I love being a gay man

Take heart in all the blessings provided to LGBT people. Others, like me, do away with the label altogether. I used to hate being gay. There are no rules with these things; you just have to choose the approach you're most comfortable with. I knew I'm a gay guy before I even came to terms with being trans.

As Alison Goldfrapp puts it : "I don't like to be defined by my sexuality, which swings wherever I like to swing. When the bullies at school would beat me up and call me “queer”, I wanted. But before long, she was waiting for a bus back home. I love being a gay guy It feels so correct and like this is what I've always been meant to be.

When I felt it was important to me to help someone understand, I found that putting them in the right conditions really eased the conversation and made them more receptive to new ideas. Slowly but surely we got back in touch, and arranged to meet back home. Saying "I'm gay" was daunting when I came out before, but at least the label was there to do some of the explaining for me.

Some kept their old label; for example, singer Tom Robinson identifies as "a gay man who happens to be in love with a woman". I had put her through my coming out, my relationships, and the apparent certainty that we would never be together. I don't think so. If you've ever felt the need to change your label after getting together with your partner, you'll know that doing it again can feel every bit as tricky, with the added burden of explaining yourself to every last person.

Now that it no longer seemed to fit, I looked for other words to replace it. I had been an openly gay man for six years when I fell in love with a woman I'd known since I was Growing up on the Isle of Wight, we bonded over adolescent heartbreak, which happened to me more than once as I got to know the boys in our year.

Throughout all of this, should I have been thinking, "don't do this, you're gay"? I used to say stuff like 'I have the soul of a gay man' when I was in my repression phase. Coming out is a big ol' nuisance. Is there a word to sum me up? Sometimes there is no snappy way of putting it, no label that really describes how your head and your heart work.

As we wrap up Pride Month, I'm encouraging us all to celebrate our Gay Yay. Since being gay is fabulous, we should all celebrate the individual reasons we enjoy being gay. Personally, I'm in favour of reappropriating it — partly because taking ownership of the word away from our detractors is a good thing, and partly because there's no other word to describe who I am.

First off, I thought, what do I call myself now? A friend of mine called me out on it once, voicing some strong opinions about how often the word queer was historically used to humiliate and isolate LGBT people. Here's mine. Saddened by "the epidemic of gay loneliness"?

Overcoming self-inflicted heartbreak is a lot harder than admitting that there's an exception to the rule. I've known people in my situation who started identifying as bi. She was straight, but seemed to understand more than anyone about unrequited love. Being gay is the best thing that ever happened to me, and I never thought I’d say that.

We spent the day together, talking, playing video games. When it finally dawned on me that, yes, this was love, I was well into my first year at university. Sometimes there's no snappy way of putting it, no label that really describes how your head and your heart work. What had seemed like a gradual build-up of feeling to me was a sudden revelation to her, but it didn't take long for her to reveal that she had fallen in love with me not long after we met.

I wondered why it was that I spoke to her more than my boyfriends, but left my confusion to simmer for years as I drifted through school. We looked at each other for a long time before sharing our first kiss in the rain, lit only by Christmas lights; it was right out of a movie.

Could I be bisexual , maybe, or pansexual? It feels so freeing being read as a slightly flamboyant gay man rather than a woman. It's been nearly four years since that moment; we spent our first two years together at separate universities, yearning for graduation, then moved to the southwest together.

I've occasionally used the word "queer" for brevity, but it doesn't always feel appropriate, since in my experience many people still take offence at the term.