Transcript
I was born in a fairly large town in Northern Ireland, which really didn’t have any kind of queer scene to speak of. It was really not. I went to quite a religious school, where it wasn’t really acceptable to talk about being gay. It was very much the kind of place where gay was thrown around as an insult. So I didn’t actually come out until I was at university in England. In the three or four years before that, I was obviously kind of confused and didn’t really know what was going on. So, it wasn’t really the kind of atmosphere that was favourable to being out and proud.
Then, as soon as I went away to university, I realised that they could all suck it and I went back and was completely myself and was much happier. I was really lucky in that my best friend growing up, who was a year younger than me at school, was so much more confident than I was. He came out when he was 14 or 15 and was essentially just un-apologetic. So, I was able to talk to him about the kind of confusion that I was feeling, even if I wasn’t able to identify my own sexuality at the time. He was a really great friend during that time.