When I reflect upon it, I wouldn’t have made the same decision to leave, had I my time again, though having not fully come to terms with my sexuality by the age of 13, this would never have played into any decision at the time. But leave I did, and I ended up in an all boys’ school. Again, probably not the most sensible decision on reflection, though that’s something that, really, I’ve realised more recently, as I finally accepted my sexuality, and came out to my closest friends. I suppose, I wrote this too, to try and dispel a common-held ‘urban myth’ regarding boys’ schools, and boarding schools in particular. Generally, they’re seen as hives of latent homosexuality, places where boys, frustrated only in the company of other boys, inevitably turn to one another to experiment sexually, gay or not. It’s something widely caricatured in popular culture, though is let me assure you, a load of nonsense. So conscious are most of the boys in my school of the abundance of males (and rarity of females), not to mention the homosexual stereotype, that they go over and above to assert their masculinity, an apparently quintessential aspect of which is to see whose ‘banter’ can descend to the deepest depths of homophobic, inane, misogynistic abuse.įor most of the guys, this constitutes ‘banter’. In any other context, namely one in which women are present – i.e.