clear as a bell

As an introduction, and specifically for those who are meeting me for the first time on this blog, my name is Rob, I'm 22 and I live in Sydney with my boyfriend, Greg. I've just recently started work as an engineer for a structural and civil engineering company in Sydney, having graduated from Sydney Uni this year. I grew up in Canberra, the capital city of Australia, which, much like Washington D.C. in the U.S., is quite a small capital city with only 350,000 people.

I realised/accepted that I was gay soon after I moved to Sydney when I was 18, and progressively came out as gay after that. I probably should have realised/accepted that I was gay well before that, but that's just the way things went!

So I'm starting this blog because I frequently remember situations from my childhood and my teen years which, with hindsight, make me think 'how could I possibly not know that I was gay?!' and this will serve as a place for me to recount and collect these situations.

I'll start with one of the most recent situations, when I was in my last year of high school, towards the very end of grade 12, when our year group were voting on joke awards, like most popular, prettiest, most likely to succeed, etc.

A group of us were talking about who we could choose for the various categories and there was one category which was 'most likely to be gay' and one girl said to me that I was in the running for it. I was in denial and was laughing it off, and I didn't end up winning it, probably because they thought it would be better to make someone win who was clearly not gay and who could take it as a joke, rather than someone who could actually be gay and might be offended by it all.

I probably should have taken the hint then, but I guess there was just so much else going on at that time, with school finishing and final exams etc, that it just wasn't a big deal.

It also wasn't a direct question, like 'are you gay? cos you're in the running for this award...' so it wasn't like I was forced to think about it or to face it. Either I could just make up an excuse in my head that would justify to myself that I wasn't gay, or I could just not think about it and bury it deeper into my head like other normal people do!