynch, has been living in a bunker since the sixties, having mistaken an earthquake for a communist invasion, and finds herself wanting to experience all the gay nightlife that she’s missed out on in the intervening decades.  When faced with the reality of putting herself out there, though, she freaks out and hides herself inside a circular clothing rack.

“Being terrified is par for the course, Dirt,” says Londra, a gay fisherwoman trying to coax her back out, “at least at the beginning.”

“Uh-uh,” agrees Ham, Dirt’s gay nephew.

“Really?” says Aunt Dirt. “But Ham, you’re so out and I want to say… proud?”

“Sure am.  But it takes some work.”

Being “proud” is something that for me, too, has taken some work.  I’m not entirely sure I’ve got there yet.  I spent a number of years rejecting the very premise of gay pride, on the same basis that I rejected the concept of being proud to be British; to me ‘pride’ was reserved for things that I’d actually earned.  I was proud of my GCSE results; I didn’t need to be proud of the things that I just was.

The problem was, though, that I wasn’t just rejecting pride: I was accepting shame.  Past me would never have told you that I was ashamed of being gay, but my thoughts, words and actions all tended that way.  I’ve covered some of this before, but I’ve realised more recently the extent to which shame has infiltrated my life and, probably, got in the way of my happiness.

I have had a lot of crushes – fallen in love, if you like – and like lots of people, if not everyone, it’s made me really miserable at times.  The majority of those crushes were with straight men, one-way and hopeless and totally unrequited (mainly – but that’s a tale for another time).  There’s some of them that I admitted my feelings to, usually while drunk, but most of the time I suffered in silence and didn’t dare to tell them.

While I definitely didn’t always fall for a particular physical type, the one thing they did all have in common was that they were all more comfortable with my sexuality than I was.  I’ve never really been the sort to fall for bastards; I was always more attracted to kindness and patience, and nearly all of my crushes were nice guys who accepted that I was gay and liked me for who I was but, alas, weren’t attracted to anyone of my gender.  I wonder now if, having spent my formative years seeing and believing homophobia to be the default, I became attracted to these guys because I mistook their (what seemed to me, at the time, unusual) tolerance of who I was for something more than friendship.

And the guys who might actually fancy me back?  In the past I’ve reacted to other gay men with awkwardness, rudeness, and at times downright hostility.  Again, ask past me and he would tell you that I believed that anyone should be able to act and speak and dress however they wanted to, and yet I had a tendency to disparage anyone who showed any signs of campness.  In retrospect, I was definitely looking down on anyone who felt more comfortable with their sexuality than I did, almost as if I disapproved of them not showing the requisite amount of shame, or of not attempting to hide it well enough.  I think I used to kid myself that by acting in this way – “straight-acting”, as the good people of Grindr would put it – I was somehow presenting a more acceptable kind of homosexuality to the world and, if I think about it, there were people who were probably more willing to be friends with me because I shunned that kind of flamboyance.  I mean, I’m pretty sure there isn’t a Louie Spence inside me screaming and high-kicking to get out, but at the same time I think in the past I’ve adapted my views and behaviours so that straight men wouldn’t be pushed out of their comfort zones by being around me.  I was being accepted in a way that I maybe hadn’t been at school, and they could feel less homophobic because they had a gay friend.  Everyone was a winner.

Except, of course, that’s not winning anything.  That’s being something else in order to please other people, other people who aren’t accepting you for you but for the you that you’re pretending to be to please them.

I look at LGBTQ+ kids today with their dyed hair and their pin badges and I wonder how different things would have been if I’d been a teenager now instead.  Trouble is, there are too many different factors; if you’d transplanted the me from the 1990s into one of today’s schools, I’d probably not have had the guts to join the societies or would have felt uncomfortable in their company.  But then, if were a teenager now, I imagine I’d be less likely to have built up those walls around myself (hello again, Section 28).  It’s all hypothetical, of course, and I’m not going to be a teenager again.  But I can see the value in Pride for those kids, and I can see the value in Pride for myself now as well.

I do wish I could go back and point out to myself how Pride might have helped me get over my shame, but aside from the fact I’m not sure I’d have listened, it’s not an option: all I can do now is change how I look at things from this point onwards.  Am I about to don my leathers and pole dance shirtless on a sparkly rainbow float?  Probably not, to be honest.  But am I going to be prouder this year, and big up the other LGBTQ+ folks around me and cheer them on, however they’re dressed and however much they camp it up?  Damn straight I am.