About my queer period.

I was being a bit roguish (for dramatic purposes) when I suggested to my friend Peter in the sixth-form coffee-bar that I hated all my family. I don’t really mind the women in it. This bias officially dawned on me towards the end of my second bedridden winter. I concluded that it was merely rather trustingly Godfrey Winn of me, nothing more sinister. My age? Fourteen.

However, one afternoon, in a doped half-state, I read a chunky paperback on Sigmund Freud.

I spent the night in a state of mild, run-of-the-mill delirium, sweating quietly as my mind wobbled and raced and swerved: and with morning, came the unshakable, indeed serene, conviction that I was a homosexual. It all added up: I had had, it was true, one queer experience (a smegmatic handful of queer experience in my primary-school cricket pavilion); I was a soprano, a first soprano, often taking descant, in the choir; I was as yet a virgin, and had to lie my unpimpled head off to my friends about how I wanked as often, and with as much piston-wristed savagery, as they said they did. Clearly, the minute I was off my arse I’d be getting it on the bus to Oxford and hawking it there to the friendly undergraduates at Magdalen. In puzzled preparation I read the collected works of Oscar Wilde, Gerald Manley Hopkins, A.E. Housman, and (for what little it was worth) E.M. Forster.

Next, exploring my powerhouse elder brother’s desk I came across a body-building mag, called Tensio-Dynamism or something, one of the ones that explains to you how to kick the shit out of anyone who bugs you at the seaside. Resignedly I went back to my room, curled up in bed with it, started turning the pages, waiting equably for an erection. No way. Idiot faces glaring in pinhead conceit, ghastly, all-out-of-control tenements of beef-cake. Never felt less sexy in my life: it beat me how females could fancy them. These gentlemen were, I realized, unrepresentative – but even so.