Gay Shame & Sexuality

Continuing our series looking at gay shame & sexuality. By Nyasha Paragon Langley

It’s 2015 and we live in a world that tolerates us but is a long way from accepting us. I came out at 19 and I presumed that I had won the battle. I had taken off the dusty fur coat and left it on a hanger in the wardrobe and stepped in to the sun. It turns out it was one of those S.A.D lights and not the sun, and there starts my agonising journey through gaydom.

I’m a young black male so (and this shouldn’t roll so easily off my tongue, but it does) I’m used to being labelled, and having to prove that I’m more than just the tone of my skin or the hoodie I may choose to wear. However, nothing prepared me for the backlash from my own ethnic community to me being openly gay.

“I’m talking people that start on you on the top deck of a bus and follow you down to carry on while you wait to get off.”

I used to have relaxed hair (chemically straightened) and this was enough to set the hateful stares and verbal abuse from black men and women in my day-to-day life. I’m talking people that start on you on the top deck of a bus and follow you down to carry on while you wait to get off. And I learned to adapt. You put on a hat while you travel on the bus in Croydon. You don’t wear that patterned shirt and skinny jeans combo you like. You learn to hide in plain sight ‘til you get to ‘the scene’.

Then you enter that world, that scene I had assumed would accept me because I was going through the same plight as they were. And in the early days I did feel accepted. Places like Heaven and Popstarz catered to all kinds of people: black, white, Asian, dancers, emo kids, rude boys, drag queens. I remember my first night in Heaven, ten plus years ago, and it was a wonderfully diverse group of people. Heaven as it was back then, is what gave me the confidence to come out. It felt as if that was where I belonged. I could just be me.

What I find most unsettling is that I knew who I was as a person and where I stood, before I came out, but something happened between my first night there and my final attempt at the Vauxhall diet. You see I don’t fall into any of the stereotypes, I’m not overly effeminate and I’m not overly masculine; I’m not a ‘rude boy’ and I’m not posh… I am pretty much non-descript, just your average person.

But on the scene we attempt to put each other into boxes whether that is the heteronormative labels like ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ or labels like ‘twinks’ or ‘twunks’. Do black twinks/twunks even exist? Is that a thing? So, you try and fit into one of these boxes but you can’t because you’re a hexagon, so like a child learning you smash yourself into that shape. The problem is you’ve now damaged your wonderful hexagon shape. Only to find the poison of that box or better yet, that mask you tried to put on is now seeping through the cracks.

Had my scene persona out-grown the actual person underneath? Had the mask that had been created to protect me turned around and started to choke me slowly without my knowledge? All I know is I couldn’t breathe and that black hole I was in was starting to close and I wanted out.

“Nothing prepared me for the backlash from my own ethnic community to me being openly gay.”

Slowly, I watched people become the same carbon copy person, the same Topman wearing, Starbucks drinking hologram, and if you didn’t fit that bill then, sorry, we don’t want you here. I had been made to feel that I was an outcast that I didn’t belong, that I was sub par.

I have been trying to navigate my way through the London scene for just over ten years, and I have come to the conclusion that I’m never going to fit in, and that is okay. I guess what I am trying to say is don’t worry if you don’t fit in, just be you and everyone else will eventually catch up.

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