The truth about the Hogmanay kiss

Twenty-five years ago, my life changed for ever.

Photo by Chris Flexen on Unsplash

In November 2013, my partner had a serious, and lengthy, operation that saved his life. He spent the following weeks recovering, which mostly involved sleeping. That New Year’s Eve would be the first in a long while that I hadn’t spent out out. I didn't mind, really; it was a relief, in a way, to check out of the anxiety of making plans, shivering on kerbs waiting for taxis, of the impending hangover. In the early evening, I watched my boyfriend sleep soundly on his sofa and I sat in his black armchair.

In the fairly sedate Chiswick street where my boyfriend lived, I could hear people beginning to leave their houses to head to meet friends, or the first rumblings of New Year parties starting up in delightful kitchen extensions, but inside his flat, it was utterly quiet, save for his gentle sighing as he slept and halting, light clunking rhythm of the central heating. I felt strangely optimistic and wistful and I started thinking of New Years past. Some of them had been endurance tests, days-long benders, stomach hurting from laughing. There had been the odd drama, too. But one had been seismic. It had happened a whole sixteen years earlier, I’d never really told many people about it and, surprisingly maybe, never written it down. I thought it was too personal, that I might give too much of myself away (I was writing anonymously at the time) and that it was too late, the moment had gone. But New Year’s Eve is essentially an annual funeral for your memories; long-gone moments become timeless and demand your attention again.

As uncomfortable as I am with nostalgia, and certainly reluctant to discuss this particular event in person, I took myself back to that New Year in 1997 – a Hogmanay, in fact, as it happened in Scotland. It sounds strange, maybe, but regressing sixteen years to a time that felt like it belonged to somebody else was the perfect escapism from what had been a grim year. Without stopping even to get up and go the loo or refill my glass, I tapped away as gently as possible on my laptop – a struggle, I am a clattering typist – trembling, my heart racing, and every nerve-end tingling as I wrote. And when it was written, I read it back just once, found an old rights-free image on Flickr to illustrate it, and hit publish, tweeting it out and breathing a sigh of relief to have finally put it into words.

The night that changed everything. The night of my first gay kiss.

And here it is again.

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Have you ever been to Edinburgh for New Year? You really should. Edinburgh is beautiful.

The year I go to Edinburgh’s annual street party, usually avoided by the locals, is 1997. I’m 22. I’ve just broken up with my girlfriend. Yes, girlfriend. We weren’t together very long and my tears had dried before we'd even got to the second syllable of goodbye.

My friend and I don’t have tickets for the street party, but we are not-very-reliably informed it is the ‘place to go’, so we buy lots of beer and make sure we’re within the boundaries before they’re roped off for ticketholders. It is ludicrously easy. But now it’s 7.30pm, it’s freezing and I’m going to be here for at least five hours.

I light a cigarette in the absence of absolutely anything else to do (this is a very long time ago) and as I take a drag, a group of people my age appear before me, one guy and two girls. They are what my grandmother would call ‘merry’. They ask for a light and we chat for a while.

My friend is very sociable and boisterous, so we soon develop a kind of camaraderie. The guy is warm and friendly and introduces himself as Alex. I'm sorry, girls, but your names escape me all these years later. We get chatting to another group of guys and soon we have a little posse all of our own, swaying as the beers take hold, lighting each other’s cigarettes and talking utter rubbish – each of us pretending it isn’t absolutely freezing. Everybody laughs at all my jokes, even the ones that aren't funny. Alex laughs longest and loudest of everyone.

The hours crawl by and eventually we resort to the game you can only comfortably play with strangers – Truth or Dare. Various dull revelations are uncovered during the first couple of rounds: weirdest place you’ve had sex, bizarre celebrity crushes etc. One of the guys we’ve met, who is freezing his balls off in a kilt, asks Alex if he is gay. Alex says he is, and looks straight at me.

Something happens to me that I don’t quite understand. I want to back away from them all, to run. I’m not homophobic – or at least I don’t think I am – but I don’t want that question to come my way. I shuffle from foot to foot and feign blowing into my hands to keep them warm. They are not cold – my gloves are thicker than axminster. I feel nervous and excited. And yet I drip with dread.

The game continues. A dare. One of the girls, who’s been feeling my backside on and off for about half an hour with absolutely zero response from me, dares the man in the kilt to kiss Alex for ten seconds. My stomach churns; I feel sick. Mr Kilt reluctantly accepts this challenge. We all watch and cheer.
I play along and exclaim ‘Urrrrgh’ loudly as they kiss, noticing that Alex tries to slip the other guy his tongue. And just as he does, for the last second, he looks me right in the eye.

Then, it’s my turn to be asked. I pick ‘truth’ – I don’t want to be dared to do the same.
The other girl tries to focus on me and asks my question: ‘Do you fancy Alex?’
I try not to glare back. I think what my reaction should be. I pull what I think is my best puzzled grimace. ‘Me? No, no.’ I laugh nervously. And then I look at Alex and pat his shoulder with a pathetic ‘matey’ stroke.
‘Sorry, man. You’re just not my type. Wrong sex and all that.’ Has there ever been a #NoHomo response that didn't sound so horrifyingly awkward and, worst of all, incriminating?
Alex smiles back at me without even a hint of snide. ‘Haha, no problem!’
And then it is over. For the moment.

The game fizzles out once everybody else has snogged each other – it’s fairly obvious the man in the kilt will be going home with almost every female within a 10-mile radius – and I drain my can of beer and excuse myself to go to the loo. I’m glad to be away from them, but I’m not alone for long. I hear my name being called and turn to see Alex bounding up behind me.
‘I need the loo too so thought I’d chum you along,’ he says.
My stomach lurches and I start to feel light-headed. He chats to me as we queue for a portable loo but I feel awkward and can’t really process what he’s saying. Suddenly, he produces a cigarette for me and lights it. I look at him.
‘I thought you didn’t have a light?’
He looks from my face to the lighter and back again. Busted. ‘Ah.’ If his cheeks weren’t already rosy from the cold, he’d blush. ‘That was just a ruse.
‘A ruse?’
‘Yeah, to get to talk to you.’
‘What? One of the girls wanted to talk to me?’
‘No,’ says Alex patiently, gently. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’
‘Oh, why?’ I’m not being deliberately stupid, I promise. I am 22, remember.
He takes a really long drag of his cigarette. ‘I thought you and your friend were together, a couple,’ he chuckles. ‘I just wanted to check.’
’Why?’
‘Because…’ he begins, but then a loo becomes free in front of us and a man further back in the queue tells me to ‘get a fucking move on, pal’, so I leap into it and have a very shaky, anxious piss.

When I come back out, there’s no sign of Alex, so I assume he has gone back to the group. I then feel a hand on my shoulder. It’s him.
‘I want to talk to you,’ he says, gulping.
‘What about?’
’You.’ His eyes desperately search mine. ‘You’re… you're gay, aren’t you? I mean–’ He scratches his head. ‘I hope you are. Are you?’
I pull my mouth in tight and attempt to shrug. ‘No, I’m not.’
Alex leans in closer. ‘Are you sure?’
I look around to see if anybody from the group is near us. They’re miles away, but I have to make sure. I run my hands over my face and try to think.
Finally, I pull Alex away farther down the street.
‘What are you doing?’ He smiles drunkenly. I don’t reply. I don’t know what to say. We just keep moving.

We end up on a narrow, dark street, free of Hogmanay drunks. There is an even smaller close just off to the right, and we scoot down it. It is drizzling. There is just one streetlight, glowing bright orange but far from warming. There is a metal fire escape staircase. It’s almost like I know I will never forget this.
Alex clears his throat. ‘I want to kiss you. But I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do.’
My mind explodes over and over again. A supernova of confusion, curiosity and fear. I have been cautious all my life, risk-averse. Tonight, something feels different.

I put my hand round Alex's waist and pull him to me. I feel the damp chill of the fire escape pressing into my back. I am surprised by the feel of his stubble and the forcefulness of his mouth. Somewhere, on another planet, a crowd starts to count backward from ten. Everything melts away.

When we break apart, it is 1998. And nothing will ever be the same again.

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The Hogmanay Kiss was certainly one of my most popular posts on The Guyliner, and while it’s not the most elegant or beautiful or powerful thing I’ve ever written, it’s one of my favourites. I even adapted it into a key scene for my main character Jake in my second novel The Magnificent Sons – authors do this all the time, mining their own lives to give their characters formative experiences, although sometimes truth is far too strange for fiction. Rewriting it for Jake felt like I was living it again, for the first time. It was liberating too – sometimes, we write the things we cannot say.

We talk about things being life-changing all the time, don’t we? It’s a term so loaded with emotion and grandeur that there are guidelines about when you can use it when it comes to cash prizes. I’d experienced plenty of things that have deeply affected me, for better or worse, but that night was, I think, was my first truly life-changing event. I became a different person in the space of a few minutes; I’d dared to wonder. As Joan Didion once wrote, ‘One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.’

Without wanting to spoil the optimistic ending, there were a couple more years of self-editing, doubt, and unhappiness to come. I kept the incident mainly to myself in the hope it was just an aberration and I could still live a ‘normal’ life, which at the time seemed like the easier option until… it wasn't, and I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I did eventually come out as gay, of course – in Edinburgh, funnily enough, where I lived by then. Fate.

But that night, twenty-five long years ago, was the first checkpoint on the path to being myself. How wonderful and amazing it is to be able to look back on it now and know it was all worth it.

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This was an unscheduled edition of The truth about everything* – the next one will be the very first Word c0unt – where I pick out a column from a national newspaper or magazine and have a closer look at it, discuss what it’s saying. Not in a horrible way. Just… in a way. Up first? Who else, but cosy column king Adrian Chiles. You don’t want to miss that one, do you? No.