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Her fear was that my classmates would be spiteful if they found out my secret, when in fact the nastiest thing that happened was seeing her rip up the essay I had spent days working on and even longer mustering the courage to write. I had entrusted to her my coming-out statement and her response was to rain on my incipient Pride parade: one of those apparently light downpours that you later find has soaked you to the skin.
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My teacher summoned me to her office, where she made understanding noises before recommending that we bin the document and pretend it had never been written. Not long before coming out to my friends, I had broached the subject of my sexuality in an essay. The one species of opposition I experienced at school came from a teacher and was cleverly disguised as sympathy. Certainly it's amazing to realise that I was never bullied or harassed. On second thoughts, it's unfair to describe my comprehensive school as unremarkable. They caught up with me later and assured me that what I'd done was brave and that they wouldn't tell anyone else, approximately an hour after telling everyone else. Eventually I babbled the words "I'm gay!" before bolting from the room.
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Given that I was a less-than-macho drama student, those friends in biology class did a good job of feigning ignorance about the nature of the confession to which I was building up over the course of an hour. My confidantes when I came out at the age of 14 were two female friends at an unremarkable Essex comprehensive. Uploading it to YouTube would have been pointless because neither uploading nor YouTube had been invented in 1985. Put it this way: had I filmed my first coming-out, as Tom Daley did with his, it would have been recorded not on a mobile phone but on a chunky video camera the size of a cereal box. In fact, I feel a bit of a fraud hitching a ride now on the gay bandwagon. I was 41 and had known I was gay since before I'd heard that word, so you might think I'd taken my own sweet time about this. L ast year, I came out to the only important people left in my life who were still oblivious to my sexuality: my three children.