IDENTITY CRISIS....

They criticize the way I talk,
and laugh about the way I walk,
Tell me if you can 
What makes a man a man?

I don't believe I ever had much of a chance to be anything but gay.


Growing up in a house with 2 older sisters.  A mother who idolized gay men and abhorred any form of roughness or crudeness, and this at a time when Aussie culture was all about being rough and crude.  Beer drinking, barbies and sheilas! 

  A father who was hardly there and when he was was either angry, demanding or totally absorbed in one of his many hobbies.  These were actually obsessions which, thankfully took up most of his time, but which also took up any spare money so we were always the poor kids in the neighbourhood.

While our friends had swimming pools, pushbikes, skateboards and a variety of games we had none of these, or very few.  Meals were plain  and simple - grilled lamb chops, boiled potatoes and carrots most nights of the week.  Meanwhile there was always a good supply of expensive cheeses and salamis for my father. Even milk was rationed to ensure there was milk left for dad's nightly coffee and for his morning thermos.

Mum wasn't the best cook and our favourite meals were always the very few times my father cooked.
I soon developed a passion for cooking and once mum started working full time in a shop and we had some extra money she was happy to let me try recipes and cook the weekend meals.  By the time I reached high school I was cooking at least 3 or four times a week.


In year 5 of primary school where for the first time since year 1, I had another teacher who didn't like me.  From day one he singled me out and I retaliated.  'Your not like your sisters are you boy?' was the question he shot me on the very first day of class. 'No sir', said I, 'they're girls!'  This caused a great laugh from my classmates but ensured that the rest of my year was miserable.  The following year after his report card to me which ended with his personal comment 'is his own worst enemy' I was downgraded to the lower class. Much to the horror of my mother as I would now be with the rough, dumb boys and naturally was met with a sound belting from my father.

It was also in Year 5 that I realized other boys saw me as different.  This didn't happen at school but on my first trip away from home.  My mother booked me into a two week 'christian youth camp'. In some remote bushland retreat near the beach.  It was great fun and we did all the things you do at camp - sing a longs, bush hikes, games, canoeing and even water skiing.

However from day one the other boys in my cabin, most of whom were country boys nicknamed me sissy.  I didn't know if this was because I was small and a pretty looking boy (snow blonde hair and bright blue eyes) or because I acted like a girl.  They weren't particularly nasty about it but that was my name for the entire two weeks.

It didn't help either when one morning, early on in the holiday, I woke up to find all the other boys laughing at me.  I slept on the top bunk and suddenly I realized that I am now on the bottom bunk with another boy and only in my underwear.  I definitely had gone to bed wearing pyjamas?!

When our cabin leader had gotten the other boys up and out to breakfast he explained to me that I had fallen from the bunk during the night and he had put me on the bottom bunk in case I rolled off again. I didn't remember a thing and had probably knocked my self out when I fell.
He was a young and, as we all thought, cool guy in his early 20's.  He told me to switch the sheets from my bunk and sleep on the bottom bunk and then went to the communal breakfast saying he would come back and check on me.

Later, when all the other kids were off on their morning activity he returned.  I didn't think anything odd when he locked the cabin door behind him/  He took my temperature, felt my head and checked to see if there was any bleeding.  Then he asked me to pull my pyjama top up so he could check for bruising.....eventually his hands wandered down to my pyjama bottoms and then slipped inside.  It was the first time a man had touched me this way.  Lots of boys had but never a grown man.  He silently gave me a blow job while he beat off.

It was after this that I realised that I enjoyed having sex with men and that I was gay. For years I had been mucking around with other boys, I'd regularly been penetrated by my older neighbour, but just thought that was normal.  But at camp the secretive way I was abused by an older man made me realize not only that I enjoyed sex with men but that it wasn't the proper thing to do.  This was to  be the beginning of many experiences with older men.