After Years Of Violent Bullying For Being Gay I Nearly Destroyed Myself To Make People Like Me

Rebecca Hendin for BuzzFeed

It was at the Christmas party in my first year at sixth-form college that everything changed. The other kids were standing around in Kangol caps, baggy jeans, and Palladium shoes – it was the early '90s – as the KLF blasted from the soundsystem. But no one was listening to the music. For the first time in my life they were listening to me.

Leaning against the bar, a pint of Diamond White cider in one hand and a Silk Cut in the other, I was regaling my new friends with some funny story or other. I can't remember what; what matters is that I was the butt of my own joke. All around me people listened intently, their eyes wide, their smiles wider. I delivered the punchline and they roared with laughter. I felt a rush of joy stronger than anything I'd ever experienced. This is it, I thought, now you've got them.

In that instant I understood that this was how I could become popular: by drinking, smoking, and, most importantly, by making fun of myself. There was a way to make people like me, and it meant becoming a performing seal.

I was desperate to reinvent myself. I needed to discard the person I had been. For more than 10 years at school I was subjected to horrific bullying for being gay. This was not merely name-calling or being excluded by the other pupils. This was hearing their disgust directed at me several times a day, physically as well as verbally. This meant not being able to walk down a corridor without hearing the kids lined up on each side spitting their insults at me or shoving me away. This meant eating my lunch in a toilet cubicle every day – I was too frightened to show my face in the playground. It meant sitting on the school bus home desperately trying not to cry while the entire bus pointed at me and chanted a single word filled with hate: queer.

Rebecca Hendin for BuzzFeed

It started almost as far back as I can remember. Before I knew I was gay they said I was queer because I was effeminate, because I hated team sports, and because I liked playing with the girls.

Perhaps worst of all, in the northern, working-class towns where I grew up – Bolton, Bury, and Manchester – adults and even teachers thought it was OK to ignore the bullying, or, sometimes, to join in. There was no one I could talk to. The experience left me feeling brutalised. I hated myself almost as much as everyone else did.

So when, around the age of 16, I began drinking and suddenly people started to like me, I felt overwhelmed, as if someone had flicked a switch and my camp voice was suddenly considered acceptable, even celebrated. I didn't stop to think that maybe my peers were starting to mature and society was becoming a little less homophobic. All I noticed was that alcohol made me loud, bold, and confident, that the new me was welcomed into the party, no longer excluded. I did not realise the dangerous associations that were being established in my mind. I did not know that this wasn't the answer but something that would make everything a lot worse.

Within a few months the performing-seal act was complete. I was ready to do anything to get the party going and the first person everyone wanted at any drink-fuelled celebration. I went from being the most unpopular person in school to the most popular person at sixth-form college, and, later, university.

When I officially came out of the closet at 17 and began sleeping with men, I realised I could crank this performance up a notch by treating everyone to stories drawn from my growing repertoire of outrageous one-night stands. "So who've you shagged lately?" people would ask the moment I walked into a room, their faces aglow with expectation.

Rebecca Hendin for BuzzFeed

Yes, I was having fun – of sorts – but it continued right through my twenties, and as I approached 30 my life was revolving around an endless cycle of drinking, casual sex, and unhealthy relationships with unsuitable men. I was constantly having to up the ante by getting drunker and dirtier just to maintain the momentum. On more than one occasion I found myself going home with a man with an unusual profession just because I thought it would make a good anecdote. My debts were spiralling out of control. I was robbed several times by men I'd taken home and my health began to suffer. The risks I'd taken sexually meant I had to undergo several HIV tests, although luckily they came back negative.

I was desperately unhappy and heading towards rock bott