In retrospect being gay seems obvious and inevitable and just the way I'm made, but I had great difficulty dealing with it. It wasn't that I went to a single-sex school, though I think that made it easier not to have a girlfriend at school. It wasn't because of my parents, who have been unfailingly supportive and loving. It may be that the most traumatic years of the AIDS epidemic (1983-1996) coinciding with my teens and early twenties was probably potent disincentive to identifying as gay.

There were a few guys at school that I perhaps paid more attention to than I would have otherwise and I won't embarrass them by naming them, but the sort of men I find attractive are really not schoolboys. The ones who were more obviously gay at school were not generally my friends.

I had a girlfriend in Year 12 at school but really didn't have much of a clue what to do with a girlfriend. We socialized and played tennis; she was an intelligent and sweet girl and much better than I deserved at the time. I guess I should have figured things out on one of my first nights in college when a girl (I won't name her either) dragged me from a party off to her room saying she wanted me to "fix her clock". Once in her room I fixed her clock and she complained of the ladder in her stocking which she asked me to examine. Completely failing to take the hint, I examined the ladder, advised her to paint the edges with nail polish to limit its spread and returned to the party.

As a student I later shared a house for some years with a guy whom I figured out was gay from his collection of muscle magazines and trips to Melbourne's club scene. I only had the magazines so he didn't figure out I was gay. Once I was living alone and by chance had a gay neighbour I found attractive, I finally came to terms with it.

I finally started going out a bit when I moved back to Melbourne in 1998 and after a few dating experiences, by the end of the year I was in a relationship with Robert and shortly thereafter attended my first gay dance event and then my first Mardi Gras in Sydney.

The relationship with Robert was my first serious long-term relationship and while I was very naive in some respects, I was also very lucky that it worked reasonably well. It ended at the end of 2004; I guess I was lucky to get to 34 before getting my heart properly broken the first time.

Since then I have been with Jay which has been the best part of my life so far. After almost 20 years together we married in November 2022.