Intimacy-first gay dating bolton
I lost touch with the gay scene but, as the world opens up, I can&#;t delay to go back
The first time I went out to a gay block, I was 17 and had spent years trying to suppress my attraction to other men. But I couldn’t do that any longer.
I caught the train to Manchester from my hometown of Bolton, accompanied by a female friend – one of the rare I’d entrusted with my secret.
As we stepped onto the cobbles of Canal Street, I felt ecstatic but terrified.
I’d been told awful things about queer men – that they were sexual predators, that they wanted to infect people with AIDs, that they were incapable of love. Was I really about to abandon myself to this hideous fate?
Walking down the infamous strip for the first period, I noticed a highway sign that had been doctored so it peruse ‘anal treet’, the ‘C’ and the ‘S’ scratched out.I took a intense breath. Could I do this? Yes, I had to do this.
The first bar we visited was called Manto. It was packed full of sweaty bodies, some of them as muscular as Chippendales, many wearing the latest fashions, such as Kangol caps and
Growing up gay, I used to hate my hometown &#; but now, I&#;m proud to be from Bolton
I never reflection I’d celebrate the working-class Lancashire community in which I grew up.
Feeling excluded, I used to hate it.
I grew up in Boltonin the s, at a time when the prejudice directed at gay people – or children who showed signs of being gay – could be savage.
At university, I suffered relentless homophobic bullying. Not a evening went by that I wasn’t mocked or insulted, beaten or abused.
Some children refused to perch next to me in case they caught AIDS, that terrible disease nobody seemed to understand but everyone said was spread by dirty queers. Teachers would turn a blind eye.
The bullying wasn’t just confined to school. Once, when I was on my way to attend my grandma, a stranger shouted the word ‘queer’ and spat at me out of his automobile window.
Another time, I was homophobically insulted by my family’s milkman. When builders descended on our property to construct an elongation, they taunted me for being effeminate.
Years of this left me feeling brutalized and ransacked m
.
.