To the young women on the train who wonder why their young male friend hasn't come out to them.

Let me take a moment to explain why your friend hasn't come out yet. I know you will be supportive of him, yes. And you and your close circle of friends already ‘know’ that he’s gay. You've guessed it, and it doesn't bother you. You wonder why he hasn't told you, and you possibly think he has nothing to fear cos we live in 2013 and not 1913.

Yes, this is mostly true. But. You live in a world that is designed precisely in your image. The world caters to your subconscious needs and desires, and it moulds itself around your identity in a way that you don’t even notice. You don’t hear anything alien in the songs that are sung by boys to girls or from girls to boys. You accept as normal that every male police detective on TV has a girlfriend or wife; that every child has a father and a mother; that the cute boy in the advert is flirting with a girl off-screen; that you can dream of being Juliet looking for her Romeo; you take for granted that heroes must be straight.

The world you live in relentlessly promotes itself and its products to your imagination testifying that there is only one kind of couple, and one kind of love. It still invites you to be the boy chasing the girl, to be the warrior saving women, to be the princess in need of a prince, to have beautiful angels cast off their wings at your feet. And once it has presented this version of reality to you (in everything you see, eat, hear, smell and in your dreams), it rolls in with the caravans of religion, justice, entertainment and education and makes sure you don’t really question it. Then it unloads the trucks and sells you everything capitalism can possibly sell you (from toy guns to mortgages, from Barbie to Jimmy Choo).

This is the world you are born into. It wants you. It wants to sell itself to you. It has billions of products painstakingly designed to accessorise the identity it sold you: it wants you to think about nothing but it.

He, on the other hand, has always to use his imagination – every time – to invent a place for himself in the drama, the music, the game, the story. He has had to look past what is sold as normal and he has to create a new role. Almost all gay characters he manages to come across in popular culture are identified and defined by their gayness, and this makes them different to all the other people around them. He can take nothing for granted. Not even you or your friends. You use ‘gay’ to describe something you’re ashamed of.

He hasn't come out in this world so far, because he has not yet built up enough tools to re-define, to re-position, to re-state and to remake the image of the world into one where he can belong without struggle or battle. It takes effort – a lot of it - to build that kind of self-confidence, to acquire those skills, and to nurture this type of unshakeable self-knowledge. If you don’t think so, then ask yourself the following 10 questions:

1. When did you first realise that you were heterosexual?

2. When did you come out as heterosexual?

3. Did you tell your friends first? Or your family?

4. How did your parents react when you told them you were heterosexual?

5. Were your friends supportive of your heterosexuality?

6. Was there counselling available to help you deal with being heterosexual?

7. Do you think having openly heterosexual teachers unduly influenced your orientation towards heterosexuality?

8. Was it difficult to meet other openly heterosexual people where you lived?

9. Do you ‘flaunt’ your heterosexuality?

10. Were you ever beaten up or mugged because you are flamboyantly heterosexual?

It takes energy and creativity to answer these questions in a way that does not let them damage you. And mostly they do damage you. They encourage you to think you are inferior. This is the one of the effects of homophobia; and most of us are, more-or-less, homophobic. Like most of us are, more-or-less, patriarchal, racist, intolerant, sexist. We live in a society where we are taught to exhibit these characteristics in order to succeed.

It is sometimes easier, for those of us who have come through this questioning stage, who have been supported by close personal role models, and who have cultivated a disarming self-confidence, to navigate the minefield of assumptions and exclusions that constitute the straight world in which we make our lives. For others it takes longer.

So give him time. He’s working on it.

And perhaps he’ll come out earlier if you start using ‘gay’ to describe something to be proud of.