I guess like everyone, I grew up footloose and fancy free – I had a great family, I went to a great school and I lived in a great place. All of these things still apply to my lifestyle, since I’m still living with my parents, I’m at the same school, and I haven’t moved home. I’ve only been “Out of the closet” for six months, which means that everybody who knows I’m gay – in other words everybody who knows me – Hasn’t forgotten.

 

I started to discover (Break the syllables of that word down and you get the true meaning of it) my sexuality when I was twelve – An early start I know, but I don’t regret that, because at the time I didn’t have any academic issues to worry about and was not forced to concentrate on more vital aspects of my school career. My school, by the way, was and still is one of the best schools in the country, despite being notoriously homophobic.

 

The way I started to suspect that I was/am gay was totally on the spur of the moment – I was coming out (No pun intended) Of a French lesson and it suddenly occurred to me how good looking the guy that sat next to me was – This guy, in fact, had been sat next to me for years, as, in almost all our subjects we were seated alphabetically (My surname happens to begin with a “Z” and his with a “Y”). At first I reasoned with my own seemingly indefatigable sense of logic and argued with myself that as a male I must just e jealous of his looks. This was, of course, a pathetic excuse, but it did the job – I don’t consider myself at all handsome, being of a dark complexion with dark hair and rather thin grey eyes.

 

I then found that the word “gay”, for no apparent reason kept swimming about in my conscious mind. Presently I began to accept this and to question the real meaning of the word. Although it had originally meant happy, or of a pleasant demeanour, the word had come to mean, almost without exception, homosexual. I’m quite interested in words and their origins, so I began to wonder how the transfer could have been made. This was, as a matter of fact, a question that would be keeping me stumped for several years.

 

I’d always felt different to everyone else, in a sort of subliminal way, so I didn’t feel like taking a long walk off a short cliff as soon as I put the evidence together and worked out that I must be gay. However, when I realised I needed to tell my parents, I did begin to feel a tad nervous. I was about to kill my mother’s dream’s of crying at my wedding (Although I’m told the average cost of a wedding nowadays is around £20, 000!), that was the trump card that she’d been wanting to play all my life, gathering that she has three other children, both of whom are married and are around twenty years older than me.

 

As it turned out, my sister was the first person I told, and she was fantastic. Come to think of it, my sister and I are closer than I was ever to either of my parents. She spread the word around so that my brother and in-laws knew before the day was up. The thing I really felt cursed with was that my parents are divorced, and so I was faced with having a choice – Live a lie until the folks get back together again, or go with double jeopardy and come out twice. On the grounds that I would do pretty much anything to stop my parents re-marrying, I chose the latter, and believe it or not, it worked out rather well.

 

My mum went through a week of not talking to me – More, I think, out of shock than genuine spite – And my father moved to Spain and I haven’t heard from him since. At this point I must tell you that my father was a real nasty piece of work and I’m glad to be rid of him. So now everybody knows I’m gay. And the interesting thing is that now I always make a point of telling this to a new acquaintance, and in this way I never risk loosing friends by revealing it to them in the future. People should take me as I come, or not at all.

 

Predictably, there will always be people who just don’t have enough life themselves to evade giving me grief about my sexuality, but at the end of the day I rather enjoy listening to their taunts and replying “Yes, I’m gay. I’m homosexual – How about you?” because the response is often that these sad people, whoever they my be, just give up trying to make me miserable, because they are so bewildered at my unabashed attitude.

 

So now I can say something that quite a few homosexuals can’t – I’m gay. Because I finally worked out the connection between the two meanings of the word – To be gay is to be homosexual and happy about it. And so I decided to write an account of how I came to realise this. And you have just finished reading it.