“What are you doing here’?” are the words spoken in the short film in Spanish above as a boy engineers to be where he knows his crush will walk. With impassive faces, the first sign for the boy leaning against a fence that he is daring to confront his ‘crush’ is in the looking away, away but yet with the hope that his eyes might be engaged. It is a romantic dream, complicated by a ‘coming out’ process we think.
However, the first crush when I was a teenager could not be straightforward for a queer lad. And a ‘crush’ (not a word we used when I was in rural Yorkshire in my teenage years of 15 – 16 (1967 – 1970) and certainly not of same-sex attraction) on another boy had to be shrouded in secrecy, although I was a particularly shy boy.
When I think about it, these were seminal years for talk about gay relationships but always in terms of physical sex. I was born on 24th October 1954, two months, exactly to the date before ‘The Wolfenden Committee’ was set up on 24 August 1954 to consider UK law relating to “homosexual offences”. I was aged 3 when ‘the Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (better known as the Wolfenden report) was published on 3 September 1957. It recommended that “homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence”, finding that “homosexuality cannot legitimately be regarded as a disease, because in many cases it is the only symptom and is compatible with full mental health in other respects”. [1]
The period after 1957 was a difficult one for boys my age, despite people saying otherwise, I cannot remember a time when my attraction was not primarily to boys and negative talk about men koving men was ubiquitous in that period until well after 1967. However much one tried to manipulate both appearances of yourself by trial of apparent crushes on girls, although never getting close enough to trial them in fact, and apprehensions of one’s own inner feelings and the attempts to deny them or crush them, with guilt, the truth was that only boys looked attractive to me. The start of my teenage years, of course, coincided with the ‘legislation’ of gay sexual relationships, if conducted in ‘private’ (the definition of which even excluded buildings with multiple separate occupancy). Here is Wikipedia:
The Sexual Offences Act 1967 was accordingly passed and received royal assent on 27 July 1967 after an intense late-night debate in the House of Commons. It maintained general prohibitions on buggery and indecency between men, but provided for a limited decriminalisation of homosexual acts where three conditions were fulfilled:
- 1) the act had to be consensual,
- 2) the act had to take place in private and
- 3) the act could involve only people that had attained the age of 21. This was a higher age of consent than that for heterosexual acts, which was set at 16.
Further, “in private” limited participation in an act to two people. This condition was interpreted strictly by the courts, which took it to exclude acts taking place in a room in a hotel, for example, and in private homes where a third person was present (even if that person was in a different room). These restrictions were overturned by the European Court of Human Rights in 2000.[34]
Of course, being 13 in October the Act’s definition of legal acts of physical love did not feel to me to apply, but, true to say, the whole act tended to pass queer boys by, whose attention was often on the romantic rather than the sexual, whatever the stereotype of horny and persistent sexualised masculinity prevailing. All I knew was that my feelings were what concerned me not sex, and that even masturbation fantasy, though it was about bodily practises with other boys, didn’t really fall into the same category as questions of how I might develop. As far as I can see all boys were obsessed by their penis, and all expressed that obsession comparatively in jokes, insults or even mutual experimentation, though in the latter case most boys fantasised about girls in doing so.
My first crush was on Tony. He was the son of my parents’ friend, and he introduced me to the ‘laddish’ things he liked doing that were far from my experience. His dad ran a coal delivery service, and I accompanied Tony and his father’s workman, Harold, in the coal truck whenever I could lugging coal on my back and pouring it into bunkers and sheds. Harold owned a farm, and tony took me to help Harold clear barns of winter manure from his cows and hepl spread it on the fields. and Tony, even at 14, drove vehicles off roads.
As a boy I had never happily engaged in male sports or activities, not even watching football, and this was my first infatuation with masculinity and the worship of muscular labour, even though both of us at this age were hardly muscular in body, though Tony was becoming so. Sometimes, I would stay over, often whole weekends when coal delivery filled Saturday mornings. we developed a smallholding with chickens in Tony’s back yards, spending pocket money together on a night ark, for these chickens .
Tony had developed but childish vision of himself as growing to have sex with girls, and perhaps marrying though his affections were chiefly for his mates. When I stopped over, we usually slept together and experimented sexually, though he claimed he needed heterosexual porn to get that going, and I complied, complaining only to myself in inner spirit. The infatuation grew greater. I think even Tony felt some closeness and some mechanical desire but his future was clearly otherwise and the experimentation stopped first, the seeing each other later, though I thought and dreamed about him for some time.
More important though than the romantic relationship, which faded with the knowledge that it was self-consuming infatuation and that I need to be whom I was, a queer young man attracted romantically and sexually only to people of my own sex.
Nowadays, I would not express the attraction the same way for much of it was about working out an attitude to masculinity and the reasons why a man chooses to love a particular ‘other’, also identifying as a man. It took a long time to work out that the image of the hard resilient and invulnerable male I thought I loved was itself a cover for a different queerer wiring that did not require the gloss of extreme masculine stereotype or what we call ‘Daddy’ images in queer culture.
It took me time to see that what I loved in Tony was the time we hugged and felt easy in occupying a joint vulnerability, not a playacted masculine-mirroring role carrying those coal sacks, digging out barns or other signs of the ‘wicious pride of our youth’ in Mr Venus’ terms to Silas Wegg in Our Mutual Friend. When Tony grew up, he no longer wanted male reassurance, though he was never ever cruel. Tony married and has children. He had a skilled manual job when i knew him last, I heard that his wife often laughs over the stories he tells us about our youthful play, even the sexual part.
A symbolic photograph. I am the one with closed eyes, waiting to learn.
I sort of love Tony now but it was a crush – definitely a crush!.That it is not a secret, even if seen as a bit weird by his wife, is better I think, for this was mostly about the awesome process of coming out, although that process took many more years. At 68, it seems a warm memory not a shameful one.
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[1] The quotations are from Wikipedia on LGBT rights in the UK Use the link.
Steve_Bamlett_blog 