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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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At Easter 1972, when I was 19, the Gay Liberation Front Annual Conference, a global event insofar as the GLF was truly global, came to the University of Birmingham Guild of Undergraduates Union. I think the conference lasted a week. At the time I almost lived in the union building, so I was present where the conference was being held, though not at the conference itself.
Part of the event seemed to attract the oddest styles of dress. In one of the bars I was struck by a creature wearing black velvet hot pants over canary yellow tights and a tight canary yellow top. He was by no means the most eccentric of the fashion statements being made.
But the weird dress of so many of the delegates made me squirm. I associated that peculiar mode of dress with the thing I was trying hard not to be - homosexual - and I hated them for wearing it, it for existing, and myself for being what I was fast concluding was a homosexual.
I was not formal in my attire. I was a student of the era, with shoulder length hair, tight jeans tucked into knee length boots and very styled shirts. The was the post Carnaby Street being new period. But I hated the steps too far that these folk took. It made me so uncomfortable that I avoided all the delegate, something I wanted desperately not to do
What I wanted was to dare to be picked up by one, any one. But I didn't dare get close to the weirdos, so I stayed clear. And I moved further into denial of what I was and I tried very hard not to be homosexual.
Something that ought to have ben an uplifting and enlightening experience, and one which probably was for the delegates, was not for me, the queer kid who needed to come out to himself. And it was the way the delegates dressed that repelled me.
When I was 19 I hated homosexuals.
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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Timmy, I read your post and suggest that 'hate' is the wrong word. I suggest that you couldn't stand in-yer-face flamin' homosexuals or even couldn't abide them, but I suspect the truth was that you didn't know any to hate.
I wonder whether I might ask you whether, if you had had as much self-confidence then as you have now, there is a chance you might have avoided them less?
Of course when I was 19 there were no flamers since Wolfenden hadn't reported so I don't know how I would have felt about them. Maybe I'd have feared to acquire guilt by association. I hope I wouldn't, but who knows? But I did buy clothes in Carnaby Street which at the time I felt was quite daring. I knew that, whatever they thought, nobody would accuse me of being homosexual even if they had known where my more outré clothes came from.
I think you are too hard on yourself. Let's have a 'be nice to Timmy' day and please will you join in?
Love,
Anthony
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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I'm going to stick with 'hated'
They made my flesh crawl. They made me disgusted with myself.
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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