The truth about conforming

Leave those kids alone.

This doll would rather be on a dinosaur’s back. [Photo by Jorge Garcia Rodriguez on Unsplash]

When we’re very young, our most accessible tools of self-expression – clothes, hair, behaviour – are controlled by someone else. Parents are our moral guides, school rules and uniforms restrain us. All that grey wool, regulation hair-length and the treatment of individuality as insubordination – it’s no wonder teenagers rebel with purple hair and a septum piercing the first opportunity they get. Being yourself is even harder when you’ve no idea who you should be, or where you fit in.

The other night, I was out with my boyfriend and another gay man around our age, and we got to talking, unexpectedly, about being children and the various attempts to thwart our creativity and self-expression over the years – sometimes even by people meant to care for and protect us. I won’t betray the confidences of either of the other men, but what was so interesting about it was how different we are but the similarities between our experiences. We remembered being bewildered by how adults reacted to things we said, and did, and how it made us mistrust our instincts.

Play, a hugely important part of a child’s development, was watched over, and regulated. I realised, as teachers repeatedly marched me out of the Wendy house or liberated dolls from my pudgy, clammy grip, that, to them, I was malfunctioning. Toy trucks left me unmoved, footballs sailed over my head – I was the kind of little boy who had footballs kicked at me, not to me. But it didn't stop adults trying to force these toys into my hand. Drills. Robots. What were then deemed acceptable boys’ toys – it didn't matter whether I was interested in them or not, so long as I gave the outward appearance of conforming. I sometimes wonder who this performance was for, who benefitted? Certainly not me.

Once I got better at reading or writing, I retreated into words, where nobody could get me. Instead of toys at Christmas, I requested a desk, paper, books. I played at being a teacher, to an audience of none. Even then, I couldn’t win. Reading was encouraged but if I always had my nose in a book it was regarded as antisocial, and had me painted as a loner. My innate hatred for sports was labelled abnormal, a problem with myself I had to fix rather than there being any understanding that I simply wasn’t into it. Thank goodness for Lego – back then, largely gender neutral and an opportunity to act out the stories that lived inside my head and still be seen as fitting in.

When it came to looking to the future, it was clear there would be no escape. I went to my careers teacher and said I wanted to be a writer. I knew I wanted to work in the arts in some way. Nothing else made sense to me. My head was so full of words and stories and different faces that didn't belong to me, and they had nowhere to go save for the odd English lesson in creative writing or what I think they now call PSHE, where we might be asked to write a short story. And when I did write them, the teachers sometimes accused me of plagiarising from elsewhere, confused that a teenager’s imagination could be so vivid and brutal (this is before Tumblr existed). Anyway, the careers teacher laughed and reminded who I was and where I was from, and sent me away to rework my ambitions.

All three of us agreed that any tiny sign of being seen as too feminine or a little gay was treated as if the devil was bidding at an auction for our souls and that it wasn’t just Mrs Thatcher banging on about ‘the inalienable right to be gay’ and Clause 28 that made the environment hostile. Homophobia wasn’t just learned off the news. It was ingrained, encouraged, and enforced with relentless brutality. Very often, the call was coming from inside the house. We asked ourselves, all these years later, who we might have been, how life might have played out for those little versions of us, if that terror of queerness hadn’t infiltrated every corner of our existence.

When you’re picked on for not conforming, you think the answer is to shrink away. You self-edit, question yourself. There are so many questions, and no manual. Why do I, aged twelve, walk like I’m on a catwalk and the world is my front-row? Why’s my voice much higher than the other boys? Why do I have a limitless supply of eviscerating clapbacks available at the drop of an insect yet my bullies can barely deliver a limerick? Who made me like this? If you cut me open, will glitter pour from my rainbow veins? And the saddest question of all: how do I make it stop? Looking back, I see I was lucky to be different but in the moment, with no escape route except your own imagination, it’s tough.

I’ve never believed in revenge; ‘showing the haters’ is a hollow motivator. Thrive for yourself. Eventually I stopped torturing myself and considered instead why it was important for them to keep me down. What were they so scared of? Clause 28 is long gone but there are still children out there whose light is being dimmed by someone who thinks they know what’s best for them. They deserve better. It may be a slightly different battle, but the enemies are simply the old ones, reanimated, and their weapons are exactly the same. You may think you are protecting a child from the world, but you are actually reinforcing their fear that they have no place in it.

Eventually I took control of my voice, my creativity, my sense of being. Not everyone is so lucky: it took me a long time, way into my adulthood. Confidence can’t appear overnight – it needs coaxing out. The first step on the road to self-acceptance is recognising who’s trying to run you off it, before speeding off and luxuriating in the distance between you. You can’t control them, but you mustn't let them control you. (And it should be noted that despite all those attempts to control the three of us as children, the result was the same: it did not work, we are grown up, and gay.) I’m driven by self-improvement and curiosity, doing the things I’ve always wanted, or things I never thought I could do, be it a novel or five, or handstands – still working on the latter. I turned my experiences into creative energy. My voice was shaped from the humour I wore as armour, and motivated by the memory of that boy who thought he’d have to hide for ever. This is why I’m so open in the things I write and, I assume, why people want to read me.

I’m always moving forward, but I never forget.

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