by Matt Lucas
Perhaps if I settled down, got married, had kids, maybe these feelings would go away?
No. I knew they wouldn’t. They were just too powerful, too ingrained.
A problem shared is a problem solved, they say. I decided that the time had come to tell someone my dreaded secret.
I had set myself the task of ‘coming out’ to at least one person before I was eighteen. I missed my deadline by a few months, but at nineteen, I decided to confide in my friend Claire. Like my other friend Alex, we had bonded over a shared love of Reeves and Mortimer. She’d become my sidekick, always on hand to offer a loud, generous cackle at my daft antics.
I went over to her house, took a deep breath and told her I was bisexual. She said she had figured that might be the case. She was wonderful. I knew she would be.
After I told Claire, I told Jeremy, as recounted at the beginning of this chapter. I then told Alex, but this time I came out not as bisexual but as ‘probably gay’. I was pretty sure Alex didn’t have a problem with gay people. He’d fallen in love with the Billy Bragg song ‘Sexuality’ and we’d sung it often together, mimicking Bragg’s unmistakable Essex drawl. He was great about it, said he hadn’t guessed, actually, but that it didn’t change a thing.
So I’d now told Claire, Jeremy and Alex. The only close friend I had yet to tell was another college pal, Nick.
Nick was one of the straightest people I had ever met. He was obsessed with Julia Roberts, Sylvester Stallone and Die Hard. He had made some offhand comments about gay people before – as had we all, in fairness – but Nick seemed to mean it. I was dreading telling him. Eventually I did so. He wanted to know when I was going to tell Alex or Jeremy or Claire. I confessed that they’d already known for a while. So Nick was horrified when I came out, though not because I was gay but because he was the last to know. I love you, Nick.
With college over, I took my year off to work at Chelsea Sportsland and do some stand-up. After gigs I should have been taking myself off to gay bars, but I just wasn’t ready.
‘It will all happen at university,’ I told myself. I knew there would be some gays there because a squeaky-voiced beanpole who worked in the office at Chelsea, and who had recently graduated, had mentioned, with a shudder, ‘Oh yeah, university, mate – there’s queers an’ all sorts.’
Soon after my arrival at Bristol University in 1993 I read up on GLIBSOC – the Gay, Lesbian Including Bisexual Society. On a dark, wet, windy autumn night, with great trepidation, I showered, dressed and began the walk from my lodgings to Frogmore Street, home of the Queen’s Shilling pub, where we were to meet for a drink before heading on to a club.
Being gay, Jewish and nervous, I took so long in getting ready that I was running very late. And – being gay, Jewish and useless – I had no idea where Frogmore Street was.
What’s that? Why didn’t I look it up on my phone? BECAUSE IT WAS 1993. We didn’t have mobile phones. My dad had a car phone, which cost about a million pounds a minute to use and cut off after one syllable.
‘Excuse me, do you know where Frogmore Street is?’
‘It’s up there, mate.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, scurrying off into the night.
The voice hollered after me, in its thick West Country tones. ‘Oi! What you going up there for? There’s queers up there! It’s a queer place. You queer then?’
And the award for Shortest Ever Visit To A Pub goes to …
I walked in. There were maybe two or three shaven-headed men in there. I couldn’t see any students. I ordered a Diet Coke, drank it very quickly, burped and left.
A couple of weeks later, GLIBSOC met again – at the Student Union. I had no excuse for getting lost on the way this time because I was living right next door.
There were a few of us staring at the floor. I knew one guy, Josh, who was in the year above me. His boyfriend Gideon was gorgeous, but taken! Apart from that, there was a girl there who I actually fancied a bit but I didn’t bother trying to do anything about that.
Okay, so let’s clarify. I was gay. I wasn’t doing gay touching things with anyone at that time, but I was gay, and was now telling people I was gay or if I trusted them a bit less, bisexual.
So I was as surprised as you might be when, shortly after coming out, I then started to develop crushes on a couple of girls on my course. They both had boyfriends and I doubt I would have done anything about it even if they hadn’t, but when I tell people this, they ask me if I am gay or bisexual.
And I’ve thought about it and I think the answer is this …
I’m 100 per cent gay. And also maybe about 20 per cent straight as well. I kissed a girl in a club once and I definitely liked it, but I kind of fancied her mate a bit more. And her mate was a bloke.
I’ve never slept with a woman, but I think I might quite like to at some point. Not just sleep with a woman, obviously. That sounds a bit mechanical. But talking of mechanics, I’ve no idea if the equipment will work. So, in a nutshell, unlike some of my gay or indeed straight friends, the idea of intimacy with a member of the opposite sex does not make me feel icky at all.
In fact, when someone (who themselves hadn’t swum the Channel) recently pointed out to me that David Walliams had and therefore demanded to know what I was going to do for charity, I posited the idea of auctioning off my heterosexual virginity. And I was only half-joking.
Moooooooooooooooving on … at university I started to assert myself. If anyone wanted to know, I was gay or bisexual, THANK YOU VERY MUCH, and if you had a problem with that, that was YOUR PROBLEM.
Yes, I became one of those. Among my course mates and the other folk in my halls of residence, that is. Elsewhere I remained cagey. It still felt like a risk to talk about it with someone you didn’t know.
And nothing was more terrifying than shuffling into the newsagents and buying the Gay Times. I wanted to buy a copy so desperately, but it took me a long time to summon up the courage to do so. While I was at university Attitude magazine launched, and I found that a little easier to grab, having convinced myself that it was less overt, that the newsagent probably didn’t know what it was about. Even so, I’d take it from the top shelf – where it sat next to the hardcore porn mags – and put it on the counter very quickly. I’d then dump loads of other things on top of it – Shoot magazine, the TV Times, a Yorkie, some Tooty Frooties – as if to suggest to the person on the till that this was something I just happened to be buying, rather than the main purpose of my visit.
Behind our halls of residence was a video rental shop which had an extensive selection of arthouse films and even a small but dedicated Gay and Lesbian section. On a Saturday night, while most normal students were in the pub, I would dart in, grab anything and check out as speedily as possible.
One film that made a big impact on me was Ron Peck and Paul Hallam’s Nighthawks – the first truly gay British film, from 1978, in which people were out and, generally, matter-of-fact about it. I had read a lot about Nighthawks but when I finally saw it I was left quite downhearted. This was no romantic coming-out movie, with handsome boys who find each other. The Everyman lead character wearily trawls the clubs for love and finds only sex. Away from the clubs, in the school where he teaches, he faces prejudice. He seems to be so lonely, so drained. There is no pot of gold at the end of his rainbow.
A few years later I returned to the film and saw it from a different angle, having, by then, become a regular at the clubs myself. I was refreshed by its lack of glamour, its mundaneness, its truth and its grim humour. The characters were real, just like the type of people I would come across, not only on the gay scene, but in life. I recommend it to everyone, not just as a seminal piece of gay drama, but as a remarkable piece of social realism. Nighthawks is barely known, yet I really think it’s one of the greatest British films of the seventies.
Oh, by the way, this is NOT the same Nighthawks that stars a young Sylvester Stallone. Though that, I’m sure, also has its pleasures.
So while I was
coming out of the closet, reading gay magazines, watching gay films, it would be a few years before I went to gay clubs or – God forbid – actually met someone.
You see, I had endured over a decade of inquisition and mockery with regards to my appearance. My baldness and my belly had made me so self-conscious about the way I looked that it did not occur to me that anyone in their right mind would want to date me.
I was also terrified that my family would freak out if I told them I was gay. They loved me and I loved them, but I had never ever heard the word ‘gay’ said in my house growing up. Queer, yes. Poof, yes. Faggot – my brother would use that one liberally. But not ‘gay’. Never ‘gay’.
Even my grandmother, who had left Berlin just before the war and who was what you would call in those days ‘an intellectual’, who loved opera and theatre and art, who doted on me, showered me with praise and taught me so much, found homosexuality deeply distasteful. I remember watching a news broadcast with her, which showed Ian McKellen delivering a petition about gay rights to Downing Street. She was very critical of him for ‘taking up John Major’s valuable time’. She was a kind, compassionate, wise woman, who I adored, but she was born at the beginning of the last century and it was one issue on which she was intransigent.
I’m not trying to paint my family as villains. They loved and supported me. I’m just making the point that that was how it was back then, not just for me, but for pretty much all of my gay friends. It was generational and societal. The best you could hope for was that someone would say, ‘I don’t mind what people get up to in the privacy of their own home just as long as they don’t shove it down our throats.’ That was, at the time, considered a liberal, open-minded response.
I could not tell them.
By the time I reached my early twenties I wanted to go to gay bars, to make friends, maybe even to meet that special someone, but I had become well known enough as George Dawes that there was a good likelihood that if I did, it might end up in the newspaper.
And so, maintaining that I must sacrifice my own happiness to protect my family, I just went about my life. I was sort of out – yes – but I told my friends I was too busy to meet anyone. I focused on my stand-up, then Shooting Stars, then my writing with Walliams. I occasionally had crushes – usually on straight guys because I didn’t know that many gay ones – but I kept them to myself.
When I was twenty-two, my father died, suddenly. In amongst the enormous shock and grief was sadness that I had never been able to bring myself to tell him that I was gay. We were close on so many other levels, but I had remembered clearly, only a few years before, sitting in traffic in the back of the car while he moaned about shirtlifters. And it wasn’t the only time.
On a more recent occasion, however, he had mentioned something about me hopefully bringing someone home one day – ‘a girl, a boy, whatever’. Had someone said something? Had he finally mellowed?
There was to be more loss. Two years after my father died, my grandma passed away too. It was less of a shock and more of a relief for us all when she finally left us. She had been so smart, so proud, but at eighty-seven her mobility and short-term memory were rapidly and irreversibly failing her.
I knew that I had to wait for my grandmother to die before I could tell my family I was gay. We were all still reeling from my father’s death and we had been busy looking after grandma. When she died, in January 1999, I decided I would give it about six months and then I would sit my mum down and come out.
But I was struggling – really struggling – and smoking loads of weed to try and blot out the pain of losing my father, my fears of being rejected by my family, and also I had something new to contend with – being in the spotlight. It wasn’t quite as I’d imagined it – being pinched, poked and prodded by people, being followed in the street, being gossiped about.
I started to see a counsellor. We talked about all aspects of my life, my sense of failure – despite being already pretty successful, my grief for my father, my weight issues and my worries about what my family would think about me being gay.
‘Why do you need to tell your mum?’ the counsellor asked.
It seemed like a strange question to me. I figured that some people might be able to lead a double life, but in my position that would be trickier – and anyway, even if I met people secretly, I would not have been able to bring them back to mine. A few weeks earlier the family home had been sold. I had moved with my brother (who was literally homophobic, in that he seemed to have a fear of homosexuals) into a rented house in East Finchley. My life had become a lot busier since Shooting Stars had hit the airwaves. I was away a lot with work and also had a lot of fan mail. So as well as living with me, my brother was working as my assistant.
Despite our professional relationship, we still rowed sometimes, like most brothers do, and one night we were bickering away. He was a huge hip-hop fan and was singing the praises of a particular track. I had moaned that the lyrics were misogynist and homophobic. He cited his disapproval of the kind of music I listened to – stuff with a tune, that sort of thing – and I had started to extol the virtues of Queen and Freddie Mercury. The argument became more heated than usual and as he went to leave the room, he muttered to himself … ‘Queer lover!’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Just queer.’
He wasn’t the only one surprised. I pretty much astonished myself with the response.
There was a pause. Then he looked at me, and started to laugh. Not a nasty laugh, more one of congratulation at having been fooled for a moment.
‘I’m actually not joking. I’m gay.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘No, I’m gay.’
‘This is a wind-up.’
‘Nope. I swear on my life. I’m gay.’
A second for this to register, then ‘Oh great!’
Just to be clear, this wasn’t the ‘oh great’ someone says when they’ve just found out there’s going to be a new series of Curb Your Enthusiasm or even the ‘oh great’ you fake when a nose-picking nine-year-old tells you they’ve made you some banana bread.
No, this was exactly the sort of ‘oh great’ that you say when you open the washing machine and realise you’ve put in all the coloureds with the whites.
Howard wasn’t happy. At all. Nor was he especially convinced. Had I tried it with a woman? No? Ah, well, that was the problem. He told me he and his friends were going to hire me a prostitute.
‘Great,’ I replied. ‘Can you get me one with nice pecs?’
Over the coming weeks my brother did his best to understand and accept what I had told him about myself, the content of which went against every fibre of his being. Having once told me with conviction (though I assume it’s not something he learned first hand) that ‘one man can’t find love in another man’s hairy arsehole’, he had a bit of a journey to go on. To give him his due, we reached a sort of entente, which largely involved neither of us mentioning it too often, though he did make the occasional enquiry …
‘So, do you, like, fancy David Beckham, then?’
‘Everyone fancies David Beckham,’ I replied. ‘That would not be an indicator of whether someone is gay or not.’
On the face of it, things went back to normality for a bit, especially as Howard saw I was still the same twerp I’d always been, gay or not. For me, though, it was a major relief to stop having to pretend I was obsessed with girls. That kind of thing’s exhausting.
The next thing I had to do was tell Mum.
A few months had passed since Grandma’s death. Her house was going on the market and I had agreed to go there with Mum to help clear out some of Grandma’s belongings. I knew it would be an emotional day, but rightly or wrongly I also knew that I couldn’t keep my secret any longer.
After a few sombre hours, we left Grandma’s house. Mum dropped me home and I asked her in. I made her some coffee, and brought it into the little dining room. I said I had something to tell her.
‘… and that is that
… I am gay. Oh wow. I can’t believe I’ve actually just said those words out loud.’
Unlike my brother, there was no laughter, and no anger either, only tears. She was devastated. She said there would be no wedding, no grandchildren and no chance of me ever being happy. I would not find work. I would not meet anyone. And my friends – well, they would not react well.
I sighed – for her, not for me. ‘They already know. All of them. Have done for years. Even Howard knows.’
More tears, including some from me.
‘It was my fault. I smothered you.’
‘No, no. It was no one’s fault. It’s not a fault.’
She did smother me, though. She is, after all, a Jewish mother. She wouldn’t be doing her job without a bit of smothering.
‘Didn’t you know? I thought you would have figured it out. Lots of actors are gay. And I haven’t exactly had a ton of girlfriends.’
She shook her head. ‘Well, Rabbi Leigh doesn’t agree with it at all.’
I helped her to the car. She seemed so racked with grief I wondered how she would even make it home. As she left, I composed myself, then called my stepdad.
‘Mum and I had a bit of a … a tough conversation. She might be a bit upset. I’m fine and she will be. But just letting you know.’
That night I called up Ian, an old friend of mine, and asked him if I could come with him to the gay club he had been telling me about, Popstarz.
I was twenty-five and finally I was out.
And so it began.
I would go with Ian to Popstarz on a Friday night and Heaven on a Saturday night.
And on a Monday night.
And on a Wednesday night.
I became a fixture in the clubs, chatting with everyone – well, almost everyone. It was never easy to talk to someone I actually fancied, of course. I still doubted anyone would find me attractive, so I just tried to be entertaining instead.
And then one Saturday night, I was dancing upstairs in Heaven when a bunch of drunken teenagers tumbled and landed on me, clearly intentionally. As they helped me to my feet, one of them said, ‘You’re George Dawes, aren’t you?’
