It Was Thirty Years Ago Today; 2 - Is This The Life I Really Wanted?

This is Part 2 of a four part memoir find Part 1 here. 

I would write four or five sides of writing longhand in an A4 pad each day, and having exhausted the words and thoughts I had left unsaid to other people then I would sleep much better than before, when I had no exit for the thoughts that went round my head.

Was this life of being unemployed/unwaged, waiting for group therapy, and filling my time as usefully as I could on my own a good life? It was as good a life as I could make for myself, and from the time after the last job I felt as if I had a free space. I left others to be more anxious on my behalf about my unemployment than I could bring myself to be. My family lived forty miles away. As far as my day to day life went, they might just as well been in another country. They did not even have a home telephone line. They could write, asking me to visit, or invite themselves to see me. But they did not like leaving the town they lived in, and tended when they did visit to think as if they were still where they had come from. I was now a stranger to the life I once had in that town. The best comment ever given to me about my leaving the town I grew up in was given to me when I returned for a weekend visit, and somebody who knew me closely observed that when I walked I walked with a straighter back than I did when I lived in the town.

In my previous life in the town my family lived in I had cottaged quite intensely, sufficiently intensely for me to be unaware of how habitual and personal to me the habit was. I had anonymous sex with men in public toilets from 1978-87. I left the town in January 1988. I was unaware of why I sought sex with unnamed men in public toilets, beyond that it was the only way of getting any sex at all. I partially aware that I was not as asexual as other people preferred to see me as being. I knew that it was impossible to expect even the most veiled explanation from anyone who expected me to be asexual as to why and how, by what sufficiency of grace, I should be confident about who I was whilst being asexual, or as they would say, celibate. Every attempt at broaching the discussion got blocked from revealing anything, by the answer to celibacy being seen to be marriage. Any discussion where the path to marriage included the process of courtship was denied. Courtship was seen as the temptation towards adultery because the courting couple were not married. And whilst gay sex had been officially de-criminalised-which meant that men could not be blackmailed for money because they had had gay sex-plenty of men blackmailed each other for further sex after the initial encounter, because all the language around homosexuality was frozen, but the desire remained. All thought, or action, towards sex out of marriage had be excluded from being discussion. Nor was sex within marriage ever discussable in realistic terms.

Even as I lived forty miles away from that reality, and I had lived away from it for two and a half years, it was a world that had filled my head with itself, leaving no room for anything else. Such that in the city I now lived in, where to succeed I had to succeed on my own terms, that old world would not extend or adapt to give me a new life.

End of Part 2. Please find Part three here, and find part four here.