The first gay couple I ever met were a witty pair with a lovely, terraced house not far from where I grew up. They were in their mid-twenties; I was 17. One of them worked at a gay club I’d just started dipping a tentative toe into. He’d give me a free pint if the manager wasn’t looking, his way of saying, “it’s OK, I know you’re nervous in here, but you don’t have to be”. It was a little rite of passage that’s gathered gorgeous extra layers of generosity with each passing decade, the more I understand it.
It was the late Eighties. Being gay was not just marked by a stigma you had to reject, in order to accept who you were, a destabilising social double bluff many of us failed to master. There was no proper guidance on how to do it. Then there was the omnipresence of HIV/Aids, making bedfellows of death and desire. This couple rented their spare room to a garrulous Scouser dying upstairs. He’d been diagnosed HIV-positive the year before, dead within three months of my saying hello. Because it was the first gay household I’d stepped into, I assumed all others were like that too.
