Growing Up Gay, with BBC Journalist Simon O’Leary
Reporting on human stories from the Other perspective
The best way to get somebody to do something is by telling them they can’t. Instruct a five-year-old to have only two of those chocolate chunk cookies on the table and you can be sure, the instant you leave the room to answer the door, the entire packet will have been devoured. Tell your flatmate they can’t get too drunk as you both have an early bus in the morning, and you’ll most likely find them slamming back vodka shots in the kitchen at 2 am.
There is a charming certainty of disobedience should you ever tell somebody they can’t do something. This is why I have always found homophobia to be one of the most oddly counterintuitive social practices. The more one is told that what they are is wrong — that their sexual orientation is a choice, and an unwise one at that — the more assuredly they will strive to prove themselves as no lesser than anybody else.
Rather as Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara decrees “I’ll never be hungry again!” in the face of starvation and destitution, it is often fear of something which compels one to be free of it. Such was the case for Irish journalist Simon O’Leary, whose adolescence was so terrorised by schoolyard homophobia that he committed to owning his queer identity in adulthood…
