Douglas Stewart

And so catfishing is a very old art form, I think.

I mean, I was devastated and sort of horrified.

And one of the things that stays with me about those times is because I couldn't be honest with my family because I couldn't tell my friends, I put myself in so many scary situations.

You know, I would meet people who were essentially strangers and I was only 18, 17, 18.

And I would sort of disappear for a few days and had anything truly bad happened to me, I don't think people would ever have found me.

I couldn't ask anybody.

I couldn't talk to my brother about it.

There was no – I had to sort of – that's really the universal gay experience of the time.

I think we were all fumbling forward to find our sense of self and how to be in the world.

But you had spoken to me a little earlier, Terry, about sort of secrets and what we hid.

All my childhood, I felt whenever I was going into a room, I was turning myself slightly to the audience that was viewing me so that they didn't see the entire person.

Everything about me felt a little taboo.

I was very proud to be working class, but I was taught to be ashamed of being very poor.

I was taught to be ashamed to be the son of a single mother, to have addiction at home.

And then also taught to be ashamed to be effeminate or gay.

And so even for my family, when I was being bullied at school for being gay, I thought, you know, all the conditions, which was absolutely supported by religion, but all of society said it was such a wrong thing to be, that when I came home at night, I couldn't tell my family.

And when I wrote my first novel, which features a lot of sort of bullying, my sister said to me, did you go through that?

And I said, yeah, I went through that for about 12 years.

And she said, I didn't know.

And I said, I know you didn't know.