Criccieth is a proud sort of place. Locals call this corner of the Llyn peninsula the pearl of Wales, on account of the beach sweeping across to Snowdonia. In one of several tea rooms, the coasters read: “New York, Tokyo, London, Criccieth.” Peter Harlech Jones embodies this spirit. A small, well-presented 71-year-old, he’s been passionate about Criccieth since childhood, having spent school holidays here with relatives. “I was born and raised about 30 miles away in a village called Old Colwyn,” he says. “I had a strict, Presbyterian upbringing. Here, I felt very much at ease and was allowed to be myself. I could smoke. I could be a bit naughty. I grew up just loving this place. It’s glorious.”

A retired vet, Harlech Jones now lives about 100 yards from where his father was born and raised; the family goes back five generations in Criccieth. But Harlech Jones left 46 years ago, aged 25, because he felt that being gay was not compatible with living in rural north Wales. “I still hadn’t had gay sex,” he says. “I feel very patriotic about being Welsh; Welsh is my mother tongue. But I knew I couldn’t stay around here because I’d have to remain in the closet. We’re talking about 1972 – it was still really difficult.”

Harlech Jones moved first to Liverpool to study veterinary science, then to London, where in the mid-70s he plucked up the courage to go into the gay bars of Old Brompton Road – but only after he’d walked past them several times.

As a young man in Sunday school, he’d quietly tried to pray away his attraction to other boys; now, he found his people in the gay Christian movement. He came out to friends and flatmates, met lovers. He slowly began the process of coming out at work. “I was still scared, but I was ready for it,” he tells me, over coffee and Welsh cakes in his living room overlooking the seafront.

The broad trajectory of Harlech Jones’s early life will be familiar to most LGBTQ people. Leaving home is a part of our story, a chapter we tell a lot. Comedian Hannah Gadsby nailed it in Nanette, her acclaimed Netflix standup show: “I loved Tasmania. I felt right at home there. But I had to leave as soon as I found out I was a little bit lesbian.”

Cities are where gay communities were built: think of 28 Barbary Lane in Armistead Maupin’s Tales Of The City, or Canal Street in Queer As Folk. Rural queer life has been much less visible – and largely unrepresented in queer culture. When these stories do appear – in Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain – they rarely end well. More often, as on Bronski Beat’s classic gay anthem Smalltown Boy, the places we come from are seen as somewhere to run away from.

But increasingly the global city is proving less of a safe haven. The number of LGBTQ spaces has diminished dramatically in recent years, under pressure from aggressive property developers, as well as digital apps that make it easy for gay people to connect online. This has meant the loss of vital support networks, given that LGBTQ people experience more mental health problems than the wider population. A 2016 University College London report found that the number of LGBTQ venues in the capital has more than halved since 2006, while San Francisco’s oldest gay bar closed last year.

On top of this, high rents and precarious employment are making cities less attractive in general. Last year, the number of people leaving London reached a 10-year high. At the same time, with gay marriage and unprecedented LGBTQ visibility, we live in a broadly more tolerant world. So it is little wonder that many people are reassessing their relationship with their home towns and that some, like Harlech Jones, are even going back for good.

***

Harlech Jones did not want to turn away from Criccieth. But by the 1980s, when he was in his early 30s, he found that he couldn’t bear even to visit. “I used to drive home to see my parents,” he says, “and feel that the sooner I got there, the sooner I could leave.” A gap opened up between his new life and the old. When his father died suddenly from a heart attack in 1985, Harlech Jones realised he’d missed his chance to be honest with him. He became depressed. A counsellor suggested he confront the burning issue: when was he going to come out at home?

This was 1980s Britain, the time of section 28, the Thatcher government’s ban on the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities. The Aids epidemic loomed, bringing in its wake a climate of fear and shame. When Harlech Jones came out to his mother in 1987, she thought he was going to tell her he was HIV positive. He wasn’t, but being gay was stigma enough. “She said I mustn’t tell anyone around here,” Harlech Jones says. “She was ashamed of me. So I felt then I could never come back.”

‘I knew I couldn’t stay around here because I’d have to remain in the closet,’ says Peter Harlech Jones; in fact he is now high sheriff of his home town of Criccieth. Photograph: Gareth Iwan Jones

But a change in Harlech Jones’s romantic circumstances transformed his relationship to home. He met fellow Welshman Mike Bowen through a mutual friend in 1996, but it wasn’t until they were both single and living two blocks from each other in east London in 2001 that they got together. Bowen moved into Harlech Jones’s flat within three weeks.

By this time, Harlech Jones’s mother was in her 90s; her health was deteriorating and he knew there was little time to mend their differences. He introduced Bowen to her that year. His mother was apprehensive but, endearingly, had done her homework. She knew Bowen liked football, so chatted to him about Match Of The Day. At the end of the encounter, they embraced. “It was quite emotional,” Harlech Jones says. “That last period of my mum’s life was wonderful. We resolved a lot of the angst.”

At her funeral in 2003, Harlech Jones read the reflection to a packed chapel. “I said that one of the happiest moments for me was taking Mike to meet her, and that he was there as my partner at her departing. So the whole town then knew. And that was very empowering.” The positive experience galvanised Harlech Jones. He and Bowen had talked about buying a second home together; gay friends had suggested they join them in the south of France, but Harlech Jones had another idea. He told Bowen: “Let me show you Criccieth.”

Peter Harlech Jones in Criccieth with his partner Mike. Photograph: Gareth Iwan Jones

They bought in the town that same year. Despite the tensions Harlech Jones had felt with home, he had remained a frequent visitor over the years. Now, he cemented links with family and friends, and became active in the local church. This fresh presence led to him being nominated as high sheriff in 2015, even though only full-time residents were eligible to take up the post. It was an opportunity for the couple, who had married in 2013, to settle permanently. Bowen, originally from a small village called Bedlinog near Cardiff, also relished a new start in their homeland.

Being back in this town with the person I love, who is the biggest part of my life now. I can’t believe it has happened

For Harlech Jones, it is emotional to recall all this. The road travelled has been hard, he says. His eyes well up. “It has a spiritual root of considerable depth, being back in this town with the person I love, who is the biggest part of my life now. I can’t believe it has happened.”

***

It has not been such a long road back home for me, though I left Creggan, a tiny village on the Northern Irish border, in 1997 when, like Harlech Jones, it didn’t feel possible to be myself there.

The 1990s were a better time to grow up gay. I did not have a physical space to be in, such as a local LGBTQ group, but there was the opportunity to get on what the academic Kelly Baker calls “the gay imaginary” – access to print, film and other media that said something about the life I might hope to live. There was This Life on television and the gay magazine Attitude in the newsagents (if you could reach the top shelf). Remarkably for that time in rural South Armagh, I found a gay best friend; I met Jarlath Gregory on the school bus home and we bonded over bands and boys. To a scared, closeted kid like me, my unapologetically queer mate, all eyeliner and attitude, was a lifesaver.

We both knew we had to live real gay lives, and that this wasn’t going to happen in Creggan. So we left for college in Dublin, across the border. Although homosexuality had been decriminalised in Ireland only four years earlier, in 1993, the move enabled me to come out and articulate who I was. I had the space to be incredibly naive and romantic, after an adolescence learning about life from Tori Amos records.

The academic and writer Bryony White also found self-realisation in the city, having grown up in Weymouth, Dorset. A degree in English at King’s College London offered the gateway to a life her bookish teenage self had always imagined. “London was always where I was going to find my true self and be happy,” she says, laughing. “I thought I’d be walking around like a flaneur, reading Virginia Woolf and having a lovely time.” White, 28, met a woman; they dated. Weymouth, meanwhile, drifted into her peripheral vision. For the first two years of college, she kept ties with home. But when she came out in 2011, things became fraught. “I don’t think I really spoke to my dad properly for about a year,” she says. “It came as a massive shock.”

It took four years of talking to get to a better place with her family. In that time, White went back for holidays and Christmas. She has written about the experience for the online literary magazine Hazlitt, describing home as “somewhere that I felt was suspicious of me and I was suspicious of it. We were constantly circling each other, withholding things from each other.”

Yet in summer 2016, when White’s relationship ended, she decided to go back. Everything in London reminded her of her ex-girlfriend; besides, she had a PhD to return to in the autumn, so it was for only a couple of months. Still, she was nervous. Weymouth was a place where White had never been herself: “I felt completely out of context there.” But home had changed since White went away. Weymouth now has an LGBTQ group, which her mother dug out some information about. There was even a gay club, the unfortunately named Closet. And something else about home captured White’s imagination. She discovered that another queer woman, the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, had lived openly with her partner, Valentine Ackland, in 1930s Dorset – forging a queer space for herself where there was none. White visited the Dorset county museum, where she found photographs and artefacts from Warner’s life. She made a pilgrimage to see the home the couple had made for themselves almost a century earlier. As White writes, going home became “far easier knowing there was a path that had already been taken by a woman who had seemed to find a semblance of happiness and acceptance in an environment where that always felt impossible”.

Though White returned to live in London, she now regularly visits home. It is different now: she recently joined a park run and is happy to sit in the local pub reading a book, things she would never have considered before. She does not discount the notion of moving back permanently, either. So does she make sense there now? “Yes,” she says, “or maybe, being older, I’ve given up trying. But I’m comfortable in my queer identity there.”

I was never physically assaulted, but I never felt safe

I was six the first time someone told me who I was. I’m pretty sure she – another child from our village – couldn’t have known exactly what a pansy meant. Neither did I. But we both definitely knew I was one, and that it was bad. From then on, I knew I didn’t make sense at home. I was always checking myself as a teenager, trying to take up as little space as possible, not drawing attention to myself. Still they came: taunts in school corridors or on the bus home. I was never physically assaulted, but I never felt safe. When I visited the house I grew up in, I rarely ventured far beyond its four walls.

Twenty years went by like this. Then, three years ago, my mother became unwell and I started spending extended periods of time at home. She had dementia, and one aspect of caring for her meant taking on certain public roles on her behalf – in the GP’s surgery or the supermarket. I also engaged with relatives in a way I’d never had to before. It was a world I had previously shied away from. Now, I found myself hamming up the local in me, strengthening my Northern Irish accent in conversation or cracking jokes I thought people might get, in a bid to fit into a place I never had.

Colin Crummy, aged six, at home in Creggan, Northern Ireland. Photograph: courtesy of Colin Crummy

But I was also suspicious. Those early traumas – homophobic remarks lobbed from the church pulpit or like a grenade from a speeding car – were hard to erase. Equally, I knew times had changed. Newry, where I went to school, is set to hold a major Pride event next year. The 2015 referendum on same-sex marriage in Ireland also signalled a dramatic shift in attitudes. We didn’t have equal marriage in Northern Ireland, but the noise about it was heartening.

My father was the first on the phone to celebrate that Irish referendum result. Though we lived north of the border, as Catholics in a Republican area we took our social, political and cultural cues from Dublin. My mother came on next. “Congratulations!” she said. “What for?” I replied. “I’m not getting married.” “No,” she replied, “but you might.”

Colin Crummy with his ‘unapologetically gay mate’ Jarlath Gregory at a school disco club night in Dublin, in the late 90s. Photograph: courtesy of Colin Crummy

One of the slightly farcical elements of LGBTQ life is that you never stop coming out. Introducing my boyfriend into the conversation with relatives and neighbours has been the easiest way to do so more widely, short of throwing a party. In the event, my boyfriend has been warmly welcomed. A male relative whose party piece is eye-wateringly risqué banter grappled sweetly with the right terminology, settling on “partner”, and has threatened to march in our local Pride.

My mother died suddenly at the start of this year. We had a wake in our home, which is still the tradition around these parts, albeit a vanishing one. We welcomed about 700 people – family, friends, neighbours – into our house to grieve and laugh and drink a lot of tea with us. That girl was there, the one who was the first to say out loud who I am. I shook hands with her, and we chatted about what we’d been doing for the last 20 years. She’d stayed there, got married and had kids. I don’t expect she remembered the incident, or knew that, for me, the childhood episode had come to crystallise everything that was wrong with home.

While I still live in London, I now feel able to move about my old home with relative ease. I go running in places I would previously have felt too vulnerable to venture. I have been reclaiming space in other ways, too. At my mother’s wake, I introduced my boyfriend to the local Catholic priest, who recovered enough to shake hands. He had to; he was in my home, after all.

***

Gina Ritch came out as a transgender woman in Edinburgh in 1999. They (the pronoun Ritch prefers) planned to transition, but couldn’t because work and money ran out. There followed many years of tumult, as Ritch struggled with work, relationships and their identity. Things came to a head in 2012, when Ritch had a nervous breakdown and decided that in order to live, they must transition – and at home, which is Unst, the most northerly of the Shetland Islands. Rich’s sister advised otherwise. “She said I should disappear again and transition in the city, where nobody knew me,” Ritch says. “But I thought, What the hell is the point if I am finally happy and feeling I have got to go and hide? No, no. I’m making my stand against all this bullshit. I’m going to do it here.”

Ritch was born Paul Johnson Ritch in 1967 in Lerwick and grew up on Unst. An early memory set the tone: Ritch was about eight and had a new haircut, a bob. Their father came in, saw it and angrily chopped all the hair off. “That was very traumatic. I stayed under the radar after that.” As a young, feminine boy into art and music, Ritch didn’t fly under the radar for too long. They got into fights in nightclub car parks. They drank too much. They pursued women and cultivated a reputation as a local lothario. Ritch became a fisherman, a builder, a husband at 22, then a father to three children.

Gina Ritch with their mother, Mavis, left, and aunt Jean in Unst. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

“Having to live constantly in the macho persona drove me crazy,” Ritch says. “I kept trying to find somewhere where I could be me.” They would escape the island, try to reinvent themselves. Everything would fall apart again. So, in 2014, Ritch ended up back home. Transitioning there has not been easy, they tell me, as we talk over Skype. They travelled to Brighton for surgery; medical appointments took place on the mainland.

On a recent flight back from Glasgow, a fellow islander made a big show of asking which lady owned a handbag in the overhead locker (it was Ritch’s, although they couldn’t bring themselves to take the woman on). Do they ever reconsider living there? “Nah, I want to bust up this little crowd,” they laugh.

Ritch is no wallflower. Shortly after Gina came out, they went on BBC Radio Shetland to speak about their decision. They turned up to their first shift at a summer job working in a tearoom in Unst in a vintage polka dot tea dress and a pair of slingbacks. They chose to sit with the girls for the class reunion photograph. Now Ritch works as a painter decorator, going into building supplies firms and people’s homes. “I put it out there,” Ritch says with a hint of mischief. “I thought, I’m not going to hide it. I’m going to be extra flamboyant, extra open and obvious, so people don’t think I’m skulking in a little croft house behind a hill scared of anybody.”

Ritch has done the hard work now. The to-do list includes speech therapy and maybe learning to apply makeup with help from a neighbour, who is a beautician and one of many supporters on the island. But, after everything, this Shetlander wants to live somewhere in the sun, possibly mainland Europe. Ritch says they will come back for life’s set dramas – births, deaths, marriages – but they’re doing so on their terms: “Your home turf is the hardest and I’ll have to come back here. When I do, nobody is going to be shocked any more; they know who I am. Now I can go in peace.”

The East Shore in Criccieth is a quiet spot, once you get past the final batch of white bungalows. Just the sea, shore and the peaks of Snowdonia lie ahead. Peter Harlech Jones goes there with his dog. He regrets that he didn’t make it back here sooner; that he didn’t get to be honest with his father. So he speaks to him. “I talk to him when I’m walking,” he says, “and I connect with him.”

What does he say? He sighs. “I wish I’d understood you better. I wish I could have told you I was gay. And I wish you could have been here to see me now, because I think you would have been quite proud of me – and I would have loved you to have met Mike. My dad was mad on football, Mike’s mad on football and I think they would have got on really well. But it was never to be.”

Still, others have made a homecoming for Harlech Jones. He remembers one occasion when he and Mike returned home to Criccieth to find a potted plant and a bottle of wine had been delivered. “And Mike said, ‘This lovely old gentleman’s been around – he says he’s your uncle David.’ He was my dad’s first cousin and he’s eightysomething. He’d heard from his daughter that we were back and just called to say he was so pleased we’d got a place here, and welcome home.”

Harlech Jones’s eyes fill up. He looks across the bay and takes a long breath. “I thought, Christ, we’ve made it.”

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