i feel like i could talk about being gay for….literally…ever?

i want to talk about a lot of gay things on here, not just the relationship side of things but everything that comes with it - obviously we’re all just people and our sexuality doesn’t define us but i do feel extremely PROUD to be gay.

i also don’t think theres any singular way to be gay, being gay can mean something different to me than it does to another gay person - but there are a lot of things that connect us and truly make me as a gay person, feel special.

i loooooove being gay - if you didn’t know.

unfortunately that wasn’t always the case, so lets delve into my gay awakening, my gay origin story…

are people born gay? or do people have gayness thrust upon them?

(that’s a wicked quote if you didn’t quite clock)

when i was younger i didn’t know what gay really was, no teacher explained it, my parents never spoke about it, i think the first time it was brought to my attention was as an insult on the playground.

‘you’re gay.’

my initial reaction as a 7 year old was ‘what does that mean?’ and also ‘how can i be something if i don’t know what it is?’ the fact that it was used as an insult made it seem like a negative thing so of course as a young boy trying to fit in i didn’t want to be something that the other kids thought was ‘bad’.

i doubt if the other kids at school even knew what it meant, maybe they’d heard it in passing or their older siblings (or even parents) had used it in a derogatory way.

it’s a shame isn’t it?

that someones first exposure to the word can be so negative.

this happened quite often at primary school, it didn’t help that one winter my mum sent me to school with tights on under my shorts to keep me warm (school uniform for boys was only shorts, all year round) very riccardo tisci at givenchy thinking about it now - i didn’t care but the other kids had a field day with me. gay gay gay they would call me.

so when you think about it, i didn’t have a good first impression of the word at all because of stupid classmates and blissfully ignorant adults.

however i was far too busy playing pokemon, beyblade and yugioh to be concerned about whether i liked girls or boys.

high school started - i got into quite a prestigious school, an all boys grammar school - it was one of the only grammar schools in the UK that you didn’t have to pay for. (my parents let out a sigh of relief).

however at an all boys school the name calling and bullying got a lot worse, sometimes the other boys would get physical, one boy spat in my face, others would push me over or twist my arm. i remember they would call me and my only 2 friends ‘gay’ and i never really thought of it as ‘oh no they think i’m gay’ i just didn’t understand why they were constantly trying to aggravate me.

i kept to myself at school, i’m not a very loud or overbearing person so i wasn’t sure why all of this attention was being directed at me?

thinking about it they were kind of obsessed with me..

(can you believe that over the last few years some of the guys that used to terrorise me have reached out asking if i can promote their businesses lol)

anyway it got to the point where i didn’t want to go into school, there was even a ‘meeting’ with the main culprits that were forced to apologise to me but this definitely made things worse and high school was without a doubt one of the most traumatic times of my entire life.

god this was supposed to my ‘positive’ article, it gets better i swear.

amongst all of the bullying i was trying to navigate the world in my 11 year old head, i hadn’t really thought about relationships, attraction, i wasn’t really bothered.

that was until..

i can’t believe i’m about to type this but i distinctly remember the first time i had an overwhelming sense of ‘oh i find this man attractive’.

i was at my friends house and the music video for…. are you ready for this?

this is so niche and not very cool. ugh.

the music video for ‘thunderbirds are go’ by busted came on.

i don’t know what it was.

but charlie from busted in that music video, something happened - he was tall and handsome and i was like okay i feel something towards this man lol.

however this sent panic signals through my mind - i then had this mental game of gymnastics about being gay because i’d been bullied for it for so long - i thought i didn’t want the bullies to essentially ‘win’ and also again hadn’t kissed or had romantic relationships with any men so couldn’t really confirm or deny if i was or was not.

at school i didn’t find anyone remotely attractive but i did actually have a few girlfriends, we mainly held hands and had long phone calls where both of us were too shy to speak.

i think i just had girlfriends because that was the ‘thing to do.’

i liked the girls who had been my girlfriends but i also didn’t have a strong desire to kiss them either.

but i still hadn’t kissed a boy, there weren’t any boys at my school that i wanted to kiss.

by this point our home computer became my entire after school life, i discovered MySpace which became my new digital hangout along with MSN Messenger. MySpace and the internet in general gave me access to a whole host of new information.

i remember being in awe of the myspace famous kids kiki kannibal, izzy hilton, audrey kitching, matthewlush, chris chaos - i was seeing people express themselves in a way i’d never really seen before. sure we had moshers and goths at school but the scene kids were a new wave and a lot of them were gay and PROUD.

i started experimenting with my own look, dying parts of my hair blonde, using hair spray to create gravity defying looks. i was listening to fall out boy and panic! at the disco whilst wearing the tightest black skinny jeans you’ve ever seen - nike dunks and a black and white windbreaker. i wasn’t dressing ‘gay’ but i definitely wasn’t dressing straight either.

you know what looking back now when i entered my emo/scenekid phase i could understand when guys at school were picking on me. i looked different on purpose but i felt so confident so it didn’t really phase me.

thinking about my previous representation of gay people, a prime example was Jack from Will and Grace. basically any gay person shown in the media was a caricature of a gay stereotype. whom of-course i live for now but at the time i didn’t quite connect to that? so i was like, if that’s gay, then what am i?

by this point in high school i had dated and kissed 3 girls and wasn’t super thrilled by the idea of doing anything else with them - so i knew i was open to the idea of dating a boy but had no idea how to do that.

side note - this also goes the other way around, why are we all seen as straight as default…? i do hate how society and parents project onto their young children, even toddlers like ‘aww have you got a girlfriend’ and ‘are you going to get married?’ as a gay man i just wish when growing up adults had been more inclusive in the way they talk so when the gay thing came up - it didn’t feel like an unspoken taboo thing.

the last girl i dated was actually very special to me (even though she dumped me and tried to ghost me out of her life, i clawed my way back in) because now she’s one of my best friends. i think the girls that i dated i just wanted to be friends with more than anything and now we have a funny story to tell when we meet people, her husband loves introducing me as his wifes ex lol

high school finished and it was time for college - i was SO happy for high school to end and i went to a college closer to my home, you could wear your own clothes, address your tutors by their first name and it felt like a fresh start for me.

college was really fun because it felt so much more mature, everyone was there because they wanted to be there, we got to choose our subjects, we wanted to learn, we could dress how we wanted and no one there knew me. i arrived at college knowing that i could be who i really was - open to the idea of dating a man.

newsflash.

it didn’t happen.

turns out nobody wants you when you look like a reject of 80’s english pop band ‘kajagoogoo’ (google it) or so the elderly customers told me at the local chinese restaurant where i worked for below minimum wage every weekend.

i think the thing with being open to dating another guy at college was still difficult because a lot of guys were also in the same position as me where they were open to it but unsure, i had guys at house parties saying they were interested or the classic ‘if i was gay’ but then girls would walk in and they’d get all ‘ahh just joking’ so maybe they were playing mental gymnastics with the idea too?

for some people there are many factors to think about other than their own happiness unfortunately - what their families or loved ones would think, what their friends would say, their teammates or colleagues - which is why a lot of men end up coming out in later life after being married and having kids because they felt pressured into the life that society has laid out for us.

i wasn’t scared of what my family or friends would think, in my mind if they weren’t happy about it, that was their problem. i gues i just wanted to be 100% sure before i explicitly said anything.

i was also lucky enough to have a group of girl friends, remember the last girl i dated who’s now my best friend? i was basically welcomed into her friendship circle from school as ‘one of the girls’ and it’s funny because i never had to explicitly say i’m gay, i think we’d all be talking about a band or a guy on myspace and i’d just say ‘yeah he’s hot’ and they just agreed and we moved on? so i felt like i could be myself around them.

we’d go on nights out in manchester with our older friends id’s and go to indie nights at 42’s and 5th ave or pop punk nights at satans hollow, getting mcdonalds at 3am and sleeping over at each others places - some of us might have kissed people in the clubs but nothing serious and i unfortunately didn’t get to kiss anyone.

2 years of college came to an end and there were some… moments lets say. house party fumbles or sleepovers where touching happened under the covers but never a kiss or even a relationship. oh! i did have sex for the first time. if you could even call it that. looking back he was actually quite rude to me but he was famous on tumblr so i let it slide - i’m not sure why but all we had was a mint flavoured condom from the condom shop at afflecks palace and neither of us knew what we were doing so just a very weird tingly experience in the end. and STILL no kissing.

idk if i was allergic to it or thought that kissing would cross some sort of line?

i was quite literally sick of manchester, i loved my friends but everyone was going elsewhere for university - i desperately wanted to go to university - not explicitly for the degree but to move away from everything and everyone i knew, to again have a fresh start.

i thoroughly enjoyed university, again arriving as myself (i had started my fashion blog by this point and had a few viral posts on tumblr) i felt like i finally had my own sense of personal style and who i was as an individual.

university was like a soft launch to real life, i felt very lucky to be able to go and had to jump through quite a few hoops to get there - with some problems at home it made it increasingly difficult but i eventually made it.

i studied contemporary performance art which was really eye opening, i think anyone could have done that course and learnt an awful lot about themselves - i was surrounded by theatre kids, singers and dancers and finally felt comfortable to be exactly who i was. however yet again i didn’t find anyone attractive.

it was actually online where i met my first boyfriend (Facebook? of all places!) and lo and behold he was back in manchester - so kind of long distance? oh! i was at university in chichester right on the south coast ( i wanted to get as far away from manchester as possible haha).

at 18 years old i finally got my first proper kiss with a boy and it just felt…right?

i remembered all the kisses i’d had with girls before and i just never really enjoyed it or understood what i was supposed to be feeling?

but kissing this guy i knew that this felt so natural to me.

i was in fact - gay.

i’m not even sure how many ‘dates’ we went on but i’d travelled up a few times and he’d come to visit me at uni too - once we had confirmed that we were in a relationship that’s when i knew i wanted to tell my mum that i had a boyfriend.

i remember calling her outside the library and she asked me what i’d been up to and i said ‘i’ve been seeing someone’ and she said ‘oh who is it?’ and i said ‘his name is ____ and he’s from manchester’ and i can’t remember exactly what she said but she was very positive and happy for me and in that moment i was so happy that i waited until i knew i was sure, sure of myself, sure of everything and so happy that after the years of being bullied or thinking that being gay was not okay, everything actually was okay.

after i’d told my mum i didn’t really give a flying fuck what anyone else thought and best be known i was ready to disown anyone that didn’t accept me for who i was.

i know that i’m extremely lucky and privileged to come out in such a way and have a positive response from my family as not everyone gets to have that.

i do hope that as generations pass it just gets easier and easier for everyone in the LGBTQIA+ to exist and grow in a positive way as we shake off the mistakes of the past.

so yeah that was my slow burn coming out story, in my head it was going to be this huge catastrophic event but i turned it into something so casual that it felt just like a regular conversation - very anti-climatic.

but i hope that now or in the future people don’t even have to ‘come out’ and we can just ‘be’, express our love for whoever we feel love towards, not to shame kids before they’ve even had a chance to think about it themselves.

but yes.

so i’m gay.

what should i talk about next?

ARCANA has gone through many phases, in fact its first iteration was back in 2014 and it was called..

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one thing that sparked my internet-career was writing blog posts (if you remember my blog being called ‘the hallowed ground’ then you’re as old as i am) but writing for that blog gave me so much joy and i really do miss it.

in our gradual shift to video content - i really felt like i lost the ability to write, not lost the ability as such but felt like video is what people were craving - of course i love creating imagery and video content but short form video content is definitely not the same as sitting down and pouring your heart out into words on a page. many times over the years i’d promised myself i’d return to my blog but even that seemed to come under the jurisdiction of my social media algorithm - that’s where substack really piqued my interest because it’s like a blog? but also a newsletter? straight to your inbox - the people who really want to read, listen, keep up, get involved etc.

so i’d like to start a community where we can discuss - anything we like? what we find chic or cool, fashion, music, being gay, moving away from home, working for yourself, becoming a content creator - literally anything - it doesn’t even have to be something i’ve done, it could be something way out of my comfort zone.

i’d love for you to subscribe, join in - comment, suggest articles, send me DM’s on instagram, talk to me about my socials, maybe we could even have a dinner or get together in london? i post on socials constantly but is it crazy that i don’t feel as connected to you as i should? so let’s change that.

as i always say to myself, if all else fails at least i’m gay and have good taste.