I am not lonely [Mystrade]

CHAPTER 187 : Climbing a mountain

The Lestrade-Holmes family wasn't really one for mundane events but  on general demands of both Greg's kids and parents and the family's  friend, Mycroft and his partner had agreed on holding a small party to  celebrate the third anniversary of their wedding. Everyone's planning  having to be taken into account, the celebration eventually ended being  held in mid-december, nearly three months after the said anniversary but  the joy was the same.

Michael, as his participation to the  celebration had overdone himself and served an exquisite meal composed  of long time favourites of the two men. At two in the afternoon, a  splendid cake was brought in, topped by the exact same figures of two  grooms the men had on their wedding cake and the elder Holmes blushed of  contentment when noticing the little attention.

They were to cut  the cake when the assembly, starting with the Lestrade's children chanted to demand a speech. Blushing even more, the politician  finally accepted, putting the knife down and demanding the silence.

"Today  is a day of celebration but I can't help but to feel a little bitter.  Mind you, I say bitter but I don't mean unfortunate. I feel bitter  because I have memories coming back by dozens." he started, slightly worrying Molly and Sally who looked at each other with a concerned look.
"I'm  not what you could call a sportsman but I can imagine how it feels to  climb a mountain so much bigger than you. Climbing it endlessly and  never seeing the top, nauseous and depleted of oxygen. I can recall that  some, many, have died in such adventures.
Trying to find out who you  were in the seventies was just like trying to climb a mountain with no  equipment and alone. No one had ever explained to me how to climb but  here I was, standing at the bottom of a mountain I couldn't even see the  top of, feeling the need to have a look over the clouds surrounding it  and in the same time being tightly hooked to the ground by the chains of  my society and my education. I had no idea of what was on the other  side of the mountain and knew no one who had climbed it before me. All I  knew was what had been taught to me, the dark abyss of sadness and  hate. I expected it to be an unpleasant experience because that was the  only image I ever had of what gay life could be. The social norm had  told me that I was going to be hated and I had to give up on my feeling  and resolved to stay on the ground, afraid and ashamed." the elder Holmes paused for a split of a second, the memories apparently painful to him.
"Being gay in my seventies meant being deprived of any feeling of belonging. It meant being isolated from anyone resembling  me, from anyone who could have understood without judging. There was  never any discussion of homosexuality but the poisonous idea of how  wrong it was to be gay was everywhere. No one around me would ever talk  about the LGBT community. No one would ever mention that Cary Grant was  gay or that it wasn't seen as especially weird to be gay during  antiquity. But yet, the feeling was there, slurred around by the precept  of the bible and the obsession for heirs. Being gay, being lesbian,  being something else than just straight and willing to reproduce was a sin, was abnormal and had no place in this society.
As  I grew older, I became famished for television. I had read books for my  entire life but I found them to be outdated, conservative and puritan.  Television, on the other hand, seemed like the modern media, where the  new ideas were exposed and where I could learn more about what it really  meant being young in the eighties Britain.
However, I was quickly deceived. Each night I would seek out in the TV  program for any mention of a little gayness in a show and each night I  would be disappointed. If ever a program featured an LGBT character, it  always had to be the over-camp, very sad, gay man. Falsely  flamboyant, falsely gay also because always played by straights who had  no idea of the gay community. I had sought out a new vision of the world  and had found something even worse than in my own family. If before  being gay was not an option, there it was an option but it would only  lead you to live the life of a miserable outcast only good to be a  walking joke, forever lonely and rejected.
I was eager for affection,  for tenderness. Nothing spectacular, but just to see that even I could  be happy. But censorship was still at work and even then, who in this  society, from the producers to the directors and the audience, would  have allowed to see the gays being portrayed as the equal of the  straights ? Having diversity of any kind on television was okay if, and  only if, they were the punt of a joke. It was okay to laugh at their  expenses, not with them because in the end, it only enforced the feeling  that being different was a sin. Again.
Even in college, in central  London, between highly educated young men, no one would ever dare to  discuss homosexuality. I believed most of us knew what it meant and some  may even knew people who were homosexual but there was nothing but  whispers. Those not looking manly enough were relentlessly picked on and  those showing a less conservative state of mind were highly suspected  of not laying on the right side as we used to say at the time.
I  naturally felt into the first category, having always preferred, and  been encouraged to prefer reading, music and noble sports to weight  lifting and running. Being pale, tall and way to slim for my  constituency – a result of being picked on as a teenager most probably - , I was the perfect illustration of what you would now call a twink  and I couldn't fool anyone. Oh, mind you, I tried but all my good will  wasn't enough to bulk me up and, after a while, I had to resolve to let  them say and to find a cleverer cover.
To everyone questioning me about why I still had no known girlfriend I would reply something about not being able to deal with people less intelligent than I was. I preferred to look pretentious and arrogant than to be seen as one of those gays I had seen on television and who were scaring me so much.
Every day, I would pretend, play  the part of the straight, sufficient bastard and it did work. I became  if not popular, important and I made my way up the ladder." Again, Mycroft paused for a while, letting the informations sank in.
"I  was so convincing at playing the part that I supposed I convinced  myself that I could actually live it for the rest of my life, that it  would make it all easier and that I didn't need that love and acceptance I had sought  for so long. I fooled everyone so well that as time passed by people  stopped picking on me, offering me some relief I have to admit I mistook  for happiness.
Yet, it always seemed like if I couldn't make the  little voice deep inside me to shut up. Every once in a while it would  resurface and the urge, contain for so long, made me felt like if I was  going to explode. Indulging myself was the only way of calming the urge  down and burying it again but gave me a profound feeling of failure, making me disgusted with myself.
It's  only years later, when assuming my feelings for a man, when coming out  some would say, that I understood that all the preconceived ideas about  the gays I had been fed with when I was younger were still anchored so  strongly in my mind that it prevented me from being able to tell the  said man about how I felt. I was still so ashamed, so sure that the  homosexual life would only led me to despair and hate that I was unable  to take the risk.
Usually, when you are to confess your feeling to  someone what you fear the most is rejection, loving the person more than  she loves you. But I was terrified about being the sinner I had been  warned about as a child. I was afraid of not being able to be the calm  and collected me if I showed myself as gay because that flamboyant  cliché of the gay was the only one I knew about.
I was afraid because the misconceptions that had sunk in my mind as a young person had forbidden me from seeing that the society around me  had evolved. That being gay, if it still wasn't the exact equal to  being straight was now a matter discussed and accepted by a large part  of the population." he glanced at his children, as if he was relieved of the society they were growing in. "I had been so good at lying to myself that I had built walls that had blindfolded me.
I  had internalized the teachings of the seventies and it had made me a  love deprived man. Someone who was trying to convince everyone that he  was perfectly happy keeping himself far away from any kind of social  interaction and relationship. As I had grown older and older, fatality had pilled up on shame and even the little voice and the urges had become less and less vivid, less and less present, as if my fear had won the war against my sentiments.
It  took me several decades to finally understand that all those lies I was  making for myself weren't enough and that the relief I had felt when  people had stopped picking on me wasn't happiness. I was still at the  bottom of that mountain but the chains had now disappeared, giving me  the possibility to start to climb, to leave the stormy ground behind me  and emerge from the clouds. I needed to let go of fear and to allow  myself to have a look at the society that had emerged around me to find  the strength to climb to the top of the mountain.
As I understood  that and only then, I was able to admit my feelings to the man I had  felt deeply in love, somewhere inside me I had tried to deny existed for  as long as I could remember." He said the last sentence smiling fondly at Gregory, sat by his side, glad to have found him.
"I had no idea how to climb that mountain, but he taught me. He showed me the way ,  never complaining even if he had himself had some rough time before and  together we made it to the top of the mountain. And like every time you finally make it over the black clouds, we were greeted by a brilliant sun warming us up." the elder Holmes concluded before pecking his husband on the cheek and winking to a somewhat emotional Sarah.