"You're Gay!" Homophobia and Homosexuality in Boarding Schools | Stephen Fry | Piers Cross

Okay, welcome. Today I wanted to offer some reflections about homophobia, homosexuality in boarding schools, and in particular around boys' boarding schools. And just that phrase, you're gay, how that was so prevalent in many of the schools. And just, I want to talk a little bit about Stephen Fry. And his book and some of his experiences, and also talking about joy and Nik's work. So enjoy. So I realize I've been recording these videos for, oh, I don't know how many years. I've been doing them since about 2006, and boarding school since about 2015, and yet this is the first time I have talked about homosexuality or homophobia. And it's interesting because it's a delicate topic, and there was so much shame involved in it in these schools. And I just want to talk a little bit about the literature and some of my own experiences. Now, this is kind of— it's in my mind because I've spoken to a few people this week, and they've used the words talking about their experiences at boarding school, that they were called gay, or the phrase was, you know, you're gay was nearly every other phrase. So it's, you're gay, you're gay, oh, that's gay, this gay. You know, there was this real fear. Not in all schools. I've heard other experiences where— and other people's experiences that actually you know, to be homosexual, to be gay, was actually, you know, celebrated in these schools. I'm just talking a bit about what I have heard and just drawing that upon, you know, Stephen Fry's work. So if I go back to my own experiences, I've mentioned this before, but at my school, to be called gay was seen as a terrible thing. There was one boy who was called gay just because, you know, his name was similar to that, and it was like, it was just crazy to think that he was called gay, which was seen as the worst insult in the school. Any form of sensitivity, softness, and I'll read a little bit from Joy's book. Boarding School Syndrome. And she just says here, you know, in adolescence, in the absence of loving adults, some comfort-seeking behavior might become sexualized as warmth is sought with the available other. So often we would seek out touch, we want to be with other people because we're not getting that from our parents. And There's this idea now in psychology of skin hunger, that we really need touch as humans from other people, and we could really see that during COVID I had family members who were isolated on their own, they had no touch, and they really struggled, really struggled with that. So, you know, it was— it's a natural urge to want to hug or touch, but the problem was is that it was seen as gay and it was really demonized. And Joy says about here, it says, normal developmental confusion about sexuality at adolescence is compounded in boys' schools by the implicit message that male is good, strong, and desirable, female is other, to be distrusted, denigrated, and exploited sexually and commercially. This is a patriarchal precedent that runs like a fault line through British society. So what Stephen Fry talks about, and Joy quotes that in her book, is just about an experience he had and how he was labeled as queer, as gay. So I'll just read a little bit. So one afternoon this boy was climbing out of the swimming pool when he suddenly got the most terrible cramp in one leg. He yowled with pain, flopped forward onto the grass and started to thrash his legs up and down in agony. I was standing close by so I went and helped him up and then walked him across around the pool until the cramp had gone. Fully recovered, he streaked away to change. And I thought no more about it. As the afternoon wore on, it became apparent to me that I seemed suddenly to have become extremely unpopular. One is highly sensitive to these things at 12. I was at least highly. My popularity rating was something I was more aware of than, than the most sophisticated political spin doctor, but I simply couldn't understand it. It must, must have been one of those rare afternoons when I knew I had done absolutely nothing wrong. It was bewildering but inescapable. Boys were cutting me dead, sneering openly at me, sending me to Coventry and falling suddenly silent when I entered rooms. The story goes on, essentially he corners another boy and asks him what's happened. What is it? He says, you, you put your arm around him like a queer. Halford is hopping mad, he wants to beat you up. And so the story continues as Stephen sits down, he starts to cry, he's kind of been so totally sent to Coventry, and a teacher comes up to him, sees that he's there and asks him what's wrong, and so Stephen tells the story. And the teacher says something along the lines of, right, okay, I'll see what I can do. And at mealtime later on, he speaks in front of the whole school and he says, you know, I just want to really congratulate Steven for, you know, coming to the aid of this other boy, and I hope that that other boy has thanked Steven because it shows real courage, and all of this nonsense about calling him names and things like that, um, just ask the older boys, put a squash to this because this shows real courage, something along those lines. And Joy, in her book, she just says if the teacher hadn't done that, then Steven could have been subjected to 6 months, a year, maybe a lifetime of You know, at the school of that bullying and the name-calling. And I saw that as well in my school, is people who were named names in the first year or first couple of years, they did something, you know, they were called gay, or it stayed with them. It stayed with them until the end. And it's just, yeah, really, really sad. So that's kind of some of this perspective. And Nick in Wounded Leaders, he says— no, Trauma, Abandonment, Privilege. I thought I had it down. I can't see it off the top of my head. But essentially what he talks about in this book here, talks about this idea of where it came from, where this idea of, you know, this timetabling to stop, you know, stop this. Why there was such— it was almost like an intergenerational trauma that, you know, to be gay was seen as such a bad thing. He talks about Hickson, Alistair Hickson, who was a sociologist and writer who conducted a large survey of ex-boarders. He says Hickson draws many interesting conclusions from his courageous feat of anecdotal history gathering. His idea is that the constant busyness and obsession with rules was a deliberate policy of the disciplinarian movement to reform the public schools that kicked off in the puritanical 1860s. The chief motive was to counteract the boys' tendencies towards beastliness. The less the boys met each other in free time, the less they would be tempted to have sex with each other, which left only the vice of self-abuse to be policed. In consequence, every second of the day was regimented with volumes of pointless tasks, codes, rules, and regulations invented to limit the boarder's freedom. Always something on the timetable. I've done a video about that, and I'll link it at the end of this video, about timetabling and how so many of us as ex-boarders— and I see British society, it filters into British society— it's like we've always got to be on the go. And he says that's okay if it's work, you know, you can get things done, but in relationships, you know, if you're always on the go, if you can't stop, you can't feel, you can't connect to your emotions, then that becomes an issue. So this was the reason that, you know, there was such a disdain. It was like this timetabling, this idea of— it was like a huge fear. And Joy talks about this idea, you know, some of the history of boarding schools in the 19th century, so the 1820s, '30s. There was lots of revolts and revolutions in these schools where they would, you know, run amok. They're basically running amok in these schools, and so this was the reason they did this. They brought in this timetabling. So what else here? Yeah, I think the final piece really is just around what, you know, Joy's seeing as, you know, feminine attributes seen as other and belonging to this foreign species were denigrated and perceived in each other. Traits considered feminine such as vulnerability, receptiveness, and empathy were eschewed. The single-sex environment fostered unconscious misogyny. Women were seen as foreign Consciously idealized and longed for, they were also unconsciously respected, feared, and ultimately hated as sirens. The fear that motivated this hatred was that they would seduce the man and then he would later— he would again be deserted. Thus, the boy bereaved and abandoned by his mother may be profoundly affected later in life. She's talked a bit about individuation But yeah, just some, um, some ideas there about, you know, homophobia, about homosexuality, and how, you know, I've heard the experiences I shared at the beginning that some schools would, you know, it was seen as a— it was okay, it wasn't punished, and there was, you know, homosexuality between the boys And yet for me, kind of, I had homosexual experiences, and then there was a potential of me being shamed, and I just squashed all of that down. I dissociated from it, and I learned to really hate and have such shame that I had these tendencies. And as I can see from what Joy's saying now, is it was just my need for touch, that feminine, that mother's love. And yet how I treated myself if I had any of those feelings, I was brutal, you know, really hating myself. So I think partly the path of healing is for us to reconnect into that feminine side, if we're men, and also for women. I've heard in conversations with women how a lot of these boarding schools are very patriarchal. Talking to Karen Wilson, who who I'm interviewing, well, I've interviewed and it will go live this Friday, about her experiences of female boarding school. She was saying there's a bell for everything, a bell to line up, a bell for this, to get up, to brush your teeth. It's like there's not that femininity, it's not celebrated. And I spoke to a friend who said when their children got older, they didn't know how to put makeup on or help them put makeup on. They just had no experience of that because it was seen as bad in these schools. So it's like, for us, it's learning to celebrate touch again. So it might be having a massage, it might be dancing, becoming more somatic. And it's the work of Peter Levine or Bessel van der Kolk. We start to become more embodied. Rather than, you know, the body is a bad thing. And I found personally that's really been useful. Creativity as well has been wonderful for just acknowledging feelings and reconnecting to those parts which are more soft and feminine and loving and, you know, empathetic. So it's been a gradual process. So yeah, just some ideas there, but Thank you for listening. Like I said, Karen Wilson, her podcast will go live on Friday. Really great interview. What she shares is just, you know, essentially went from age 7 to 10, she was basically picked on by some of the matrons, and eventually she was expelled at age 10. So yeah, it's quite heartbreaking. So yeah, any questions about this, please do let me know. And yeah, thank you so much for listening.