Growing up, I never saw any positive representation of my sexuality. I’m glad things are so different for a new generation
No one came out as LGBTQ+ at my comprehensive in the north of England in the late 1990s for a very straightforward reason: it would constitute social death. Homophobia was the background hum of school life, a crude instrument to sometimes violently discipline any boy who deviated from rigid male expectations. Homophobia is, after all, the savage border guard of masculinity.
A geography teacher once mentioned a young boy who was outed years back, and suffered relentless abuse and violence until they were driven permanently from the school. It was a salutary lesson imprinted on my young brain. Shamefully I, too, occasionally laughed along at anti-gay innuendoes or lowlife gags about George Michael. Why risk suspicion with all it entailed? Half-victim, half-accomplice, like everyone else, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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