I'm From Driftwood
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I'm From Bristol, England, UK by Sam L.
As I sat on my bed gazing at the television screen watching BBC Parliament for the first time, it occurred to me that I will always remember this day, February 5, 2013, for this was the day in the United Kingdom where the gay marriage bill was either to be declined or accepted by the British parliament. I am just 19 years old and this is the first major change in gay rights I have witnessed or can remember in my entire life. As the news broke that the bill had been accepted I suddenly felt overwhelmed with emotion and joy. I am not the emotional type, in fact quite the opposite but I finally felt as if gay rights were moving on instead of moving back.
I live in a tiny village in Bristol, United Kingdom. We have seven shops and a high school, it’s the type of place where everyone knows everyone’s business and everyone has to air their opinion because there is nothing better to do. High school for me never felt like a school, it felt like a prison. I was held captive from 9 to 3:30 every day, all the time just counting down the seconds. I wasn’t openly gay but being somewhat effeminate I didn’t need to be, I didn’t get to come out of the closet, I was thrown out. There wasn’t a day that went by where I wasn’t knocked down or beaten or taunted, and in the end it became part of daily life.
By the time I was able to leave my high school the confident outgoing personality I once was had completely diminished. What remained was an empty, tired and unstable mess. I had numerous breakdowns including several years suffering from Anorexia Nervosa. Even as a young child I was teased and taunted and what childhood I did have was almost destroyed by the isolation I felt.
But turning 17 changed my life; I got accepted into a prestigious performing college which changed me forever. I met all manner of people, all races, all religions, and all sexualities and suddenly I didn’t feel so isolated. I started to develop a personality, I started to find my feet and become a person. When I turned 18 I hit the gay clubs in the city and met my boyfriend who I have been with for over a year and I started to recover as a person.
So last week it finally felt as if everything was beginning to fall into place, I felt as if my life was moving in the right direction and so was my country and I felt proud. I have never made any announcement of my sexuality to my family members other than my parents, partly due to the initial reaction my parents had as they banned me from telling anyone else. So on 5th February I updated my Facebook status (something I do rarely) to say:
“Today the gay marriage bill was accepted. I cannot help but think in a decade we’ll look back and think that this was a long time coming. Love is not gender, love is not something you control, love is love. Everyone is born to love who they love, we cannot change nor must we. Today something spectacular happened and love triumphed prejudice.”
The status was liked by over 60 people, and within those 60 people were family but more importantly several people that had previously bullied me during my time at high school, and I even received an apology via Facebook message from one individual. I felt as if I were in a daze, a moment of bliss, as my parents had accepted my boyfriend the world was accepting me.
But the very next night as I was stood at a bus stop, a man under the influence of drugs who identified that I was gay after attempting to start a conversation with me proceeded to attack me. Telling me that he ends his nights “slashing people’s throats” I feared for my life as he held me up against the screens of the bus shelter. He threw me into the road in front of oncoming track, and as I got back onto the pavement he once again grabbed hold of me and told me how easy it would be for him to kill me.
With dozens of people walking by I didn’t understand why not a single person intervened, he was just one man and I needed help. Then just as I had given up hope a gentleman appeared and took hold of my attacker to set me free, he urged me to walk away but just as I did my bus appeared and on it I went, the gentleman who had effectively saved me followed me on the bus to see how I was feeling, and he softly smiled at me and said nothing.
To many this event would replay in their minds as a negative, but to me I look back and think of it as a positive. It has restored my faith in humanity, although just one man stood forward, it was still one man, one man who saved another life. Those two days are amongst the most extraordinary of my short life, I don’t think I will ever forget what happened in those 48 hours, and I hope I won’t.
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I'm From London, England by Tom Wicker
On the route from my west London flat to the train station is a tree in a park. It’s pretty nondescript, only really notable because it stands by itself. But since sitting beneath its branches on my 31st birthday and popping the cork of the champagne that turned a friendly drink into a date, I’ve turned its seasonal changes into chapters of a story.
This is something I do, often to the exasperation of friends and family. I could say it’s because I studied literature at university, or because I review theatre, but it predates both. I’m incapable of letting things be. I need the reassurance of a bigger picture, the drama that comes with storytelling.
My tree has dropped its leaves twice since that birthday, a spindly outline in the rain as I run past, cursing the holes in my shoes and promising myself (again) that I’ll buy an umbrella. Coming home late at night, blurry with drink and self-pity, I’m greedy for the bleakness of its winter existence.
It’s easy to turn a tree into a metaphor when real life is messy. It won’t argue back or challenge you. My date never turned into a relationship, but what followed hurt like one. He was brilliant, but complicated, and I’ve made a habit of retreat. I’m no good at love. I want to recognise it straight away.
When we met, he was at a low point: a talented journalist frustrated professionally, and getting over someone. I seized on these as reasons for not taking it further, for becoming “just good friends.” Like me, he suffers from depression and the black hole he was in at the time scared me.
If you’ve had depression, it can make you selfish. You understand its power, how it is always lurking beneath the surface waiting to strike. I needed to be more than someone’s life-raft, fearing that we would both end up sinking. I didn’t want to be pulled down again.
But we didn’t go our separate ways. Instead we became confidantes, sharing things about our lives we weren’t telling anyone else. Weekly dinners and drinks were stations on the way to a destination I pretended not to see on the horizon. I wanted the intimacy without having to take responsibility for it.
This continued until a seductively idyllic evening of drinking with my friends and winning my local pub quiz ended with us spending the night together. The next morning, hungover, I tried to pretend it was business as usual. But it wasn’t and two weeks later he asked me out. I said no.
His hurt was raw. “I thought I had a reason to be happy,” he said numbly. His reaction afterwards was swift, as he cut me out of his life both on- and off-line. More than a year later, the extremity of this response still makes me angry. But if I’m being honest, he was only doing what I had done. We both put ourselves first.
We didn’t speak for months, and this rift loomed over my attempts at relationships with other men. I felt validated in my fears that he had seen me as a symbol rather than a person, but this was cold comfort. No one else was as passionate about gay rights, as interested in the world or as good a writer. In racing his demons, he outstripped everyone else I met.
But people change over time. He found a man who wasn’t afraid of the prospect of a relationship, and we eventually reconciled after a few awkward encounters at parties. He and his boyfriend recently moved in together and are deservedly happy. As for me, while I’ve never regretted saying no, he is still a complicated part of my life.
I’d like to think I’ve been as important to him as he has to me, but I’ll never truly know – I’m not brave enough to ask. So I take comfort in things like my ever-changing tree, watching it fade into a shadow of itself in late October before blossoming in time for my birthday in late April.
Looking for hope in the cycle of seasons is undeniably sentimental; but change, at least, is a fact. For me, next year promises a move from London to New York, which is scary but exciting. And perhaps leaving my tree behind will be a good thing. There are other stories to tell now.
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NOTE: Both photos are taken by the author, Tom Wicker. The main image is the park in which his tree grows, and the second image is the actual tree mentioned in the story.
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I'm From Birmingham, West Midlands, UK by Neil
The words of my mother stayed with me for a long time.
“I don’t want a bent son” she had said when I was twelve years old.
She wasn’t referring to me, much to my relief at the time, but to my younger brother who had done something to incur this comment. I forget what.
Well, she did have a bent son.
I think she had a hard time coming to terms with the fact that one of her sons was gay and I don’t blame her for this. She was a product of the baby boomer generation when the only visible gay people were them likes of Charles Hawtrey and Larry Grayson. They were the definition of what it was to be ‘bent’ or ‘queer’ or a ‘poof’.
I couldn’t have been further removed from that.
I was a fat kid and quite strong, there was no effeminacy about me at all.
But as she made the comment I sat on the sofa, still in my school uniform and munching on some cereal, I remember thinking, “But you have got a bent son.”
I remember growing up in the working classes of Birmingham, knowing I was very different, I was not the ‘norm’. My early teenage years were filled with crush after crush, always on the men around never a fellow pupil or friend. I attended a boys school and if anything was going on I was not privy to it. I remember I had a strong crush on my Science teacher, a big bear of a man with thick legs and a lopsided grin. I didn’t learn much science, I whiled away the lessons imagining being with him, in his arms or lying on his chest the way I had seen women in films and on TV. Sex was an abstract concept, the though of it felt good but I hadn’t yet discovered the mechanics of it.
My attraction to big guys has never wained, perhaps part of the reason that I am a big guy myself.
Looking back, the whole of my teenage years were stifling and I really did not become my own person until the day I left home. I was surrounded by warring parents that included a step father who was constantly being unfaithful to my mother and a father who was nowhere to be seen. Even though he only lived 12 or so miles away he had chosen his new life and children over myself and brother. I would take the bus to school and then later to college, always fantasising about a life that seemed to be out of reach.
When I eventually moved out and moved to London, my life started to change. I suddenly had a few boyfriends and although each one was short lived I was learning how to be with another man both sexually and on an emotional level.
There never was any great coming out moment with my mother. I was living with a guy and she came to visit and over dinner she realised what the living arrangements were. And she cried. Quietly to herself she cried. I don’t know what or for whom she was shedding tears and I have never asked her.
Maybe she was forced to question and challenge her own prejudices, prejudices that had been forced upon her. If that was the case she won. Years later when her gay son got married to another man in front of 60 or 70 family friends, her pride was as immense as her love for them both.
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I'm From Buckinghamshire, UK by Luke Lyesmith
I’m 18, and have been for about a month. It was hardly a big change, compared with all the other stuff that my life has involved.
Right now, I’m sat in my (foster-brother’s, but he’s at uni) room, surrounded by residual chaos. My clothes and variable possessions from before are strewn about the place, some in boxes, some in the wardrobe, some on the bed.
Seven months ago, I was effectively orphaned. My mother has been dead since I was eleven –cancer. I’ve never really grieved overly much about it. I knew it was coming, and I’d grown up with my mother’s tumour. She called it Voldemort, and the little chemotherapy thing Hedwig. I’ve not even read the last two books (I know how it all ends, of course), but I knew the first four religiously.
To the matter at hand, my father had a stroke. A massive, life-fucking stroke. It was five in the morning, and I heard a thump. Must have woken me up. Called out to him, and got odd moaning in reply. So, rushed in and did the whole “Dial 999″ thing. I thought it was a heart attack at first. I got drunk as hell the next three nights, and then taken in by a friend and her family. Still with ‘em, as I can barely spend more than a couple of hours with what’s left of my father without massive draining.
Anyway, the main thing. Of all the paradigm shifts I’ve gone through –“Your father is likely to die of throat cancer. Your mother has about 4 months lefts to live (Sucks to them, she lived just under four years). Your mother is dead. You like dicks. You’re effectively orphaned, and living in care.” –the second-to-last causes me the most strife.
Not directly. Or possibly directly. Guilt is pretty much a constant for me, to the point where I guilt-trip myself. The last time I was attracted to someone, I shut down for the best part of two days trying to purge myself of it. It worked (which I was shocked by, my self-discipline is atrocious), but I retain my enduring admiration for Russell Tovey –primarily for a role model to finally latch onto. There’s fuck all decent, openly gay men in the media, and that’s a fact.
The guilt of just being attracted to someone is unbearable sometimes. Sure, I’ll lech a little at the telly and in the street now and again, but that’s the limit. I only recently agreed to kissing another guy at spin the bottle, and that was for comedy. I’ve not had a desire for any single person that I know or not, ever. Still, a hand to hold and a mouth to kiss, a neck to nuzzle and a shoulder to cry on would do me just fine.
“It’ll happen at uni” is the default response. Logically, yes, I know that. I’m planning to go to Sussex, and relying on the massive amount of extenuating circumstances to make up the 5-month gap where I got almost exactly nothing done, and fighting every step of the way to not go see a councellor –an inevitable defeat, but a battle I had to fight anyway. I hope it works out. I want this to change, to stop the guilt and chain up the acid tongue, push that part of me that when confronted with homophobia flips straight to violence, and rises above.
Whoever tells you that the teenage years are the best is a liar. You’re full of angst, and there’s nobody else who can truly understand your worldview. You may even write poetry. But stick with it, they tell you. It’ll work out. It’d better, or there will be blood.
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I'm From Sherborne, Dorset, England by A.Y.M. Kong
“We shape our dwellings and afterwards our dwellings shape us.” Winston Churchill.
Yeah, I know it’s a poncy public schoolboy thing to do to quote Winston Churchill, but it does sum things up pretty well.
For an outsider, boarding school is daunting to say the least. I learnt to hang in there until people knew that the gay was not going away. I persevered and fit in.
And then I fell in love with you. We were friends. You didn’t believe it and you probably still don’t–but you are perfect in my eyes. You taught me grace, beauty, kindness and generosity.
And I told you. And you left. Not abruptly but withdrawing slowly, like it would hurt less. You taught me cruelty, disappointment, regret and my own stupidity.
We lost touch, as it probably should have been. But I would like to thank you. In spite of the pain that I wrought upon myself, the hope for happiness you gave me kept me going.
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I'm From Oakville, ON, Canada by Michael Brown
It was on a trip to London with some of my close friends from school. Just us drama kids in England for a week. When we first arrived we met our tour guide, Christian, who I right off the bat knew was gay. He introduced himself and started telling us a little bit of what he had planned for the group for the next couple of days.
It wasn’t until 2 or 3 days into the trip that I started talking to Christian more. I didn’t bring a ton of extra money on the trip and wanted to save the most I could for shopping. So needless to say, I wasn’t going out for expensive lunches everyday with the rest of the group, although Christian would always offer to take me to different places to grab a quick and cheap bite to eat. Afterwards we would just talk for a little bit while the rest of the group was finishing lunch a couple blocks away.
To be honest, I’m pretty sure Christian knew I was gay and that was why he would help me out by spotting me with change when I needed it, or even a lunch one day. Anyway, throughout the trip and over the course of our daily lunch talks, Christian told me his whole coming out story, something I was very interested in at the time. By the time we left I was actually ready to finally tell Christian I was gay, but couldn’t seem to muster up the courage (not that he would have judged, but it was just something I couldn’t do).
I missed what I felt was a great opportunity to come out, and in doing so forced myself even deeper into the closet. I spent most of that summer forcing myself to go out with girls in an effort to seem straight. It wasn’t until going to a Kathy Griffin show months later with my dad’s friend, his partner and another friend that I finally came out to someone.
Although I might not have told Christian I was gay at that point, I finally was able to reach out to him again and thank him for his support over the trip (even if he felt as if he hadn’t done anything). I’m very happy with where I am today, and everything that I do to support the gay community, and I feel privileged to have received all of this support during my process of coming out.
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I'm From Hounslow, Middlesex, England by Christopher T.
I first realized that I was attached to guys in my first year of primary school, at about 5 years old. It was during an afternoon playtime and someone suggested that the boys should try and catch and kiss one of the girls.
Tina was the prettiest girl in the class; she was blond with blue eyes. I discovered that I didn’t want to be kissing her but rather I wanted to be kissing Paul who was also blond with blue eyes.
So, we all ran around trying to catch a girl to kiss, except I was doing my best not to catch a girl and was doing really well until a girl called Margret caught me and tried to kiss me. I pushed her away.
When I got home from school, I told Mum and Dad about what happened and they laughed and Dad told me that when I got married I’d have to kiss girls. Even at 5 I had a smart mouth because I told him that if I had to kiss girls, I’d never get married.
And, I haven’t.
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I'm From London, England by Michael
I miss one thing.
I grew up in a classic 70′s burb. No gays. All whites. Little life. Worse: nylon clothes. Worst: no deli.
At 13 I forged a heart-bond with a mate at school. We listened to Brahms and Gershwin together. Even Bartok. We went through puberty together. By 16, he was climbing through my bedroom window at three in the morning to talk about the world. Heck, we shared a girlfriend. Or two. We talked constantly about authenticity, faithfulness, character.
I wasn’t gay then and neither was he. But our friendship was deep. Confusingly deep.
As we grew up together, we faced and denied the complexities of our sexualities. But we never kissed. Our shared girlfriends were our proxies.
As we hit our 20′s I had that damascene moment and came out. It doesn’t matter whether he was gay or not. Perhaps the crisis was/is all mine. I still don’t know if I had fallen in love with him, or he with me.
But he has never spoken to me since then.
And that’s the thing I miss.
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I'm From Wanstead, London, England by Megan Jones
Lily and I were perfect together. We had exactly the same sense of humour and endless things to talk about, even though we were two of the shyest people on the planet. I guess we just clicked and that just makes it all the more painful to remember.
We met at one of my first ballroom dancing competitions. I was really nervous and I went to the loos to change my outfit, forgetting to take my number off my back first, so I asked a girl standing by the sink for help. She slipped me her mobile number on a slip of paper, then disappeared.
I found the paper a few days later and, after much deliberation, called her. We met up in a cafe on the other side of London and we just talked for a couple of hours about nothing. We kept meeting up in the cafe every Saturday at 2. After 6 or 7 weeks, I finally twigged that we were never going to be just friends. Going that bit further just seemed totally natural.
Meeting up in the cafe couldn’t last forever, but she was very firmly in the closet. We agreed that, to stop her big brother from finding out and probably killing both of us, we’d be super secretive about the whole thing. My number was saved under ‘Charlie’ on her phone and she was ‘Sam’ on mine, both names suitably unisex. I even used a different Oyster card when I went to her’s so that no-one could track where I was going. It was so exciting, like being double-agents with secret identities. We loved it.
She had a flat in North London which she shared with her big brother and her two little sisters. I’d go round sometimes to help her babysit her sisters while her brother was out. I got to know her eldest little sister, Sophie, pretty well. She was a typically volatile preteen, but usually nice. The youngest sister, Amy, was 5 and loved showing me her reading books from school.
Cut to February 2010. I had just had an interview and I knew that her brother was out for three days, so I went round to Lily’s to watch a film and talk about the interview and just generally relax. I knew that she was feeling poorly, so I brought some tulips too. She loved them and laughed at the droopy one.
We sat on the sofa with her head on my shoulder and her hand in mine, watching some sickening chick-flick. It was just a normalish day. I felt her hand twitch and then her head. Her whole body was shaking and all I could think was ‘FUCK’. She had never done anything like that before and my mind was completely blank. There was no terror, no sadness, just nothing. Just ‘FUCK’.
Sophie came into the room with a tray of orange juice and biscuits, which she dropped on the floor. I could tell that her mind was doing exactly the same thing as mine had. I don’t know if it was the crash of the tray hitting the floor or if it was just me coming to my senses, but I could suddenly think again. I screamed ‘Call a fucking ambulance Sophie’ and stuck a cushion under my Lily’s head. I held her hand and cried and kissed her cheek until the paramedics came.
The hardest bit was letting her go. I knew that I couldn’t go to the hospital with her because sooner or later her brother would turn up and she wouldn’t want me to risk it. She lived straight. That was what I had signed up for and that was how it had to be.
She never regained consciousness.
I feel honoured to know that I was the last person that she saw and held and kissed, but because of the secrecy, I couldn’t tell anybody that she had even existed, let alone that she had died. I couldn’t even go to the funeral. I had to keep pretending to everyone that nothing was wrong.
I doubt that anything I do ever again will be as hard as that and I wish every day that she was still alive. However, I had a great time with her and I never want to forget a single second of it, the super romantic day trip to the beach or the picnics in the park or sitting on the sofa watching rubbish telly. I loved it all.
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