my latest blog post on six months in sydney included this aside:

Even as a student I would splurge on tea, buying only Tetley’s (quite the opposite of a prospective romantic partner I once had: all thought of romance was lost when I discovered he bought Asda Smart Price teabags, and dried them out on the radiator so he could re-use them!).

it took my a long time to work out how I was going to word that, mainly because i wanted to try to avoid giving any indication of the gender of this prospective romantic partner. i tried various ways of phrasing it, but they all sounded unnatural.

i’m angry at myself for re-wording it and re-wording it again, all to try to avoid using the word ‘he’. perhaps, i thought, if i avoid using a gendered pronoun readers might think it was a woman, and think i’m straight and continue reading. if i give any indication i’m gay, they’ll stop reading, and might send me hate mail.

honestly, that’s what was going through my mind. it’s ridiculous. i’m not in the closet; i’m one of these proud queer people, except i never actually want to tellanyone. it’s stupid. i love my gay life, i love my same-sex relationship. to put it bluntly, i love cock and i’m not ashamed to say it, but stirring inside is this fear of it, and an in-built feeling of shame.

it’s internalised homophobia of course. that’s society. it gets drummed into us from such an early age. usually not even deliberately. heterosexism does it. heteronormativity does it. not being able to find a news article about gay men’s mental health without an AIDS charity being quoted for no other reason than gay men = AIDS does it. still. in 2014. still.

so it’s hardly surprising that while i was writing that, my head was telling me that being gay is way worse than drying out teabags on a radiator, re-using them to make tea and serving it up to a potential fuck.