 I came out in the same year that ‘Going Straight’ first aired on the BBC. It was a time when the age of consent for gay men was 21* and the number of gay bars in London could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The Fourth Estate - redtops and broadsheets alike – were routinely beastly to the down-trodden embryonic gay community and the police raided at will. It’s no surprise then, that my politics were a little leftish and I thought of myself as standing on the outside looking in. Now in my fifth decade I find myself published in the Telegraph, that most ‘establishment’ of newspapers – only online mind you. Read my Bumpy Rite of Passage. I’ve sold out for a sell-out.
*In fact it was only legal for two men to get down and dirty if they were alone in a private dwelling. Also, lesbianism was never a crime presumably because most of the (male) lawmakers not knocking off the boys on the side were rather turned on by the thought of it. |
