Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys is eloquent and intelligent. He was interviewed about his life and a question was put to him along the lines of ‘are you glad to be gay?’ His reply was subtle and interesting.
He was gay and accepted that as part of his make up. He acknowledged that freedom from the strictures of the law and general social acceptance was an unalloyed good. But ‘glad to be gay?’ About this he was more nuanced. With gay came a ‘gay lifestyle’ and on that he really was not so keen with its separation from the ‘normal’ straight world of children and family and definition almost entirely by sexual orientation.
He would have preferred, he said, to have lived as a straight, married with children, and dealt with his sexuality quietly and discretely on the side. It was a yearning, without the illegality, for the life of a discrete gay man of the 1950s.
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