by Matt Lucas
I had thought I was the only gay in the village.
Actually – before we go any further – that was Walliams’s line and the character of Dafydd was based on Walliams’s suggestion, inspired by a guy we’d both met. But we wrote the sketches together and I identified greatly with the irony of both wanting to be accepted and feeling less special as soon I was.
I wasn’t entirely honest with Jeremy. There’s a quip people sometimes use: ‘Bi now, gay later’ (a play on ‘Buy now, pay later’). I know a lot of gay folk who came out in a similarly timid way, one foot still firmly in the closet, keeping up the insurance payments just in case. It’s partly why some gay people sneer when someone tells them they’re bisexual. They don’t believe them. I believe them. These days it’s even harder to come out as bisexual, it seems.
Let’s go back. Because this didn’t begin when I was nineteen.
When I was seven, I was playing some records with my friend Michael. I remember looking at the cover of a Shakin’ Stevens single.
‘Girls are pretty but boys are handsome, don’t you think?’
Years later, when I mentioned in an interview that Shakin’ Stevens was my first crush, The Sun newspaper called it an ‘Exclusive’. They wrote about how I ogled photos of the star, even printing the word ‘ogled’ in bold letters. Can you ogle at seven? Surely at seven you’re just looking? To add to my embarrassment, they called the man himself for a quote. Years later I saw him at Rob Brydon’s birthday and hid in the corner.
Oh. Sorry, I completely forgot. Two clangs (Shaky and Rob).
As a child I was relatively sociable, despite losing my hair. ‘Doctors and Nurses’ and various inventive adaptations were often played, with both male and female friends, but this kind of thing died out by the time I was about six, I suspect, when it no longer felt right to be dropping your pants and showing off your willy … er … willy nilly.
I started at a singlesex secondary school in the autumn of 1985, aged eleven, where I encountered boys, over a thousand of them – tall, short, fat, thin, clever, stupid, ugly, handsome boys. In the changing room after swimming, I noticed some of my classmates had hair growing down there and the talk was often of girls. I didn’t have any hair down there yet or any interest in girls. I assumed the two went hand in hand and so I patiently waited to develop into a man.
‘Do you know what “gay” stands for?’ went the joke. ‘Got AIDS Yet?’
Oh, how we laughed. Being gay was hilarious. Because none of us were, obviously. Like I say, I didn’t fancy girls yet, but I was going to. Very soon.
In the meantime, just as I had stolen money from the charity pencil case, I stole a look here and there at the prettiest of my schoolmates. The blond ones, usually. Or the ones with dark hair. Or brown hair. Or red. Everyone with short hair, basically. And, of course, the long-haired ones. And straight or curly hair. And the boy in the sixth form who looked a bit like Glenn Hoddle. And … well, you get the picture.
You couldn’t stare too long though, or someone would call you gay. Actually, someone would probably call you that anyway. People at my school seemed to be obsessed with outing each other. You were never asked. You were simply informed. And it could happen at any time for any reason – the smallest hand gesture, the way you pronounced a certain word, the colour of your new duffel coat. And that was it – ‘Gay. You’re gay. You are actually gay,’ said someone, and as far as everyone else was concerned, you were effectively now lead singer of The Communards.
One poor boy in our class – Richard Hudson – was sweet and sensitive, though he didn’t strike me as particularly effeminate. No matter – one day it was his turn to be labelled gay, and it stuck. He got it the worst of anyone. Halfway through the year his mum became our French teacher and then we would tell him he was a French gay and that he stuck baguettes up his arse. Just as it started to calm down, his namesake Rock Hudson died of AIDS and the next day it started all over again.
Yet even when Rock Hudson publicly acknowledged he had AIDS, he didn’t mention being gay. There were very few gay role models – camp, yes, but actually gay?
Well, there was Colin and Barry, the groundbreaking but ultimately anaemic gay couple in EastEnders. Their gay kiss supposedly revolted the nation, prompting people who wouldn’t watch rubbish like EastEnders anyway to write in to the papers to say that while they wouldn’t watch rubbish like EastEnders anyway, they were extremely offended and definitely wouldn’t watch rubbish like EastEnders now.
There were the people on Out on Tuesday, a ‘queer’ lifestyle series on Channel 4, who talked about things like gender roles and gay adoption. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.
There was Derek Jarman, who made very arty, impenetrable films, which I also didn’t understand.
There was miserable Maurice, from the Merchant Ivory film of the same name, which they’d show late at night on Channel 4. I’d video it and label it something else, like ‘Royal Variety Performance 1987’ or ‘The Muppets Take Manhattan’ – something I knew no one else in the house would watch – and I’d put it on for maybe twenty minutes after school, until my mum got home from work, and then watch the next twenty minutes the following day and so on. Eventually I’d panic and tape over it, and then six months later they’d show it again and I’d repeat the whole routine.
There was Jimmy Somerville in Bronski Beat and then The Communards, who sang beautifully, though also a bit like someone was standing on his balls.
There was Frankie Goes To Hollywood, but they were banned from the radio by DJ Mike Read.
There were those lesbians who invaded the BBC News studio and who Sue Lawley sat on.
There were the Pet Shop Boys and Freddie Mercury, but they weren’t really ‘out’ out, and there was Elton John who was so gay he married a woman.
Oh, and there was this actor who had come out at the age of fortynine, Ian McKellen – who actually came to talk at our school one lunchtime about his career, but also about his concerns over the proposed Section 28.
Prime Minister Thatcher, in a speech given at the annual Conservative Party Conference in 1987, said it was the ‘plight of girls and boys’ that worried her the most in eighties Britain. ‘Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay,’ she declared, to applause. ‘All of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life – yes, cheated.’
Thanks to Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 – the first anti-gay laws to be introduced into Britain in over a hundred years – local authorities were prohibited from ‘promoting’ ‘homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.
Eh? How the hell do you promote homosexuality? Is there a twofor-one offer?
Because of this, I only ever heard homosexuality mentioned once by a teacher in five years at Haberdashers’ – in a biology class, in a dry reference to chromosomes.
Sex education finally took place in the sixth form, by which time I’d already left, so I’ve still never been formally taught it. Even if I had been, it would not have included homosexuality in any way, as teachers were terrified that they’d lose their job if they so much as mentioned its very existence.
When Thatcher died, I mourned the victims of HIV and AIDS who had perished through helpless ignorance on her watch.
And me? I just threw myself into acting, both on and offstage. I joined in conversations in which we lusted after half the girls’ school, despite me not knowing who any of them were or understanding quite why they were supposedly so desirable. At fourteen, I had appeared in a West End play. I boasted about losing my virginity in the dressing room, conjuring up a juicy tale about a hot brunette in the company who seduced me in between a matinee and evening performance. The event supposedly took place on the dressing table and we were so busy humping that I burnt my bare buttock on the light bulb. There was no truth in this, of course, but I think I sold it.
And yet, I wasn’t entirely bereft of action i
n that department.
During a sleepover I had been wrestling with a friend on my bed – innocent, routine, laddish stuff. After a few seconds he looked down at my shorts in shock.
‘Um … you’ve wet yourself.’
I had not wet myself.
Neither of us said anything more about it, but his visits became more regular as we started to explore our feelings. At the beginning we’d linger downstairs and I would offer him a drink of water. I’d wait for as long as I could until finally I could take it no more.
‘Not much on TV. Shall we go upstairs?’
Before long we gave up any pretence that we were meeting for any other reason. If I called him, or he called me, that meant the coast was clear. However, we never ever kissed or had any kind of penetrative sex – we just ‘fooled around’. Remembering it now, I realise we didn’t even hug, not once, but it was – for me – a formative relationship.
This continued for four years, until I was eighteen. We had a couple of close calls, towards the end, when we nearly got caught. One time my mum came home from work unexpectedly early while we were both naked in the bath.
Soaking, I dived into the bedroom. As I heard my mum come up the stairs, my heart must have been beating even louder than her footsteps. My clothes were strewn on the bathroom floor, so I pulled on the only clothes I could find at the bottom of the cupboard – some ancient stone-washed jeans and a jumper I had last worn when I was nine! Patches of water flashed through.
Mum appeared. I stammered that the boiler at my friend’s house had broken and that he’d come over for a bath. I expected him to come out of the bathroom at that point, but instead he walked out of the toilet, fully clothed.
He said a sheepish hello to my mum and left quickly. I got in the bath, shaking, beads of sweat teeming down my forehead. Forty-five minutes later I summoned up the courage to go downstairs.
This was the moment I had been dreading. I had been rumbled. This was it. There would be tears, recriminations, ultimatums.
Except there wasn’t. Nothing was mentioned.
Had she not noticed? Or did she prefer not to say anything?
Somehow we had got away with it.
The next time he came over, he asked me if I was gay. The tone was surprisingly accusatory, as if I might be but he definitely wasn’t. I mumbled something about ‘liking girls as well’. He said he thought we shouldn’t do this anymore, that he found it ‘embarrassing’.
We saw each other a few more times after that, but then it started to fizzle out, until it was no more. I hoped in vain that things might resume eventually, but they didn’t. I missed our sexual contact, though it had not carried with it any emotional weight. I wasn’t in love with him. I had never dared think of him as a boyfriend, nor him me. Such things simply didn’t exist.
Back at school, like most sixteen-year-olds, I became utterly besotted with someone. Unlike most sixteen-year-olds, it wasn’t a girl or a teacher; it was, of course, rather inconveniently one of the other boys.
I’d vaguely noticed him before. He wasn’t in my year so I didn’t have much contact with him. I don’t think we’d ever even spoken. But one day, something in me suddenly understood that he was the most breathtaking thing I’d ever laid eyes on.
From that moment on I could barely focus on anything other than the object of my obsession. If I saw him in a certain part of the school at a certain time, I’d make a note and be sure to engineer a way to be at that same place at the same time the following week.
I was so dazzled and dazed by his appearance that I found I couldn’t retain or summon his image. It would drive me mad. I’d linger in the PE corridor where some of the school photos were pinned up, because he appeared in one of them. I’d pretend I was just passing through, lest anyone thought I was staring.
I hated going to school, but suddenly I hated going home each night even more. The weekends, formerly two days of glorious freedom, now conspired to bring time to an aching halt. Holidays were interminable, denying me those precious glimpses.
At home I thought of nothing and no one else, though, as besotted as I was, when I lay in bed at night, I didn’t sexualise him, beyond a kiss. I wanted him in my arms, but this wasn’t cheap or sordid, this was a love above any other, a coupling that rendered all others ersatz and inconsequential.
I knew a few people who seemed to know him, but I barely spoke to him myself. I assume he knew my name, though I can’t be sure. I doubt I occupied a moment of his thoughts, but he was perennially in mine and I couldn’t tell a soul (and certainly not the boy himself).
I left Haberdashers’ after my GCSEs. I explained to everyone that I didn’t like the teachers there, didn’t like the other boys, wasn’t going to get into Oxford or Cambridge anyway, so I might as well go somewhere else and take the A levels I wanted to take, like Theatre Studies and Media Studies, rather than the more academic ones I’d be obliged to take at Habs.
All of this was true, but I also knew in my heart that I simply couldn’t continue in that environment. It was too intense for me, too painful. I was just too far away from what I needed, and from what so many of my classmates appeared to have. I had accepted that I would probably never have a boyfriend, never know real love, but being tormented on a daily basis by this almost ghostly apparition of unattainable beauty was making me feel more and more helpless, more dejected.
Weald College in Harrow. The autumn of 1990. A new start.
Thoughts of my crush remained; yes, they weren’t going anywhere fast, the desire always there. We had mutual friends. I would see him around. I would buzz, I would jolt, I might even dare to talk to him for a few seconds, before withdrawing to comprehend, digest, assess. A hit and run. It would be a few years before the intense desire would fade, before I could say, hand on broken heart, that it no longer pained me to think about him.
At college I was able to express myself in ways that hadn’t been available to me in the stuffy environment of my private school. The tutors at college dispensed with formality. No one called me Lucas. No one bellowed. They taught, but also listened. We appeared to connect on a more equal footing.
My lovely drama teacher Janet Harrison inspired the class daily and offered an alternative, more broadminded response to the world. One day she was discussing the virtues of a performance given by Derek Jacobi.
‘He’s gay, you know,’ I said.
‘Yes. Isn’t it glorious?’ she replied – the first time I had ever heard anyone express such a view.
Another episode sticks in the mind and no one comes out of it very well.
Our student union had invited a gay activist to speak at the college. Attendance at the talk was optional and, short of the whole college turning up, I doubt I would have gone along, despite being the target audience, as I would have presumed – correctly, I would say, this being Harrow in 1990 – that anyone’s presence there would have been used as evidence that they were gay themselves.
But as soon as the posters and leaflets started appearing on campus, they were being rounded up by Harry, an indecently handsome, confident student in the year above me.
Harry was one of those guys who may have only been a year or two older than me, but who had the appearance and authority of someone ten or twenty years older. You know those guys? There’s always a few of them knocking about. Taller, broader, smarter, sportier; hair longer and more flickier. We were still boys long after they became men. Like Kiefer Sutherland in Stand by Me. Only seventeen when he played the role, apparently, but he still scares the shit out of me today.
Incidentally, while we’re talking about Stand by Me, watching that film shortly after it came out on video I found myself open-mouthed at the sight of River Phoenix. The night after I watched it, I had my first ever wet dream.
By the way I was thirteen and he was about fifteen or sixteen, so don’t get all busy.
Anyway, Harry was a lad. The girls loved him. The blokes wanted to be him. In my first term at college I grew excited
because Harry and his pals announced they were going to direct a production of The Rocky Horror Show. Harry had tipped me the wink that there’d probably be a part in it for me. Harry held auditions but the show never happened. He later admitted that he’d only done it to meet the new girls. We all thought this was funny. Like I say, Harry was a lad.
And Harry had decided that we weren’t going to have a gay speaker at Weald College – not if he had anything to do with it. During the morning break he took the pile of posters and leaflets he’d collected, marched to the field by the canteen and dumped them in a large wire bin. He then asked for a light.
By now a twenty-a-day man, I proudly pulled out my prize bronze Zippo lighter and handed it to him. He set fire to the contents of the bin.
The talk was cancelled.
I participated in the ceremonial burning because I was sure that if people saw me there, then no one would think I was gay. I handed Harry the lighter because I fancied the pants off him.
I don’t think anyone at college knew I fancied Harry, but I was known for a few other things – for doing Chris Eubank impressions, for boasting insufferably about my acting prowess and for my obsession with Queen.
When Freddie Mercury died, my mum couldn’t understand why I was inconsolable.
‘But he was a homosexual,’ she said, not unsympathetic but mystified that I should even be surprised at the occasion – and the inevitability – of his passing.
The press pored over every detail of his life and death for days. I remember an Evening Standard editorial, not twenty-four hours after he had gone, which cited his decadence and debauchery as the reasons for his demise. Cause and effect. Crime and punishment.
I was beside myself with grief and grew deeply depressed. What hope was there for me? I could spend my days alone, celibate, loveless – or come out, be shunned, catch the plague, die.