"I didn't know anyone else that was gay." That was Christopher Anstee's experience of growing up in the Valleys.
The 46-year-old is Rhondda born and bred. Growing up, Chris knew he wasn't like his brothers, who were sport mad. Instead, he did drama and dance, which led to an onslaught of bullying.
He said: "It was small towns, quite single-minded - I didn't know anyone else who was gay. I did feel out of place. And even though I hate the word, the truth of the matter is when you're a teenager and you start to realise you're a bit different, in that environment of rugby, football, and very masculine environment you do instantly start to feel like a bit of a freak. You think how am I going to do this? Do I push it away, do I pretend, and it's incredibly difficult.
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"What was even more difficult for me in that environment is I did a terrible job of hiding it. Part of it is because it's who I am, it's my personality, and I was very, very fortunate with my parents. I grew up with two older brothers that played rugby in football, they had lots of male friends. I wanted to go to dancing classes and drama, so I did a terrible job of hiding it, and the onslaught of that was horrific bullying for many years. That's what it was like back in the early 80s, in some ways."
Chris slowly grew to accept his sexuality through doing his own research. He continued: "I was fortunate I was always very inquisitive, and I was deeply interested in gay history in terms of what had gone on in London and in the 80's and the AIDS pandemic in New York and San Francisco. I started to research activism, I guess. People that were you know, some famous people like Harvey Milk and Marsha P Johnson and things like that in terms of people who had stood out against intolerance.
"I started to develop a clear understanding, that it was wrong for people to think that it was wrong. So I guess I developed that understanding in my very late teens. And kind of from that point, I think that's when the bullying went away towards the end of my education. I got to a point where the bullies lost their power, because when they would call me queer or queen or gay man, I started to be saying 'Yeah, what's your point?' and suddenly the rug gets pulled from underneath them because they're not hurting you anymore because they're just telling you what you know about yourself and you've started to accept. So I guess I accepted my situation in the last half of my teenage years and accepted the fact that it was wrong, and then I changed I adjusted I started to build my confidence."
By the end of his education, Chris felt he was ready to come out. "I actually came out to my friends before my parents, just a couple of very close friends when we were around 18", he said. "It was actually an 18-30's holiday, God forbid. I'd spent the week building up the courage to come out, and I told them, after quite a few jugs of sangria. When we'd woken up in the morning, they'd completely forgotten. I had to go through it all again the next night.
"The strange thing was, even though I was ready to do it, I was ready to say the words 'I'm gay', I ended up coming out as bisexual initially because I thought that would be easier for them to digest. So I put one leg and one arm and one leg out of the closet and the rest of me followed about six months later."
Chris has spent the past five years writing his book 'Polish the Crown' which was released at the start of May. It's the first book Chris has written and he says he's surprised it's doing so well. He said: "It's number six in the LGBTQ chart in the UK and in the top 30 of biographies. So yesterday, I had to look twice just to be sure so yesterday, my book was ahead of Graham Norton's book and one of Stephen Fry's books. I almost wanted to ring up and find out if it'd been a mistake. It's It's slipped back down a little bit today but I'm still so pleased with its reception."
"During the process of writing I've discovered the amazing benefits of documenting your story and I found it incredibly rewarding. It was empowering to do it because it made you face certainly, in my case, some of the demons from the past and it made me reflect that it's easy as you grow to forget things that weren't right when you were young. And actually, it made me confront them and realise that some of the things I experienced really weren't right and I shouldn't have experienced them. But it was a very good reflection opportunity. Thankfully, things have come a long way in recent years, but there is still a long way to go."
