Apart from a couple of years in the middle of the ‘70s when I just wanted to be one of the Tomorrow People in the British sci-fi TV series, the only career I’d ever wanted was flying in the Royal Air Force.
Like the Tomorrow People, I had a secret. One so secret that I didn’t even know it myself until well into my service.
I went to RAF Cranwell late 1985, graduating in March 1986 on the proudest day of my life, with my parents watching in the crowd, me as a sword bearer and a mighty Vulcan howling overhead for our flypast.
I had no conscious idea that I was gay at that time, all I’d heard made it abundantly clear I could not be gay in the military, or to be frank, in any version of a happy future life, and so that was it, I wasn’t gay!
Those early years I was too busy, or was it just too deep in denial, to worry
about it. Graduate, get on a squadron. That was my focus. I took the traditional junior officer route – married, two kids – before realising I was gay.
Denial is not a place that is healthy to live forever and so we separated. It was a horrible decision to take, but I still believe it was the best one for us all from a short list of bad options.
The RAF, as all the Armed Forces, was still subject to “The Gay Ban” and so I knew that my coming out was limited, I was now a target, despised and hunted.
Every conversation, every trip to explore the new world I found myself party to, every liaison could mark the end of everything I had worked for. Before I was just lying to myself. Now I was lying to everyone!
Eventually my own clumsiness was my undoing, losing a wallet with a membership card for the Gay Bikers Motor-Cycle Club. Then followed weeks of waiting for that knock on the door, to be driven off to the police flight. Waking every day thinking is this the day it all comes crashing down? The days passed and I began to think I’d got away with it. No such luck!
August 4th 1994, the boss is there to meet the aircraft. He comes up to the nav station where I’m packing up, “Don’t worry about that, come with me”, the sentence that marked the beginning of the end.
Thirteen months of suspension doing all I can to fight and change their minds all to no avail and I’m ordered to resign, discharged, out.
I was ex-military, but according to the military, not a Veteran. But ex-military know what to do. We get on, we make a bad situation better. I retrained as an accountant, I forged a new life. But I still wake up from dreams of being in the RAF. I still miss it. I don’t think that will ever leave me.
