Coming out again and again

Thursday, March 6th, 2014

The delicious (and I mean delicious) wedding cake from my mum and dad

When you're born a homosexualist like me, growing up is so much more complicated than it is for heterosexualists, and let's face it, growing up isn't easy at the best of times. Just becoming and being a teenager has a wealth of its own obstacles to overcome.
But when you're gay, it's even harder because while all the usual adolescent stuff is going on, you're also trying to work out why you have these feelings which seem different to those of your friends and family, and once you do manage to put a name to how you feel, there is the huge obstacle of actually accepting it and then being brave enough to let other people know.
Some people take years - decades, even - to realise or accept that they might be gay, others know early on and just get on with it. But there's one thing that almost all gay people have in common, and that's the dreaded day they come out for the first time.
I'm not going into the trials and tribulations of coming out here, but what I do want to write about is the phenomenon of the never-ending coming out. Because it doesn't happen just the once, you know. Coming out can happen every week, every day perhaps. You come out the first time to someone close to you, maybe your family or a friend, but then for the rest of your life you're constantly coming out again and again to people who do not know.
Society assumes everybody is heterosexual, it's the default. So every time I meet a new person, that person will automatically assume I am straight and that I have a girlfriend or wife. And so often you have to correct somebody's assumption, resulting in a mini coming out.
This happened yet again last night on my college course. Everybody had known for weeks that I was getting married, and were very excited for me, and yesterday was the first session back since the big day so there were lots of questions.
And then came that question: "And did your wife enjoy it?"
I politely replied: "Husband, actually." And they were very apologetic and not a little embarrassed, but all was fine and we just carried out chatting about the day.
But as the evening wore on and I chatted with more people, it kept cropping up again. "I'm sure your wife was as stressed as you were"; "It's good that you're learning to cook, it'll take some pressure off your wife"; "Now you have that ring on your finger, you're wife has control!"
And to my shame I just stopped correcting them because the first time I'd done it, it'd really embarrassed the person. Now the fact they made an incorrect assumption isn't my fault of course, and I fully understand why they did, but I just felt uncomfortable having to create awkward situations constantly just because I love a man instead of a woman.
Society makes assumptions all the time - even I assume everyone I meet is straight! - but it can get so tiring being the exception to the rule sometimes, and also pretty demoralising. Most people do not have to declare their sexuality every time they meet a new person, but when you're gay, you often do. It's a constant requirement to label and define what you are in terms of who you choose to sleep with rather than any number of other far more interesting aspects about you.
So it's been really bugging me that I didn't correct some people's assumptions last night because now they think I am married to a woman and I never told them I wasn't. The fear of being gay and being disliked because of it never quite leaves you...

Bad dreams in the night...

Wednesday, March 5th, 2014

Me. Exactly me.

I had a bad dream last night. I don't have them very often - or at least I very rarely remember them - and neither do I like having them. Dreams, good or bad, unsettle me, because it demonstrates to me that the unconscious mind has a power over me, that my mind does things I cannot control, and I don't like that thought.
When I was a child I used to have a recurring nightmare which makes little sense to me now, and I've always wondered what it meant. I was in a vast empty black void, but standing on a train track which crisscrossed many other tracks shooting off into the inky nothingness in lots of different directions.
Then, thundering towards me along one track came a giant ball of what I can only describe as Plasticine or clay, intent on crushing me. I would shout "Press the button! Turn the switch!" out loud in my sleep, prompting my mum or dad to rush in and wake me up to stop the nightmare.
I had this quite often for a period of time, always ending, like a Doctor Who cliffhanger, with me shouting to press the button and make it stop. Weird.
Last night's bad dream really did feed into something buried deep in my psyche from childhood. When I was a schoolboy in the 1980s they used to show us schools programmes on the TV - Look and Read, Middle English, that kind of stuff - and they used to have a serialised story called Interference, which absolutely terrified me as a nine-year-old.
It was about a family which went away to stay in a cottage for the summer holidays but discovered that there were problems with the electricity and at night the power would go off. It transpired there was a ghost in the generator in the cellar, and it would manifest in different ways, most pant-wettingly of all as a scarcely-glimpsed crying face of an old woman through the interference on the television screen (even though there was no power to the TV!).
Last night's bad dream involved Gareth and I going to a cottage in the countryside to visit what I seem to recall from the dream were supposed to be quite an odd couple, a man and his wife.
Then the dream started twisting and changing, as they do, until people and situations changed and the cottage became my mum and dad's house, and the odd couple became my parents (I think - even as I type it's fading!).
For some reason I then tried to discover if my mum and dad's house was haunted by asking out loud if there was any spirit in the room, and we established that there was the spirit of a young boy.
I asked whether the ghost boy had been haunting my mum for some time, and then a scratchy moving image of a young boy's face came up on the portable TV, in and out of a haze of interference, and it answered each of my questions my making the interference hiss loudly.
I asked: "Have you been with my mum for a year or more?"
The TV hissed.
"Have you been with her for two years or more?"
It hissed again. My mum was now getting quite hysterical with fear, with the though that she'd been followed by the ghost of a little boy for all this time.
I asked: "Have you been with her for three years or more?"
It hissed again. At this point we all got really spooked because, in the dream at least, it was a fact that my parents hadn't been in this house that long, so the ghost had obviously followed them there from somewhere else!
It was at this point that I was woken from my bad dream by Gareth moaning loudly in his sleep, obviously having a bad dream of his own. I nudged him to disturb him from his nightmare, and when we both woke properly a few hours later I asked him if he remembered having a nightmare. Sadly, he didn't, but I do wonder whether he was "sharing" my bad dream in some way.
Needless to say I won't be telling my mum about this incident, but it demonstrates the reason why I really don't like dreams and nightmares. They are uncontrollable within us, like demons of the mind.