All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt

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This is an exceptional work which is touches you deeply through the honesty and openness Seán offers us.

I read it as I was finishing reading the Alcuin Club book about Dean Dwelly of Liverpool and so the open scene of Seán cruising in the grounds of Liverpool Cathedral created an interesting connection.

Within the account of his relationship with Elias and with Elias depression he unpacks the particular mental health burden that so many LGBT+ people carry as a result of living is a hostile straight world.

He reflects early on about visit to sexual health clinic, and the sharing of sexual history “I was anxious, full of shame, always expecting the worst… [but] in that strip-lit hospital room, my history was not mine at all. Like a river, spreading through its bends and tributaries… seeping from one man into the warm body of another, then being carried off into the daily life of the world, barely noticed.” (p9) There is something in this connectivity, found often in brief and anonymous encounters that can be validating, especially when so much else in life invalidates you.

Talking about Gerard Manley Hopkins, and how he turned to his poetry after learning of the loss of friend Jack, despite the century of so between them he sees that there is still “this procession of men, walking beside me, people I knew and loved being added to it, and, one by one, their lights were being put out. In their midst, I felt my own light flickering, too.” (p31) This undertone of sadness builds.

As he becomes estranged for the Catholic Church reflects that “I felt a deep schism opening between myself and the people and institutions I had loved. But as the rift widened over time, I began to feel more free. The ties between myself and my world, the ones that had held me down, were being cut. My body and my queerness and my life became inseparable. Through that splitting away, I felt myself becoming irrevocably and radically whole.” (p130) That leaving the Church is a life enriching experience is such a sad thing – one I wish wasn’t true but all too often is.

I found his description of a time when he was struggling, “My mind was knotted and unclear. I couldn’t tell whether it was an absence of thoughts, or too many thoughts at once.” (p153) really resonated with my own experience.

And then turning more directly to the impact of growing up gay in a straight, and largely unwelcoming world he touches so many nerves – he says “Lying is something I had become good at with practice. Before I came out, it was so deeply integral to the way I lived my life that it was hard, afterwards, to unpick which parts of myself were armour and which parts of myself were real.” (p184) I think this is also something that can link to neurodiversity – you spend so much time masking that you no longer know what the unmasked “you” is actually like.

I really identified with the experience that “At that time there were no other gay people (that I knew of) in my school of over 2,000 students. Clearly, there were…” but he could see past their carefully constructed facades. (p189) – a few via Facebook contact etc I now know are gay, were gay, but that lack of visibility is something I hope has changed in many places since our days at school.

And of course one of the big changes that allowed that to happen is the repeal of Section 28 - Seán addresses the impact of the silence on LGBT+ issues it created saying “What I was left with was this unsettling feeling that we didn’t exist, or there were so few of us I’d never find another person like me. I knew I didn’t exist alone – there were the men I met, after all – but I existed alone among the people I knew, the people I loved.” (p198)

There is a sense of the loneliness of growing up gay that I identified with – the ways that this becomes internalised and then jumps out at you in later life when you are not expecting to be ambushed is a real challenge. Although this is a very different book from Tom Allen’s No Shame there is at the core of both the same constriction on young gay/LGBT+ people – things are better now, but better doesn’t always mean good – being less bad is progress but not a success.

Overall it renewed my sense of commitment to living visibly, to doing all I can to ensure those growing up today have positive role models, that they know whether you are you are not alone.