Beresford Sundays have given me a few stories over the years.

There was the time I got so drunk I decided to confront an international pop star who happened to be there, and somehow the confrontation was charming enough that it ended in a date.

And then there was the time a guy I went to high school with confronted me for being gay.

I mentioned it briefly in my last blog, the one about Friday night footy and how growing up around footy gave me just enough vocabulary, just enough camouflage, to avoid a certain kind of teasing in high school.

Well.

This is that story.

For the sake of the story, let’s call him Mitch.

Mostly because that was actually his name, and it matters.

I was at the Bero one Sunday, minding my business, when out of the corner of my eye I saw this guy swaying side to side, double-fisting vodka sodas, staring at me with the kind of shock usually reserved for seeing a ghost or your ex at Coles.

I recognised him instantly from high school.

“Hey, it’s Mitch, right?” I said. “We went to high school together.”

“I know you,” he slurred. “Your name is Mitch too. Just like me. We were in high school together.”

I smiled politely, if not somewhat confused. First this guy copies my name, and now he’s repeating my words back to me as if I hadn’t already covered the key points.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “How are you?”

Then he came out with a sentence so fiercely it may as well have stopped the music.

“When I found out you were gay, I hated you.”

And that, I think, is one of the few things that can silence a five-metre radius at Beresford on a Sunday.

You could almost feel the heads turning. One Mitch to the other. Waiting to see what happened next.

And fair enough, because I was waiting too.

“Oh wow,” I said. “Um… that’s not… why?”

His answer has stayed with me ever since. Not just the words, but the pain in them.

“I’ve seen you out and about. I’ve seen you hooking up with hot guys. And you never got teased for being gay in school and I did. And it’s not fair.”

It landed heavily.

Because underneath the vodka sodas, the public scene, and the slightly surreal fact that we were having this conversation in one of the gayest places in Sydney, what he was really saying was: you got to have the life I wanted, and I got punished for being the thing we both were.

And he wasn’t wrong about one thing.

They were awful to him.

I remember that much.

He was teased in a way I wasn’t. More visibly. More directly. More cruelly. And I think what shocked me most in that moment wasn’t his anger, it was the realisation that he’d been carrying that comparison with him the whole time.

That somewhere in his mind, I had become part of the equation.

So I said the only thing I could think to say.

“Yeah, they were pretty mean to you. I hope I was never mean to you.”

And he said, “No, you were always nice. But you never got teased for being gay, and I did.”

At that point he’d spilled half of both vodka sodas, and I knew there was absolutely no version of that conversation that was going to become productive. So I told him I was sorry that happened to him, but I wasn’t sure what it had to do with me, and that if he wanted to talk about it another time, when neither of us had been drinking, we could.

That follow-up conversation never happened.

And honestly, I’m not surprised.

Why Didn’t I Get Teased?

I’ve thought about that moment a lot over the years.

Because he was right to ask the question, even if I wasn’t the right person to answer it for him.

Why didn’t I get teased the way he did?

I don’t think it’s because I was less gay. Clearly not. History and several blog posts would suggest otherwise.

I think it was something more ordinary, and maybe more insidious than that.

I could camouflage.

I knew enough about footy.
I grew up around the sheds.
I could speak the language.
I knew how to be adjacent to masculinity in a way that made people more comfortable.

There was probably always a sense that I was different, but I had enough social cover to avoid becoming a target.

He, for whatever reason, didn’t.

And that’s hard to sit with, because it means the difference between us wasn’t character. It wasn’t merit. It wasn’t one of us being “better” at being gay.

It was timing. Presentation. Social codes. Luck. The unspoken rules of masculinity in a regional town.

He was punished for reading too visibly as different.
I was spared because I blended just enough.

And once you see that clearly, it’s hard not to feel a little sick about it.

What He Was Really Angry At

I don’t actually think he hated me.

I think I was just standing there, alive and available, in a body that made me a useful symbol for something he’d never fully gotten over.

I represented ease where he had experienced humiliation.
Freedom where he had experienced punishment.
Possibility where he had experienced shame.

That’s a hard thing to look at, especially when you’ve had a few drinks and all the old feelings are still sitting right there under the surface.

And to be honest, I get it.

Not the hating me part. But the grief underneath it.

Because there’s something uniquely cruel about being punished for being yourself, and then years later having to watch someone else live more freely in the thing that hurt you.

Even if that other person didn’t cause the hurt.

The Long Afterlife of High School

What that moment really showed me is that high school doesn’t always end when school ends.

Sometimes it just goes underground.

It shows up years later at Beresford on a Sunday with two vodka sodas and a grievance.

It lingers in people’s bodies. In their confidence. In the way they move through rooms. In the stories they still tell themselves about who got hurt, who got away with what, and who was allowed to become themselves without being publicly punished for it.

I think that’s what shook me most.

Not that he remembered.
But that it still mattered enough to erupt.

Because if I’m honest, I think part of me had assumed we all left that town and became new people. That once enough time had passed, whatever happened back then had blurred at the edges for everyone else too.

Clearly not.

Some things stay live in the system much longer than you think.

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I don’t think there’s a neat moral to this story.

I wasn’t responsible for what happened to him.
But I wasn’t untouched by the system that made it possible either.

I was just luckier. Better hidden. More legible in the “right” ways.

And maybe that’s the conclusion I keep coming back to:

Sometimes the people who look like they escaped unscathed didn’t.
They just got through differently.

Still, I think about him sometimes.

I hope he got gentler with himself.
I hope he found people who let him be fully who he was without consequence.
And I hope, wherever he is now, he’s having much better Sundays than the one where he confronted his namesake in the middle of Beresford and accidentally asked a much bigger question than either of us could answer at the time.