I first became aware of gender as a child. I can date it fairly accurately because at the age of eleven I transferred from primary to secondary School and started to learn French.

French has two words for the word ‘the’ – ‘le’, which is masculine, and ‘la’ which is feminine – and they have to be used correctly. So if you are translating “the table” into French (the word is the same; just the pronunciation is different) it is wrong to say “le table”. The correct translation is “la table” because a table is feminine.

Really?

I have never been able to get my head around the concept of an inanimate object having a gender. But it taught me two things. Firstly, that people in other countries have very different ideas than I do. Secondly, that gender is some sort of construct, rather than a natural phenomenon.

As I grew into my teens it also became clear to me that although I was male, and happy to be so, I was not masculine. Masculinity seemed to be a matter of liking alcohol, fighting and sport, and having a strange obsession with women’s bodies. None of that fitted me.

In the swimming pool changing rooms as a teenager a high school friend wet his handkerchief to make it transparent and said wouldn’t it be fun if girls’ costumes were made of that. I thought it was a strange thing to say.

And it was earlier, through sport, that I learned another lesson that has stayed throughout my life. At primary school a classmate and I were sent up to the headmaster for some infraction or other. (My memory is that we hadn’t done our Latin homework – yes, I learned Latin throughout my primary and secondary schooling; those were the days!).

The headmaster gave us both a choice – we could either have the cane or we could miss the upcoming sports day. True to form, my compatriot chose the cane; I chose to miss sports day.

The headmaster caned us both. I was furious. To be given a choice and then have it removed was not only lying, it was unfair. Not that I could say anything at the time, of course, but it was my first (unwitting) lesson in social justice.

But I did not think of myself as effeminate, and despite being in all-boys schools throughout my education I was never bullied. I did tend to keep myself to myself, and was a bit of an egg-head. Maybe that allowed me to merge into the surrounding scenery and not stand out.

My mother was fairly dominant in our household, and if I have to pick one word to describe her it would be ‘sensible’. I obviously inherited from her that attitude to the world around me. With a natural curiosity about people it also led to me being almost unshockable. Other people’s behaviour was strange and interesting, but not necessarily shocking unless it involved violence.

But my mother’s sensible attitude did not extend to emotional or sexual matters. So I had no sex education at home or at school. In fact the most I had in my early teens was to find a booklet of my mother’s about the Dutch Cap. (If you don’t know what that is, Google it!).

I can vividly remember my first orgasm as I had no idea what was happening to me and thought I had done myself some damage. However, I soon realised what fun it was and the fear disappeared!

I also had no concept of homosexuality. Over 60 years’ ago such sexual activity was illegal with heavy penalties and was a ‘sickness’, as well as being ‘immoral’. It was not openly talked about and I was not aware of the word, or the concept. But nor did it particularly concern me.

In my early teens two school friends and I were pushing our bikes up a country hill at dusk when a man appeared out of the bushes waving his erection at us and inviting us to join him. I took no notice and we kept walking.

But a couple of weeks later at a birthday party I was taken aside by two plain clothes police officers and asked about the incident. I was amazed; firstly that one of my companions had told his parents, secondly that they had told the police and thirdly that the police thought it important enough to talk to me. I was not much help.

In my late teens I began to notice that people were open in talking to me. Not only my peers, some of whom talked of their attraction to other boys, but also adults. I found striking up conversations with strangers on a train or bus came easily to me, and I often started hearing their worries about their children or other aspects of their lives.

So in 1963, around the age of 20, I volunteered to become a telephone counsellor with The Samaritans (the UK equivalent of Lifeline). They were keen to have such a young recruit and I soon found myself alone on all-night shifts answering phone calls from all kinds of people. That of course opened my eyes to many other ideas.

There were men who liked ‘cross-dressing’ (as it was then referred to) – another activity that was illegal. And there were ‘transvestites’ who, although identifying as heterosexual, liked to secretly wear one or more items of women’s clothing. Some even got together to cross-dress. Again, not an activity that attracted me but another variation in my concept of ‘masculinity’.

Some callers, male and (more occasionally) female, were attracted to people of the same sex and so that was a learning curve also. But it was not until I moved to Canberra in 1967 that I realised that I had fallen in love with another man. It was not reciprocated but it opened my eyes.

I attended the first meeting of the first homosexual law reform organisation in Australia in Canberra in 1967. It was not a gay organisation as such, just one calling for repeal of the laws criminalising male sexual activity. Something that was consistent with my belief in social justice.

Being a bit naïve and observing the world around me through my blinkered lens, it was perhaps inevitable that I had also done the ‘conventional’ thing and got married and had two children. Marriage was a support in finishing my education and starting on my career.

When we came to Australia in 1967 we were interested in having more children but with my concern for social justice and care for the earth I was worried about the world population growth. (The world’s population is now twice what it was then and nearly four times what it was when I was born). That led us to adopt two children as babies rather than continue to have our own, to the dismay of my in-laws – we were ‘good stock’ and should have more children of our own!

Marriage had also led me to Quakers – my wife was one and we married in a UK Quaker Meeting. I have always regarded it as a ‘sensible’ religion (echoes of my mother!). My experience of traditional churches was minimal in my childhood and I thought conventional church services very artificial. Quakerism was sensible, open minded and pacifist, as I realised my upbringing had been.

Not that Quaker attitudes extended to accepting gay sex. In 1963 a small group of British Friends published the booklet Towards a Quaker view of Sex; an essay by a group of Friends (Friends Home Service Committee, UK, 1963) which, among other things, advocated acceptance of sexual relationships between people of the same sex (and of unmarried heterosexual couples). The story I heard was that in Brisbane Meeting the Ministry and Oversight Committee reviewed the booklet and decided it could not be held in our library but would be kept in a locked box, available to Friends who requested it. Later when a Friend did request it the box was opened and the booklet was missing!

In 1973, by which time I was living in Brisbane, British Friend David Blamires was coming to Australia to attend an international Quaker gathering. Quakers in the UK had published a book he wrote called Homosexuality from the Inside (Social Responsibility Council of the Religious Society of Friends, UK, 1973). My then wife and I had already raised issues with Queensland Regional Meeting around supporting the Campaign Against Moral Persecution (CAMP), a gay support organisation. So QRM agreed to help finance David’s brief trip to Brisbane to give a public talk here. He stayed with my family and I. The talk, and his visit generally, was very successful.

He was part of my coming out. On returning to the UK he got agreement from his university to come to study for three months in Brisbane, and he lived with me. He also became a big influence on the views of Queensland Friends.

At about that time I had become involved in telephone counselling with CAMP which had club rooms in Brisbane. Whilst mainly a social and political group it had a telephone and a couple of volunteers and I used to answer the phone at night to provide what support we could for any callers.

Queensland Quakers also agreed to support the idea of establishing a proper telephone counselling service, but nothing came of that then. However, in 1973 we were involved in the lead up to the 1975 Yearly Meeting public statement calling for a change in the laws against male sexual activity. The first religious organisation in Australia to do so.

Of course all that brought me into contact with many other types of people. There were the drag queens, cross dressing for entertainment reasons, the transsexuals, living as people of the opposite sex, and those who had had gender reassignment. I had no problems with the new awareness of gender and sexuality issues as gender had always been an artificial construct as far as I was concerned.

I have been involved in many gay organisations and activities since then, in Quakers and the wider community. I also married a second time – a woman – and have been in a gay partnership for over 30 years. My concern for world population was obviously not well transmitted to my children (two natural and three adopted) as between them I now have 12 grandchildren! As yet, I am not a great grandfather.

To me, gender is not binary, either physically or socially. I am happy to identify as a gay man, recognising that others identify themselves very differently. Nor are gender and sexuality connected as far as I am concerned. We live in an extraordinarily diverse world and our main problem is how to live together in peace.