How growing up queer and in the countryside shapes you

People often say “home is where the heart is” but while that may be true, what if going home also breaks your heart?

Like many queer people, so much so it’s almost cliche to admit, I have a love-hate relationship with my hometown. Growing up in West Yorkshire, I always (somewhat accurately) felt that my sexuality made me vulnerable. While city dwellers fled to the countryside during lockdown, following the promise of more space and their idealised visions of friendly neighbours and small town chit-chat, I was trapped there as a teenager – stuck in a place that wasn’t yet willing to accept difference as a young, gay man. Looking back, my adolescence was filled with more painful experiences than I’d care to remember: bullying at school, homophobia at home, hate crimes I’d experienced whilst simply walking down the street.

Eager to make my great escape, I became the gay flight stereotype by moving to London in 2016, intent on fleeing my restrictive hometown for the big smoking city. At which point, something unexpected happened: thanks to some much-needed distance (absence makes the heart grow fonder) I was able to redefine my relationship with the former mill town where I grew up. Finally feeling secure in my sexuality and living a comfortable life in the South, I delighted in going back to Yorkshire: when being among all that isolated splendour became a choice, not an obligation. After all, there was so much to enjoy: long countryside walks in wild and desolate fields which were adored by the Brontës, dusty and dark local pubs with a cast of characters washing down packs of Seabrooks with flat pints of Carling and of course, the familiarity of the beautiful North twang which answers my own.

Big dreams

Now, my work as a journalist even seeks to explore queer life in the North as a way to celebrate my gay and Northern identities: after all, gay people don’t magically disappear once you go north of Watford. This was something that I struggled to realise during my youth, when the only local point of reference was Sean Tully in Corrie. He’s an icon, of course, but his storylines surrounding his sexuality and queer love have hardly been easy viewing.

Yet even with a lack of positive representations of people like myself growing up, I had big dreams of what I wanted to do with my life. As a teenager, I’d always had this idealistic view for how my future would go. Career-wise, I’d be a successful journalist, writing stories that were turned into movies. In my personal life, I’d move to a big city and meet the love of my life. We’d live in a gorgeously decorated Victorian home with a huge back garden for growing herbs and reading the papers on a Sunday morning.

"Now, my work as a journalist even seeks to explore queer life in the North"

All a bit of a pipe dream really, but one that was intensified by the nature of gay life in Yorkshire at the time, which felt pretty much non-existent. A few years ago, my own version of that pipe dream arrived in the form of a Croatian guy: he’s attentive, funny, vibrant and incredibly patient. He’s one of the biggest characters I’ve ever known and, now, the lead character in my life. We met through Tinder (so lacklustre, I know, but I can’t fault it!) and have spent pretty much everyday together since our first date. It’s one of those partnerships that just works.

Queer homecomings

Naturally, I was excited to bring my boyfriend back to Yorkshire, to share stories of my childhood, introduce him to my family and friends and give him a taste of life in the North, which is worlds away from our life in London. There’s an unrivalled stillness about Yorkshire and, in that stillness, it’s easy to feel almost frozen in time. Nothing really changes: the landscape stays the same and so do the ideologies of those that live there – at least that’s how it has often seemed to me.

Despite the initial excitement, the 3 hour train journey offered enough time for my feelings to completely change. For every mile closer we got, I felt this overwhelming sense of dread come over me and become harder and harder to ignore. Like a shapeless but dark cloud closing in and suffocating me. These were not the usual jitters I’d heard people mention when they introduced their parents to a new partner, unsure that the qualities they love so much will translate at first meeting. No, this was a more deeply rooted fear that came from an unknown place within me, threatening to swallow me up.

"When my partner was by my side in my hometown, I wanted to become invisible"

By the time we got off the train, a dramatic change had taken place within me. I felt the need to walk ten steps ahead of my partner, worried about the physical proximity of his body to mine and on edge. I almost immediately became rude and standoffish. Try as I might to act like everything was normal, I couldn’t help myself. When it came to introducing him to friends and family, I found myself sniping or making comments at him. The words “Don’t do that!” or, worse, “Ugh, really?” slipped from my mouth more than once. My loved ones, perplexed at the change in my usually confident and warm personality, questioned if I even liked my boyfriend at all. And it wasn’t just among my loved ones that there seemed to be an issue: in the day-to-day I wanted to avoid going out and being seen together in crowds, instead sticking to more secluded areas like woodland or country roads. It was becoming clearer and clearer that when my partner was by my side in my hometown, I wanted to become invisible. To be honest, it’s a testament to my partner that he politely ignored my completely altered personality, just nodding along and smiling reassuringly – obviously sensing that something bigger was afoot.

What I wouldn’t say aloud or even really admit to myself was that having my boyfriend with me in my hometown startled me. He was the “evidence” – flesh, bone and impossible to ignore – that I wasn’t living up to the social norms I’d been brought up with in rural Yorkshire. That I was in violation of the biblical suggestion that you must not lie with a man as with a woman, as it is an abomination. In my head, his mere presence made me that abomination. While I had been able to comfortably split my self between London and Yorkshire – putting my queer life on hold whenever I headed up North – taking my boyfriend home with me had led to a collision of worlds that I wasn’t quite ready for. With him there, my mind went into survival mode as I worried that proximity to him would make me a target for all the close-mindedness and bigotry that I’d grown up with.

“Is everything OK?” He asked me on the train home. We had come full circle, so I nodded happily, feeling the tension I had held within me slowly loosening with each mile closer we got to the capital. By the time we arrived at King’s Cross, I was myself once again. A lovable and affectionate partner and a confident, at-ease person who doesn’t feel the need to hide themselves away.

Internalised homophobia

We had a few more of these awkward trips, repeating the same patterns of behaviour until it became too much to ignore. The breaking point came during the Christmas of 2020. We were staying at my parents house, in my childhood bed, and he tried to cuddle me under the covers. It sounds dramatic but it felt like this single moment might disrupt world order, like this tiny fraction of affection could well throw the world off its axis – I guess that’s survival mode for you. I froze in panic under his touch before quickly jumping away from him and turning over. He sighed heavily and rolled away from me, a sad silence settling between us. It was hard enough for my boyfriend to be away from his own family at Christmas, let alone feel devoid of love and affection from me, especially after the year we’d had.

"It was hard enough for my boyfriend to be away from his own family at Christmas, let alone feel devoid of love and affection from me, especially after the year we’d had."

On the journey back to London, he made one thing clear: he was no longer willing to accept being iced out whenever we went up North, only for the cold to thaw out the second we came back home. “I think you may have some issues about coming home with me,” he explained, a sentence that had been a long time coming. And while my instinct was to jump to the defence, deep down I knew he was right: something needed to change.

Some months after the Christmas trip, I decided to see a therapist and undertake a short burst of psychoanalytic therapy to respond to this Grand Central Rail identity crisis. As is often the case when we undertake counselling, diving into all of the tightly-held problems we keep buried within ourselves, the issues around my sense of self were much broader than I had imagined. I’d actually reached a point where I was questioning everything about myself. Am I a good friend? What do I want out of life? And, damningly, am I a good person?

The therapy took me down a path I hadn’t really imagined I’d travel, one that forced me to face the challenges of growing up gay and closeted in Yorkshire; the sense of shame I felt, and in some ways still feel, about my sexuality. These introspective sessions encouraged me to relive rather than repress. It was like taking a pickaxe to glaciers which had housed my hidden traumas for years, but ending the ice age was essential in helping me understand my own identity.

A turning point

On one particularly in-depth journey into the icy mountains of my past, my therapist guided me to understand why my entire personality seems to shift when I go back home with my boyfriend. Speaking about the homophobia I faced growing up, everything suddenly fell into place. How am I supposed to go back home with a same-sex partner when the attitudes in this place had conditioned me to believe that homosexual relationships were wrong? How can I feel at peace when I had spent decades of my life lying in bed at night, feeling the walls of my so-called “corrupt” sexuality closing in on me. With every year, I leaned further into this aspect of myself, an act of self-exploration which should be positive. But when you’ve only been told that your identity is an “affliction”, living authentically just intensifies the self-hatred. All it took was a 3-hour journey back to Yorkshire for me to step back into the shoes of my teenage self, and for the shame and anxiety I had buried deep to bubble back up to the surface.

The truth was that my own internalised homophobia was affecting how my relationship functioned whenever I visited home: to distract from or ignore the very real love and life together my partner and I had worked to grow and nourish. Something encouraged me to continue living the lie that I’d fought so hard to maintain throughout my entire adolescence, to do all I could to conceal my sexuality and, in essence, to become invisible.

Even though I might feel like I’m the only one to have gone through this, I suspect that it’s a common – maybe even universal – feeling for people who have grown up alongside homophobia. Our hometowns become synonymous with feelings of shame and secrecy, and if left unaddressed, we can’t be our true authentic selves when we go back later in life. Despite all of its drawbacks, London had given me something priceless I couldn’t experience at home: the space to explore myself away from the ugly attitudes which coloured my formative years with shame and fear. Sometimes I wonder, if I had stayed in Yorkshire, would I have ever had that opportunity?

A way forward

But what is the solution? How to re-write all the wrongs that happened to us in our childhoods in order to shake off the shame when we visit home? Is it even possible?

I’m writing this on the train back to London after a whistle-stop trip to Yorkshire with my partner. I found myself reverting back to my usual tactics; walking five steps ahead to avoid being in close proximity to one another, the odd jibe here amongst friends and family, occasionally feigning annoyance to disguise any form of affection. But I’m well aware that these feelings of shame associated with my hometown aren’t going to go away overnight. Eighteen years worth of self-hatred over my sexuality aren’t going to miraculously disappear, but I am taking more care to recognise this behaviour and counteract it. Offering the occasional kiss or cuddle, trying to engage more in conversations and avoid being hyper-aware of the strangers around me. Baby steps but progress, nonetheless.

Therapy, though, has been the biggest eye-opener. Had I not been on this journey of self-discovery, I wouldn’t have been able to acknowledge the negative association I had with home. I’d have continued with these bad habits and allowed them to impact the stability of my relationship and, in doing so, I’d have let the negative experiences and homophobia of my youth win, in a way.

So more baby steps to start with, but mostly I’m reassuring myself that I am worthy of same-sex love, in my hometown or anywhere. This is my life to live, and so I’ll live it on my own terms.