Developing feelings for boys
1951
“In 1951 I started having feelings for members of the same sex, probably about ten, but certainly preferring men to women or boys to girls but very rarely sexual feelings.”
“I don’t think (I worried about it). I had a couple of brothers who I was very fond of. Raymond, who was two years my junior, was my soul mate, I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without him. It was quite amazing, certainly for four or five years we were totally inseparable and to me it was a most natural thing to have these sort of feelings for guys and I didn’t know about the intricacies of what the law thought or what they didn’t think at that time.”
“By 1955 I don’t think I ever went through the stage where I thought I was the only one, the only gay, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, because there were school friends, who were obvious in what they wanted and what they needed. I don’t think I was camp, I developed that later on, but quite a few of my friends were camp and they stood out at school. That was a good lesson for me not to be camp because they were bullied and called names, and that’s where ‘poof’ and everything else came in, words I wouldn’t allow people to use nowadays but now we have some form of defence where we didn’t in those days.”
“So as an older teenager I never had any doubt at all that there was a life to be had out there, whereas a lot of my friends had gone through their early life thinking they were the only one in the world, that they were the odd one.”
“From 1956 from around fifteen until I left home (at 18) I was (having sexual contact with a particular boy a couple of years younger) I would go all out to please him before I was pleasing myself.”
“By 1959 I was eighteen. I was rather a late starter, I didn’t come to fruition (orgasm) until I was eighteen so I had no idea what these guys were screaming and jumping about at so I used to say ‘what does it feel like?’. I was a later starter anyway so a lot of the excitement and the fun of being at school, any suggestions of sexual contact with quite a few of the people I went to school with went completely over my head because I was such an innocent. There’s the odd couple that I had schoolboy crushes with but it never went more than a sort of romance, not deep physical sex.”
Contributed by: Robin McGarry, 66