The teenage years are a forge where the major components of sexual desire are cast, and school is its red hot crucible, smelting a poisonous alloy of thrill and terror that, poured, eventually set into an adult sexuality, one riven with stresslines and fractures, air pockets that you hear creaking back down the ages. Things that never go away. I don’t know about you but I can remember the eroticised images and experiences of my teenage years with an almost eerie precision, not least because it’s a time that is otherwise swathed in a stodgy resin of forgetting that masks everything else. I can remember the cut and colour of the denim jeans on a photograph of a pop star I cut out of a magazine, the thin trail of hair that ran up his stomach to his navel, that caught me off guard as I was flicking through, to the extent that I needed to store this image for future consultation. I can remember the way a particular girl in class discussed the way she liked to give a blow job, and how this was the first time admitting to doing such a thing brought admiration rather than disgust from the rest of us. I remember her showing me her underwear the year before, in the stockroom of the language block. It was a Thursday. I can remember when I heard specific words, and I can remember that there was blossom of the cherry tree outside the art room when I heard the other allegations for the first time.
The lovely tendrils of puberty seemed to grow at an uneven rate between my cohort, partly as a result of biology, partly culturally, the way some people had older cousins while some still spent their weekends doing the shop with their parents. As a result there was always room for confusion, power, manipulation, desire. I was largely happy and middling for the first few years of it; neither the pain of early development or late blooming, knowing enough of the exciting possibilities but not too much of the horrifying truth. I was middling socially too, I think. I played on the rugby team, which must have counted for something, but was far from a popular kid. I was one of those with a small but cohesive group of close friends. And I was a boy, so the limits of my sexual understanding were limits I was encouraged to push for myself, to be in control of. This was unlike the girls in my class, whose understanding of their sexual being seemed to be imposed upon them by the leering, grabbing boys and, I’m afraid to report, teachers. Therefore it was a shock when all that switched.
I don’t know if I was gay or not. Certainly I had enjoyed my experiments with other lads and wanted them to continue. But there seemed to be so much riding on it that wondering seemed out of the question. The few people I had encountered who were gay were all on television, and they knew. So, if I thought, I must know. I understand the drive so many gay men have to define themselves as ‘born this way’, but I can’t claim that myself, personally. Rather I took something, and ran with it. It can’t be ruled out that we have some degree of autonomy, in terms of directing and cultivating our sexual desires. It doesn’t feel right to me that we think of them as curses, immutable conditions, and our right to have them shouldn’t rely upon that immutability.
After coming out there was a degree of sexual autonomy that was rescinded as my right. School are little dictatorships in their way, worlds that, especially in more isolated communities and before social media as it exists today, were almost impossible to escape. I had told a friend that I thought I was gay, and, unhelpfully, she told everyone else. In a remarkably short space of time – somewhere between one or two days – my experience of life changed forever. I could only have been fourteen at the time, maybe fifteen, and so the next four years of my life were defined by this role I played for almost everyone else in my school. From then on I was to play the faggot, a role I adopted as my own on understanding that I couldn’t evade it.
In that role I was a sort of receptacle for abuse, a container where other teenagers could put a lot of uncomfortable feelings about sexuality. The feelings they put there, I mean, put on to me, were the visceral ones, the fluid, fleshy, embodied ones. My experience of being bullied for being gay was to go from an assumed heterosexual male with a certain degree of control in outlining my own bodily desires, to being suddenly out of control of how others, and hence myself, understood my body. The bullying was always physical, whether I mean that literally or not. That is to say, even when it wasn’t physical violence aimed at me, it was always, in some way, about my body. There weren’t the sort of political or social euphemisms that adults use to disguise their homophobia – discussions of ‘lifestyle choice’ and the like – but just the rawer, unfiltered, purer hatred that nonetheless underpins adult homophobia. Put plainly, I was disgusting, both my body and the things that I did with it.
My sexual desire was disgusting, and probably dangerous. At that time British society was only just emerging from an era where virtually all mention of homosexuality was appended by the suggestion of AIDS – indeed, the only discussion of homosexuality in my Section 28 era sex ed classes was about the risks of HIV, followed by a screening of Philadelphia – and so I was inevitably regarded with suspicion as a potential vector of disease. Gays also held the unmistakable air of predation to them; I was always referred to by other lads as a likely rapist, but in comic terms. Watch your backs! Indeed, even when I was the one being held to the floor outside the changing rooms, mock-fucked by another boy, the question was always ‘do you want to bum me?’ I became a focus for the weird, the bodily; I remember clearly being sat on a bus back from a school trip and a guy talking to me, or rather, about me, in my presence. Gay men, he said, had to wear diapers when they get older, because they can no longer control their destroyed arseholes. I think I hadn’t really contemplated anal sex myself at the time. It sent a frightening shiver down my spine which still resonates somewhere in my body today. It won’t surprise you to hear that, given a few crucial years of only relating to my body as something abject, a cause of disgust, I developed some unhealthy coping mechanisms. No-one will ever want me for my body.
Listen up you little fucker, I shout to myself. It gets better! Except, of course, it doesn’t, not really. As they say, it doesn’t get better, it gets different.
I was experiencing all this just at the time when I was becoming aware of my body, all of it. I was also discovering it at the same time I was trying to make my first tentative connections with other gays. I didn’t know any: when I came out I was the first gay person I’d met. But I had a friend who went to another school, and we’d hang out at weekends, watching his mum’s voluminous collection of horror films, and sooner or later I met a few other queer people through him. We swapped MSN handles and livejournal names, and I began to realise my sexuality in a different, more complicated, yet less abject manner: through words. Given the space and distance to be able to formulate my thoughts, ideas and desires before committing them, and having them mercifully detached from my disgusting body, allowed me a small crack in which I could develop my first positive understanding of my sexual desire. As a result, it also gave me space to be desired. I think I was probably in the first generation to really widely get this opportunity, thanks to the spread of the internet in my teenage years. Here I could flirt, anonymously or not, sext (or cyber, in the contemporary argot), and discuss things that, in every element of my life away from the screen, would have been a source of shame or violence. As a result, my emergent sexuality was very much text-based, and cognitive, rather than embodied. It took me a long time to learn the physical codes of flirtation, or even to read them – something I still struggle with.
Sex was something that happened in my brain. Once I started to form sexual relationships, as a faggot living in a rural environment, a good deal if not all of them were initiated and conducted online before we actually ended up fucking. For a decade after that was how I approached all of my sexual relationships; at the very least, get their number, then chat via text. My own sense of my body as something desirable was virtually nonexistent. Sex was something to be won through words; the gradual erosion of other people’s repulsion to my body by words would end, hopefully, in sex. It’s a horrible way to approach it; degrading to oneself, weirdly alienating to your partners. The whole thing becomes transactional, far more transactional than casual hookups are alleged to be. Out of touch with my own body, I have no doubt I encountered other’s bodies in the same way. Troubled not so much by shame or guilt, as many gay men say, I felt more a visceral disgust not in sex, but in the way I fitted together with others, as though my participation was a fluke, a mistake.
I think many men experience this disconnect with sex, staying locked into your own head to a certain extent. I remember a line from the sitcom Frasier, when his father, Martin, is saying that in his generation, sex was something private, “and I still think that's a pretty healthy way of looking at it. Sex is something between you and the person you're doing it to!” Young men are rarely encouraged to discuss sex as something that might ever entail a complex, embodied connection, let alone vulnerability. It is something to achieve, to perform well at, and to claim victory in, even if you rarely manage any of those things. Even for straight men – especially for straight men, probably – there’s a largely performative aspect to sex itself, a disconnected consumption of the body of the partner, visually, while also monitoring your own performance. I can hardly be accused of being anti-pornography, but I suspect porn doesn’t help the situation as a dominant mode of engaging with sex. But this is not simply a matter of porn; for me this was a fundamental disconnect from a body I couldn’t really relate to, that I understood only through the way it had been framed for me, as an object of disgust. And if I felt that about my own body, then surely other people, notoriously judgmental, would see me in a worse light, as more disgusting?
Nothing was the sole key to changing this relationship with my body, or with the bodies of others. It was a process of realisation, of moving from animosity with my own public sexual identity and my sexual body towards something different. It started with friendship – the friendship of gay men who offered me a model of male affection that was different to what I’d experienced as a teenager. From that led onto some physical relationships with guys where I felt more valued, of course. But key to undoing at least the first building blocks of self-disgust came from taking part in sex cultures that still stimulate an embodied revulsion in many, and not just from heterosexuals. By which I mean to say: darkrooms are magic.
I remember arriving at one. It was wintery, the sun pale all day, struggling through the fog, and I arrived as the street lamps, strung between the tenements of this middle-European city, had begun to flicker on and soften the gloom. It was quiet and cold; the occasional ghost-turned-cat, the occasional distant car horn, the occasional shuffling of a tram across the rails. I buzzed into the bar, pushing open the thick wooden door and descending into the sweaty basement, the raw red lamps glowing against the dark varnished wood. I drank a while and chatted, before heading towards the back of the bar. At the end of a short corridor a door opened on the right into the bathroom, while facing it, on the left, chains hung down as a curtain, behind which twinkled low blue lighting at knee level. I entered into the space and left the noisy drinkers as a distant buzz. Inside I shuffled through the dark, my boots dragging against the gritty floor. I acclimatised, first to the smell of deodorants and stale beer, and then to the noise, as I heard from somewhere across this room – maybe 30 foot deep – muffled grunts. It was my eyes that acclimatised last, helped by the disembodied glowing embers that hung in midair at the back of the room. Slowly things became a little clearer, but only a little. You could never really make out a face, just the limits of the room and the extent of bodies. The closer you get, the more you see. I walked further into the room, towards a pool of light that cracks through from somewhere. I feel a hand reaching out for me; it runs down my back and across my arse, where it lingers. I cannot tell you how thrilled I am: not just at the imminence of contact, kissing, fucking – in fact, it needn’t even go there. But I am thrilled to be anonymous, almost entirely non-verbal, and submerged in this sexual atmosphere.
I allow myself to be pulled towards him, and he runs his hand down my body. He is everything I might expect; gruff, his mouth tasting of cigarettes, and I go to run my hand across the flies of his jeans, only to find his cock is already out, and erect. I play with it for a while to hear the noises he makes, but then leave him against the wall, as more men are entering the room, and heading towards us. I walk further into the darkness. The twists and turns of the corridor are broken occasionally with small cubicles, with other men in them, some fucking, some ready to be fucked. I am a casual, an amateur, and I relish never saying a word, un-navigating myself until I find myself lost. Now there are more people here, their hands sometimes dislocated from any figure – I can feel two or more sets on me, running under my clothes, unloosening my own buckles. I am dislocated. I feel the outlines and contours with my own hands, other fleshes and draw in new smells. Here in the darkness, here is sex. And at that point I’ll shoo you, the reader, outside; there is no need for any more words from here on out.
It was this that undid it. I understand there are problems with the situation. I understand the idea can induce anxieties. I’m just trying to recount my experiences, none of them without the potential for violence or shame, because it can never be easy. And the disgust that I was imbued with during the rituals of teenage man-making hasn’t gone away, not through love or patience or anonymous sex with strange men. Instead the shame is transformed into something you can sit with, and sometimes enjoy. That’s what I think when I’m walking home. I try not to think of the boys from school, try not to let the sense of shame that filled by body throughout those key years take over, that shame that is, in its essence, me.
I found with darkrooms the first place to reclaim that shame. Inside, away from the transactional confidence trick of actually talking, I know only one thing; that what is attracting this man to me, that his reasons for touching me, are due to one thing alone. This body. This abject body, that registered for so many years amongst everyone I knew, and really everyone, as a source of disgust, of collective amusement, of curious repulsion. I am disgusting! Really disgusting! I always knew it! And yet here, in this low-blue light, amongst this smell of deodorants and plastic sneakers and beer and cigarettes, I am taken at last for this one thing alone. Those bastards were wrong. There is nothing they want from me but my body, and God knows I will not say no now. This time I choose.
Thank you again to all my subscribers, and I’d like to apologise sincerely for the lack of newsletters over the past couple of weeks — I was recording a new series of Bad Gays after which I struggled to get anything finished. I hope this extended essay goes some way to make up for the pause in service, and I hope the new series of the podcast is worth the wait!
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It's very good to find this. And you tell it all so well. I remember being that disgust. I was utterly confused the first time I was told I was 'sexy'. Schools have to be rethought big time, I think. Thank you, Huw. And now I'm off to get excited about the new series and enjoy my body falling to bits, which at least I'm able to have on my own terms.
Stunning. I'm so grateful for your writing and courage Huw <3