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Queer Me!_Halfway Between Flying and Crying (2019) - Simon - 12-10-2025
Tim discovers to his horror at 13 that he has fallen deeply in love with another 13 year old boy. The coming of age story of a shy queer teenager in the Swinging Sixties in the UK, this true story is the dramatised diary of Tim's teenage school days. The emotional ride starts on his 13th birthday on the 5th of August 1965, in a grey coast town in North Wales while he still is certain he's heterosexual, and ends as he leaves school in December 1970 aged 18.
His parents never understood who he was, never realised he had insecurities, was failing, was in love, was afraid of them, that he needed help. They told themselves he was a perfect China Doll. Queer China Dolls were faulty. In his family faulty China Dolls were smashed. This is the UK when homosexuality was first illegal; then, in the days leading up to its legalisation for consenting adults in the UK in 1967, it was talked about in parliament and the press as abhorrent, a perversion, an abomination.
These were bleak times to be a gay teenager, yet Tim shows his hopes and fears throughout. The places are real, so are the boys. The names are changed to protect the innocent and the guilty alike.
Quote:5th August 1965 – Thursday
We’re on holiday. We’re in a weird place in North Wales, and I don’t like it much. We used to go to Tenby, but Father decided he wanted a change, so we tossed up between Barmouth and Pwllheli. Why we chose the unpronounceable one I’ve no idea, but we did.
“You’ll like it,” Mother had said as she booked the caravan for two weeks. It’s got a sandy beach and everything you’re used to in Tenby. And the caravan site’s just by the harbour.”
She was wrong.
Did I say I didn’t like it much?
It stinks.
I don’t mean ‘it’s not very nice’, which it isn’t, but it actually stinks.
I can’t make up my mind if it stinks of raw sewage or rotting seaweed, but it really pongs when the tide’s out. And it’s not very nice. And it’s my birthday and I’m a teenager at last, and nothing’s different.
This is meant to be special, this is. I’m a teenager, I’ve just left my old school and I’m starting my new one in September, and I’m in some God forsaken hole in a rotten caravan with no friends and it’s my birthday.
And guess what? The sandy beach is about 400 yards away, only there’s the harbour between us and it. We’ve got shingle. Great banks of shingle. Miles of sodding shingle. We could have had shingle in Aldeburgh and stayed with my aunt and uncle in comfy beds instead of a rotten caravan. So we either need the car or a rowing boat, and we don’t know anyone here so we can’t borrow a boat.
We went to the sandy beach yesterday. Abererch Sands, it’s called. And just before we got there Father decided he wanted to dig for some bait for fishing. That's all he ever does on holiday, fish. The mud’s so deep where he wanted to dig, and all reeking of sewage or whatever, that it pulled my welly off. I don’t mind saying that I was scared. I don’t like the idea of drowning in deep mud. Well, not before I’ve chatted up a girl and had sex and stuff at least. I want that. It’s pretty much all we ever talked about at my old school.
I don’t know any girls, not really, so fat chance of that I suppose. There are a couple of sisters in the caravan over the way; they look quite pretty. A bit young, though.
Anyway we got to the beach eventually. Turned out it wasn’t that nice. It wasn't rotting seaweed, and at least I know what a rubber johnny looks like now. Sodding hell, nothing's right about this sodding place.