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You are here: Home > Forum > A Place of Safety > General Talk > Encouraging the less self confident to post here
Encouraging the less self confident to post here  [message #67127] Wed, 24 October 2012 08:32 Go to previous message
timmy

Has no life at all
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13818



For the last several months I've been using private messages here to talk to a very quiet and unassuming young man who was outed by a girl he thought to be his friend. The outing hurt him emotionally, though, paradoxically, it has also helped him. Among other things I've been showing him that, now he is out, his thought processes about what matters and what does not matter can change. It is no longer important, if it ever was important, to hide who he is, because folk know who he is. "Yesterday" he felt terrified to tell a boy he finds him attractive. "Today" he has the very normal frisson of nervousness, but he knows he can do it. How? Because he has done it.

What I'd love to happen is for him and folk like him, the ones who just lack the self confidence to make an initial post, to know how safe and easy it is to break the ice here and make their first post, even if it is about the weather Smile

The reason is because these are the ordinary, normal, gay lads of today, and I so wish they felt able to show the other ordinary, normal, gay lads of today how ordinary and normal it is to be gay.

How do we do it?


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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