Collection of One Shot's

Coming out of the dark ages.

When I think about growing up I am not met with pleasant memories, in fact my early teenage years were filled with misery and depression of the deepest kind. It didn’t get much better either it continued into my late teens and it wasn’t until I was well into my forties that my life began to improve.

I was a teenager in the sixties and life was hard for everyone like me, I watched as gay celebrities slowly killed themselves through drink and drugs and all I could see was an image of how my future would be. The difficulties of coping with your sexually and keeping it hidden wore you down until the only escape you could think about was to commit suicide.

Thankfully I never went that far but those thoughts were ever present throughout my early years. I was fourteen when I realised that I was sexually attracted to boys in my class and men on the streets. I didn’t want to feel that way, the term gay was so rarely used because it was deemed disgusting and immoral.

I knew right then and there that I couldn’t tell anyone about this ever, unless I wanted to be arrested for gross indecency. As the years went on though my sexual desires became harder to control and I knew that I would have to find a way to either rid myself of those desires or quench them. This wasn’t as easy as one may think though despite the reform in 1967 things never improved and it remained illegal to contact another man to arrange a date. So despite it now being legal to be gay arranging to do anything deemed gay was still illegal, we seemed to be fighting a losing battle.

So we weren’t allowed to contact each other, we weren’t allowed to flirt or chat one another up in public. If we were lucky enough to meet someone after all of that we weren’t allowed to get involved in sexual relations, unless the premise was empty even if the person was accepting of our situation. So you can imagine how difficult it was to just be yourself, something I believe a lot of people take for granted these days.

When I turned twenty one the year was 1969 and this was the year my situation hit me the hardest, this was the year when I felt like giving up would be better than carrying on like this. It was the year I met Bobby Newell and I fell in love so hard that I was surprised I didn’t fall right through the ground and out the other side of the earth.

I had recently been sneaking out on a night to visit the underground homosexual bars and cottages in what was then the unofficial gay village of Liverpool England. This was where I met Bobby, I was on my third trip to the village and I was still incredibly nervous that I would happen upon a family friend or neighbour. I knew they wouldn’t out me considering they would be in the same predicament but I didn’t want this to be any more awkward that it was already. I also didn’t want to adopt any friends purely because we shared the same fate in life, I wasn’t looking for sympathy filled friendships.

So when Bobby approached me that night I wasn’t particularly friendly at first because I was on edge, however he understood my problem and eventually calmed me down enough to talk to him. He asked me if I was out to anyone and I remember looking at him as if he had lost the plot and he had chuckled but without any humour.

He spent the next hour telling me how he hadn’t been quite so lucky and as adept at hiding it as I had been and his mother had found out. At this point his choices had been to either go to prison or volunteer for aversion therapy treatment on the NHS for several months. Bobby was a stranger to me and I didn’t know him or have any particular feelings for him that night, yet by the time he had finished telling me the story I was in tears.

He was subjected to electric shock treatment, hallucinogenic drugs and brainwashing techniques, he was humiliated beyond belief and after all of that he still couldn’t remove the sexual attraction to men from his system. He began to hate himself and even hurt himself on several occasions but not long after his ordeal he decided that there was nothing wrong with him, he decided to accept himself. It was then that he had started coming here to find out how other people coped with their sexuality and he happened across the man who had forced him through the humiliating torture.