I will, I hope

In 2007, when I was sixteen, I came out firstly to myself, secondly to my friends, and finally to my parents. Six years on, I remember the feeling this long and terrifying process gave way to pretty well. It was a concoction of emotions. Firstly, there was the relief of throwing off a mask, and the acknowledgement, in hindsight, of the exhaustion that wearing it had caused. Secondly, there was a feeling that I could do anything. If I could do what at the time was the most difficult thing I could even imagine doing, then I must have been able to achieve whatever I wanted. Thirdly, I felt I had conceded defeat to the people who called me ‘gay’ as an insult, and to my body, or my mind, or whatever it is that means I am as I am.

I had until that point maintained that I was straight because I saw being straight as better, and easier, than being gay, and having outed myself I hadn’t yet changed my mind. As I saw it, if I had only been different I could have got a proper job (gay men didn’t have jobs in my mind – don’t ask, because I don’t know), been friends with other men, laughed and joked and fantasised about man things like beer, and tits, and football (if ever I somehow taught myself to enjoy them), had children of my own, and walked in public with my hand in the hand of the person I was to love, without anyone batting an eyelid. Nobody would whisper about me from across the street as they did from the other side of the classroom. Nobody would spit at me in the street. I could have been normal, which is all I’d ever wanted. I wanted to give in to the taunts. I wanted to let them win, because it was easier.

A big part of the heterosexual fantasy I played out in my mind, as I waited for the moment that my sexuality righted itself, was marriage. I was never and am not now religious, and will not be seeking to be recognised in marriage by any religion, but I have always wanted to one day be married. To me, marriage was and is not about declaring love in the face of that big lie in the sky. Marriage is about two people declaring their love to each other, and in the faces of all of those whose opinions and blessings matter most to them. It is a statement that one person is going to spend the rest of his or her life with the other, and by telling everyone they care about that this is the case, they are proving to that person that they really mean it; look, I’m telling everyone. I love you. It’s hard to take it back if everybody knows, so you have to work for it when things aren’t so rosy. You don’t really want anybody to have to one day read that Such and Such has gone from being ‘in a relationship’ to ‘single/divorced/lonely/a failure/Bridget Jones with no Mr Darcy’, so you put the work in. At least that’s what it’s supposed to be about, I think.

Until today it was supposed to be about a man and a woman. Until recent decades it was supposed to be about a white man and a white woman or a black man and a black woman, and until Henry grew tired of Catherine (whose marriage to Henry was actually annulled, and no divorce took place, but go with me here), it was supposed to be forever. Marriage, like most things, changes. I believe that change is positive. Change is synonymous with progress. I have little respect for the upholding of ‘tradition’ for tradition’s sake, which in essence is merely stubborn unwillingness to let go of one’s dummy because one’s dummy is all one has ever known, and therefore must be all that is right and holy. It is short-sighted, stagnant, and upheld by the fear of change. But nobody is perfect. We all have to adjust. Technological advance would likely occur a lot more quickly if only we weren’t so frightened of it. Social change is just the same.

I feel as if I’ve taken you all on a merry dance. What I wanted to say is simple. It is that now, following a monumental decision made earlier today, and providing I am not sad and alone forever more, I might be able to be me and married after all. I don’t have to put up with having one thing and not the other. I can have it all, just like everyone else can. I can be equal, without being the same. It’s a big hurrah for me and people like me, and a satisfying fuck you to all the ignorant bastards who ever gave me and anybody like me any sort of hassle for nothing more than being ourselves, and proud of it. They are the frightened ones, quivering in their caves with their dummies sucked tightly between their lips, ancient life manuals clutched to their chests, and eyes tightly shut, and the the rest of us are marching forward with the torch of progress and enlightenment ahead of us, eyes open, in pursuit of the next hurdle over which we shall drag our terrified cousins, as they kick and scream, and scramble for their mothers’ familiar wombs. Silly sods.

We have jumped a hurdle in a race with no foreseeable finish line, and on we go…

A post for a post’s sake

It’s been a while now since I’ve posted. I’m asking myself whether quantity or quality is the more important. Of course the answer is ‘quality’, but I can’t just write nothing. I have to do something. If I give myself too much of a break I’ll begin telling myself that there’s no point carrying on and that people already know I’m unreliable and uninteresting so I needn’t bother trying. I just don’t have any developed ideas right now. I’ve been thinking over a handful of things but I’ve not had the time to consider them properly. If I sit down and just start writing about one then I’m liable to miss out some key points that later I’ll wish I’d got in there to begin with.

I have turned twenty-two since I last posted. I was born on the twenty-ninth of November, nineteen-ninety. It was a cold day (it was November), and my mother was screaming (probably), and my father was crying (probably). North Tyneside General Hospital is the setting. I came out of my mum and I was fine and I went home with my parents and everything’s been pretty much all right all the way until almost the end of twenty-twelve. If I were either of my parents I would be terrified by the fact that it were even possible to have a son in his twenties. They probably are terrified, actually. In fact, I know that my dad is because he told me so, or at least said something to me to that effect. He’ll turn fifty-one tomorrow. My grandfather was fifty when Dad married my mum. Dad was twenty-three. He says he remembers him (that’s my grandfather) as being an old man on the day of his wedding. I don’t see my parents as old. (Mum isn’t yet fifty. She has roughly seven months of her forties left to her.) I see them as in a sort of undefined stretch of life. Both still have young children, so maybe that’s what makes them so hard to define. We’re no longer the nuclear family, and our definitions haven’t quite been set in stone just yet.

My dad says that now I need to sort myself out. I need to cut my hair and change my image, he says. I won’t. Not for now. It’s taken a long time to settle into myself and I don’t want to uproot everything again just as I’ve breathed a sigh of relief at just being me. I don’t want to give up on my dreams (excuse America’s influence) already. There are things I want to do. One of them is not to get stuck in a life that is going to make me miserable. Wouldn’t it be so fucking simple to do things with our lives that we actually enjoy? So few of us manage it. We’re all so skilfully led into the pen that is a career. In we go, and on we plod until we reach the man with the stun gun who knocks us on the head with it so that we’ve no idea what the fuck is going on but we’re still essentially living beings, and then Death is looming and as he’s nearing we’re bleeding out over the floor and after a bit of a shake we’re dead.

I’m sure I’m covering old ground here, but I am so scared. My life is sitting on the road in front of me and I just want to crawl back into the warm den where Mum and Dad and all the other adults were such mysterious beings, doing their adult things like ‘meetings’ and ‘work’ and ‘taxes’ whilst I fiddled around at their ankles with a pencil and some card, oblivious to what lay ahead. They were so rich that they could buy cars and houses and masses of things to keep in them. They’d stay up late and talk about secret things in semi-whispers, and sometimes they’d slip into broken Welsh to disguise the mysterious grown-up conversation topics as I fell asleep to their deep voices amongst the big feet beneath the table.

I’m considering teaching. I have always said I do not want to be a teacher. It’s beginning, isn’t it?