David suddenly started to cry. When I asked what the matter was, he said he’d been thinking about his parents, and the time he’d tried to come out to his mum when he was twenty-one. Her reaction had been enough to send him hurtling back into the closet. She told him that he’d never have children, never get married and never have security in a relationship. He would have no future, he would be discriminated against throughout his life, he might die of AIDS. She wasn’t being mean, she was just terrified for him: at the time, that’s what people fully expected a gay man’s life to entail. It wasn’t
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