R U COMING OUT?

WE LOOK AT HOW YOU TACKLED THE WHOLE COMING OUT THING

NICK BAIGENT, 25, BARISTA MANAGER, BIRMINGHAM

I sit in my bedroom on a Saturday night watching Charmed on Channel 5; a scantily clad Alyssa Milano is being thrown around a room. The latest issues of FHM and Loaded magazine are carefully placed around my room for everyone to see. I’m straight. I like girls, cars and all the other stu~ the typical heterosexual male is supposed to like.

That’s how I spent the majority of my teenage years. Trying not only to convince others but myself, too, that I wasn’t gay. Admittedly, they were probably the loneliest years of my life, having nobody to talk to about what I was going through. I’d punish myself again and again for allowing a thought about another guy to enter my head. Of course, this was because I had grown up in a household, where my dad would go go-carting with his male friends and their sons at the weekend. Growing up, my relationship with him was quite strained, I wasn’t the ‘lad’ that he had probably expected me to be. I wasn’t interested in cars, go-carts, or any of the stu~ that was expected of me. Truth be told, it annoyed him that I was interested in Disney and had a doll from The Little Mermaid that my mum had brought for me when I was nine. That was promptly taken away and destroyed, because ‘Little boys shouldn’t play with dolls’.