Chapter 17 - The Alien And The Impossibility Of Homosexuality

I knew well enough how sexual experience should be a direct, real and lived experience, both for good and ill. What puzzled me was how what was meant to be direct had become random and indirect experiences for me. I sort-of enjoyed what I did but I found myself frustrated with how I could not convert what I knew and did into a singular and more personal relationship where we/I would be accepted and were approved of. I found that I wanted to talk about what I did and how I wanted it to change every conversation that I attempted with anyone became a prelude to a disconnecting and frustrating experience with them. 

Sex was the subject for discussion where when one person does allow another to speak their mind, then the listener appeared to listen, but they listen only for when to shut the speaker down from all further mention of the subject. Either the listener was uncomfortable with any intimate details, or all along the listener was only waiting to get their rebuttal in and change the subject. If the listener seemed patient then it was only in order that later they could tell the speaker that they should never have done what they did and should never seek to describe in any detail to anyone what they should not have done. This waiting to tell the speaker off, root and branch, had a name, 'directive counselling' or 'prescriptive counselling'. It was how counselling regularised taboo whilst suggesting that with counselling there were no taboos.

This being unlistened to, seemingly because of what I had been through and had to say about it seemed too personal. had been true for me since at least the age of ten, in 1972. Back then I was half out of my head on anti-depressants to subdue me, and it was early in the times when dad would insist that the television be tuned to the television wrestling every Saturday afternoon. It was surely my drug fuelled incoherence that made the wrestling seem homo-erotic to me, but it was taboo that made the mention of how strange I felt on the medication watching the television wrestling unmentionable. Nor could I say how much I found the soundtrack of the wrestling to be intimidating because it sounded like the noises of the school playground. It particularly reminded me of the goading and bullying that back then had recently, literally, done my head in. Between the taboo about mentioning mental health and the effects of medication, and the taboo on all talk of homo-eroticism I felt utterly immured in my own forced silence. 

That dad had a large hangover every week which was another reason for silence reigning whilst the wrestling was on loud. The men in trunks who fancied themselves enough to go in front of a television camera were examples of a kind of hyper-masculinity that appealed very much to working class television viewers, even though with matches being obviously fixed the men were nearer acting out being in a live action cartoon than the commentator could admit. In any other circumstance, e.g. seeing it performed live or it being watched on television with somebody who was sober who would allow discussion around it, then it would all have had the ring of a humorous surrealism that was worth a giggle or two. Where there was humour the viewer could permit themselves to be in on the joke. But framed by the borders of the television screen, with every cliche played utterly straight, and with the thundercloud of dad's hangover threatening us all, there could be no open laughter where taboo was on display and held such sway.

If I had seen and heard the wrestling once, and experienced dad's vehement silence about his hangover whilst the wrestling was playing, then I probably experienced both together over 500 times before I was relieved of never having to endure that weirdness as 'normality' ever again. But by 1982 I could only begin to break away from the weirdness, and even  every time the wrestling was broadcast I found it to be compulsive viewing on my own. I watched the television wrestling for as long as it was on, wherever it was moved to in the ITV schedules over the years, until it was taken off altogether. I used the television wrestling the way men used pornography, as some highly detached filmed example of human behaviour I might like to try out given chance to, whilst knowing that I did not have the remoted chance of acting out such activities.

The Saturday family ritual around the wrestling, where Mother chose when the wrestling was on to serve the Saturday meal, touched me in a place that many of the Christian rituals that I was beginning to attend regularly in 1982 could not get anywhere near. The Christianity that was available to me was like the secular understanding on offer to me, but for different reasons. Both would openly avoid anything to do with matters of sex, sexual activity, or mental health. All Christianity would say was that 'God knows us by our deepest sorrows', as if grief were a natural state and precondition for repentance. Whether secular or faith-led, the best cure for all questions of sexuality was marriage, and if companionship ever led to mental health problems, then the answer was 'We simply can't have everything we seek.'.

I knew people who by their reputation were known to be gay, but who were also known even more for never talking about it. People who knew me could well have attributed something similar to me, whether it was the sexuality or the reticence, and I would be the last to know about it. I had a few experiences where as a closeted gay man Mother introduced me to another highly closeted young gay man called Terry. He was as controlled by his family as I was controlled by mine. It was like introducing two neutered male rabbits to each other. All we could affirm in each other was how much our families preferred us neutered and controlled. I resisted identifying with that but only on my own, and unnamed. By the time I was twenty I'd had several minor sexual affairs. I had experienced what seemed to me to be discreet and consensual sex, though how discreet it was and how much the discretion trumped the sense of consent could have been questioned. 

What was most difficult for me was how any positivity in my outlook on sexuality was overshadowed by some deeply early un-consensual sexual experiences, where I had the words to describe what happened to me. But they were so awkward, painful, and were so deeply buried in me that I could not imagine how the words might be drawn out, and who might draw them out. Even the slightest attempt at saying anything about the loss of consent both turned inside out on me as I tried to imagine saying it, and left me so incoherent and grief stricken at the sense of loss I felt that it was clearly too difficult a subject to go near. I ended up blaming myself for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Between the twin taboos around sexual experience and mental health it was safer to be dumb with shock about these most personal and difficult of experiences than try to say what happened.

At the time of feeling so blocked up, and partly because I had started to keep a diary every day, I wondered whether I could say more through writing than I could live to anyone around me. But who to write to? How to find them? What to say? How to phrase it all? I remembered the failed attempt at pen friends, via local radio, from only a few years earlier. I knew I had to be more coherent than I'd been back then, the response  I wanted mattered much more to me than anything had mattered to me back then. 

In the Christianity that I was newly discovering I found a helpful lifestyle magazine. It was called 'Buzz', named after the hum of feedback that amplifiers gave out. It was the first nationally distributed Christian magazine. It was as serious about it's Christianity as it was it's journalism, but it was light in it's prose and approach. It was aimed at evangelical groups and members of Christians youth groups like the one I had been attending for some time who wanted to explore the difference between 'being in the world' whilst 'being not of the world'. If 'Buzz' had a wider aim then it was to level up the Christianity of its day through its national distribution, so that the wealthier and poorer parts of the country met each other on it's pages. It also promoted Christian music, which was at the level of 'a cottage industry' in terms of scale. There were lots of acts, and many good musicians. The best musicians had found limited success with the mainstream record companies but there they found retaining their Christian profile difficult whilst they sought popular success. Since their faith was the point of what they did as much as the music, then the faith base across the country had to grow to sell more Christian records and the faith base had not grown in that way. With national church attendance figures stalling at under 10 % level of the population 'Buzz' supported the musicians and kept their audience informed as to where their musical heroes were and what they were doing. In turn this connected all the Christians with the biggest date in the Christian music calendar, The Greenbelt Arts Festival. The magazine also reviewed books, had cartoons and columnists in it. It was comparable with the magazines aimed at women before later gossip magazines like 'Chat' came along. At the back of this magazine were small adverts like you might find in any shared interest magazine. Some of those adverts were for niche ministries. One such small advert said something like 'Are you worried about homosexuality? If so write to..... ' and there was an address and Post Office box number. The advert was for True Freedom Trust who were based in Liverpool at first, though later they also had an office in London.

True Freedom Trust were not the only people that I might have written to, they were the only people I wrote to. In many cities across England there were gay helplines whose primarily aim was the nurture the gay communities in the cities in which they were based. They all had P.O. Box addresses where people outside of that city could write in and get a positive response by return of post. If there was the lifestyle magazine that did for being gay what 'Buzz' did for evangelical Christianity then it would have listed such addresses. The addresses existed long before the first glossy monthly magazine, first published 1984. The first national newspaper which told of news aimed exclusively at/about gay men was not started until 1987. At the time of my first writing to True Freedom Trust the gay helplines existed, but I had no way of finding the helpline addresses that might have been much more encouraging. Perhaps if I had bought Bronski Beat's first album 'The Age of Consent', released in 1984, when it came out then I would have found lists of gay helpline contacts for across the country. They made such information available as part of the sleeve notes to the album. But I would have had to have been much nearer 'being out' than I was to have bought such a campaigning and 'out and proud' album.

In the meanwhile locally there were mild 'behind the bike sheds' levels of private discussion of homosexuality, mainly of the 'Is he? Isn't he?' type. Gossip about the unknown sex lives of popular musicians like Freddy Mercury, Rob Halford, Pete Burns, Marc Almond, and George Michael. Frankie Goes To Hollywood had their radio debut with a session for John Peel and were close to a debut on national television. There was Tom Robinson too, but he was quite dour and straight acting in his protestations. With the pop music of 1982 the gay musicians had the same problems as Christian musicians, with both their convictions were the reasons that they wrote, played, and performed but when national fame through a record company approached it reduced their convictions to some sort of minor lifestyle choice. Where being gay proved different to being Christian with music was in marketing. 'Gay' in the oldest sense of the word meant flamboyant and the more flamboyant the outfits the gay pop stars wore, the more their outfits bypassed the need for verbal comments and said what the stars were not allowed to say. 

Another way of approaching homosexuality whilst making sure it remained an irregular form of relationship was the first gay pub in the town, The Tiger Inn. I went there a few times and recognised a few of the faces from our more discreet life as willy wavers, not that seeing these folks drinking, willies firmly tucked away, made for a better connection with them. Like all public drinkers, we connected with the drink more than with each other. One reason for this was because the atmosphere in The Tiger Inn was incredibly macho. It was as if the married men of the town thought that they had found some new territory to claim as their own. Although they were mostly slightly too old for it, they had collectively decided to dress on the louche side to find out who there was to be had there for the new sexual opportunism. Many of them would have looked at others and thought 'mutton dressed as lamb' not realising that they were closer to being judged the way they judged others than they realised. If they expected some all-new sexual opportunities they were disappointed, they mostly discovered each other and realised that the pub was no opportunity at all. Marketing 1 Locals 0 was the score at the end of that particular game.

If the above were the open, broadly secular, evasions that I felt at ease with as I joined in then what did I find in the Christian faith? I can't remember when I first wrote to True Freedom Trust or what I wrote to them. I would estimate that I wrote to them sporadically for five or six years, between 1982 to 1987. After 1987 I felt less need to write to them. The character of my early correspondences with them would have been quite direct. 'I am gay and a Christian what do I do with that combination?'. I was glad that they never ignored me, but I often felt frustrated at how detached their idea of 'support' was. Broadly their answers to my points ran 'We know you are gay. You have told us you are gay. You have told yourself you are gay. If you want to say you are gay then you are entitled to say it. God has never made anyone gay, but he has made many people Christians. Families don't make people gay. If you are authentically gay, and if you are authentically Christian, then you will want to be obedient to God. God will want to be celibate. That how the argument works. We don't know of any other way'.

There were variations on the message, nuances where different glimmers of possible origins for homosexuality were inferred and left undeveloped. They might touch on how same sex boarding schools can have adverse effects on some people and the school would deny and cover up these effects. They might touch on the possible effects of dysfunctional non- Christian families, but always where they started what could have been an interesting seam of ideas long before the ideas might develop they would revert back to the argument 'God says that anyone who is unmarried must be celibate, whether they like being celibate or not.' and they would back away from enquiries where I wanted to know how to feel closeness and trust in friendship whilst overtly shutting down and avoiding all sexual feelings and responses. No answer with that one. 

If I could have written down exactly what my family were like, and described the Saturday afternoon television wrestling routine it might have changed their script, but I never did. Tied to my dysfunctional family as I was, and with True Freedom Trust always putting perfect family values on a pedestal as values to aspire to, what we had was a written dialogue between the deaf. If they had accepted that some families could be imperfect enough to actively cause homosexuality in their offspring it would have helped. But even then the man who successfully claimed that his family made him to be gay-me- might still be told 'God did not do that, and God will reject all unchaste homosexual behaviour.'.

I understood the underlying theological point that they were defending. God made sex 1-to be enjoyable enough when suitably socially confined within the privacy of marriage and 2-for the purpose of bringing children into the world. Thus if 'sex is the problem' then 'marriage' might well be suggested as the answer, But for those who were depressed and /frustrated by their continually being single, they were clearly not fit for marriage and clearly not fit for the solution to their problem. To prescribe marriage as the answer to their problems was to further leave them unprepared for what they were decreasingly unfit for. 

A.I.D.S. changed things but only a little. Years later when the government A.I.D.S. leaflet dropped through my door I rang the London gay helpline from a public callbox, less to ask about safer sex advice, more wanting to talk about how to get out the cul-de-sac or closet that I was stuck in. I spoke to somebody who was gay and 'out of the closet' and their version of being 'out' was to send me away with a flea in my ear for my being in the closet. In the place I was even a flea in the ear for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, emotionally, was an encouragement to me. But by then life had changed the year before anyway.

In July 1986 I was in the parental house just with Mother. No other family about. She asked me to find the cellotape in the sideboard. I found it. I also found a letter that had obviously been randomly stuffed away in the cupboard in a hurry, among the tightly packed clothes. The letter was dated late May 1972 and it was from Social Services to my parents. In the letter they confirmed to my parents that my place at boarding school, the same boarding school which as an adult they had told me that I had never needed to go to in the first place, was now fully arranged. Fourteen years after that arrangement had been made I was at last in a relatively good place in life, though it had taken hard work and a lot of patience to get there. Thanks to Mother I was renting a small modern flat that I liked and I had a reliable landlord, I had a few close friends and many acquaintances. My attempts at finding work of substance were proving futile, but  I was three years into having discovered the joy of Radio 4. With discovering that joy I found something that tasted of being an adult to me. Part of what had got me to the present state of a positive sense of balance about life was now clearly derived from how carefully my parents had avoided all talk with me about how they had brought me up and why I attended a school that they later said that I had never actually needed to go to in the first place.

The letter was 'the smoking gun' that was still hot after fifteen years of being stuffed in a cupboard. The evasions around how my parents made certain decisions about my life then had started in 1971/2. Since then the evasions had been regularised to the point where any sense of personal crisis, botched decision making and any of us feeling personally wounded had been so well smoothed over that we no longer knew where or how to start with asking about it. My parents knew that if they raised the subject with me then they would have to end all further attempts to cover up on their part. They knew I would feel angry and betrayed. They knew that the more they tried to explain what they did and why they did it the more I would view their actions as extremely shoddy. I was glad Mother and I were on our own and we remained undisturbed when the letter appeared out of nowhere and I asked her what it was about, not grasping immediately what it meant. Within minutes of my asking there was severe defensiveness (Mother) followed by a deep sense of being betrayed (me) then there was the expectation I should understand how she was under pressure (Mother) and sheer rage and disbelief in response (me) where I did not know whether to be angry at my parents for making the decision that they did or angry at them for with-holding all they knew about the process of me being sent to the care home/ boarding school. 

The oddity of it all was that I was getting on better in myself and with my family than we ever had before. All the ritual of dad-comes-home-drunk-and-insists-on-the-television-wrestling-whilst-Mother-makes-the-Saturday-fry had come to an end. The television wrestling had been moved in the television schedules. Now that I had more privacy from my family I had an improved sense of humour about the self deceptions of private vice and public virtue. I left the parental house that day wanting to never see Mother again, but knowing I would/must. Inside I was numb with shock and boiling with a rage so overpowering that whilst I knew I had friends, I had nobody that I could trust myself enough to tell what I had learned that day without what I was sharing destroying the friendship.

It so happened that I had written my latest letter to True Freedom Trust only a few days before the scarlet letter from Social Services, where my parents accepted that I should go to the care home/boarding school reappeared out of nowhere. I had written to True Freedom Trust in response to yet another of their letters full of spiritual instructions that I simply had not the resources to follow. Thankfully I was also going to the Christian Arts festival, Greenbelt, in three days. Those three days of preparation before I left were soaked in a private grief for which I had no language. My family were nothing like how they had been led to see them. Privately I was gutted as I joined up with my friends as we departed. They must have seen that I was rather down and decided that saying less about what they could see was as close to being accepting and forgiving as I could receive. They were right, three years earlier I had received 'Christian counselling' at a different Christian camping/teaching weekend and it had been 'directive counselling'. After the counselling reached some sort of awkward stalemate the counsellor decided to close with a quote from Psalm 46, 'Be still and know that I am God' and my response to that was to believe that what she was saying to me was 'Shut up, God is right, you are wrong'. I was still livid but she felt that she had done enough. I did not want any more 'blame the victim' type treatment where when I displayed a sense of being a victim then the counsellor would, quietly but abruptly, retreat from the counselling session mid-session, and leave me to flounder, openly wounded.

Everything seemed okay as we set up camp at Greenbelt, we soon sorted out who should sleep in which tent and we left our things in the agreed sleeping space. We each set off our separate paths to explore the different sites that were to be browsed. Throughout the weekend I was two different people. Inside I was a torrent of rage, grief and hurt. Outside appeared to be normal whilst investigating the site and enjoying the teaching, the stalls, and the music. On the evening of the last night of the festival the grief came back to me, much worse than ever before. I felt as if the grief was about to physically knock me out and put me on the ground, as if I were in the prelude to having a grand seizure or an epileptic fit. I found the counselling tent and somehow held myself together and got in the queues for being counselled. I go to the front of the queue. All the counsellors wore black trousers and white shirts which had their name on badges attached to the shirt, first name and second. They all sat at the back of a big tent three feet apart in a and the counselling was done right there, it was still confidential because even if others heard they were for their own reasons. I went towards the counsellor who was free, I thought I recognised his name. I did know it, but he was the man from True Freedom Trust  who I had written to querulously a few days ago and his name was Chris Medcalf.

It must have been confrontational to have somebody before him who he half knew through them writing to him, but was now here in front of him, the real deal, the flesh and blood that was alive and clearly in a bad way. At first I could not speak through the floods of tears. As I put words to my story and how I felt. It was as if I was falling apart from the inside out. He let me cry and talk, cry and talk, on and on, until it was more talk than cry. Adult size that I was, he did not stop me from sitting on his knee when it felt right to me that I should do that. It was definitely a four hanky therapy session, I left Chris four hours later somewhat settled. I had not intended that the time with Chris should become something nearer 'primal scream therapy' than Christians were used to. But twenty years of living and being fobbed off from the future I thought I was due to parents who disguise their fobbing off so well I did not recognise what it was had tested me beyond all rationality and belief. The intensity of the outpouring was natural. When Mother was in her thirties she had to go to hospital for surgery at short notice. The speed at which the need for the surgery was recognised by the doctor and the hospital completed made it the most efficient moment in Mother's entire life. I was having the emotional equivalent of surgery right there, right then. My need had the same immediacy that Mother's medical needs once had. The equivalent of an assessment and four therapy sessions in one go later, the time with Chris was rounded off with talk of my possible future, if I could make it work. I went off to pray with the Franciscan monks in another tent and got my own sleeping bag very late and very tired. Nobody else knew that I had a burden lifted from me.

Where True Freedom Trust tried to help through writing, and sticking to scripture, they were out of their depth was in the area of mental health, which was the very area in which I, and surely many other troubled gay men, deeply needed practical help. On that last night of Greenbelt I wrung out of TFT and Chris Medcalf the help I knew I wanted. They were in front of me and I suspect that they were underprepared for what happened.

Whereas everything that happened through exchanges of letters, and sending leaflets out, TFT were never out of their depth, but the people they sent the material to wanted a lot more than the material that was sent would cover.

One final point about Chris, back then he was a handsome man with a full head of black hair and a short thick black beard. As a gay man I liked men with beards, it was a source of regret to me that I met so few at the time. My reaction to his appearance must surely have complicated matters and slowed down how effectively he recognised what my needs were. But the complications were small given the depth of testimony about feeling devastated from living out a small town life where I was thoroughly deceived that he had to carefully unravel. That would not be the last time that I found conflict when my counsellor turned out to have a beard when I first met them either. But counsellors would know more about the complications of people needing help, and them being found to be attractive, more than I need to say much about here. Being fancied for their appearances whilst trying to help people is one of the complexities that are part of the counsellor's vocation.

Chris helped me wean myself off relying on my parents' ideas about how to be an adult, which were formed, and were very much still stuck in, the 1950's. He also helped me reset how I saw work and training, which was also echoing the memories of 1950's rationing. With his help I decided that I wanted to train as a nurse. I prepared as well as I could for that future. My plans did not pan out as expected, but eventually bore a very different but equal fruit. Within six years of that one and only time of meeting Chris I learned how much I was happier without paid work, I fell in love, and I was in my first gay relationship before being one half of a long term partnership.

Please find Chapter 18 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.