Adapting in the Closet! Part 2

Mother spots early internet activity

My first experience of gay pornography came when I was 12 years old. We had just gotten our first desktop PC and installed the internet. I have no idea how I found the images that I did, but I was certainly very glad that I did so! A particular image became imprinted on my mind: two guys sitting on the floor with their legs facing each other and cocks touching. It blew my mind!

Every day I would keep coming back and looking for more. So much so that I almost told my mother that I’d seen some things that I knew I shouldn’t have. I remember planning to say that it all happened because I’d typed in “cook”, but I couldn’t go through with it! I was petrified of her finding out while I was hiding it; better to make it look like an accident. Eventually, she did tell me off in front of my older sister because I’d been looking at “adult things” on the internet, which I denied. I remember feeling scared and also hurt, but couldn’t understand why. She never spoke to me about it.

Caught by dad

Not only had my mother probably seen what I was looking at, but my father too. He had no idea what the internet was, let alone how to use it. But, on one evening in my bedroom at age 12, I stumbled across the first episode of Queer as Folk (UK) where Stuart brings a 15 year old boy back to his flat and they have sex.

I felt both terrified and excited: they were the same as me, but did I have to do that? Did I have to go to dangerous places and meet scary men? My mother had gone to bed, but my father was still watching TV downstairs. I was hooked and couldn’t take my eyes off the programme, when suddenly my father burst through my door shouting “What the hell are you watching?” and turned my TV off, as well as my lights and slammed the door shut. I remember feeling very scared, but also saying that I wasn’t watching the programme, just skipping through channels and begged him not to turn everything off. Again, like my mother, he never spoke to me about it.

When I was 14/15, I tried to convince him that I was straight by occasionally letting him see that I was looking at pictures of women from Page 3 of the Sun newspaper. One time, I was sat on the sofa with my left hand resting in my pants whilst looking at a topless Page 3 model and my dad walked in. I didn’t stop and he didn’t acknowledge what he saw. He just asked me a question about lunch and left the room after I answered him. I wonder whether he thought it was inappropriate, or he felt relieved, or just thought “Who the hell are you kidding?”

My parents were both working class, born in the 40s and 50s in coal mining areas. I know this would have been very difficult for them to acknowledge or even talk to each other about. I still don’t know if they ever did. But, as far as I understood at age 12, these things I was looking were not “right” and made my parents cross. It seems so sad that there was no acknowledgement or discussion about sex in itself, let alone sexual-orientation. Today we are so aware of the importance of talking openly with children about all the changes they will face in life and we are much better at supporting them through changes. (Embarrassingly, I still can’t acknowledge that sex is even a thing in front of my parents, and neither can they!)

Next

In my next post I’ll be talking about my first tentative steps towards coming out, then going back in again!