A Handsome Bromance: Four Gay Stories

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After a year of being in the closet in University, attempting to have girlfriends and be ‘straight’, many of my friends started to guess that I may be gay, which looking back was pretty obvious. The tension between celebration and critique is a balancing act that we struggled with in the UKGBD, we felt it was a problem we had to resolve within the work. I was in the hands of a total stranger who could have done anything to me, yet I was so desperate to meet him, and, well, to “meet” him if you catch my drift…! I don’t remember much of the conversation but it was the end of the night and we ended up in the car park standing up against my mini.

It offers a completely fresh perspective of an epic story we know so well, through the eyes of a young gay guy hero. His character represents homoʂeҳuals of the 1950s in the USA, showing the difficulties they faced back then. The book was banned three weeks after it was published in 1928 and it wasn’t available in the UK again until 1949. Two boys lie on a bed, one of them is already dead; they listen to Glenn Gould playing Bach and talk about suicide and love.

When it came out, Fire was famous for being one of the first mainstream Bollywood movies to explicitly showcase gay relations, and certainly the first we’ve come across that focuses on a lesbian relationship! It is set in the late 1970s, 80s, and early 1990s, a time when Argentina experienced such immense change. Just because someone is related, doesn’t make them family; it’s people’s actions and how you feel and respond to someone. Starting out as members of the secret society ‘The Apostles’ at Cambridge University, they eventually became part of the London-based ‘Bloomsbury Group’, whch also included Virginia Woolf, her sister – the artist Vanessa Bell – and Duncan Grant, also an artist. Although it's wonderful to celebrate the beginning of our journey towards acceptance and equality, I believe it's also important that gay men take the opportunity to start sharing our stories, so that we can grow and move forward both as individuals and as a community.

Zorig told us all about how hard it was not only to get around intolerant landlords but to also inspire local gay Mongolians to come out of the closet to visit the bar! After a long legal process, straight from court, I was oddly glad when the cell door closed behind me for the first time and the ordeal was over. Society as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on just and unjust alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. Suddenly everything falls into place: you're not a freak of nature or “different”, simply experiencing the simple joys that you were born to enjoy! He is expected to excel in his studies, honor the deities, and eventually find a nice Indian girl to marry!We’ve all seen the Brad Pitt movie, “Troy”, and read loads about Helen of Troy…but what about stories of gay lovers? The act of posing as a female figure unravels Einar’s repressed desire to be a woman, which then sparks his one-way journey to become Lili Elbe and leave behind her former life as Einar. Wouldn't it be nice, I kept hoping, if for once I would fulfill somebody's sexual fantasies, and be picked for just this reason? He had come to accept and understand his own sexuality, helped in part by Edward Carpenter’s 1908 book The Intermediate Sex, which made a case for social acceptance of same sex relationships.

Admittedly it was only the usual dire prison food but it was served on a platter rather than in a carrier bag. Keynes eventually married the ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova, Strachey set up house with the painter Dora Carrington and Grant had a romantic relationship with Vanessa Bell, with whom he had a daughter. And to keep things exciting, we always make time for date nights in hotel rooms, especially when we travel. Dominant media voices blamed the 2015/16 gay bar closures on the rise of dating apps and the increasing acceptance of LGBTQ people in society, these messages were absorbed back into the community despite the contradictory rise in homophobia and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric over the last five years.Terry collected the rent and paid it to the landlord, Mr Patel, whom I never met once in my three years living there. Jason recently lost his job and can't afford to lose money so Tim suggests that if he wins the payment is a full body massage with happy ending! When we split a few years later I moved out, and not long after I relocated to Berlin, where I lived for most of the 80s.