On the (Gay) Fear of Holding Hands

In the summer of 2016, I spent a few days in the beautiful coastal town of St Andrews, the home of golf, once the ecclesiastical capital of Scotland, and the site of the third oldest university in the English-speaking world. It was a place I was very familiar with, having spent many long weekends there with my dad over the years. He was three years gone by the time of this visit, however, and this was my first time in St Andrews since his death. I was alone and spent two or three days revisiting our old haunts in a kind of pilgrimage in honour of him. The town was as lovely as ever in the summer weather.

On my final day, when I was due to drive home later in the evening, my then-boyfriend joined me. He had driven a long way to be there and we spent a wonderful day together. Among other things, we took a stroll out along the old stone pier, which juts out into the North Sea and which plays host every Sunday morning to a procession of St Andrews University students in memory of a fallen hero (how many actually turn up in their red robes for chapel and the pier walk after Saturday night, I couldn’t tell you).

So, there we were, a couple wandering along a pier on a warm summer’s day. It should have felt like the most natural thing in the world to hold hands. But it didn’t. My exact memory of what happened is fuzzy, but I remember feeling anxious at the idea of taking my boyfriend’s hand. I think we did hold hands for a little while when other people couldn’t see us—and other people seeing us was something I was very conscious of. There was no drama. It was just how I felt (I can’t tell you what, if anything, my boyfriend thought). We went to the end of the pier, admired the view, and took a photo together, and that was that. But still, that feeling of anxiety, perhaps even of mild fear, at the idea of holding hands—that remains with me as one of my most vivid memories of the whole trip.

Why should this be? Friends have suggested it was merely an aversion to publicly displaying affection, something which, as a quick Google search shows, is quite common. Lots of people don’t like holding hands let alone—ugh!—kissing in public. And this is understandable. Why show off to the world unless you’re insecure about your relationship? Or maybe you’re just a quiet, private sort of couple. Nothing wrong with that. Perfectly natural. But in my case, there was something more at work. The Fear—which I now capitalise to show you, dear reader, that I Mean Business—was not merely caused by discomfort at PDAs but by the fact that we were both men.

As a lifelong homosexual, I can’t run the experiment of having a girlfriend and holding her hand in public to see how that would feel, so I can only rely on my own memories of my own feelings here. But I am as certain as I can be at such a remove that the same-sex thing was the thing that made me feel the way I felt.

Now, I’m no closet case, that’s for sure, and I live in one of the world’s most gay-friendly countries. What’s more, St Andrews is a well-heeled, highly educated sort of town, not one where a gay couple holding hands is likely to enrage some skinheads into violence. So the fear was not fear of being beaten, but of being judged. And even the feared judgement would not have been overt. I highly doubt anyone on that pier was likely to make a haughty comment about protecting the kids from corruption, never mind hurl a screaming “FAGGOTS!” our way. No, it was just fear of being seen, of what people might think.

In short, it was a kind of paranoia.

How would I even know what anyone who saw us might be thinking unless there was a slight narrowing of the eyes or a faintly disgusted turn of the head? I couldn’t possibly, of course. So my fear of holding my boyfriend’s hand in public was also a fear of what might or might not be going on inside the minds of strangers. I was willing to forgo a natural display of affection and contentment because someone might look a little discomfited or might think some thoughts? Absurd. Egotistical, even—surely those people on the pier, with families and children and partners of their own, would scarcely even have noticed the sight of two men holding hands?

And yet, however much my rational mind tells me all this, I know that even today I’d be scared. Yes, I have since kissed men in public as well as private—at gay bars, that is, or at night, or when inebriated. But walking down the street in the cold light of day? No, no I don’t think I could easily do that even now.

What is the deeper reason for this? Here I enter unmapped territory, even though that territory is my own mind. Perhaps it is shame. Yes, I am out and proud, but as all gay people know, the long, lonely years of childhood and adolescence, spent wrestling with strange feelings seemingly unshared by everyone you know and enduring an unceasing bombardment of words and images declaring, subtly and unsubtly, the supremacy of heterosexuality and the vileness of its opposite, and during which your parents express disapproval and even disgust at gay kisses on TV and one of your earliest memories is the sight of a mob on the news screaming that all gays should be slaughtered—well, those years leave a mark.

Yes, it’s still there, that shame, all those difficult years. However much I’ve changed, however happy I am with who I am now, that shame remains deep down and affects my actions (or inactions). It doesn’t require overt homophobia or abuse, either. I never faced much, if any, of that. It just requires that you be different and society be stacked against you. It is insidious. And yes, things have changed, at least on the surface, but I wonder how many young boys and girls are still being brought up in such environments, which are, after all, pretty common across the world.

Or perhaps such insidiousness was a product of a particular time and place? As gays demanded their rights more publicly and became ever more visible across society (I was born in 1996), perhaps my environment simply reflected a backlash, when latent homophobia bubbled up at different levels from the depths? Maybe, but I doubt it. This experience is nigh-universal among gays in both time and space, so far as I can tell. And it might never cease to be so, however much things get better.

So, what is to be done? Well, it’s important to emphasise that things do indeed get better, not just personally but also at the societal level. Pendulums swing and seasons turn and cycles cycle, but I doubt that the advances in gay rights most western nations have seen in recent years are going to be reversed (that ‘most’ is mostly for the U.S., whose Supreme Court contains a member who would dearly like to “reconsider” the right of American gays to marry).

And then again, there’s strength to be found in accepting that the gay experience will be with us forever. Maybe it even gives us an edge in life, a certain resilience and drive. And I’m grateful that this is the extent of my problems—more serious energy ought to be expended on all those people in swathes of the world who face much, much worse for their sexuality. How comparably more awful it would be to be raised in an environment where the very real threats of torture, rape, and death hang over you from your earliest years.

If it’s some sort of redemption arc I’m after, then, here it is: I resolve in future to hold hands with my boyfriend (or, being optimistic, husband) in public and to hell with The Fear. Consider it a small act of defiance in the name of those worse-off millions both near at hand and far-flung. Admittedly, I’ll need to overcome the perpetual singledom that has befallen me since breaking up with my boyfriend years ago if I am to do this, but let’s not spoil the mood.

Perhaps I wasn’t so shy after all: a small act of defiance occasioned by nothing in particular on St Andrews pier, 2016. My ex is the photographer. (How thin and beautiful I was then! Oh, the glorious past.)