Listening to the album was like waking from a bad dream and liberated me from the shame I’d felt about my sexuality
A
s a young man, shame was a constant companion to my consideration of my sexuality. It made me question my sexual orientation: was I attracted to men, as I suspected, or did I simply have a desire for gratification?
When I tip-toed around the topic of queerness in conversations with past girlfriends, more than once it was made clear to me that bisexuality was an unattractive trait for a man to have. The shame heaped up. And yet my secret fantasies continued. It wasn’t just men I fantasised about, it was the possibility of different power dynamics, of multiple bodies, of feeling seen.
I think my father had something to do with this. He became a manipulative, and sometimes violent, alcoholic by my teenage years, and I came to associate addiction, anger and excess with him. My longing for sexual exploration felt like the early stages of the kind of lascivious male appetites that I knew could wreck lives. And so I bottled these feelings up.
