Long before the twenty-somethingness of sitting around watching the X-Factor with your beloved, intermittently snuggling and inhaling chocolate biscuits whilst taking for granted the pair-of-old slippers level of comfort that goes along with it, you were once a mess. You were once thirteen and desperately trying to masturbate to Pamela Anderson in Baywatch to convince yourself that YES, I DO FANCY WOMEN. Only you always ended up thinking about the other lifeguard, the one who didn’t have breasts but did have honed biceps and hairy legs, the one whose character was drawn so thinly that his personality could have been spread on half of a wafer-thin cracker. I am not referring to David Hasselhoff (breathe easy, reader…) but to the air-headed pretty one, the one who may or may not have had a name, the one who may or may not have felt something or done something once, something other than running across the golden California sand in his little red shorts to save someone less attractive than himself from drowning. It really matters not, just as it mattered not to 99 percent of the show’s viewers whether Pamela Anderson had anything to say for herself, ever. As long as her breasts were fully-inflated and jiggling, as long as she was being given lots of excuses to run in slow-motion, who cared?

Well actually, I cared. Pamela Anderson’s breasts were meant for me. The pretty-boy lifeguard’s biceps and shorts-area were not. I know because by this point in my life I had already spent the last decade spending Sunday mornings in church, a place children are made to go so they can Stop Fidgeting, curse Jesus for ever existing in the first place and sheepishly shake old people’s hands whilst mumbling ‘peace be with you’ towards the back-end of proceedings. Jesus always struck my childhood self as a fairly frightening man, one of those people who always had a bone to pick with everyone. He most definitely would have had a bone to pick with me because he never promoted boys being interested in male lifeguards, let alone being interested in their naked torsos and shorts-areas. And neither did anyone else I knew. My friends didn’t promote it, society didn’t promote it and my family certainly didn’t promote it. In fact, the only person in the entire world who did seem to promote it was Julian Clary. This horrified me. It felt like I was about to be forced – by the catastrophic biological disaster that had occurred in me – to join a club in which the only other member was The Scariest Man in The World Except for Michael Jackson. This was not a prospect I could bear, so I took the only other viable option and turned to drugs. Drugs and denial and lots of self-hatred. And whiskey.

I didn’t really start to deal with my sexuality until I was about eighteen. And to be honest, I didn’t really start to properly deal with it until I was in my twenties. I didn’t come out to my parents until I was 23. And I can honestly say that the decade leading up to that point was, on the whole, incredibly painful. I made some of my closest friends during that period and had some great times, but virtually all of those ‘great times’ were punctuated by alcohol or drugs and were all preceded or followed by anxiety, depression, confusion, sadness, hopelessness and occasionally, aspirations of suicide. For a long time, I hated myself and I hated my life. I hated being gay and I also hated the fact that I hated it. I wanted to be fixated by things jiggling in bikinis instead of things jiggling in shorts. I wanted to be ‘normal.’

Adolescence is probably the most stressful period in anyone’s life because the transition from childhood to adulthood is so disjointed and complex and drawn-out. What makes it worse is that we have to go through it surrounded by the most critical, cruel and abusive group of people we will ever be lumbered with, our teenage peers. The period during which we are least able to deal with criticism, rejection, bullying and abuse is the very period we experience it most. If you are gay, then coming to terms with your sexuality on top of all this is unbelievably hard. I cannot speak for every gay person, but for me it was a challenge so immense that it almost broke me. Actually, it did break me. I had to pick up the pieces of myself and glue them haphazardly back together a lot when I was growing up. There were times during my teenage years when I couldn’t envisage how I could possibly be happy, or anything even resembling that. Ever. I couldn’t imagine how I would ever be able to tell my parents, how I would ever be able to tell anyone other than my very closest friends. I couldn’t bear to even say the word ‘gay.’ I couldn’t make sense of my future. I didn’t want to because it terrified me.

The key, ultimately was endurance. If you endure something long enough, have faith that the pain will pass in the end, and envisage what it is you want your life to look like, eventually the reality will start matching up to the pictures in your mind. And the great news is that there is a lot more acceptance and support for gay youngsters now than there was when I was going through that period in my life, back in the late 90s. There’s still a long way to go, but it is getting better.

One of the things I know now is that no matter what happens in my life, I will never suffer as much as I did during my youth and early adulthood. And having survived it, I understand that I can survive anything. This is an important lesson because I know that when something terrible or heart-breaking or tragic happens, I will pick myself up and carry on in spite of it. It will hurt me but it won’t break me.

My friends know me as a low-level worrier. I worry about whether people like me enough and whether I push too hard too soon in the early stages of relationships. I worry about whether I am eating enough vegetables and whether I will ever be able to fully stop smoking. I am anxious for the vagaries and the maybes and the indeterminables in life. But in crisis situations, I’m good. If somebody dies, I know what to do, I know what to say. If someone’s partner walks out on their marriage, I am comfortable with being the first one on the scene. If someone is threatening to kill themselves and needs talking down from the bridge, I can do that. I’ve stood on that bridge a hundred times. Metaphorically maybe, but I’ve been there. I know how it feels to be so tired of ‘this’, so hopeless about tomorrow and all the tomorrows that follow that you just want to sleep without any prospect of ever having to wake up again. When you know that feeling at sixteen, you’ve lived a lifetime already and all the suffering in the world isn’t going to pull you down as an adult, if you can just hold on and get past this.

It is true what they tell us. It gets better. It’s easy to say, I know, but it really does. And being gay teaches us early on just how resilient we are, how brave we are, how strong we are. How do we know? Because we are still here.

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