It was the summer we were 18. Sitting on the sofa, bored with waiting for our lives to start, my best friend, Joanna, suggested we go to Pride. It would be an adventure, she said. Even though I said yes, I secretly hoped we weren’t really going.
The following Saturday I was standing by the taxi rank at Charing Cross station in London. I had been too nervous to eat breakfast and, waiting for Joanna, I felt sick. I wore new trainers I couldn’t afford and a new T-shirt. Briefly, I thought about turning round and getting the next train home. Spilling out from the station were more gay people than I had ever seen: an older man in camouflage combats wearing a pair of angel wings, a trio of drag queens in tight red sequins, polished as a Motown girl-group. I watched them crossing the road, feeling like I was underdressed, as if Pride was just another place I didn’t belong.
I’d told Joanna I was gay when I was 16, while lying on my living room carpet, listening to REM. Although I had finally said the words out loud, I wasn’t sure I believed it, if I knew what the words would mean for me. I still felt like the bullied boy, my eyes fixed to the whiteboard, ignoring the sting of spitballs on my collar and the breaktime shouts of “bender”. I would catch the train home on Fridays, fizzing with freedom. Sometimes I would buy a gay magazine, if the newsagent wasn’t too crowded, but the photos of smooth-muscled perfection only increased my feelings of alienation. I hid them under my mattress – they didn’t seem to promise a bright future, a party I could join. I have cerebral palsy and, as a disabled person, I felt my sexuality would always be theoretical. What did it matter, really, what I called myself?
Then Joanna arrived at the station and pulled me into a hug, back into the present, smiling widely. “We made it, then,” she whispered.
Trafalgar Square was tight with bodies, all noise and glitter. Joanna saw the woman before I did. She was about 50, old to us then. Her hair was shaved into a precise greying quiff. She had tattooed arms and was topless apart from an open leather vest. Her nipples were large, but almost hidden by heavy-looking piercings. My first thought was that her display looked painful. My second was that she looked wonderfully, exuberantly, like herself. The stranger looked proud. Comfortable in her skin in a way I had never been.
I walk with crutches, so I am used to the stares, and parents pulling their children out of my slower way, as if my disability were contagious. But that first afternoon at Pride, I was the one staring. The stranger turned, giving me a quick thumbs-up. Smiling, she said: “Enjoy yourself honey, it’s our day today,” before turning back to her friends.
Nearly 30 years later I can still see that smile and hear her warm Scottish accent. It was a tiny moment, but a huge shift in the way that I saw myself. The paradox of having a visible disability is that, too often, I have felt invisible. Reduced by others, and myself, to only a difficult difference. Not someone desired or desiring. I had denied my sexuality because it was easier to pretend I didn’t have any. But to deny your sexuality is to disallow an essential part of yourself – your humanity.
More important than who I wanted, or who might want me, I needed to be seen. This woman had seen me. “Our day,” she said. That small phrase meant me and all the people in that exultant crowd. She was the mirror I needed. It allowed me to see myself. I was gay and disabled. Not one identity despite the other, but both.
The marchers had thinned out. It was trying to rain, but we didn’t want to miss the party, so we took a cab south to Brockwell Park, where the Pride festivities continued. I think the driver regretted the fare, thought we were drunk. We rolled on his backseat, screaming with laughter. The relief, at last, of being ourselves. Sitting next to Joanna in that cab, I thought: this is what life is, where it starts. I wanted the boys at school to see me, to know that they had been right.
I can’t remember who was headlining, but the music didn’t matter. I sat on the damp grass, drinking warm beer. Watching the groups of friends, kissing couples – my community. I thought about the woman and all the other people whose first Pride it was. I felt happy and finally proud.
Go the Way Your Blood Beats: A Memoir, by Emmett de Monterey, is published by Viking (£18.99) on 6 July
