An only life can take so long to climb
clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never.
Life before marriage
My life started at a bad time in history. A quarter of the world was ruled by Hitler and Stalin. When I was born, in the suburbs of London on 17 January 1941, Britain was at war, and some of my earliest memories are of sheltering during air raids. Just before the war started, my grandfather, who lived two doors down the road from my parents, had his cellar reinforced to act as a shelter. When the air raid warning sirens sounded, my mother took me and my baby brother along to grandpa's house, and during night raids we all slept on camp beds in the cellar. Quite an exciting experience for a small child, and of course I was too young to have any sense of danger. One time there was an extra loud explosion, and when the all clear siren sounded we came up from the cellar to find that the house next door to grandpa's had been completely demolished by a direct hit.
My father was serving in the army during the war, and was not discharged until a year after it finished, so I did not know him at all until the age of five. When he did come home, I never felt quite at ease with him. He was a good father, and looked after us well, but my brother was always closer to him than I was. I always felt much closer to my mother. Dad died in 1987, and Mum in 1989. I never did feel that I had really got to know him well.
Some people say that boys who don't have a good relationship with their fathers are more likely to grow up gay. On the other hand, I read recently that someone claims to be able to tell gay men from straight by their thumb prints (apparently straight men have many more lines on the right thumb than on the left, whereas gay men and women have only a few more), which would reinforce the theory that homosexuality is genetic, rather than something caused by upbringing. So probably even if I had been closer to my father I would still have been gay. Personally, I think that something as complex and varied as homosexuality cannot be traced to a single cause, and that it has both genetic and environmental components.
Whatever the cause, I knew by about the age of 13 that I was attracted to boys rather than to girls. By then I was in an all boys high school (at that time most schools in England were single sex). But I wouldn't have been able to put a name to this attraction, or to know that was such a thing as a homosexual orientation. Kids then were much more innocent (and ignorant) than they are now, and for that matter so were adults, and this naivety extended to our knowledge (or lack of it) about sex. At school there was a lot of talking and joking about sex, of course, and occasional rumours about sex acts between boys. Some of the rumours may even have been true. They never involved me, sad to say: I was a shy and studious child who would never have dreamt of such activity. Correction: I did dream about it, more and more, but I would never have imagined putting it into practice. There was no concept of gayness as an acceptable way of life. In fact, until 1967, homosexuality was completely illegal in Britain. From time to time there were scandalous stories in the papers about some prominent figure who had been arrested or imprisoned for what was regarded as a criminal perversion. There were scarcely any role models for young gays, with the notable exception of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears (see Music). But since it was a single sex school, there were plenty of crushes between boys. These were considered fairly normal, and my friends (but not the teachers) all had a relaxed attitude to them. Perhaps that is why I have never felt at all guilty about being gay, and I have never been conscious of any of the 'internalised homophobia' that some gay men suffer from.
Everyone said that emotional attachments between boys were just an adolescent phase that we would grow out of. I had no reason to doubt this, except that there was no sign of it happening in my case. As my friends started going out with girls, I found that my fantasies were always firmly centred on other boys. But by the time I reached the sixth form [American translation: grades 11 and 12], I had acquired a girlfriend, sort of. The way it happened was that a good friend of mine had a girlfriend who wanted a date for her best friend Diana. So we started going out as a foursome, and occasionally Diana and I went out on our own. But there was a tacit agreement between us that this was a platonic friendship. As far as I remember we never even held hands, certainly we never kissed. But a pattern was set: I had a female partner, for events like the sixth form dance, but secretly I always fancied boys. When I went to college, I stopped going out with Diana, and I soon lost touch with her completely.
I was always a brainy kid, so it was no surprise when I won a major scholarship to Cambridge University. Academically, my years there could hardly have been more successful. I got just about the best mathematical education available anywhere in the world, and went on to do a PhD. But socially I was not happy at Cambridge, and to explain why, I must tell you something that I would rather keep quiet about, and find embarrassing to look back on now.
The fact is, I was very religious as a teenager. When I first went to high school, I made friends with a couple of boys who invited me along to the boys' bible class that they went to. So I went along to this, and also to their summer camp each year. In some ways, I gained a lot from this. I learned to be more sociable, to join in team activities and to speak in public, and I made some good friends. The only snag was the religious side, which I fell for in a big way. It was a very evangelical organisation, with a big emphasis on conversion, witnessing for Christ and so on. I believed all of it. But there were a few things about it that I didn't quite go along with. For instance, they used to warn us against 'sins of impurity'. But I figured that God wouldn't have made masturbation so enjoyable if it was really wrong. I suppose there were other things that the more hard-line members of the church disapproved of, that I thought were not wrong for me, like drinking alcohol. My parents had brought me up to enjoy a glass of wine with dinner, and I certainly wasn't going to give that up. Then there was a complicated tariff of things that you were and were not allowed to do on a Sunday, which I took with a pinch of salt. But by and large I went along with all the church's teachings.
So while I was at college I was a member of the Christian Union, and that is where I made most of my friends. I didn't consciously realise it, but this brought a lot of tension into my life, chiefly because of the emphasis in the CU on evangelism and the pressure to encourage other students to become Christians. Although at the time I felt that Christianity was right for me, I did not like the idea of inflicting it on other people. Also, I began to notice that religion did not seem to make people better, as it is supposed to do. In fact, it became more and more obvious to me that my nonchristian friends were much more mature, caring and generally good than the christian ones.
That is why my undergraduate years were not happy, and in fact were pretty much wasted from a social point of view. And they were completely empty of any sexual experiences. No, not quite: there was just one occasion when I had to help a guy back to his room in college after an evening in a pub. We had both had too much to drink, but he was in a worse state than me, so I helped him into bed, and somehow ended up in bed with him. That was my only experience of gay sex until many years later.
In my first year as a graduate student I shared a house in Cambridge with three other guys who were all engaged, or at least had steady girlfriends. Every weekend they went off to visit the girlfriends, and I was left alone in the house to think about how I wanted to spend my life. One thing I was quite sure about, I didn't want to spend it on my own. The idea of a gay partnership just didn't seem to be a realistic possibility (I didn't even know any other gay students), and I decided that the best thing for me would be to get married. I think I probably realised by this time that gayness was not just a phase that I would grow out of, but I was coming to the conclusion that I did not want my life to be determined by my sexuality. I started to look for a girlfriend. I didn't know any girls in Cambridge that I liked, but the youth group at my church at home was organising a hiking trip in the Black Forest, in Germany and Switzerland, that summer. I signed up for it, and noticed that Mary had also done so. I had known Mary since I was 17. She was small and slim, short haired, a bit boyish in appearance, lively and full of fun, and very insightful. She had a steady boyfriend, in fact she had had a whole succession of them. But a couple of weeks before the trip, she broke up with him. Like the others, he wasn't good enough for her.
The Black Forest trip had a dreamlike quality about it, as I went through the motions of acquiring a girlfriend. Each day, I walked with Mary, and in the evenings we went to a Gasthof and I bought her a drink. (What a cheap date: Mary wasn't used to drinking, and after one small glass of schnapps she practically had to be carried back to the youth hostel.) Then we started holding hands and kissing, and by the end of the trip we were definitely attached to each other. I thought of Mary as a very dear friend, I loved her personality and her attitudes, but the process of courting was more like a charade, something to be done because one was expected to do it, not something that came from the heart. Mary made fun of my awkward ways. She thought of me as a clueless other-worldly mathematician, as indeed I was.
Back in England, my research supervisor had moved from Cambridge to Newcastle, and he took me with him. I was glad to get away from the stultifying atmosphere of Cambridge to a more relaxed and friendly place, and I started to take up some of the activities that I had enjoyed at high school, like playing bridge. At school, I played bridge every lunch hour, and got quite good at it, but I gave it up when I went to Cambridge in order to concentrate on work. But in Newcastle I joined the bridge club, and soon developed a crush on the club President, a fellow math research student. But he was not at all gay, and even if he had been, I was far too clueless to have been able to do anything about it. My bridge partner was a rather abrasive and unattractive guy who nobody else wanted to play with. Years later, I found out that he was gay. I had no idea at the time (my gaydar is virtually inoperative). Even if I had known, I wouldn't have wanted to do anything about it, because I didn't find him at all attractive. Story of my life: I always fell for the most unsuitable and unavailable boys.
Most weekends Mary came to visit, or else I went down to London to see her. We started to plan our future together. But then I found out that my supervisor was moving again, to take a sabbatical year at the University of Pennsylvania. He asked if I wanted to go with him. Of course I did. Mary and I agreed that if we hadn't changed our minds about each other by the time I got back then we would get married.
The year in Philly was great, but I think I'll skip over it. From an emotional point of view, it was the usual story of crushes on unsuitable and unattainable boys. When I got back to England I was appointed to a tenured university position in Newcastle, and Mary and I got engaged.
In Newcastle a new kid had joined the bridge club. Mick was an expert bridge player and the most irresistibly beautiful boy I ever knew. Before long I found myself falling in love with him. Bad move. Not only was he not gay, he was fairly openly homophobic. Apart from bridge, he and I had nothing in common. But I could not keep away from him. We even played as partners a few times, and won first prize at a weekend bridge congress. It was a very frustrating time for me, to be so close to him and yet unable to touch him. But this actually helped to confirm my belief that a gay relationship was unattainable for me, and that life with Mary was my best bet for long-term stability and happiness. The following spring, we were married.
Summary: when I got married, my only experience of gay sex had been one drunken episode in college, my experience of straight sex was zero, and I had made a purely intellectual decision that a straight lifestyle would suit me better than a gay life. What a crazy way to plan one's life. You don't even buy a car without test driving a few models first. But that's how life was for some of us in the so-called swinging Sixties. And remember that gay sex was then still completely illegal in Britain. I thought at the time that I was doing the right thing, and it may surprise you that I still do think that.
