Standing Out, Explained: My Theory & My Why

Christopher: Hey and welcome to the first episode of Standing Out. I wanted to first thank you for joining. Many of you will know me in some way, but for those of you who don't, a little bit about me. and while we're here, please be sure to follow along on TikTok and Instagram and be sure to subscribe both on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. It's completely free to do and it just helps me get into the ears of more people like you and I would really, really appreciate it. my name's Christopher. I'm a thirty-two year old man who's lived in London for thirteen years. I came here initially to train for musical theatre before transitioning into marketing a couple of years after graduating. I live in South East London with my very, very sassy cat Nova, and I am and always have been gay. And for the most part, I love it. I love the community it brings and the side of life I might never have seen had I been blessed or cursed with heterosexual genes. I love our creativity and our wit, and I love how being gay means we just get to do things differently. However, on the flip side, there is a permanent otherness that's bestowed upon us as queer people, which leads to all sorts of weird and wonderful things down the line. And it's this that I've always been really interested in exploring. I've been talking about this podcast and then recording this podcast and then editing this podcast for a long time. And I wanted to take some time today in the first episode to really explain to you and be open and honest. About where it came from. also, if you're a straight person watching or listening, and I hope there's many, these are just my opinions and they don't speak for the whole community. As you'll learn along the way, each person experiences queerness and does queer in their own beautiful way. Also, also, speaking of my straighties, this podcast is not just for queer people, it's for anyone who's felt othered. Anyone who's interested in learning more about the LGBTQIA plus community. And really anyone who's interested in people that have taken brave decisions to become amazing people. So be sure to share this with your other straight pals too. wanted to create something around this subject for a really long time. Something that gives visibility to different types of queer people and ultimately creates a space where other queer people can see someone they identify with and hopefully just feel a little less alone. Also, I fucking love a podcast. My go-tos would suggest that of a middle-aged woman rather than a 32-year-old gay guy. But we're all about being authentic around here. So yes, my favourite podcasts are Happy Place with Fern Cotton, the Mel Robbins podcasts, and Begin Again with the Queen that is Davina McCall. also Life's a Beach with Alan Carr, so I guess I am a raging homo after all. Just quickly, before we dive in, I also want to address my wording. You'll have noticed that I use the word queer a lot. Now I've been creating content around the LGBTQIA plus experience for the last few months, and I use queer interchangeably with the longer acronym. For me, not only is it easier to say when describing the community repeatedly. There's also power in reclaiming a slur that's been used to insult us for decades. Please know, I do understand that it's triggering for some people, but I really want to be part of reclaiming it and using it to describe all the wonderful people that come within our community. Ultimately anyone that doesn't identify as a cisgendered heterosexual. So, where did this idea of me gabbing to a bunch of queer people and recording it come from? Two years ago, I was in a very different place in life. I was in a job that wasn't serving me anymore. I was in a relationship that was struggling and ultimately felt like I had no purpose. I had never felt so alone. It felt like everyone else had this map on how to do life and somehow somewhere mine had got lost. I would speak to my parents when I could, and I'd confide in friends, both straight and gay. frequently to try and find answers and feel a bit happier. I felt like my straight friends were all settling down, most of them now married, with a few of them welcoming mini mees too. My gay friends seem to have jobs that paid much more than mine. They seem to be in positions of much higher seniority. And on a personal note, they seem to be able to get laid at the click of a button, regardless of whether they were in a relationship or not. When would I find my purpose? When would my relationship feel right again? The only way I could describe how I felt was alone. Look, life can be shitty. It's messy and full of humans and we're all broken in some way. None of us have a clue what we're doing and we're all just making it through as we go along. Life throws things at all of us. It doesn't discriminate in that way and so in that way, life can be shitty for everyone, right? But what makes life even shittier? Feeling like you don't fit in. Feeling like everyone is part of the group and you're not. You're the outsider and you're not sure why or how to get in. And for queer people, it's an othering that starts young and stays with us in some shape or form for life. But it often starts when we're too young to name it, let alone understand it. But it's there. Always in the background. It's kind of like a fly on a summer's day. You know, you've got all the windows open and there's that fly buzzing around and around. And no matter what you do, the fly will not fucking leave. For me, it was there when all the boys wanted to play sports and I didn't. It was there during our sex education classes when we learnt about men and women procreating. Full stop, that was it. It was there when at the age of four, all I wanted to do was dress up in dresses. And it was there when I was 16 and I did have a girlfriend, and I just felt like I was doing it all wrong. This otherness seeps into our bones as queer people, it manufactures shame on which our foundations are built, and it informs our decisions as we move through life. In many ways, it pauses us, freezes us until we have the courage, knowledge, or wherewithal to come out and finally start living as our true authentic selves. But Rome wasn't built in a day. Coming out is just the beginning, and as we start to live our lives and learn from lessons we're shown, I can't help but notice we're behind. And for good reason, our straight counterparts had a massive head start. For me, this feeling of being late, caused by the otherness I've felt for my entire life, has led to times of real loneliness. I look around and I see my straight counterparts moving on with their life and me constantly behind. As I said, they're married, they have kids. To me, society has taught me this is the path to follow and the steps to complete in which to be doing life right. But then I started to think what if I don't follow the path? And who else can I look to for inspiration on this journey? Loneliness is a tough place to be. It's debilitating and it's exhausting. To me it felt like everyone else had this map to life and I was just I was just broken. But I wasn't broken like I thought I was. In fact, studies have shown that gay and lesbian people are twice as likely to feel lonely, and bisexual people are three times as likely to feel lonely as straight people. It's also not just a UK quirk, and it shows up in the same way in country after country. And reported loneliness has also increased since the COVID-19 pandemic. So it wasn't just me, it was a known problem within the community. So why wasn't anyone talking about it? I felt like a broken record. I'm pretty sure my friends and family were sick of hearing me moan about how lonely I felt both in my job and in my relationship. Speaking of my relationship, at the time me and my ex were, like so many other gay people, going through the monogamous, non monogamous choice that so many gay people face. Back then I felt I not only didn't have the tools in which to choose what I wanted, but I also lacked queer people around me, and for me, gay men, who had lived successful lives that I could actually reach out to. People who might have gone through this decision too, and were still okay on the other side. Sure, I had gay friends, more or less around my age in London, but that was really where my queer circle ended. I'll always remember the time I was first introduced to my friends Richard and Graham. It was a scorching hot day in 2023, and my ex and I travelled down to Sussex to visit our friend, lovingly coined Auntie Marilyn, although she's not an auntie to either of us. Now, Marilyn is a stylish, interesting, and ultimately iconic woman of a certain vintage, and she invited us to lunch with some of her other friends. Enter Richard and Graham. Though my memory of that day is slightly distorted, all I remember is listening to Richard and Graham tell fascinating story after fascinating story. I was hooked on every single anecdote and ultimately every word. in the car journey home, I couldn't shake this question. Why was I so transfixed by this gay couple? I'd met a ton of different people of different ages before. I'd been lucky enough to have three grandparents up to just before the age of 30. And I was fortunate enough to have met lots of different gay men within my life. And then it hit me. I'd never actually met a couple, an outwardly gay couple, over the age of about 45. Like, what? The amount of straight older couples I'd met, I couldn't even begin to count. But gay couples, no. And then I got a bit sad. What effect does this have on the gay community as a whole? If we're never shown what it looks like to have successful queer relationships at 70, How are we to know when our relationships aren't going so great in our 30s? And another thing, Richard and Graham didn't just define success in terms of their career. Though being head designer of Valentino and starting a fashion brand where they were awarded Designer of the Year by Princess Diana herself, I think they'd be okay and allowed to be measured in those metrics. But they didn't. Instead, they talked of friends, they talked of caring for each other as they'd got older and life had gone on, and yes, they talked about how they'd made their relationship work for. Decades. So I thought, I know what? I'll create something for the older queer community. But just as soon as this idea would come to my mind, another thought took over. If the community is just that, a community, then why create something around just one part of that? We're marginalized enough, right? Why do I need to make that space even smaller? And something else I'd been thinking of for a while was this thing that I like to call Queer Silo Safety From what I could tell, many of our lives in the community had followed a kind of very similar pattern. One, we grow up in a world that ultimately tells us that there's something inherently wrong with us. Two, if we're lucky, we come out. Three, if we're even luckier, we come out to people that are. Kind, loving, and accepting, and they love us just the way that we are. Four, we then start to gravitate towards more people like us. For me, that was gay men. For years I'd sought them out wherever I went. It wasn't only familiarity, but for me it was it was ultimately safety too. But I questioned in doing this, how much had I siloed myself from the rest of the community? What did I know about the bisexual experience? What did I know about my transgender and non binary siblings? The true answer was I didn't really know much at all. Although the cause of this queer silo safety does make sense when you think about what queer people go through, both as a direct result of their otherness and also the feelings and thought patterns that this leads to in a queer person's life. So there's this thing called minority stress, and it's this core idea developed by the psychologist Ilan Meyer in the early 2000s. It basically explains that people from stigmatized minority groups, like queer people, we experience an added layer of chronic stress simply from being ourselves. And yes, this is on top of whatever ordinary life stress everyone deals with. So minority stress splits this added stress into two types. The first one is distal stresses, and these are the objective external things that happen to us, like discrimination, harassment, family rejection, or just being excluded or treated differently. And then there are proximal stresses, and these are what happen inside us as a result of anticipating or having experienced those other stresses. Like constantly expecting rejection or hiding who you are and ultimately turning society's stigma inward. Sound familiar? So it makes sense that we would gravitate towards other people like us to ease as much of that stress as possible, right? However, I was also kind of scared of my naivety, if I'm honest. What if I started a podcast and I asked someone a question that seemed callo or misinformed? But without asking questions, how do you grow? If I didn't ask these questions, I'd be damned to queer silo safety forever, right? So I started to think, what if I could create a space where all people within the queer community could have a voice? A place where we can ask questions and learn more about other people in the community. And with that, Standing Out was born. There were three things I wanted to get to the crux of with my guests. Number one, what does authenticity mean to them? You know, we talk about living authentically, living our true authentic lives, but what does that actually mean? What is that? How do I find it? Number two, how have they lived their life authentically amongst a world which is ultimately created for our straight counterparts? Three, and this forms actually a lot of the body. of the episodes, what are the decisions they've taken in order to get to this level of authenticity? And four, what can they pass on to younger queer people to try and ease the stress in their lives compared to the amount that they might have had? Starting this podcast, if I'm honest, I was being selfish. I wanted to expand my mind. I wanted to speak to more queer people, and I wanted to develop as a human being. But contrary to that, the more I told people about the idea, the more people they would tell me to go and speak to. They'd say, I know this person, I know that person. And as I spoke to those people, do you know what I found? That there are an infinite number of ways to be queer and do queer. And you can be successful in doing it too. It's this that I wanted to show to straight and queer people alike. To you guys. So hi, once again, my name is Christopher, and I'll be your host for all things queer around here. I'll be asking the questions that we all have, but are maybe sometimes too afraid to ask. My objective here is simple. Create a space where both curiosity, respect, and authenticity are welcomed. So who's up first? My very first guest is a character in the hit movie Pride, played by none other than Dominic West. He was also one of the first people to be diagnosed with HIV in the UK back in 1982 and lived for years thinking that he had just months left to live. My very first guest, and I'm very honored to say this, is none other than Jonathan Blake. It's one not to be missed, and I can't wait for you to see who else we have in store. I'll be waiting for you next Wednesday. See ya then.