Richard's story

I'm not really certain that I ever really "Came Out". 

As a small child I have an early memory of coming out from behind the curtain that hid the kitchen door and kept out the cold.  I was wearing what I believe passed as a dress (in the 1920s, boys were often dressed in a similar way to girls). I had a red coloured fringe around my head, to resemble hair, which my mother had removed from a lampshade. On making my entrance, I sang a song that I had learned from Radio Luxembourg. My parents seemed astonished. Their applause was most encouraging. 

Some time later I took to wearing my mother's high-heeled shoes and I noisily flopped about in them at home.  Sometimes I went to school secretly wearing one of my Great Aunt's Victorian corsets which proved to be very tight and restrictive - so much so that I developed acute chest pain which the doctor described as pleurisy. 

Soon I started wearing my sisterís clothes, and I would venture out and walk around the village believing that no one knew it was me.  Then, in my very early teens, my school friend John and I would dress in frocks and wigs and take ourselves off to fancy dress balls in the surrounding villages - tottering along the country lanes in high heels and dancing with the local farm lads. 

John lived on a farm, as we did, and on Saturday evenings his mother would encourage us to dress up.  She would roll up the carpet and play the piano while John and I danced with Giovanni and Bruno who happened to be prisoners of war (this was in 1940 during the Second World War). They both worked on the farm. John's father sat by the kitchen range in his rocking chair, smoking his pipe and enjoying the entertainment. 

I came to live in London in 1946.  I was introduced to "The Lily Pond", a Sunday-only teatime venue frequented mostly by men whom I discovered were known to be "like that". The so-called Lily Pond was on the first floor of Lyons Corner House, in what is now Planet Hollywood in Coventry Street.  In those days I had never heard the word homosexual and would not have known what it meant. Often younger men like myself were referred to as ìBumBoysî, the meaning of which also escaped me. 

The pubs I got to know that were for people "like that" were The Fitzroy Tavern, The Wheatsheaf, and The Black Horse. It was the done thing to circulate between these three pubs as the evening progressed.  It was at the Wheatsheaf that someone asked me in a loud voice "Do you masturbate?", which shocked me beyond words. There was a pub called Ward's Irish House which was immediately in front of the London Pavilion and was reached by a downward flight of steps.  Almost opposite, at the top of Haymarket, where the fountain is now, was The Standard and somewhere below The Criterion Theatre was The White Bear. It was at these two pubs that the bouncer would, seemingly indiscriminately, pick on this person or that one and shout "You. Out."  It happened to me many times. Perhaps he thought I was rent. Apart from this I was not aware of any disapproval or hostility. My friends and I just went on our merry way. 

In the so-called straight world, such as work and social situations, I did not flaunt my sexuality but I did not deny it either. 

In 1953 I was a first-year student nurse and madly in love with a third-year student nurse. We were caught in the sluice kissing each other passionately. This was reported to all and sundry and we were the talk of the entire hospital.  My lover left his training the very next day, but I was determined to stay and appear to ignore it all ñ which I did for a year, and then I left to resume my training elsewhere. By the way, men in nursing were few and far between. At the next hospital I was the only male amongst thirty or so women: "Real men did not take up nursing." 

Looking back, I have come to believe that it was due to general acceptance of my behaviour as a child and adolescent that I never looked for disapproval or hostility and now, at 75 years of age, I have to say that life as a gay man has been good. I would certainly do it all again.