My late dad was the hardest nightclub bouncer in a tough working-class area in Medway, Kent. He was a bodybuilder and terrifyingly quiet; you never quite knew what was going through his head.
My underage sixth-form mates knew he would refuse them entry if they tried to get into the sprawling, sticky floored and aggressively heterosexual nightclub where he worked the door with a formidable scowl. Luckily, I would sooner pour petrol in my eyes than set foot inside. He told me he broke the arms of any drunken louts giving him trouble. I believed him.
Everyone was a bit scared of him. Everyone except me. I had Dad wrapped around my little-princess finger. My sister and I lived with Dad after he and Mum divorced, and while my younger sister was his real “princess”, in his eyes I was a golden boy: a straight-A student, obedient and respectful. I could do no wrong. Until I discovered boys.
My golden status slipped rapidly then. Dad was sort of OK with me being gay, but never fully comfortable. I kind of understood the discomfort. I had also grown up in the homophobic society in which we had both tried to make our way as men.
It is now 10 years since same-sex marriage became legal in Great Britain. Dad died suddenly around the same time. In the decade since those two seismic events in my life, the world, the UK and my little part of Kent have all changed.
Same-sex marriage has transformed the way everyday Britons view gay people like me. First off, we’re more visible: we’re in soap plotlines, posing for pictures outside town hall register offices and in the same celebrity nuptials pages of glossy magazines that straight people have always featured in. But the change in the law also sent a stereotype-smashing message: gay men like me can be in long-term committed relationships. It needn’t be a lonely life lived in the shadows. We can be happy. And we’re equal to straight people, for better or worse.
Those are powerful messages, filtered down to real lives and softening society’s views. They are views Dad never absorbed. The images he saw were of men who were shunned, ashamed or dying of Aids. Would he have become more comfortable with my homosexuality as society’s attitudes have become more accepting?
In the early 2000s, the Gay Times – which I used to buy from my local newsagent and smuggle out hidden under a Take a Break – ranked Medway in its top 10 worst places to live as gay. Last year, I attended my first Medway Pride march with Mum and my sister. A giant rainbow flag was draped over Rochester’s Norman castle, which was the backdrop landmark to my early life. I honestly thought I’d never see the day.
Aged 17, after discovering boys, I put Dad through hell. Closeted and dangerously in love, I mischievously snuck my first boyfriend home, stupidly convincing him that Dad, who left for work early, would never know. Dad’s sixth sense made him come into my room the next morning, seeing my boyfriend and I snuggled under a single Liverpool FC duvet (what a joke: I hated football!) That’s how Dad discovered I was gay.
He hit the roof, banned my boyfriend from the house, then took up smoking again, two years after giving up. The respectful son was gone the minute another boy paid me attention, so I started frequenting our new local gay bar. I would demand that Dad pick me up, as his bouncer shift finished at 3am – the exact same time the gay bar closed. Dad would never drive to the door. People might see him! And think he was gay! I would have to drunkenly stumble around the corner, tipsy on pineapple Bacardi Breezers, annoying him all the way home.
Dad would buy my subsequent boyfriends the same Christmas present he bought my sister’s boyfriends. He treated us equally. But he tried banning me from telling my nan, his mum. “She’ll have a heart attack!” he protested. She didn’t; it simply made Nan and I closer. But he refused my request to accompany me for moral support the day I told her. It hurt.
The day I met his new girlfriend, he asked that I didn’t “talk about your lifestyle stuff”. She asked how my weekend was. “Amazing. I went to Gay Pride in London, because I am gay!” I said, looking Dad square in the eyes. He may have been tough. But so was I. I had to be – a survival technique in a society that was unequal and unfriendly to men with my “lifestyle choice”.
Last year, my best schoolmate got married. Turns out we were both gay – and both too scared to admit it to each other till years later. Watching his parents attend his same-sex wedding, a thought came to me. Would my dad in 2024 have set foot inside that same gay bar he refused to drive to the door of, and had a pint with me? I’ll never know. But given how much Britain has changed in the last decade, I’d really like to think so.
This article was amended on 3 April 2024 to clarify that the writer first attended the Medway Pride parade in 2023 although the inaugural parade was in 2022.
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