I was brought up in the world of Boarding schools from very young, which created many strange habits which have taken a long time to unpick and come to terms with. One of them is my relationship with homosexual men.

Single sex Boarding schools are a strange world, especially so in the 1970s. They mixed up the homophobic, homosocial and homoerotic – in a context where paedophilia was rife and the need for affection was something you exorcised as best you could. At the same time there was extreme isolation from the outside world, with no respite from the formal and informal rules of the institution. Communication with the outside world was a weekly letter, left open for review.

Now leap forward to the late 1990s and I’m studying for a Masters and my tutor is Kamil, the most aggressively ‘out’ gay man I’d ever encountered. My espoused life values were solidly liberal, while my internal felt reality was of total terror in the face of such a man. I’d encountered gay men over the years, one in particular could be classified as a good friend, although I was scared of him in particular because of his HIV positive status – it was the mid 1980s when such a status was a death sentence.

The Masters was an immersive, emotional experience as well as an academic one – self-work was seen as integral to its process. The chink of light out of my terror of Kamil came when he was working with a small group of us and I experienced him holding us all as we went into dark emotional territory. Never mind his sexual orientation, it was the first time I’d been in the presence of a man who could pay attention to and work with strong, raw emotion – in a containing way.

As the course unfolded, he was also in the midst of his own life work, finding a better way of coming to terms with the family story which had seen many of them murdered in Auschwitz. He brought us, his Tutor group, back a stone each from the railhead where people were unloaded – for him the stones kept the sounds of the time alive. His sexual orientation became background, less defining of who he was in my mind. Since then, I’ve seen the artwork produced by his sister commemorating the journey his parents took into, through and out of the Camps – I’ve read the story of his half-brother burnt alive with petrol because there wasn’t enough Zyklon-B to go round.

He’s now one of my best friends – along with my wife Rosie, we have responsibility for overseeing what happens to him and his affairs come his death or infirmity. He now enjoys lightly shocking me, and I like being lightly shocked, as he talks me through the questionable delights of ChemSex. We take his dog for a weekly walk together; in summer we snigger at the posh Hampstead ladies having a delightful picnic on a fallen log in a secluded dell that come night time is known as ‘the fucking tree’.

He's become ordinary to me, not some exotic creature to be kept at arms-length. He’s the man I’ve seen come a cropper when he fell in love and become the object of someone else’s bad games. He’s taken responsibility for another family, making sure they kept body and soul together when times were tough. And he’s a tricky, awkward bugger who keeps me on my toes and calls me out when I get on my high horse or blame others for patterns that I’m wholly complicit in.

Does the fact he’s gay still bother me? It’s certainly something I’m mindful of, aware that my relationship with gay people evokes a mountain of history in me. There’s a metaphorical story he uses when he finds himself or me repeating a pattern that comes from our ancient pasts. Our spontaneous patterns and reactions, the ones laid down well before we knew they were there, are like children in the morning – they get out of bed fast and are down the stairs and on their way out of the door well before the considered mind can get going. But we do have a considered mind, an adult one, which is slower to move, find its glasses and shake off the effects of last night’s wine – but it is there and it can eventually reach out of bed and stop the kid running out of the door.

My fear of homosexual men, of male intimacy, of all intimacy, was an unwanted gift from long ago. And most of the time I can pat it on its head and put it to bed before it can do its worst, undermining my capacity to enjoy affectionate connection with people of all sorts.

This is about gender and at the same time it’s not. It’s really about learning to embrace all types of human connection, playful and serious, heartfelt and headfelt. In time I’ve made some intuitive leaps into new ways of living, one big one was putting my work driven identity on the back burner and becoming the prime carer for my daughters. That opened my eyes to new wats of being with others – I never knew how much people could share with each other until a quick phone call to arrange a playdate turned into half-an-hour of no-holds-barred self-disclosure by one of the Mum’s. I learnt to reciprocate and enjoy reciprocating.

I’m still a bit awkward with others, but I don’t mind if they don’t. I love the stories we tell ourselves and each other, and the connections that can grow when we replay the childhood game of ‘I’ll show me mine if you show me yours,’ in whatever way works for us both.