By the middle of 1982 I had read almost every gay-positive book that I could get my hands on.

These included The Theory and Practice of Homosexuality by John Hart and Diane Richardson, Dennis Altman’s Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation and Jeffrey Week’s Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (plus the occasional racy gay fiction novel).

I got two particular messages from my reading. Firstly, that homosexuality had been around for millennia but only problematised relatively recently. And secondly, that coming out to your family was important on both a personal and political level.

Personally, it meant that there would be no more hiding a fundamental part of ourselves from our significant others.

Politically, it showed that homosexuals weren’t some strange ‘other’; some mutant species beamed down from another planet. We were sons and daughters, cousins, nephews and nieces, uncles and aunts.

Still in my first flush of political radicalism, I decided to come out first to my eldest brother. He lived in Australia and I was on holiday there, staying with friends in Sydney.

I rang him first in order to arrange a visit and also explain what I was coming to talk about. He hung up on me.

I was, initially, quite shaken. For some reason I was convinced he was going to drive over to where I was staying and beat the crap out of me. There wasn’t any particular logic behind that fear; he’d never done anything like that before. I suspect it was merely an indication of the vulnerability I was feeling at the time, having invested much emotional energy in the build up to this revelation only to have it answered by a swift but brutal click of the telephone.

He didn’t turn up, of course, and we had no further contact for the remainder of my holiday in Australia. My return to the UK simply reinforced our emotional as well as geographical distance.

And rather than put me off the idea of coming out to other family members, the episode more or less provided an additional reason for it. I would, for example, need to explain to my mother why, having travelled halfway around the world to spend three months in Australia, I had spent less than a week of that time with my brother.

Thankfully I had some time to work on my strategy. She lived in the North East of England and I in the Midlands. It was easy to make a case that work commitments prevented me from visiting immediately. In consequence, it was nearly three months before I had to prepare for ‘Coming Out – Part Two’.

I had no idea what, if anything, my brother had communicated to my mother. My guess was that he would have avoided the subject – and it turned out that I was right.

So my preparation was still based on the ‘textbook’ procedure for coming out in the most personally and politically effective way.

Lesson One was ‘Don’t start on a negative’.  In other words, don’t say “I’ve got something awful to tell you” or “You’re probably not going to like this but…”

As an extenson of that, Lesson Two was ‘Couch it in positive terms.’ In practice this meant saying something like, “Our relationship is important to me so I want to be able to share other things that are  important to me.”

And so it was that I began to prepare my script. No apologies, no negativity, just caring and sharing.

But, at the back of my mind, there was still a concern about getting a negative – indeed, hostile – response. In such a situation it would be necessary to beat a hasty retreat. That, in itself, presented a logistical problem.

My mother lived in a little village with limited public transport options. I didn’t own a car at that time. There was some distance between my home and my mother’s. And my visit was going to be over the Christmas holidays, so there’d be little or no traffic for the last desperate resort of hitch-hiking back to Nottingham.

It’s at times like these you find out who your real friends are. By the time I got to visit my mother I had a back-up plan in place. In the first instance, a student friend in York had put her housemates on stand-by to receive an unexpected visitor over the Christmas period. It wasn’t exactly walking distance, but York was much closer than Nottingham.

And friends as far away as London had filled their car’s fuel tank on Christmas Eve, just in case they needed to make the long drive up to the North of England at short notice.

I don’t recall reading about such elaborate back-up plans in any of the books I read about coming out – but it was reassuring to have them in place anyway!

And so I arrived on December 22nd for my festive visit – with one particularly surprising Christmas gift. I decided to tell her the day I arrived in order to get it out of the way.

It’s funny how plans can change so quickly! ‘Best to get settled in a little bit first’, I told myself.  And so the Great Revelation was put off until the 23rd.

But that day was spent doing so much last minute Christmas shopping there just didn’t seem to be any time!

Christmas Eve dawned grey and miserable (or was that just me?). I was ready to explode and yet my mother still suspected nothing. Today had to be the day – apart from anything else, the buses stopped running at 5 o’clock, making escape all but impossible.

Television on Christmas Eve was the usual bland pap.. – I know, I stared at it vacantly from the moment I got up! I still remember that there was an old Tarzan movie on. (Not that Johnny Weissmuller ever did anything for me – although I doubt even a naked Brad Pitt would have registered at that point).

My mother fussed around, making the breakfast and chirpy chit-chat. I responded with monosyllabic grunts.

Whether it was the threat of being stranded without a way home, the mind-numbing vapidity of Christmas TV or just my mother’s innocent but sustained cheeriness, something gave. I switched off the TV (my mother’s first indication that all was not well) and sat her down in front of me.

The script swirled around in my head. ‘No negatives. Keep it positive. Say why it’s important’.

But what really began to pre-occupy my thoughts were the words I should use. Should I say ‘homosexual’? Would she know what that was? What about ‘gay’? Neither of those terms were likely to be part of the social lexicon of Hunwick Over-60s Club or any of her other regular haunts.

I know I managed to avoid the negativity. I think I even got in the stuff about it being important, wanting to share and so on. But I’m painfully aware that I concluded it all by bursting into tears (and, berating myself whilst crying on the grounds that this was not a positive action!).

After what seemed like an endless pause my mother said, “Well, I can’t claim to understand it – but it doesn’t matter. Whatever you are, you’re still my son.”

Cue more tears. And yet, in the midst of the tears, the main thought that went through my head was, “Is that it! After all the planning and anxiety, that’s all you’re going to say!”.

I know, some people are never satisfied!

It all turned out to be a bit of a damp squib – although she never mentioned it again for the duration of my visit, despite various prompts. I don’t think she ever understood it but, to her credit, always accepted my partners and always treated them exactly the same as my brothers’ partners.

But I still don’t like Johnny Weissmuller.