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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13773
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This is interesting. I was 15 in 1967, and I had very different worries. In 1967 I refused to be a queer. In 1967 we had awful media coverage about those perverts, the homosexual because the UK was legalising homosexuality, but between consenting adults, and in private. Adulthood came at 21 then. So my concerns and stress levels were about being found out as being queer. We were not gay then.
I went to a school with a uniform, so we were not worried about the clothes escalations. We looked the same in rather tatty, baggy grey suits. Here we were:
 
    
Obviously no clothes escalations there. Nor tech collections. We were concerned about bikes, but not much else.
There was bullying. Until I was 14 I as a bully. A victim taught me that was not good by beating the crap out of me. I wasn't the bully who was a coward. I fought back. But I was the bully who thought about it while nursing quiet a few unpleasant wounds, and never bullied again, physically or emotionally. My bullying was the nasty emotional sort.
I had been a victim of bullying myself. I managed to break the cycle, albeit late.
I worried, to an extent, what my schoolmates thought of me. That was a twofold worry, no, threefold.
- I was keen on being liked. I had not much affection at home, and craved it in school
- I was not keen on being outed as a queer, a pervert.
- Paradoxically, I wanted all the boys in the pictures, except the ones of me, to discover that I was queer and to be my lovers, The lasy one especially
And yet I also wanted to be attractive to girls because my future was mapped out to be with girls, at least in my head.
There was absolutely masses of homework, and hard, hard, hard exams, poor teaching, and the difficult atmosphere of the British Public School which had the objective of turning out middle class administrators for the empire we no longer had, and in removing any individuality from us.
My life at 15 was glorious and awful in equal degrees, but it was totally different from the description in the BBC article
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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