I don’t spend my life watching films and TV programmes - I haven’t watched Big Brother or Celebrity Come Anything for years, and my television is the size of a small fridge. But when you have a wimpish shadow self still cowering in the closet in your twenties, you need more than a little guidance. If you can’t find it in reality, then that small-fridge TV that crops off half the image becomes a treasure trove. Many have inspired me along the way, but there was one moment that made me want to wrap myself in a rainbow flag and jump up and down.
I had tried to make the most of my year-out in France. But though I discovered a different part of the world, where marshlands mirrored flamingos and white horses, a wealth of vineyards spread out into the hills and a class of teenagers waited for me to teach them; and though I learnt about the upsetting glory of the bullfight and how to find my way around an HLM (a French council estate), I failed to find sexual “me”. I tried, but I just couldn’t meet anyone and I couldn’t make any of those feelings a reality. So back into the closet I went, propelled by the idea that I’d been lucky to have one wonderful, if brief, affair and that I had yet to meet the right man.
I had met her, I’d had a revelation but somehow I found myself back in that damned closet. How did I go from the road to Damascus to a cul-de-sac?
Looking back, I wish I could invoke a benevolent being to visit my younger self, and take the dim creature out for a coffee. But later that year, a ray of light did hit me - and it came in the unexpected form of Ellen DeGeneres.
It was 1997 and I was back in England, when Channel 4 screened a coming out party for the gay comedienne. The main event was the screening of The Puppy Episode, in which she came out after years of playing a straight character. When it was first shown in America, the build up was spectacular. I pretended to be nonchalant (again) but I was gripped as article followed article. The scripts had been locked away and kept secret, and she was going to do it live, on prime-time television. Evangelical mobs had their crosses and placards at the ready. The ratings were huge.
Advertisement
It is not a masterpiece of acting but for a closet-dweller, it is pure genius. She meets a gay woman she likes, thinking she is straight, and much embarrassment ensues. “No, Ellen. I don’t date men.” Ellen freezes: “Really?” She moves uncomfortably. Pause. “Why?!”
Ellen’s question is defensive, not curious, and she plays it perfectly. She then lies to her friends about sleeping with a man and ends up at an airport trying to explain her behaviour. She leans over to make her confession, but on the table is an open microphone.
“I’m gay” echoes across the terminal. It was sitcom excellence – and it made me cry with laughter. Something rang true.
I watched it enraptured. If she could do it with such panache, surely I could too? I had told my loved ones – but how to tell people I liked but who were tied to the public side of me, the one who was at university, the one who didn’t want to be gossiped about? If Ellen was leading the charge, wasn’t it time for me too? But how to do it?
A tattoo? (‘L.U.V.Z.’ and ‘L.E.Z.Z.’ on my knuckles?) If I had left my devil in charge, I would have done it with a gospel choir or a team of trapeze artists. Instead, even though I was all fired up, I decided to wait. And wait.
Advertisement
I never thought I would write about it, week in/week out, but in the end it had to be this way: mechanical, irreversible and a way of explaining it to myself. I had to make it real by joining up all the memories, all those sitcom moments into one coherent tale.
Back then, I had no plan – and I didn’t have the words. I needed time and experience. As thrilling as it was to fantasise, I hated the idea of the spectacle – and the shame that would follow. Not all TV divas were good for me. In Dangerous Liaisons, Glenn Close’s character is exposed at her pernicious worst in front of high society.
In the final scene, she has to enter an opera to a barrage of catcalls and demeaning hisses. It was a note-perfect rendition of the reception I expected. I was mortified every time I imagined uttering those words, then hearing them repeated over the gossip Tannoy. “She-e-e-e’s gay.” The closet door stayed shut and the elaborate coming-out rituals were put away – along with my sacred videotape of the Ellen episodes. My own coming out hadn’t been scripted yet.