I wish he was right.

There was a time when you could enjoy oral sex without becoming an oral. No, I don’t mean that. There was a time when you could enjoy gay sex without becoming a gay. (Nobody would think that enjoying oral sex makes you an oral. That would be silly.)

Homosexuality is a relatively recent phenomenon. It’s the result of a cultural spell that has turned sexuality from a way of expressing ourselves into a way of identifying ourselves; transforming an in-the-moment behaviour into a through-time orientation.

From at least the 7th century BC, people across different cultures were enjoying same-sex relationships alongside mixed-sex relationships.

In Ancient Greece, the Sacred Band of Thebes was an elite army in the 4th century BC that was exclusively for 150 pairs of male lovers, because their bond as couples strengthened their resolve. But in general, Greek society was inclusively mixed. They didn’t have gay bars in those days. Why would they? They hadn’t invented gay vodka yet.

It’s only in this age of individual consumerism that people are attached to “having” a sexuality – and buying all the accessories to go with it.

The past was different. Male shaman were encouraged to have wives as well as male lovers in some of the early African and South American cultures. Same-sex relationship were honoured alongside mixed-sex marriages during the Ming Dynasty and in Ancient Rome. Temples were dedicated to male/male devotion (and to a lesser extent female/female devotion) in Ancient Egypt.

So what’s the big deal about gay marriage in 2013? Why are people so worried about it?

When Constantius II included a law banning same-sex marriage in the Theodosian Code in 342 AD, it was about power. As a Christian emperor, he wanted men to rule and women to be helpmates. Unions with two men wielded too much power.

We can learn at least two things from Constantius II. One is that same-sex couples wanted to get married all those years ago, otherwise there would be no point in banning them. The other is that Christians have been worrying about this issue for a very long time.

It was a Catholic bishop who told me that to truly understand why Christians are so afraid of gay liberation, you need to first understand the phenomenal power of masculine-with-masculine expressions of sexual energy. And he said it really helps to see how many books on the subject are hidden in the Vatican’s vaults.

Sex between men is energetically different to other forms of sexual alchemy. Consciously experienced, it collapses the duality we commonly refer to as yin and yang. Therefore it doesn’t have the potential to create new life, like the folding of male into female energy does, but instead it creates the potential for transmuting consciousness within life.

Epoch-defining magicians such as Alexander the Great, Leonardo Di Vinci and Aleister Crowley understood and experienced the power of masculine-with-masculine sexuality, but they weren’t ‘homosexuals’.

It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that people began thinking of homosexuality as a distinct orientation or condition. That permanence is so ingrained into our culture now that it’s hard to see it as anything other than ‘common sense’. But it’s not common sense when you examine it. Our modern focus on the individual self has only perpetuated the sense of division that has weakened us collectively and strengthened those who wield power over us.

Like Freud, I believe that all human beings are essentially bisexual and it’s our conditioning that affects which parts of ourselves we express and repress. We may be born with genetic or structural predispositions, but it’s how we live that shapes how we see ourselves – and it’s how we see ourselves that shapes how we live, in a big ongoing cycle.

Attachment to a self-image always leads to shame, because on some level we know we’re pretending to be what we are not. Our true nature is bigger than the face we recognise ourselves by and it’s only when we embrace our infinite potential that we can be free of ego and therefore free of shame.

Nonetheless, it’s become normal these days for most people to think they’re either attracted to other people of the same sex or they’re not, and therefore most people never access the freedom that Ancient Romans took for granted. Sexual energy is rarely expressed holistically or even consciously. Male-with-male, male-with-female and female-with-female merging rituals are positioned as different kinds of behaviour for different kinds of people – and many people stand behind those imaginary lines even when they have their clothes on.

Eros (Cupid) is a primordial god in some ancient myths and in others he is the son of Aphrodite (Venus). The ancients were debating whether innate desire exists or whether it only comes in response to stimulus.

If we can accept that our urge to evolve within our lifetime is an innate desire, (especially in those who cannot give birth), then we can appreciate why nearly all religious traditions feel threatened by magic, and sex magic in particular, and masculine-with-masculine sex magic more than almost anything else.

Organised religions seek to be an external gateway to an internal experience. Their power is threatened by the simple truth that we don’t need them or their top-down rules.

Therefore it’s precisely because equal marriage offends the pope that I think it’s so beautiful. In future centuries, it will be obvious that gay rights weren’t for the benefit of gay people but for nudging everyone to wake up and see beyond the illusions we mistake for truths. That includes seeing that homosexuality doesn’t exist.

It’s obviously peculiar that a celibate old man in a frock, with ruby slippers made especially for him by Prada, is the chief condemner of homosexuality. It’s like an odd dream where a cat tells you to wear a hat.

We’re being challenged to wake up and stop looking outside of ourselves for answers we already have within.

For as long as we experience ourselves as solely separate selves, it makes sense that I can get fat while you starve. Only when we experience the connection that has always existed between us can we heal the disharmony that has so far led towards war and terrorism, environmental irresponsibility, corruption and widespread depression.

My sense is that equal marriage is part of bending society into a new shape – one where we see each other as we really are and respect all people equally.

Today’s ideas about ‘homosexuals’ will be as incomprehensible to future generations as human sacrifice is to us now. Those people will be born into a more loving and inclusive age, and it will be simpler for them to see clearly and solve the challenges we struggle with today.

That is part of the transmutation of consciousness that is happening in our lifetime. It is because we have all felt unloved and excluded that we are creating a more loving and inclusive future. Today, as MPs vote for equal marriage, we are seeing evolution in action. What an amazing time to be alive.

It’s hard because I doubt it — because I don’t even know that I don’t know.

It’s a delightful conundrum.

You see, it seems like my thoughts maintain the illusion that there is paint on the canvas. But without thought, I don’t even see a canvas. Without thought, I have no facility to experience form at all.

I know, I know.

To make this more practical, sometimes I like to look at optical illusions and remember that ‘seeing’ happens in the brain. However good your eyes are, you can’t see without a brain.

So as I look at my computer screen now, clusters of light are passing through my eyeballs. That light is turned into electrical signals and transmitted to the visual cortex of my brain. What I ‘see’ is created there, and it’s an effect — my brain’s interpretation of what was in front of my eyes a moment ago.

I think of this as my brain constantly answering the question “What must have been there for light to have entered in that formation?” — and optical illusions show how easy it is to ‘hack’ the visual system.

My experience of reality is similar. Like film passing a light projector, thoughts passing consciousness get projected as experience. I never experience an objective reality; only my thoughts about reality. And it’s consciousness that makes those thoughts feel real.

Seeing this, it makes sense to me that my experience of life gets clearer and more vibrant as my consciousness gets brighter. And it also makes sense that I experience confusion and lack of clarity when my consciousness is at a low ebb.

To explore this deeper, I like to imagine a beam of white light hitting a glass prism and splitting into a rainbow. I love how all the colours reveal themselves.

Then I imagine how the same film would look different if it was projected through different colours.

Different parts of the whole get emphasised or obscured when I look through different frequencies of light, and that’s how I experience my thoughts in different states of consciousness too. At different points along the spectrum, I have different priorities and values — I see the world differently and respond to the same thoughts differently. I have different ‘moods’. Only when I expand my consciousness broadly across the spectrum and start approaching the equivalent of white light do I experience deep peace of mind, wholeness and new insight.

Understanding this, I’ve become grateful for experiences like anxiety and fear. I think of them as signals from my nervous system that tell me when I’m experiencing a distorted projection.

It’s like viewing a beautiful painting while wearing sunglasses — if you didn’t know you had the glasses on, you might think the picture wasn’t as beautiful. So I’m glad to get a nudge in situations like that.

If I smell some old milk, my nervous system creates a sensation of nausea as a warning signal. If I experience a distorted projection of my thoughts, my nervous system creates other warning signals like confusion and frustration. The more I stick with the distorted projection, the more extreme the signals become — up to rage, panic and terror.

Sometimes I forget what my feelings are for though. Sometimes my consciousness is so skewed and limited in that moment that my own signals feel like more problems to deal with.

It’s like if I have a headache. Sometimes I realise I’ve been staring at a screen for too long or not drinking enough water. I take a break, get some fresh air and the headache passes. Other times I think it’s unfair that I have a headache, especially when I have so much to do, and I gobble down some pain killers and carry on.

Similarly, sometimes I respond to ‘bad feelings’ by breathing, grounding my consciousness and observing my thoughts. Soon I experience the same thoughts differently and the feelings pass. I experience clear, whole thoughts and I’m free to choose my response. Life is easy again.

Other times I think it’s unfair that I feel bad, especially when I have so much to do, and I gobble down ‘pain killers’ — things like alcohol, sugar, reality tv and actually anything that will desensitise me to my internal experience. The only price I pay for taking these ‘pain killers’ is they make me so numb to my internal senses that it seems like my feelings are coming from outside of me. So if I’m sitting on the beach and feeling relaxed, I might think it’s the beach that made me feel relax. And if I’m talking to you when I start feeling frustrated, I might think it’s you who frustrated me.

I start believing in a be-cause — a cause for my way I’m being. So I feel anxious because you didn’t make me feel welcome, I feel let down because the train was late, and I worry because the government is so useless. Because, because, because. And then I get busy trying to fix all these things outside of me, and I get lost in the cycle of another dream. I gobble down more ‘pain killers’ and carry on.

My dreams feel real to me — and I guess yours feel real to you too. (But I don’t know. Because I don’t know anything!)

So I want to go back to where I started:

“The hardest thing for me to admit is that I don’t know anything.
It’s hard because I doubt it — because I don’t even know that I don’t know.”

I don’t think that’s actually true. What’s more true for me is that sometimes I find it hard to admit I don’t know anything and other times I find it easy. Moment by moment, day by day, my condition stays the same but my experience of the condition changes.

When I experience a distorted projection of my thoughts, I see lots of partial-truths that each point to a because. Then I think I need to do stuff, fix stuff, plan stuff and try really hard. I take life very seriously then. I have even been willing to die for a cause.

But when I experience whole thoughts through a white light projector, everything feels easy and there’s very little to do. There are no conundrums to solve. Life is good.

In the realm of pre-because – “before the therefore” – I’m free.

So that’s why I think there’s only one reason I have problems. It’s because.

Don’t worry — I haven’t signed up as a ghostwriter for the neo-cons. But I did allow a personal post from my blog to be shared on a couple of platforms where I knew only a handful of people would get the point and appreciate it.

The evolution of sexual identity has been a theme with a couple of clients recently and I’d written about it before but not from a personal perspective. So I thought I’d do that.

The article got extraordinary support. My articles have been shared around Facebook before but I’ve never seen friends of friends recommending it to other friends and 500 ‘likes’ on the page within a few hours. It was beautiful to read messages from people saying how it had touched them and how they resonated with my story. One friend related it to being deaf. Another saw how seeing herself as an immigrant had become a glass ceiling for her.

Chas also shared the article with his friends and it was through him that Ben Cohen from the Out4Marriage campaign asked to cross-post it on his blog, ‘Pink News’. I had a quick look and didn’t see a reason to say no (other than fear of how an avowedly Gay readership would respond!) so I said ok.

Well that was kind of stupid. What appeared online was an edited version of my article, introduced as a comment piece for ‘Pink News’. The top of the article billed me as “life coach” (I’m not) “making the controversial claim that people can choose their sexuality” (I didn’t). There were edits in nine of the 17 paragraphs and the link that showed the original version and context was removed.

It was another hour before my version went live and by then the tone had been set and comments were already pouring in. I remember Brené Brown talking about how she felt after she did a really personal and vulnerable talk at TED and then read the responses, but I decided to open my inbox anyway and I’m glad I did. There was a lot of anger expressed, and many belittling comments. But amongst all that, messages started to arrive from people who had really related to my story. They too could remember the times they had shifted how they saw themselves — and many saw how they’d been absorbed into a bubble without even noticing it consciously at first. Older people explained how their awareness had grown as they got to know themselves better through the years. A younger guy had been forwarded the article and said he felt understood for the first time. Another guy realised that he’d always hated the idea of same-sex marriage because he’d come to see himself as so fundamentally different from others, and now in a small way he was questioning that.

Peter Tatchell is a campaigner I really respect and when he said it was a great piece and recommended it for The Guardian, I took a big gulp. I’d written about what was true for me without meaning to imply it was true for anyone else, and I wrote what I thought without asking anyone else to agree. That doesn’t matter once an article is framed as a comment piece for a newspaper. The implication is that you think your view is more interesting than anyone else’s and that you want to win people over. If it was read that way, The Guardian would be a big stage to be crucified on! Did I dare?

I decided yes. What I’d learnt from the ‘Pink News’ experience is that you can stand naked in front of strangers, be called ugly and still feel comfortable with yourself. Other people’s thoughts are their business.

I noticed how repelled I was by another label when I insisted The Guardian didn’t call me a life coach, as ‘Pink News’ had done. I haven’t found a good way to describe what I do but I imagine life coaches as loud Californians giving people pep talks and I definitely don’t do that. The editor put ‘personal coach’ on my contributor’s bio and that somehow felt better. Crazy, eh?

I didn’t read many comments on The Guardian, but I did read all the e-mails I got yesterday, seeing how each person’s perspective makes sense and is true from that perspective. I also saw reflections of a wider truth in the messages and I learnt a lot from exploring the stories people told me. Even when one guy said I was an idiot and should kill myself, I thought there was such elegance in that. Our constructed personalities do block the flow of intelligence, and I find my personality evaporates whenever I’m present to here and now. I’m almost always trying to kill that constructed self. That’s my meditation. That’s my life. He knew me so well!

The best thing about sharing my story on The Guardian was it’s global reach. Many of the messages I woke up to this morning were from people in countries where the Gay lifestyle hasn’t been packaged yet. I wrote an article for The New Statesman in 1999 about how Gay businesses thrive because Gay people feel different. Where that cultural (commercial) pressure isn’t reinforced, people identify and experience themselves differently.

Another thing I found interesting was how many people said it helped them to understand their Gay friends better, and how hard it has been for many people who felt pushed away by Gay friends. If I feel different to you, it makes sense that I treat you differently and then you start feeling different to me. We construct these walls and then try to climb over them. Yet seeing through our constructed identities let’s us see we’re not so different and there are no walls to climb.

None of this was my intention though.

A Guardian journalist who’d seen my piece was frank when she said my problem was that I didn’t tell people want to think. Readers always think you’re trying to persuade them of something, and if you don’t play the game then they’ll assume you tried and failed.

My head span for a while while I reflected on that.

So many people seem to think it’s narcissistic to share what’s on their mind without wanting anything back. Inside that bubble, is it any wonder it feels courageous when we dare to be ourselves?

Thank you to everyone who’s connected with me in the last few days. I’ve learnt something from every exchange and appreciate the opportunities I’ve had to deepen my own inquiry and learn more.

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Here’s Brené Brown’s video about vulnerability and courage:

I remember seeing a guy buying a copy of Gay Times magazine and he looked like me but happier. It may sound flippant but that’s when I first thought about being Gay as an identity; a semi-conscious process that really made a mark on me in that moment. It was like seeing my reflection in a different mirror.

I’d grown up in local authority care until that point and been alone for a lot of my life. I’d often been shut in my room for very long periods with no books or music. The positive side of that is it meant I did more than my fair share of self-reflection and got to know myself quite well. I thought a lot about doing vs being. Who was I? Did my behaviour create me? Who was I beyond my behaviour?

I knew that some guys played football and became Footballers, and some guys just played football. Some guys slept with other guys and became Gay, and some guys just slept with other guys.

I knew that the roles I played – roles like ‘son’, ‘brother’, ‘Londoner’, etc. – gave form to my thoughts and those created my experience of myself. I decided to reinvent myself by playing the Gay role wholeheartedly.

Coming out at school the next day was simple: I confided in someone I knew would tell everyone else. The reaction was swift and electric. The next break time, a huge crowd of kids surrounded me and bombarded me with questions and insults. The insults excited me more than the questions and it felt amazing actually. People couldn’t see me as a person anymore; they only saw a Gay. None of their insults were personal; they were all about Gays. I felt so shielded and safe. Even when some boys smashed a glass bottle over my head, I felt untouchable.

I knew I was playing a role but it didn’t always feel that way. I became friends with the actor Ian McKellen for a while and it always seemed funny to me when he’d come off stage and became Ian again, even while he was still in the make-up and costume of his character. I asked him how he knew who he was and we talked about that.

Once I’d turned 16, I lodged a case in the European Court of Human Rights and argued that the United Kingdom was prejudiced against me and other Gay teenagers. Having sex with another man was illegal for me when I was 16 while having sex with a woman was fine. The age of consent was 18 for men with men; 16 for men with women. I joined a campaign group and was on the cover of Gay Times, featured on television and invited to meet politicians.

I also toured universities, giving talks and sharing my experiences. The students were a few years older than me but their lives were unfolding too. It felt like a stealth mission because by day I would be studying for A Levels, or at least pretending to, and then in the evenings I would do my real work of affirming our right to create our lives and our identities however we chose. Universities are magical places — full of people reinventing themselves.

It was funny: my lawyers for the European Court case kept telling me that we’d win and I kept thinking ‘so what?’. It didn’t cross my mind that we wouldn’t win but it wasn’t about that. I didn’t want to win heads with legal and intellectual arguments, I wanted to win hearts and have people accept us. By us, I mean me. I wanted people to accept me – but I wasn’t ready to ask for that. I thought identifying myself as Gay and asking people to accept Gays was a first step — and I thought it would help others too.

It was difficult though. I remember one day we were fundraising for the campaign and I was dancing with Robbie Williams and other celebrities at the Royal Albert Hall. We sang We Are Family and the atmosphere in the Hall was beautiful. I didn’t feel part of any family though. I’m not sure many of us did. We were so caught up with our Gay masks and you can’t love a mask.

I got what I really wanted in the form of Chas, a beautiful young journalist who phoned and asked to write about me for a Gay magazine called Attitude. I knew instantly that we’d spend the rest of our lives together. It felt so right and so perfect and I loved him with my whole heart. Somehow he loved me too, and I remember loving myself for the first time too.

Chas saw beyond my mask. Meeting him was the first time I felt truly seen. We loved each other immediately, moved in together within weeks and I gave up campaigning to make my life about learning to do for others what Chas had done for me. I studied psychology and began a new path, learning to see people as they truly are.

Fourteen years later, I don’t think I’m Gay anymore; I just know I’m in love with a wonderful man. And that is why I support same-sex marriage, because love transcends everything and it doesn’t matter who you love as long as you love.

I want future generations to take it for granted that their love is as real and genuine as anyone else’s, whoever it is they love. Nobody should have to soul-search and wonder why their love is considered less worthwhile than other people’s. Nobody should question if loving someone makes them sick or evil. And nobody should be afraid to love, unable to even imagine themselves in love.

Matthew Todd wrote in The Guardian about how shame still cuts deep in many people, including many who seem happy and successful. I think sometimes it’s the people who talk most about pride who are the most gutted by shame. I won’t duplicate Matthew’s excellent article but I will add this: I think shame is at the root of our current financial crisis and all the problems in our country. Shame affects everyone who holds back the whole truth of who they are because they are afraid of rejection, and that means almost all people. Shame eats away at us and makes us less creative, less productive and less willing to contribute to society. Shame makes us independent rather than collaborative. It makes us pessimistic rather than optimistic. It makes us care less about our health and it leads to addictions, anxiety and anti-social behaviour. The cost of shame is immense.