Learning to be your true self as a gay man is a lifelong project. These photographs chart mine Photographer Charles Moriarty on X, intimacy and honesty through a visual medium
about 18 hours ago
I knew I was attracted to men from around the age of five or six. There’s a moment, a foggy memory with a policeman and a hairy chest. I hadn’t even seen a Tom of Finland book, but it made sense many years later in the book section at the back of Tower Records.
I knew that attraction was a problem by the age of 10. In the words of the Queen of Ireland herself, Panti Bliss, I learned to constantly “check myself” from a young age. To make sure I wasn’t doing anything that would make me stand out, to make sure I was as invisible as possible. As a teenager, I retreated to spaces I could control, but eventually got better and better at the lie; every day was an act. I got so good even I began to believe it, for a moment at least, enough to ignore it.
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The late artist Fiona Cribben would have celebrated her 43rd birthday next Tuesday but her 13-year-old son, Johnny, and her family have a very special ‘gratitude’ scarf to wear. – one she collaborated on in her final months.
“One thing I would love to do before I head off onto my next best life would be to change the way we look at cancer,” Fiona wrote to Electronic Sheep designers, Helen Delany and Brenda Aherne, in 2018, a year before her death from metastatic breast cancer.
“I guess I sort of want to do something beautiful before I leave this earth and I want this to be one of those things.