An instance of homophobia

In 1977 I started at a school called "Bristol Cathedral School", now "Bristol Cathedral Choir School". At the time I was there it was all boys, but it was becoming mixed when I left.

At the primary school I attended, Christchurch in Clifton, nobody seemed to be that concerned about homosexuality, but at Bristol Cathedral School the order of the day seemed to be to discover which people were gay, and unkindly accuse them of Alan Bates-style homosexualist practices. I remember one boy in particular "Carl" (not his real name) pushed another boy against a wall for no particular reason and then became labelled as "gay" for the next several years. This boy was a rather odd person who was fond of saying "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" and used to repeatedly wash his hands. Another boy called Paul New, since deceased, made up a song about him which went "Qu'est-ce que c'est? Carl's a gay! He can't help it / He's made that way." Paul then for some reason would claim that he himself was also gay. I understand from his obituary that Paul was in fact heterosexual.

Amongst all this "homophobia" was our first year form teacher Mr B, a history teacher. Not only was Mr B quite clearly gay, but he seemed to have a "thing" for some of the boys in the class. I was baffled why none of the "gay bashing" was ever directed at this obviously-gay man.

Among my classmates was someone I'll call Sunny (not his real name). Sunny in particular seemed to dislike gay people. He claimed that the dormitories of Clifton College, a local boarding school, were hotbeds of mutual masturbation, and that the boys of Clifton College had contests where boys would masturbate onto a cream cracker and then force the slowest ejaculator to eat the cracker the others had deposited onto. I have no idea if any of Sunny's stories were true nor why he was particularly disgusted by Clifton College. He had an older brother who wasn't at the Cathedral School, and perhaps this brother had attended that school and then invented some lurid stories about it.

However, like everyone else, Sunny didn't seem to notice that Mr B was gay, in fact he said once that Mr B was one of the better teachers at the school, but "he has his little favourites" which was certainly true.

Sunny also had a sideline in quizzes which he claimed were the work of eminent psychologists. For example "If you saw a coca-cola can in the road, would you 1. kick it 2. leave it alone 3. pick it up and put it in the litter?" The "reveal" of the quiz was that if you picked it up and threw it away, it meant you were gay. He was an inveterate liar about many things and I strongly suspect that he had just made the quiz up himself.

Sunny had some kind of problem where he needed to go to the toilet frequently. He often said that he was "shitting bricks". One evening I was walking around with Sunny and another friend nearby the Clifton Suspension Bridge. There was a public toilet on the Clifton side of the approach to the bridge, and Sunny said that he needed to go to the toilet, but he was very concerned that there might be a gay man inside the toilet. I suggested to him that even if there was a gay man in the toilet, all he needed to do was to refuse the man's advances, and after some back and forth it turned out that Sunny's real concern was actually that if there was a gay man inside the toilet, and the gay man offered to have sex with him, he would be unable to refuse.

Sunny left the school at 16 and I never saw him again after those days. I suppose some of the boys at the school must have been gay, but I don't keep in touch with them so I don't know if anyone "came out" later on. I remember getting shocked looks when I said that it was obvious that George Michael was gay.

I saw Mr B one last time at the end of my sojourn at the Cathedral School where for some reason or another he greeted me by saying very sarcastically "What an honour to meet the great Ben Bullock". I don't know what he was thinking about.