And I have never mastered the simian stroll. I firmly believe that being an ordinary bloke can and should encompass the qualities my dad showed me. I also appear an ordinary bloke: married with two kids. I often prefer talking to women than men (though I have good male friends). I still detest all-male, macho and misogynistic attitudes and environments. I had hard-won respect from my peers, but at some cost. I didn’t really have any friends at school until I was 16. My dad was also something of a counsellor to his friends: “ordinary” blokes who, I later found out, would confide to him problems that were taboo at the time, eg erectile dysfunction. That is, being kind, gentle, caring, sharing household duties, very involved with bringing up the kids, and not spending hours in the pub. The masculine examples I had grown up with showed a different view of what it was “to be a man”. My classmates rewarded my difference with a daily diet of homophobic insults. I was just different, in the way I looked and spoke.
While the school I went to wasn’t “rough”, a lot of the lads were still “hard”. Though the memories are decades old now – I went to a Catholic boys’ grammar school in Liverpool from 1976 to 1983 – the homophobic abuse I received is still very clear in my mind. I readily identified with Owen Jones’s important article ( Why homophobia against straight men matters, 17 May).
