Next week I'll be visiting my old middle school to attend a parent forum where the school will be seeking feedback on sex and gender education. It set me thinking back to the sort of gender education I received at the school almost three decades ago - in particular how they helped me come to terms with and understand my homosexuality - and I realised that in actual fact we didn't discuss sexuality at all. Not one bit of it.
In fact, it took two decades of life before I was able to talk to anyone about this stuff. Longtime readers of this blog will know that I first came to understand I was gay while watching a rerun of George & Mildred at nine years old, but I didn't then actually get an opportunity to speak about my sexuality with another human being until I was about 19 or 20. Sure, there were other gay people at school (I now learn), but like me they were all hiding so far below the horizon we couldn't even find each other.
It's hard to imagine in these liberal times, but back when I was thirteen there wasn't a single popular gay role model in western culture. My brother was outraged at suggestions Frederick Mercury might be gay even as the latter lay dying of AIDs. Boy George meanwhile demonstrated such a level of gender fluidity there was still some debate in my household whether he was a boy or a girl, and the thin end of the tolerance wedge that was Julian Clary was still a year or two away. And Hollywood Montrose? We genuinely just assumed he was a woman.
Although it seemed association with homosexuality would effectively be career death for any celebrity, there was one small class of person whose homosexuality was still readily discussed in detail: the queer cannibalistic serial killer. Bumbling along through life one day I happened to glance at a copy of a monthly murder history magazine in the local newsagents, and quickly saw the featured killer of the month - Dennis Nilson - had been a gay man who preyed on other men.
Finally! I thought... a chance to learn about my kind.
I pored over that magazine for weeks, taking in every detail of Nilson's personal history and psyche ... yet never really certain which details were part of the universal homosexual experience, and which were unique to queer cannibalistic serial killers. Loneliness and mild self-loathing, for sure. Picking up young men in a club, sounds good. Wanking them off in a filthy bed, okay. Strangling them with the telephone wire ... getting into dodgy territory there. Storing the young man's head in the fridge ... well that just sounds unhygienic. Reading the details I began to think there might be a good reason homosexuals were so vilified.
The sad thing is that as a gay child I had to go to great lengths to disguise why I was so interested in this story, so I had to subscribe to the entire murder history magazine series just to create the illusion it was the murders I was interested in, not the man-fucking. There was literally a greater fear in those days that ones child might be gay than they might be unnaturally obsessed with serial killers. To maintain this cover, I ended up learning a lot about Doctor Crippin, Ted Bundy and others of their ilk. My dad even told my hairdresser about the magazines, and she exclaimed "What sort of sicko reads that sort of thing?" and I hung my head, cheeks burning with shame but also pleased my real secret was buried behind this cover.
I can confirm now, after forty years of being a gay male, that wanking off young men before strangling, dismembering, boiling and eating them in fact plays an extremely small role in the overall life of the modern homosexual. We are a much more culturally varied race these days. Things were perhaps simpler in Nilson's day, but I do so prefer things as they are.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment