Nowt so queer as folk

My first crush, at the age of about eight, was on Kenneth Williams. I'm not telling you this to carry on the theme of humiliation, although it is quite embarrassing, but because it appears to be the first sign of what has become quite a pattern in my life.



When I was in my first year at secondary school, various popular and influential people in my class coerced my best friend George and I to "go out". All this involved was going about our normal business with added hugging when they told us to. Apparently this was "sweet" as we were both short, speccy and swotty. I believe this relationship came to an end when we completely failed to call each other over half-term. Neither of us was in the slightest bit upset and quickly got back to being best friends without the irritation of constant demands from other people to touch each other. Time passed and by Year 11 I'd blossomed, if that's the right word, into a moody, sulking goth. George, on the other hand, had grown into a rather flamboyant personality, "camp George" as he was affectionately referred to throughout the school. So it was absolutely no surprise when he came to my goth friends and me, who wore eyeliner and fishnets and pretended to be wordly, to confide that he thought he might be gay. Looking back on it, I'm quite proud of the emotional maturity with which the fifteen year old me and friends dealt with the situation. By the beginning of the next school year he was happily out to most people and a much more relaxed person for it. But it stands that my first "boyfriend" turned out to be a homosexual. A portent of things to come?

As a seventeen year old I had self-hatred down to a fine art. I was consumed by it. The years of being told I was fat and ugly had paid off and it became fact, it was burnt into my retinas so that that's all I saw when I looked at myself. It's pathetic really but I want to cry when I see one of the very few pictures that I allowed to be taken from this period. I looked nothing like the hideous monster I envisioned myself as, yet I spent hours scribbling Placebo lyrics into black notebooks and ineffectually attempting to carve "ugly" into my arm with a compass. Emo before emo was invented. That's how cool I am. I've got my razor on the pulse of modern trends. But anyway, you can imagine that Valentine's day wasn't a joyous occasion for me as a permanently single lump of self-loathing. Imagine my surprise, then, on seeing a very attractive man obviously eyeing me up from across the pub my friends had dragged me to in order to "celebrate" the day of cheap cards and insincerity. I couldn't believe it when he came over to speak to me, and only me. His name was Pratesh and he was all gorgeous brown eyes and long black hair. I was still in a state of shock when, after talking for a while, he leaned in to kiss me. I couldn't believe my luck when after a fair bit of snogging (including an unfortunate face-biting incident that I glossed over at the time but really, bloody goths and their vampire obsessions) Pratesh decided to accompany my friends and me to the club we were moving on to from the pub.

So I was on the dance floor at my favourite club with a handsome young gentleman making inept attempts to put his hands down my corset and I was thinking, "Gosh, this didn't turn out too horrendously after all," when he whispered in my ear that he needed to tell me something. I followed him to a table in the corner and he took my hands and said, "I'm really sorry but I'm gay. I thought I could do this but I can't. You're the only girl I've ever felt anything like this for but it's still not going to work. I'm so sorry." I stared at him, gobsmacked, then proceeded to cry in the corner for the rest of the evening, convinced that I was so hideous I'd forced him to make up this outlandish excuse, while my best friend got off with the most beautiful man I'd ever seen. Or, as a friend summarised on being informed of the night's events at a later date, "It was Valentine's, Alice pulled fit James and you turned someone gay? Wow!" Wow indeed.

And so we come to Travis. Yes, that Travis. I'd fancied Travis for quite a while before we got it together and when it happened I was pretty happy. That might be an understatement. Travis had charisma and big, piercing blue eyes. He also had an alcohol problem and mental health issues but that was by the by as didn't I too? He and I had drunken conversations late into the night about Issues and Art and we discovered a lot in common. He had a fierce talent for writing and observation and could make me laugh about absolutely anything. I fell for him hard and fast and, miracle of miracles, he seemed to feel the same way. Travis identified as bisexual when we got together, although his past had been swathed with confusion. That was fine, as I too believe that variety is the spice of life. After a while he stopped identifying as bisexual though. "You're the only woman I fancy," he said. And I liked that. I'd refer to him as my gay boyfriend and we'd go to gay clubs where I'd watch him tarting about in skinny jeans with a faux-hawk, happy in the knowledge that this gorgeous creature was coming home with me.

We were together two years all told and towards the end of that I was stupid enough to relax, to look forward to years of what I had at that point, we 'd got each other through some difficult times and just seemed to be coming out of the other side. And so it was as inevitable as Shakespearian tragedy that it would all come crashing down. It was during a perfectly innocuous phone call that he dropped in that he'd decided he was gay. I think he may have said that the idea of being with a woman made him feel panicky and deftly delivered an enormous kick directly to my self-esteem. To add insult to injury, at the time this happened an almost identical storyline was running on Hollyoaks. So it was like living in the most ludicrous of teen soaps, only with less facially gifted people, and in certain cases worse acting. So, despite my love for the sexually ambiguous, I've been confining myself to red-blooded heterosexuals ever since in an attempt to break the pattern. I'm sure the gay community are devastated but it's all fun and games until someone breaks a heart.