Was Coming Out Easy For You?

[marshlander]

I've just been trying to answer Andy's poll about when we realised we were gay/bi etc. My history is a bit complicated and I wrote a long reply which didn't really fit the mood of the question, so I thought I start this thread in case anyone else has a story they'd like to share. An actual life can sometimes be stranger than a fictional one.

Shall I start?

I had crushes on and intense friendships with boys during childhood. I generally had one special friend at a time rather than belonging to any one group or gang. My mum even teased me about being in love with a male music teacher when I was eleven and still in primary school. I didn't recognise or acknowledge any of that as being gay though - "'mo" was the noun we used at the time in the sixties. I felt I was an outsider in all my social interactions at school, home and church - normal adolescence in that regard maybe? My family and cultish religious upbringing informed my inability to question what was really going on. Being a regular churchgoer affected my friendships at school while the music I wanted to listen to, my hair and the clothes I preferred to wear brought me (and my parents) a lot of pressure from church. During weekdays I attended a state-run all-boys school and through adolescence I didn't have many encounters with girls except when I went to church. I realised boys made good wank fantasy material in my early-teens and, thankfully our p.e. changing rooms, showers and the communal baths after rugby or cross-country running did not elicit the same fear that feeds the plots of a so many American films.

At church in my mid-teens I was given pamphlets to read and weekly reminders that explained that many adolescents can form unhealthy interests in members of the same sex. When I was pressured to "confess" to my "bishop" (not the one I guiltily enjoyed bashing of course ) I was told I would grow out of it after I got to know some girls. I made friends with a girl from church at sixteen and we became best friends. I was also fully expecting to grow out of fantasising about males as soon as I got married. In our religion a loving heterosexual marriage was very aspirational and affected not just this life, but the afterlife too. From church leaders and teachers at church there was a lot of pressure to abstain from any and all sexual activity until marriage, so apart from my right hand I didn't explore many intimate opportunities. That doctrinal propaganda proved unproductive because, had I realised the disappointment of my wedding night before getting married, I probably could have saved a lot of people a lot anguish. Even so there was a lot of praying and repenting going on  and I was seriously trying to avoid giving in to temptation. The cultish nature of the church meant that throughout my life I had been trained not to recognise the knowledge or authority of anyone who contradicted the doctrine. They were being used by Satan to draw me away from "the truth". Masturbation would lead me into homosexual activity and homosexual behaviour was a sin worse than murder. "Parents, if you realise your son experiences same-sex attraction it would be better that you had tied a rock round his neck and thrown him into the Great Salt Lake," was one of the pithy aphorisms that were often regurgitated from the pulpit to the general congregation during my teenage years.

When I was nineteen four important things happened. After working in London for a year I started college*. I met and fell in love with a man* a year or so older than me who'd come to London from New York to work for an Anglo-American band I followed. He was clearly interested in me and filled all my waking and sleeping thoughts. I was not capable of processing these feelings as love, but it was too late anyway, I'd married* my best friend. Around this time I also discovered cottages*. I couldn't keep away, but was determined never to go back after every single encounter. I couldn't explain it and learned to begin to put all the bits of my life that wouldn't fit together into different boxes in my head. The next few years were a mess. I got through college and took my first job in a school. We moved away from family with a family of very young children of our own. By the time I was twenty-five I was trying to make ends meet in my draining, but poorly-paid job, be a dutiful husband and a good father to my beautiful kids and fulfil a number of exceedingly onerous duties as an elder in the church. I was failing in all those roles, sinking deeper into depression, lost my faith in a dramatic realisation and went out to commit suicide. I even failed at that.

So, in answer to Andy's question, while I had known for most of my life at some unconscious level, it took me until I was nearly forty to come out to myself and start to process what that was going to mean for me and my loved ones. That was when I finally acknowledged I was probably not going to grow out of being interested in men - slow learner - and my mental wellbeing took another dip (although the low periods had never completely lifted). I struggled on thinking this is what everyone copes with until so many of my friends and colleagues were telling me I needed to get help that I decided to go through the motions to shut them up. That was when depression was finally formally diagnosed and I began to receive treatment including what became a total of four years in counselling.

Very early on I had come to think to myself that my engagement and marriage were best described as a state of warfare interspersed with occasional periods of truce. During the engagement, older, married friends explained that betrothals were always tense and that life would improve once we'd tied the knot. When we were visiting my parents would walk out of the room rather than have to listen to the way she spoke to me. I convinced myself the truces made it all worthwhile and it would all get better. I would do better. It was a shock when my counsellor first used the word "abuse" to describe what I was experiencing. That sort of thing happened to other people not to men and certainly not to me ... but sadly he was right. It took a further five years, but getting to the stage of knowing I was not going to survive another year (I'd make sure I got it right this time) I finally found the courage to leave the home and my wife finally began divorce proceedings. All her church friends and family surrounded her with love and support and church friends I'd known since childhood immediately cut off all contact.

I wasn't looking to fall straight into another relationship. I wanted to have some "teenage" years that I'd missed out on before I started looking for someone special again. However, we don't always get what we think we want. Meeting PA online and growing into our relationship over the past eighteen years has been just the best experience. I wish I had known then what I know now. I would not have hurt so many people. However, until the lockdown experience of this year I can honestly say that my life has never been happier. I wish my mother had lived long enough to know I could be happy.