I can wear feminine clothes and sing or dance around to upbeat pop music. I even have a few straight male friends, men who enjoy gay company as an opportunity to free themselves from the pressure to conform to a toxic idea of masculinity that can restrict their individuality and suppress their spirit.Īs a gay man, I feel far less restricted by the expectation that men should behave in a certain way.
I also have a special bond with my gay friends, people who’ve been through similar experiences to me and travelled a similar journey towards self-acceptance. These include free-thinking and sexually expressive straight women, who cherish their gay friends as people around whom they won’t be judged. And, this Pride month, I want to celebrate that.įirst of all, I have more friends than I could ever have imagined.
Growing up in working class Bolton in the 1980s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, I just wanted to take a pill and wake up straight.īut now I can see that so much of what I love about my life is a result of my sexuality. When the bullies at school would beat me up and call me “queer”, I wanted nothing more than to be “normal”. As a gay man, I feel far less restricted by the expectation that men should behave in a certain way (Getty Images)īeing gay is the best thing that ever happened to me, and I never thought I’d say that.
