3. Dreaming.

“No!”

I was sitting up in bed but it was still dark, it was the middle of the night. I looked around me but I was still in my bedroom, the clothes I wore last night were still bumped on the chair and my computer was still sat on the table and was still turned off. It had only been a dream but a fucking real dream. I fell back onto my bed, not bothering with my pillows or duet, my skin felt cold but at least I wasn’t sweating. I was wide awake now.

This wasn’t the first time I’d had this dream, it was getting to be regular now, but it was still horrible. It was always the same. I’ve died and was going down into hell. I’m naked and walking along this dark and wet tunnel. All along the sides of it are people actually chained to the walls, and they’re as naked as me. At first these people are whole, their skin is cold and lifeless but they look like normal people. Soon, as I walked down the tunnel, these people start looking bad. Their skin turned green, their eyes were falling out or gone and slime oozing out of their bodies. The further I walked the more decomposed these people got, soon they were rotting lumps of meat chained to the walls. Finally, they were just skeletons chained up there, their bones brown and black with dirt. But all these people, not matter how decomposed they were, were all letting out the same low moans of agony. At the end of the tunnel, just waiting for me, was a figure dressed in a long black rode, silently waiting for me. Only when I got close to it did it speak, but only one thing:

“Welcome…”

Then I woke up, I always woke up then. It was always the same with this dream. Afterwards I’d always find it hard to get back to sleep and that night.

I know were that dream comes from, from my childhood and my growing up, but it didn’t make it any easier.

My mum and dad are very Christians, therefore I was brought up to be a Christian and to go to church and all that, but I believed it all. I believed that God was always right, no doubts. That family was everything and you couldn't live happily outside of one. That everything I was told was always right, certainly what I was told by the Elders at church. That I had to conform and toe the line, if I didn't it was a sin. That church and God had to be everything to me, my whole life, and no other life.

That was what I grow up in and where I found out I'm gay but I kept very quiet about it. I believed right from when I was really little that it was wrong to be gay. No one really told me this, they didn't need to because all that homophobia was there in the air and I just breathed it right in.

When I was sixteen, I found one of The Release Trust's leaflets, hidden away at the back of our church. They weren't as glossy as the one's I’d been given at Pride but they said the same things. They said being gay wasn't wrong, just a mistake, but expressing it was a real sin, certainly if you had sex with another guy. The Release Trust said there were only two ways I could live and not sin. I could either be celibate or be "healed" and turn straight. I believed it all, every last thing they said, the moment I read it because I felt so relieved. I thought I was going to hell just for being gay, I was still a virgin at sixteen, but The Release Trust gave me an escape.

So I joined them. I went for a kind of counselling from one of its leaders; a very strange guy called Henry Webb. I also went, once a month, to a sort of support group for gay men "wanting to change"; it was called a "Release Group". They were all older guys who had been out on the gay scene before finding Jesus. (The group fell apart when I was eighteen after it was found out that two of the guys were having a relationship) Everyone there, the Release Group and Henry Webb, told me that I was perfect to change, to be healed, to turn straight. I was young, a virgin and terrified of being gay. I believed it all and begged God, each night, to turn me straight. Nothing happened though.

At nineteen I was still gay, still a virgin and still involved with The Release Trust. The problems were really starting though. Nothing had changed, except my gay feelings were getting stronger. I had a really big crush on another guy at church, Marc, who was straight and didn't have a clue how I felt. Then one of our church's deacons was thrown out for being gay and living with another guy. It was all getting to me, all the pressure. Being in the closet to everyone and everywhere telling me that being gay was the worst sin on earth. Plus I was feeling more a failure because I wasn't turning straight. I felt God didn't love me because I wasn't straight. It was all my fault, I believed.

In that autumn that year I took an overdose. I wanted to die. I was so depressed about everything, but mostly about being gay and unable to turn straight. I wanted to end it all and stop the pain. Instead of dying, I woke up in hospital. They treated me for the pills I'd taken and next day they moved me to a psychiatric ward. I was mad, mentally ill. I stayed on that ward for two and a half months. I met my first openly gay man, a gay man who was happy to be gay. Ed, one of the nurses.

The problem was I'd written a note, when I took the overdose, all about being gay and not being able to be straight and all that, and mum and dad read it after my sister Annie had found me. I'd been on the psychiatric ward about four days when mum finally came to see me. The only time she did. She had all my stuff packed in three old cases and she told me I wasn't welcome back home anymore. It was bad enough I'd tried to kill myself but being gay as well was too much. I wasn't wanted in the family. She wouldn't listen when I cried and tried to tell her I was still a virgin.

When I left hospital I went into a hostel, a sort of halfway house, and later a place of my own. I never went back to The Release Trust or back to church.

I've been trying to come to terms with what happened to me ever since, and not doing very well about it. I was twenty-four when I had my first relationship with another guy. It didn't last long, like the few that I've had since then. Kay is one of the few people I've been able to get close to, one of my few real mates, and even with her I haven’t told her everything that happened to me. She knows I was involved with The Release Trust but not about my overdose or me being in hospital. I haven’t told her because I just can’t.

I lay there and stared up at my bedroom’s ceiling. It was gone four o’clock in the morning but thanks to that dream there was no chance of me getting back to sleep. The thing was that dream always brought with it the same worry, were those Christians really right? They always said being gay was a lonely and sad life, full of disease and unhappiness. My life was really lonely and none of my relationships had worked, was that because I was gay? Was I damned to be this for the rest of my life? I couldn’t face it if I was, I couldn’t face it if those Christians were right.

When I was in The Release Trust they always went on about how harmful and lonely the gay life was. Now I’m living the gay life and my life wasn’t great, I didn’t have a lover or a chance of finding one, I hardly had any friends and only went to gay bars to find sex – otherwise I hated the places. God, I was such a failure as a gay man, but I couldn’t go back to The Release Trust because I’d really failed at that. God, my life was shit.

I didn’t want to think about that but it kept coming back to me as I tried to sleep, every time I closed my eyes that thought kept coming back…