PEOPLE: Alistair Howtown

Alistair Howtown lived next door to me when we were very young, and later moved up the road into the cul-de-sac about five doors away. Apparently we played happily as infants, but I have no memory of this. I do remember we were best friends throughout middle school (age 8-12).

Alistair almost never came to my house, and so I was always round at his. Looking back at the things we did it's clear we were both gay. We liked playing happy families with the soft toys (Alistair was always the wife, usually heavily pregnant), cooking chocolate crispy cakes and drop scones, staging our own plays and musicals, watching movies like Grease or tv shows like French & Saunders, and singing along to Kylie Minogue.

I used to envy him his mother, who was a lovely friendly woman with a big round face who seemed to radiate love, but thinking back perhaps I preferred my very close knit family. Alistair was left to forage for his own food (usually pre-packaged pancakes microwaved with syrup, or a packet of Hula-Hoops sourced from a drawer stuffed with packets of them in the kitchen) and was offered no protection against his brother, James. Almost every visit to the Howden household ended when James entered the room and started beating Alistair up. Alistair would run and hide in the bathroom, locking the door and screaming and crying, and I - at that time quiet and very uncertain how to act - would finally give up and go home.

From my perspective, James wasn't all bad - he was very into building his muscles (he was very short and trying to compensate), and also very into only wearing very loose boxer shorts around the house. God bless him, while James was crouched over Alistair pummelling his stomach, my thoughts were often focussed on his muscular back, round bottom and - more frequently than seems probable - his balls hanging out of the sides of his boxers. This was probably the source of my earliest real-life sexual feelings and certainly my first real exposure to the post-pubescent ball-sack. I used to make excuses to sit watching tv in their house in the hope James would sit on the sofa, spread-legged and cock out of the henhouse.

Alistair and I were superb friends, and clearly didn't fit in with the rest of the school (indeed, on school trips to Wales and France we were generally in a clique of two), but our friendship deteriortated significantly when we moved to grammar school. I guess I started to distrust him after he told a dumb lie (he said his hamster was pregnant. Believing him, I reported this to my mum, who confirmed via his mum it was a lie, and any trust I had in the boy was destroyed forever), but we fully drifted apart once we went to big school and ended up in different streams, and he started hanging around with the louder, ruder girls and took up smoking.

I saw him little after that. Even in sixth form, he was on BTech while I did A-levels. I last saw him walking his dog when I was about 21, when I was back home from university trying to make enough money to move back to London. He was a good looking man: tall, tan, handsome face. I sighed and thought about getting back into contact, but months later he hanged himself with his dog leash.

I was no longer close enough to him or his family to find out why he hanged himself, and it only saddened me slightly. It was many years later - 2006 perhaps - that his death really hit me. I was lying in bed just thinking about him and suddenly I realised how close we had been, and started crying when I realised everything he had missed in life, and everything he would go on to miss. Worst of all, I realised I was now the only person in the world to remember the things we had done together, which is a weird way to think about something like this.

My favourite memory is when we were playing catch in his living room, and he threw the ball and knocked some little lead soldiers off the mantlepiece and they broke. They had been his grandfather's and so we spent hours finding glue and trying to fix them so his mum wouldn't be angry, but it was no good as the lead wouldn't stick. In the end we had to come clean and - expecting punishment - we were instead praised, as his mum had always hated them. They were stuck in the bin and forgotten.

It's odd that we were two gays in a homophobic northern town, and yet somehow that was never mentioned in our friendship. My other best friend from this time was also a homo, and it was similarly never an issue. Looking back, I wish he'd remained a friend through school and someone to go through the whole realising-I'm-gay thing with. I think we'd both have come out stronger.