She arrived late into my year at school because she was transferred and I found out that she liked me because she gave me a teddy outside French class (well she didn’t, but her friend from the boarding house did, and the guy I was chatting to at the time immediately thought it was for him – arrogant little sod). We started a brief relationship, like you do in Year Seven, consisting mostly of holding hands and talking to each other.

The first time we kissed was downstairs from the entrance to her boarding house, outside the food tech room, and it was diabolical. No, really. I just remember it being warm and a bit wet, and I kept my tongue firmly in my own mouth because I didn’t want to impose my tongue on her (that sounds weirder out loud than in my head at the time, trust me). Anyway, things fizzled out as they do at that age, and I heard that she gave me some rubbish score out of ten for it, possibly a one or a two, but not undeservedly so.

If you were to speak to her today, however, you would discover that she now defines her sexuality as gay, classifying herself as a lesbian and having a big ol’ crush on a certain Davina McCall. Ironic huh? It gets worse.

My first proper kiss with a guy, and I use ‘proper’ as in not through force of social pressure and alcohol, was with a guy who had previously been going out with one of my best friends, which is a cardinal sin but our friendship was pretty much over when she got the school hating me for being gay. By this point I knew he really liked me, and I really liked him. We mostly communicated through texts and the internet, and we used to secretly hold hands at lunch with only his best friend knowing what was going on.

When we first kissed outside the English room, I knew the difference. I had practiced the kissing thing with a few of my friends so I knew what I was doing. My stomach flipped, my groin reacted swiftly and all I remember about the act was the intensity of the connection. When I stayed round his house once, we spent an hour kissing until his mum called us down for a meal, and I knew she recognised the stubble rash that adorned both of our mouths, but bless her, she ignored it.

We kept up this secret game until I discovered that he had been seen going into town with his ex-girlfriend and had been seen kissing her and other girls, so I dumped him and walked away.

The ironic thing is if you were to talk to him today, he would deny that it ever happened and claim we were just friends when he was seeing his ex-girlfriend. He would also deny still having contact with me or inviting me up to stay at his, but such is his career path – homosexuality is equated to weakness.

The DVD features contributions from Brian Eno, Ruby Wax, fashionista Zandra Rhodes (who designed all of Andrew’s hostess costumes), Richard O’Brien, Nick Rhodes and Grayson Perry, The British Guide to Showing Off was filmed over five years, charting the mounting of the 2009 Show, bringing to life its history through newly discovered archive, exuberant animation, and plenty of offbeat humour from contestants old and new.

For your chance to win of three copies of The British Guide to Showing Off, simply enter your details in to the boxes below. Entries must be received by 11.59pm on Friday 10 February 2012.

For those unlucky enough to win their own copy, the DVD and Blu Ray is available to purchase now through Amazon.

We speak to young photographer Jules Mattsson (@julesmattsson) about how exactly you become a photojournalist at just 16, and TV presenter and voice-over artist Mark Ryes (@markryes) tells about how getting turned down by Jim’ll Fix It led to his big break.

You can subscribe using iTunes or listen online or download the MP3 directly below.

Music by Michael Speed

Featured image: Microphone by Seven Morris, Flickr

Promoting his hot new, upbeat and fun single featuring the stunning Rita Ora titled Hot Right Now, due for release on 12 February, we are pleased to offer our readers the chance to score two tickets to this gig.

Winners must be over the age of 14, under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

To enter this competition, simply add your details to the boxes below. Entries must be received by midnight on Wednesday 2 February.

This competition has now closed.

So Mr. Rowe tell us a bit about yourself. What is your role at Dave’s Leicester Comedy Festival and The Big Difference Company?

I am the Director of Dave’s Leicester Comedy Festival and the CEO of Big Difference Company. My role is pretty diverse; I lead on strategic partnerships for both the festival and the overall work delivered by Big Difference Company. This involves working with a really diverse range of organisations, partners and clients which include Dave, UNISON, De Montfort University, Equity as well as health organisations, public sector agencies and private organisations.

As the legend goes you thought of the Leicester Comedy Festival as part of your final piece of work at uni, is this true? Tell us the tale.

We started the festival as a final year project when we were studying Arts Management at De Montfort University in 1994. As is typical with university projects, we got together in our group and had to decide what event we wanted to organise. At that time, comedy was huge and incredibly popular. Rob Newman and David Baddiel were on the front cover of NME, and that same magazine coined the phrase “comedy is the new rock & roll”, a reference to the fact that comedians were beginning to do massive gigs in arenas. We were a bunch of students and for many of us the NME was our “bible”; we wanted to organise an event which would get us excited so it didn’t take long for us to talk about starting a comedy festival. None of us had ever promoted comedy before but I knew a couple of people who worked in comedy so I went home, rang them up and said “tell me everything I need to know about running a comedy festival”.

Did you have a passion for comedy before starting the festival or did you see a niche and go for it?

If I’m honest I had always wanted to be a music promoter. I promoted my first gig when I was aged 13 and organised gigs in my local village hall throughout my teenage years. I then went to work for a band in London for a year before coming to Leicester for University. I had never particularly thought I’d get into promoting comedy however I had always wanted to be involved in promoting events and festivals which had energy and excitement about them. I hate festivals which are “just” a collection of shows in one venue, or full of touring shows – there is nothing special about those. I’ve tried to always move the comedy festival forwards and try things out; some of which don’t always work out but at least we give them a go and experiment.

What does your normal day involve?

There is no such thing really. Today I am meeting with our “official” hotel, then sorting out our city centre branding and then meeting a bunch of students who produce digital animation and chatting about possible projects for next years festival. Tomorrow I’ll be meeting with the festival team, and then catching up with our Finance Director and our network of promoters. It’s a diverse role and involves work on the festival, as well as the wider work of Big Difference Company. I often find I’m thinking about stuff we’ll be doing in 12 months time rather than the day to day work of the festival or company. I think if my job ever became predictable or mundane I would want to move onto something else. I enjoy the diversity of what we do as a company and want to retain that for as long as possible.

When you were growing up did you dream of running a festival or did you want to be an astronaut or fireman like a normal child?

Initially I wanted to be a vet but then quickly realised you had to be really clever and train for years to become one. For a short time I thought I might become a teacher but then I started to organise gigs and realised that I wanted to be a promoter. For many years I wanted to take over from Michael Eavis at Glastonbury – actually, in some ways I would still love to run Glastonbury!

What achievement with the festival are you most proud of?

There are so many specific things that I am proud of. Whether it’s bringing Roseanne Barr across from the US to perform her first ever stand up shows in Europe, or seeing Johnny Vegas win our new act competition way back in 1997 or producing our Comedy in the Dark show at Edinburgh Fringe. Most recently I guess the partnership with Dave has already impacted massively on the festival. I guess the thing I’m most proud of is producing what is probably one of the longest running independent arts festival in the UK every February since 1994.

What has been the hardest struggle?

Money. In the early years it was an enormous struggle to keep things going. We survived thanks to the commitment of various key individuals who supported what we did and never gave up. Looking back I’m kinda pleased that we had a long term view and focused on the vision of delivering a brilliant comedy festival every February. Without that it would have been easier to give up.

What would be your advice to someone wanting to start a festival?

Do it – but make sure it’s brilliant! Running a festival is such a great thing to do, if you can get all the various elements right and you engage with performers, venues, stakeholders, media and the public. It’s easy to run a rubbish festival where actually very few people care about it. Run a great festival and, if you’re passionate about what you’re doing, you’ll find it’s the best thing in the world.

What is next for Geoff Rowe?

I’ll probably put the kettle on and have a quick cup of tea before rushing off to that meeting with our official hotel…….. after that, who knows?

Dave’s Leicester comedy festival runs from the 3 – 19 February and includes an incredible mix of new and established talent. To find out more visit comedy-festival.co.uk.

The whole time I was there I was never trained to use the tills, so I spent my full-time hours over the summer wandering the sports section (yes, they put me on sports) making sure each shoe was at a 45-degree angle atop its box. When it wasn’t possible to avoid a customer any longer, I’d pop out to the stock room to get their size if needed. It was dull, but I had a job and was working hard for my £3.90 an hour (although future pub work has shown that the experiences within that shoe shop were far from ‘hard work’).

Over the course of the job, I learnt the following things:

• People (not all, but most) are completely different outside of school. You may even end up pushing a girl you once thought was a complete bitch around in a cardboard box under the broken CCTV camera.
• Polyester uniforms are a subtle but effective form of legalised torture.
• You will be able to get away with anything if you are an old battle-axe of an employee named Dot.
• If you’re going to discuss pay, make them say it first. When you realise you’re getting more than them you can just agree with what they’ve said.
• That weird noise you can hear is actually your manager playing the ringtones from her new phone over the tannoy so you can pick your favourite.

From reading my fellow So So Gay writer’s experiences it seems I missed out on sexy stock room encounters. The closest I got was drunkenly groping my boss’ boobs on the work night out. She approached me a few days later to inform me that I was funny, but weird.

That night out was an issue as half of us were underage. I was fortunate enough to borrow ID from one of the older members of staff. He also happened to be the fittest guy in the shop, and said: ‘We definitely look similar enough to get away with it’. After memorising his birthday, star sign and address I’m pretty sure I was in love (although just to confirm, I did not stalk him).

While I often had fun, less pleasant times were had. These chiefly occurred on the shifts where I had to cover the kid’s section. Finding a full nappy in one of the aisles was not a pleasant experience (until I ran straight to my supervisor and made him clean it up as I was not going near it). Neither was having a child who must have been made up of at least 60% mucus sneeze on me as I was trying to fit their shoes.

As first jobs go, it was a pretty good one. It only went pear shaped when my manager was accused of stealing £3,000 and got fired. The new manager was somewhat less friendly. At some point in December I handed in my notice, telling them I wanted to ‘focus on my studies’. My AS level grades of A, D and U clearly reflect how serious I was about my education.

At the age 10 years old it was clear to anyone with eyes in their head that the young boy before them was destined to grow up and become a flamboyant homosexual.

Once I’d reached the stage when I was telling the boys in my class that I’d missed ‘the match’ on Sunday night because I believed that when Popstars ended each Saturday night the rest of the weekend’s TV schedule became immediately redundant, my impending lifestyle was a more-or-less accepted fact.

Indeed, as I reach adulthood I continue to have a neon pink arrow above my head alerting people that the person it’s pointing at does not so much ‘play for the other team’ as ‘lead the other team’s cheerleaders in a medley of Christina Aguilera’s hits’.

Therefore when I announced to my best friends that I was taking a year out from my studies to teach English in a high school in rural France, they had some concerns. As we gathered together for our last meal together before I left the country, it became apparent these concerns were still there.

‘Aren’t you scared they’ll realise you’re gay straight away?’ I was asked over an obligatory bottle of white wine.

‘Of course not’, I replied, already slightly slurring, ‘And anyway, why would that be a problem?’

‘Because’, came the reply, ‘You know how teenagers can be’.

I was immediately reminded of my own teenage years where, being the only gay person in my year group at Catholic school, I was not the most popular of students. Upon remembering this I did what anyone in my situation would do and entered deep denial.

‘Who knows?’ I said, calmly, ‘Maybe they’ll just think I’m eccentric and foreign or something’. To this remark I received no response, other than looks of pity and disbelief from the three people in the world who know me best.

In time, I forgot about my friends’ worries for me and, more importantly, the pink elephant which would inevitably be lingering behind me as I tried to deliver my lessons. That is, until I arrived in France. A week before I was due to start my lessons, one of the school’s teachers had a talk with me about the sort of things I could expect.

‘When you first meet your classes, they will have lots of questions for you’, she explained. ‘Don’t be surprised if you end up answering the same questions over and over again for different classes’.

Suddenly I pictured myself shouting ‘I have answered this question three times today!’ at a confused French 14-year-old before storming out of the classroom like an A-list diva. I wondered if I could pull off sunglasses in a classroom environment.

‘However,’ she added solemnly, ‘Some of them may ask personal questions’. I subconsciously gulped, knowing what was coming. ‘They may ask whether you smoke, or if you have a girlfriend, or perhaps…’

In truth, I have no idea what followed, because the idea someone in the world thought I was capable of starting, and indeed maintaining, a relationship with a woman had thrown my concentration. Perhaps my teacher thought she was being polite by overlooking my so-obvious-you-can’t-look-directly-at-me gay tendencies. I was intrigued.

My first class came and as my students began to ask me about myself, I slowly relaxed. It was going swimmingly. And then the question came…

‘Do you have a girlfriend?’.

I grimaced, anticipating stifled laughs and rolled eyes, but as I scanned the room for traces of irony, or recognition that I might prefer the company of other garçons, I found none. What was going on?

‘No I don’t have a girlfriend’, I replied, certain I saw one girl nudge her friend and giggle excitedly. Unfortunately it didn’t end there.

‘Do you prefer English girls or French girls?’

I hesitated. Surely this wasn’t a legitimate question. Surely the teacher would haul the student out of the classroom for what was obviously a joke at my expense. But no. It seemed I was genuinely expected to answer the question.

‘Hmmm. I like them both the same’, I explained, deciding not to add, ‘Which is not at all’.

The next morning I logged onto my email account to find a message from the teacher leading the class, explaining that she was sorry the class were so talkative while I was teaching them, but ‘a lot of the girls told me they had such a crush on you they found it hard to concentrate’.

As we walked home that night, my friend Jenni and I pondered how it could be that these students weren’t noticing what was right in front of them. Could it be something was lost in translation? Was I more subdued in the classroom?

‘Who could believe you were straight?’ she asked, having known me for just a few weeks at this stage. Suddenly a homeless man garbled something after us.

‘What did he call us?’ she asked.

‘Les amoureux’, I replied, smugly.

Methods of skipping ‘games’ usually involved a small group of us refusing to leave the changing rooms and chatting about what had happened throughout the past week on Neighbours. This was during the first break up between Carl and Susan, a very important time for us all.

During those brief moments when we weren’t sobbing about the dissolving relationship of that Australian couple we all wished were our real parents, we made the decision to do something better with our time. After talking to one of our teachers, it was decided that we could use this time to help the community and so the Community Action Team (C.A.T.) was formed.

To the outside world we were a bunch of six spindly –  and one round – nerds who just wanted to better the community; but what we really wanted was retail experience to help us get part time jobs when we turned sixteen. We schmoozed with a number of later-in-life ladies and got positions in some of the finest charity shops in the land… well into the three charity shops in Bangor. I honestly believe this was one of the wisest decisions I have ever made.

If you’ve ever worked in retail then you’ll understand when I say that anyone who has ever been into a shop should be forced to work at least one week on the shop floor to understand how difficult it is. I think this would stop a lot of people being ignorant to sales staff,  making the world a happier place. FACT. I would take this one step further and suggest that everyone should give up some of their time to work in a charity shop. It is an incredible way of meeting a wide range of people who live in your area, from the completely weird old folk to the cool indie kids hunting for a elusive book or cheap knitted jumper.

So what did I learn in my three years at this charity shop? Well the first was how good cigarettes taste with coffee; this being back in the days before the great indoor smoking ban. Over those cups of coffee with the manager  I learned the most valuable piece of wisdom; that people aren’t that scary. No matter your background, if you smile a bit, listen and be genuinely interested in what the other person is saying you tend to find common ground. This has helped me no end in the world of Comms, which is what I do now.

Of course it also taught me the less interesting but much more practical skills of stock inventory, cashing up tills, ironing, how to get rid of scabies etc. Sometimes it was disgusting, people seemed to think on a regular basis that it was perfectly acceptable to donate dirty underwear – and by dirty I mean utterly vile. If there had been a bodily fluids bingo card we would have we would have a full house every two weeks or so. But every cloud has a silver lining, and I learned not to be grossed out by such things – you just have to deal with that moment and then move on. I think my final skill learnt was the ability to chat to people, after finding out that not all strangers are going to offer you lollies to get you in their car and be driven somewhere shadowy. I discovered how odd but beautiful people and their lives are. There was also bonus that staff got first dibs on the stuff that came in.

So did I grow from this experience? The answer would be most definitely yes.

Has it shaped my current career? Well, ten years on from stepping into that charity shop is a million miles from where I am now. I learned some key skills and it helped me into the world of retail which funded many Buffy boxsets and my years through university. But as a turning point in discovering my dream job, I can’t say it was.

Would you recommend other people do it? Totally. If you can spare a few hours to help out in a charity shop you will not regret it. They won’t be able to pay you, but what you will learn is totally worth it.

This month’s cover star is the hunky actor Freddie Hogan, best known for starring in the sitcom Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps, while Waterloo Road actor and Celebrity Big Brother star Lucien Laviscount and comedian David Morgan (who we have previously interviewed) are also featured. Others include: Andrew Hayden-Smith, singer Gareth Gates, actors Marcus Patric and Danny Young, former Big Brother housemates Mark Henderson and Dale Howard and the Naked Boys Singing (how fitting). And keeping in with the naked theme but not quite at the same level, David Beckham does what he does best too – no, not play football – pose in just his underwear.

As well as 46 – yes, 46 – pages of nakedness, plus interviews with those who took part, this issue also talks about spreading and receiving more than just Christmas cheer when it comes to sex, takes a look at reasons why Britain’s former empire is still causing problems for gay people abroad, looks into the increase of gay cake makers and also features Vanessa Williams in her role as Renee Perry in Desperate Housewives.

This month's gorgeous cover star, Freddie Hogan.

Lucien Laviscount was most definitely one of last year's Celebrity Big Brother's perks.

Comedian David Morgan. Thanks to Matt Sills and Thor Haley for the photographs.

Scenario one: It’s 2 am on a Wednesday night. There are four boys in the corridor of your halls rather homo-erotically wrestling and making a lot of noise – they’re so loud that they’ve woken you up. What do you do? Do you open your apartment door, tell them to knock it off and threaten them with Sevens for the next two weeks? Or do you ignore it and hope they’ll get bored and go to bed on their own? There’s an added twist – the students are 18 and 19 year old football and hockey players and you’re 22, scrawny and gay. The only authority you can muster is from the facial hair you’ve forced onto your face and by the fact that these students have to call you Mr. Pohotsky.

Answer: You open the door, in your bathrobe, with your eyes closed and say ‘You have five seconds until I open my eyes, whoever I can still see has to be in the dorm at 7 pm for the next week.’ The students quickly disperse.

Scenario two:  It’s 6 pm on a Friday night. You’re on dorm duty and you’re patrolling a hall as you are meant to occasionally, and you hear a girl giggling through a closed at the end of the hallway – there is no light emanating from beneath the door.  Do you do your job, knocking on the door and then opening it with your key to catch the kids in the act (breaking the co-ed visitation policies and probably doing some horrible heterosexual horizontal tango or whatever they do) or ignore it?

Answer: You knock, wait five seconds and open the door – praying that they haven’t actually gotten down to business just yet.

This was my first job. Fresh out of University, I was a teaching intern at a rather prestigious co-educational boarding school in New Hampshire (if you’re enough of a US political junkie you may have seen many speeches given by republican presidential candidates from our assembly hall). I’ve promised myself that I will not mention the name of the school for fear of this turning into an advertisement but I taught Lighting & Sound Design in the Theatre & Dance Department and looked after a dorm of 54 teenage boys.  I’ll call that dorm Woolworth, in order to protect the [guilty.]

Woolworth is known on campus for housing the best of the sports teams. Mind you, to get into this school you actually have to be bright – there’s a saying at the school: ‘From the dorkiest dork, to the jockiest jock, everyone here’s a nerd’. Nonetheless, Abercrombie could probably recruit some of the older students for their annual catalogue (that and they could knock you to the floor with a proper football tackle). Whenever ‘Woolworth’ is uttered on stage in an all school assembly, one can expect to hear a deep bark like sound of boys trying to sound older than they are cheering ‘WoolWORTH!’ At times it was a bit like the movie Animal House – but with a curfew and without alcohol (at least that’s what we enforced).

There were five other teaching interns at this school of 1000 in what seemed to me like a sleepy little country town (little did I know that by New Hampshire standards, this little town was quite bustling). The one major difference between my experience and the experience of the other interns was that, for some reason, I was given a beautiful 6 room flat, meant for a small family, and they all lived in two room flats – a private room and a room to receive students in during duty hours.

What I eventually discovered, much to my own amusement, was that I was assigned this apartment, and dorm, with a political aim – to quietly inculcate these students, who – if they lived up to their stereotype should verge on homophobic – with the notion that gays are regular people too. This is a very progressive school – in 2001, they were picketed by the Westboro Baptist Church for allowing same sex faculty couples to live together as dorm parents.

Even with this very progressive ‘at-home’ agenda that I was somehow meant to transmit by osmosis, the kids remained utterly clueless. Rumours quickly spread about me and another intern (female) because she and I were spotted ‘taking late night walks after check-in’. This is true – but our late night walks were to the local bar because we were having trouble coping with living in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of teenagers. Apparently we also broke up at some point, but neither of us quite knew exactly when.

This all changed when in January, I suffered a difficult personal loss. I don’t really want to go into it, but let’s just say that if the kids had no idea that I was gay before, they’d have to be a bit thick to fail to receive the hint. The school was extremely understanding – giving me as much time off as I needed, suspending my dorm duties for an entire month. I could hide with the final season of Battlestar Galactica and nobody would give a rat’s ass.

Except, one morning, I woke up to find a card slipped under my door. A few of my students had bought it from the Walgreens Pharmacy 10 minutes down the road from the school. I don’t remember exactly what the card said, but, there, signed in many different coloured pens, were the names of many students throughout the dorm.

Word travels quickly in the world of a boarding school – but even with all the hoots and hollers, the late night hall wrestling, and chest bumps and secret sexy times, that ‘at home’ message that I was unknowingly meant to teach had clearly been received.