This was a question I asked myself, many times, when I was going through my own coming out process when I was 40. I knew I was different from the other boys from  age seven. I’d rather play with girls than boys. I thought boys were too rough and competitive and aggressive. Girls seemed to be more gentle and played more role games like doctors and nurses, mummies and daddies. Boys seemed to want to destroy things, play soldiers, cowboys and Indians, killing and maiming. It was important to be able to make an authentic sound of a gun going off. I couldn’t take the mimicking of killing and maiming seriously enough and my gun noises were more like, “pee-ow!” So I was relegated to the medical core where I could take care of “wounded soldiers” coming off the front line. The role enabled me to utilise the feminine energy within me in a socially acceptable way. I wanted to be a doctor for years and what I realise now is that I wanted to be socially accepted full stop. I never made the grades to be a doctor. I lowered my sights to a vet (although some say that the training to be a vet is more rigourous), then a dentist, then a radiographer. I failed to get even one a level to get into radiographer college.

When coming out, I started to do some research of my own and I read that In ancient times, because gay people didn’t have a procreational function, and generally didn’t like the rough and tumble hunting in the bush some leaned towards learning about the healing qualities of plants and the rhythms of life and nature and became the medicine people for the tribe. They lived on the edge of inclusion and exclusion, (often living at the edge of the village) and became observers of nature and of animal and human behaviour and as a result were able to offer useful perspectives to their tribe. Having the masculine and feminine energies they were sometimes known as “two spirit” people and were the reconcilers between the masculine and the feminine. They were the counsellors, the peacemakers, the mediators, they were the latter day sex therapists and the tribe was all the more poorer if it didn’t have one in their midst. Gay people, in this role, were known as “the sensitives”,  (My mother often said, “You are such a sensitive and complicated little boy”). They could pick up on the more subtle energies than the physical ones people generally sense. They were the psychics, the conduits between the physical and the spiritual realms, the “hands on” healers. They were the walkers between tribes sharing information and the travellers (Shamans) between different worlds and realities (as in Lord of the rings, Avataar) again bringing back information for the benefit of the tribes. Having said that generally gay people didn’t like the rough and tumble of the bush the Greeks had armies of gay men on the premise that they would fight harder to keep their lover alive!

When Christianity became established, the church wanted to be the conduit between the different realities. They wanted to be the healers and the counsellors and they made a good job of it. However, they demonised the established practices of those that had been doing a good job of it for many years before. They started burning people at the stake and calling them witches and it didn’t take much of that before gay people were out of a job, their contribution written out of history and until lately unacknowledged and hence, me thinks, the birth of homophobia.

So for me it was about using this information about my ancestors, reclaiming my role, and how I contribute to society and, putting it into our modern context to find some kind of meaning in my gay life. No easy task let me tell you!