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For Youngsters to Anticipate and Oldsters to Emulate [message #47792]

Fri, 28 December 2007 04:43

unsui

Likes it here

Registered: September 2007
Messages: 338

No Message Body

[Updated on: Fri, 24 October 2008 19:44]

Re: For Youngsters to Anticipate and Oldsters to Emulate [message #47798 is a reply to message #47792]

Fri, 28 December 2007 10:18

timmy

Has no life at all

Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796

Ah the embers. Would that I had embers to stir that were not even then in my imagination.

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

Re: For Youngsters to Anticipate and Oldsters to Emulate [message #47844 is a reply to message #47798]

Sat, 29 December 2007 20:26

acam

On fire!

Location: UK
Registered: July 2007
Messages: 1849

Dear Michael and Timmy,
I've just written an essay in another thread. Yes I agree. I'm not sure what age I am. My daughter says "73 going on five".

How does one tell whether someone else is emotionally mature?

Of course the converse is easy - when they disagree with you!

Do you agree that there is a tendency to think that if someone has been able to form and sustain a relationship for a few years that is evidence of maturity? Or could it just show that they or their partner is willing to put up with too much?

How do you tell?

Love
Anthony

Re: For Youngsters to Anticipate and Oldsters to Emulate [message #47927 is a reply to message #47844]

Mon, 31 December 2007 16:46

unsui

Likes it here

Registered: September 2007
Messages: 338

No Message Body

[Updated on: Fri, 24 October 2008 19:43]

Re: For Youngsters to Anticipate and Oldsters to Emulate [message #47936 is a reply to message #47927]

Mon, 31 December 2007 22:11

acam

On fire!

Location: UK
Registered: July 2007
Messages: 1849

Dear Michael,
That was a marvellous answer.

I do seem to have led a charmed life - I feel I have escaped the dreadful problems so many others seem to have had.

The first thing is that I was so unaware of relationships that I didn't recognise I had any sexual feelings for other people until after I left school (at the age of eighteen!). I mean that I didn't realise that a friend was in love with me until forty years later when a common friend pointed it out - and then it was obvious.

So I didn't have problems about telling people I was gay because I didn't know!

I left school very shortly after my eighteenth birthday and within four months had won a scholarship to Oxford and I was then required to do my national service before I took my place at Oriel College.

During my national service I made various friends and invited some of them home. One of them seduced me in my own bedroom (it wasn't difficult!) and subsequently I had sex with four others. Remember that homosexual acts were illegal and punishable by terms in prison in those days. I was able to go with the flow - that is I didn't have any problems doing what I wanted even though I knew it was really really dangerous.

By great good luck I was never caught.

For a period of four or five months, by pure good luck, Peter and I were assigned to the same shared 2-person bedroom.

Subsequently he stayed with me at home and I stayed with him at his home and he even came to visit me at Oriel College (where he had a guest room but, if I remember right, he used it only in a token way).

I left Oxford in 1958 and he got married in 1962 (I think). I'm sure that he didn't regret his marriage. I wish I had had the chance to get to know his children. Then I got married in 1963. I don't regret it. My wife is such a good person that I don't think I can live up to her. Having children and bringing them up has been the most fulfilling experience of my life and I thought it would be before I started. I would have liked Peter to knopw my children.

So I don't feel I have suffered anything like as much as some of the others who have opened up to us on this site.

If I had been exposed to all these emotions at the age of eleven or twelve as you were I think I would have blown it. I was simply not equipped to handle such problems.

Perhaps I am hoping to rescue someone now in the boat I would have been in if I had been faced with it!

Love
Anthony

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