Coming Out In Public

Woke up, busy head. Coffee doesn t clear it. Buy paper, and miss Ireland. The British press prides itself on its supposed internationalism and objectivity, but nothing beats the British broadsheets during the silly season for petty parochialism and abject subservience to spin doctors. Irish papers suffer the same summer drought in serious news, but go for pleasant diversions, human interest stories and literary festivals.
I was caught out last week, exposed as a columnist. My various identities, hitherto separate, blurred. My karate group has an Irish spy, who happened to read in these pages about my hapless encounter one evening with heat and humidity, a certain formidable training partner, and my own ineptitude. I was recognised, for the first time.
It was of course cringe-making; I ve grown so used to writing out of place, away from where Hot Press is read, that I don t expect discovery, and that particular piece was not the most discreet. (In England, they don t even know what a hot press is that s how alien this environment is, folks.)
I may get a few e-mails from readers some of my stuff is on the Internet at www.astrologer.com/bootboy but until last week, I have not had the experience of people adopting that strange, guarded look, half-shy, half-fascinated, being in the presence of someone who s revealed to be a note-taker, a word-stealer, an emotional recorder.
Despite my protestations, I won t be believed if I say that I m not going to use private conversations as fodder in my karate club from now on. I ve only myself to blame. I can deal with it; I wasn t unkind to anyone, just embarrassingly revealing about something akin to a schoolboy crush. I have no option but to laugh it off and hope it s forgotten.
This is the era of the public confessional. From fly-on-the-wall TV programmes, made with hand-held camcorders, to the vast uncharted territory of the Internet, people are pouring their hearts out to whoever will listen, watch or read.
Mark Rollings, the self-described cute gay boy from Peterborough , whose website I wrote about last year, has been merging his public and private life in a far more risky way than I have. Yes, I ve written about one-night stands; yes, I ve written about fetishes and sex addiction and all sorts of personal things; but I try not to take hostages to fortune. I m genuinely trying to grapple with these issues, and am not ashamed of writing about them.
Until recently, I had anonymity on my side when socialising; not from a wish to stay in the closet, but because it freed me to write about things, such as how men relate to each other on the gay scene in London, in a way that I couldn t otherwise.
Mark, however, is doing something different; he s living his life almost completely in public. Readers know where he lives, works, goes on holidays; we see his holiday snaps, pictures of his friends, we know how much he drinks, how he gets on with his family. There s hardly anything he keeps to himself, as far as I can see. He wears his feelings on his sleeve in his daily diary that, at times, makes for heartbreaking reading. Here are a couple of excerpts from last month, about his relationship with his boyfriend Ryan:
21st July: When I have something as good as Ryan is, I get so scared that I ll lose him. I m 25 years old. Ryan is 18, cute looking and could have the pick of a million men. I can t seem to see why he would want me. So in a few situations my insecurity has caused us to fall out. It s always after I ve had a few drinks and I m not really thinking rationally. It only serves to push him further from me. I pushed too far this time and it s over.
And the next day, after Ryan and he have patched things together again:
22nd July: My happiness depends upon one person. Without him I fall to pieces.
There s something about this public display of neediness and insecurity that I believe is common to a lot of gay men and I include myself in this. Crushingly low self-esteem; being overly dependent on others for our happiness, and yet, at the same time, unconsciously driving them away; vulnerability to addictions, such as drink or sex, to numb the pain, but which make everything unmanageably worse; it s a recipe that far too many of us are following. I d like it to be different; but can only really try and work out why it is for me, and let others find out for themselves.
I don t need to add that, of course, gay men haven t cornered the market in neuroses; but I m talking about that particular narcissistic self-pity, that drunken torch-song I-hate-you-don t-leave-me camp, that Tainted Love in which we seem to specialize. n
Mark Rollings website: http://www.btinternet.com/~thatboy/
Bootboy is at [email protected]