Dear Stephen,

I had exactly the same feelings…!
I knew I was 'different' to the other boys at 5..? 6..?
And there was this thing looming up for me at 18 called NATIONAL SERVICE…!
I soooo did not want to have to do that because, being a proper likkle cissy, I knew I would be in for a hard time…
I would not play rugby as a kid at my Catholic grammar school…hated gym but liked my music…collected stamps…always neat and tidy…a right nauseating little git, I must have been…(still am, prob!!!)
So what to do, what to do…?!!!
I know!!… I thought at 15, ('cos NATIONAL SERVICE was only 3 years away)… I'll go into the Church and be a priest, they can't marry and so I will have a ready made 'get out' for my 'differences.'
[Is that a devious little bastard or what..?!..]
Needless to say, it all dissolved when the hormones really kicked in and I had to tell my seminary confessor that I had become a serial likkle MIDLAND (banker) a right likkle BARCLAY's..
Probably gave him an 'interesting' time in the confessional..!
I don't go to mass at all…haven't for getting on 50 years. But I often wonder if many of today's older priests went in to that life for the same reasons that I did, as a 'laundering' of what they knew to be in themselves.
The other side of that today is that young men do not feel quite so desperate to 'launder' their same sex attraction…and may be that is one of the reasons for the dearth of priestly vocations today; just a thought…

KS.

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