After Owen Jones wrote about how such abuse affects straight men too, readers respond with their own experiences
I readily identified with Owen Jones’s important article (Why homophobia against straight men matters, 17 May). Though the memories are decades old now – I went to a Catholic boys’ grammar school in Liverpool from 1976 to 1983 – the homophobic abuse I received is still very clear in my mind. While the school I went to wasn’t “rough”, a lot of the lads were still “hard”. I wasn’t. I was just different, in the way I looked and spoke. I am not gay, but that didn’t matter. My classmates rewarded my difference with a daily diet of homophobic insults.
The masculine examples I had grown up with showed a different view of what it was “to be a man”. That is, being kind, gentle, caring, sharing household duties, very involved with bringing up the kids, and not spending hours in the pub. My dad was also something of a counsellor to his friends: “ordinary” blokes who, I later found out, would confide to him problems that were taboo at the time, eg erectile dysfunction. Sadly, he died when I was 12.
