Shunned, sedated and battered just for being gay – why I celebrate Pride Month

They say the first cut is the deepest. But it was that final kick in the face that proved so lastingly detrimental to my adolescent good looks. It was 1979 and I’d been flung out of the house after I broke down and told my mother I was gay.

This followed an emergency home visit by our family doctor, who had been asked to work out just why this jobless, friendless and largely lifeless boy of 20 was constantly in tears.

He diagnosed depression and prescribed such heavy tranquillisers I could barely think straight.

The truth is you didn’t have to be Hippocrates to know that thinking straight was the fundamental problem – because thinking and acting straight was what powered mainstream society.

Forty-three years later, it still is, and that’s what I’m focused on this Pride Month.

Back in 1979 no one ever asked what was wrong. Because they couldn’t face the truth of what had happened to me in London the previous year, a time that changed everything.

London was where I discovered myself and started looking outwards to the person I was always meant to be.

London was a playground for misfits like me, a liberal environment where I found my tribe and realised that being on the outside was OK.

Now, at the age of 62, I know that being on the outside isn’t just a lifestyle choice – it’s a necessity.

This is a long way away from the naive boy who had left Dundee to find fame and fortune, and instead encountered initial failure.

Returning to Scotland in 1979 after the end of my first real relationship, I quickly missed the freedom of life in London. And I missed my fellow freaks there. London was open and free, with a wealth of possibilities available to anyone who was happy to seize them.

In stark contrast, Dundee seemed brutal, oppressive and intolerant.

This was a city operating on the adage ‘my way, or the highway’. And I was forced into taking the highway.

In truth I liked the speed of travel the further I got from the harsh reality of life on benefits in Dundee.

Now back home, I spent days locked in my room playing a Pretenders song called Lovers of Today. I’d repeat the track over and over until I fell asleep to the sound of Chrissie Hynde singing my personal lullaby to loneliness.

Even now I can’t listen to that song

without remembering how alienated I felt. I’d like to believe it’s impossible for someone to feel quite that isolated and unloved. But I know that’s not true.

Because I was that lonely, frightened boy trapped in an environment where barbarism began just outside my bedroom door.

It felt like there was no place for me in the world. And practically that meant there was no place for me in Dundee.

Stupefied by tranquillisers that would silence a pack of rabid dogs, something had to give.

What collapsed was family life as I knew it.

Mum told me I could no longer live at home as there was a risk my sister would be victimised at school because of my sexuality.

Days later I found myself homeless at a time when I most needed stability and love.

I couldn’t think of anywhere to go. So I went to Edinburgh and turned up on the

doorstep of a woman called Wendy, a nurse I’d met at a gay club. She took me in and let me sleep on a mattress on her floor.

One night, Wendy took me to a pub and she got chatted up by a gang of lads.

When we left the lads realised Wendy was coming home with little gay me.

So they chased me through the dark streets of Edinburgh until I ran into a cul de sac and was punched and kicked so relentlessly I thought I might die.

Now, 43 years later, my jawline is still uneven from where they booted and battered me until they got bored and left me lying bloodied on the street.

This is still the reality for many people who pay the price for being themselves.

At the end of 2021, figures showed hate crimes against LGBTQ people had soared to their highest level since the pandemic began.

Don’t be fooled that we live in a liberal society just because LGBTQ people at last have some voice.

We still live in an increasingly reactionary time when even our prime minister called gay men “tank-topped b ***** s”.

June is LGBTQ Pride Month, a time when we all supposedly come together to celebrate our differences and embrace our commonality, and 2022 is the 50th year we have done so.

When Pride started LGBTQ people faced widespread discrimination, even in law.

Much has changed. But there is still so much to do to ensure stories like my own aren’t the norm.

Pride mustn’t come before a fall.

Much has changed. But there is still so much to do...

STREET PARTY: Enjoying the Dundee Pride March in 2019, but despite advances we still live in an increasingly reactionary time.