This is just a random photo off the internet, I have no idea who these guys are, but it did make me smile.
Ah, gay guys.
But, then I realised that the dark haired guy reminded me of my school mate Nick Andrews.
Nick, (the dark haired guy) and another guy with whom we went to school, Mikail (the blond haired guy) who Nick had the hots for during school.
I haven't thought about all of that for a long time.
So smitten with Mikail was Nick that, privately, he made all sorts of passes at Mikail, none of which were returned. Mikail stayed calm and, as far as I could see, non-reactive to Nick’s overt attempts to get into his pants.
Nick was loud, and blokey and full of life.
Nick became a mechanic after we left school. He fitted right into the blokey world of the mechanic’s workshop. I hate saying this, but it is probably true, Nick probably did a lot of good out there in blokey land, as he was never quiet about being gay. He had this way of telling people he was gay, delivered as the quintessential straight, blokey lad.
“Yeah, I like guys, it’s true.”
We were both always mad on cars. I should have become a mechanic too, you know. It is what I should have done. I could so easily be restoring vintage VW Beetles right about now.
Nick was one of my four mates at school who all turned out to be gay. Five of us. Someone's mother, I think it was Leah's, years later, apparently was heard to say, "There was something in the water when those boys were growing up."
There was Adam. Oh Adam. Not the sharpest tool in the old tool shed. He would go on to deny he was gay well into his adult life, way beyond when the rest of us came out.
I was, actually, friends with Adam’s older brother Daniel, who really was, not to put too finer point on it, the school’s ‘raving’ queen. (both Daniel and Adam were gay, but oh so different) I’m not even sure how I became friends with Daniel now, he was quite a few years ahead of me at school. But, I liked him because he was smart and funny and, as far as I was concerned, a complete breath of fresh air. I’d say, he was my early window into a life I was going to have, but Daniel was, er, I don’t know. I want to say effeminate, and I wasn’t, and I guess that was true, but so less important as it wasn’t so much that, as I saw Daniel as brave, as he faced the world face on, taking no fucking prisoners, and I wasn’t. I think it was Daniel’s strength that I saw, more so than his homosexuality.
Daniel introduced me to Adam, when Adam came to the school two years after me, who was in my year, and asked me to look him while he got used to the school.
Adam and I bought a house together after we’d finished uni and headed out into the world. It was a financial decision, nothing more, we were just mates. Adam worked for a corporate bank and could get a really cheap loan, and I had come into some money from an old, cherished great aunt who had died.
Unfortunately, Adam was retrenched almost the day after settlement getting 3 months to re-finance his cheap loan, and he just couldn’t do it. He crumbled, moved back to mum and dad, receiving advice from an ego-centric husband of a drag queen friend of his to do nothing, as he hadn’t even made a single mortgage payment, so the cheapest course of action was to just let the bank foreclose on the house.
Suffice to say, Adam and I did not remain friends.
There were the two David’s. David M & David S.
David S was loud and unapologetic for anything he did. He came to Australia in his mid teens, coming to our school halfway through high school. He had a loud English accent, so he was always the outsider, if you like.
His father was a big shot executive of some sort sent to Australia to sort out the company he worked for in Australia.
He and I became friends, all us boys became friends. He was smart and funny and outspoken and artistic and would go onto to be an eccentric artist, of sorts.
In year 11, his father’s Australian contract was up and the family was moving back to England, except for David who loved Australia and who did not want to return to England to live, so he didn’t. But, it meant he had to drop out of school after year 11 and get a job to support himself, which I kind of thought was mean of his parents, they could have supported him into year 12, but they wanted him to return to the UK with them. After his parent’s pleas for him to return with them to England failed, they set him up in an apartment attached to an old house, pretty much, in the suburb in which I lived.
David S embraced the gay lifestyle enthusiastically once his parents had left for the UK.
David was 17, left to fend for himself alone in Australia and while he coped, I guess, admirably, it was a hard, difficult life for a 17 year old.
I used to go and hang out with David once I’d left school and was at uni. He always wanted to take me to gay things that he was doing, and, you know, I should have, but I didn’t. I had a girlfriend by this stage and was keeping up my straight boy image. David never believed I was straight, not at all, and while he didn’t ever confront me directly on the issue, he was always telling me to go to gay events with him, all of which I turned down. Stupid me.
The last mate was David M. Ah, David M. Handsome David M. Okay, I guess you have been waiting to hear which one of my gay mates I had a thing with, that would be David M.
David left school after year 12 and got a job. He didn’t pursue uni directly after school, he got a job and worked in banking.
I had lost contact with my schoolboy boyfriend, Alex, after school had finished. I had a girlfriend, Leah, starting Xmas holidays at the beginning of last year of school, so I was seeing Alex and Leah at the same time for just over a year. I’d PM go to uni with Leah, first year.
Life was going along swimmingly. I had a girlfriend, I was going to uni, I was straight and looking forward to my straight life with Leah, who, by the way, looked remarkably like Kylie Minogue and I was the envy of almost every guy we met along the way.
It must have been the beginning of summer at the end of the first year of uni. We all went to stay with some friend of Leah’s parents in Anglesea, a beach town down the coast. Our group of friends. As it was a friend of Leah’s parents, the girls were put in one room, and the boys were put in the other room, and David and I were set up in the lounge room to sleep.
I had always been attracted to David M, with his tall, dark and handsome good, looks, even if I denied it, even to myself.
Well, I guess, you have guessed, old mates David and I, a bit boozed up, lying on that beach house lounge room floor, had sex with each other for the first time, which, as hard as you may find this to believe, surprised both of us.
I remember it was kind of cold that night, and we got to telling each other that it was cold. That led us into a discussion about putting our hands between our legs to warm up, which led to us putting our hands between each other’s leg to warm up. Something like that. I haven’t thought about that forever.
It would be fair to say after that, that David become infatuated with me, which wasn’t so cool, with me being with Leah, but it did lead to David and I having a lot of sex.
So, again, I had a girlfriend and a boyfriend, with both of whom I was having sex.
David’s infatuation was always threatening to become a problem. He was never really cool about it, or good at hiding it. It kind of became obvious to people that David was, well, how would I say it, not really acting normally when it came to me.
This went on for a few years.
Let me just say, we were all friends, David M, his sister Alex, Adam’s best mate, Alex, (the only boy in the group, who would remain straight, and in fact marry David M’s sister, Alex) Nick, me, Leah, Leah’s best friend Cathy Austin, Shelly, who had a brief moment as Adam’s girlfriend (yes, I know), Rachel, Jill, and Jill’s sister, Elly, and David S, although David S would be the first one of the group to drift away.
We hung out down the beach a lot, down the Great Ocean Road. I remember we were all standing on the beach down the coast having just arrived down there one Xmas. We were checking out the water and the sun when David’s little brother, Scott, came running towards us to say hello in a pair of skimpy, pale blue speedos. I think we all had to roll our tongues back into out heads that day.
Rachel grew up interstate. She met us all one weekend, when we all decided to go interstate for a road trip. She would pack up all her things not too many months later and move to Melbourne.
Five, or so, years later, Rachel wanted to go to Europe travelling. She said to me that I should go with her. She’d finished uni, I’d finished uni and was just beginning to wonder what I was going to do with my life.
I had Leah to keep happy, and David to keep happy. You know, keeping up a healthy sex life with both a girl and a guy is difficult, especially when you have to keep one of them secret not only from the other one, not only from all your collective friends, but from the world. If everyone knew, I think it would, obviously, be much easier, but that wasn’t the case.
I don’t know now how much of a strain that was on me, or how much of that was impetus to take up Rachel’s offer, but I did take up her offer to travel with her.
I split up with David before I left. There were tears and declarations of love, from him. I, think, I was in escape mode.
I split up with Leah too. We had a long, serious discussion about the future and how neither of us knew what it would be, and how we shouldn’t put restrictions on each other when we are living in different parts of the world, sitting in her family home’s drive way in my sports car. We would just wait and see how we both felt about each other when I returned.
It was the only time Leah ever said anything about never wanting to hear that there was something between me and David. Oh, yes, she had said a lot about David, but it was always around David’s infatuation with me, never before anything about what I might have been seeing in David.
Anyway, two years in England sorted out my messy sex life back in Australia, bringing the whole thing to a close.
You know, it must have been a strain on me when I think about it, as I went from fucking Leah and David constantly, to living the life of a celibate for two years overseas.
Rachel and I based ourselves in London. We went and saw every live show in the West End that we could. We travelled a lot, as that was the point of what we were doing. And I never had sex with anyone for that whole time.
I thought nothing of it, at the time, but now I look back on it, it does now seem kind of weird. I can’t remember how I felt, but looking back on it from where I am now, I think it was a relief, even if that just sounds kind of odd now.
I still wasn’t out as gay, of course, that took me a number of years yet.
So, what happened to everyone?
