Matt Cain on tour

Matt Cain, born in Bury and brought up in Bolton, is an author and leading commentator on LGBT+ issues. He has written a number of books including “The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle” which includes interviews with Out In The City members.

There are some local events:

An evening with Freya North & Matt Cain – £5.00

Wednesday, 31 January 6.30pm – 8.30pm

Waterstones, 91 Deansgate, Manchester M3 2BW

Book a ticket on Eventbrite here

Book Launch of “One Love” – Free

Friday, 2 February 6.30pm – 9.00pm

Bury Art Museum, Moss Street, Bury BL9 0DR

Book a ticket on Eventbrite here

Author Talk with Matt Cain – Free

Saturday, 3 February 2.00pm – 3.00pm

Bolton Central Library and Museum

Le Mans Crescent, Bolton BL1 1SE

Book a ticket on Eventbrite here

Book Launch of “One Love” – £6.13

Tuesday, 6 February 7.30pm – 9.30pm

Queer Lit, Social Refuge, 27 Great Ancoats Street, Manchester M4 5AJ

Join us for the official launch of Matt Cain’s heartwarming new novel “One Love” – a glorious and unflinching portrayal of queer love and friendship.

Joined by Queer Lit owner, Matthew Cornford, who will be discussing the process of writing “One Love” followed by audience Q&A and book signings.

A percentage of ticket sales from this event will be donated to Manchester Pride.

Book a ticket on Eventbrite here.

A Happiness That Took 90 Years to Achieve

When Kenneth Felts began work on a memoir at age 90, he found himself filled with regrets over a secret gay love affair. So he came out – privately and publicly – which inspired Johnny Hau to do the same.

A decade ago, Johnny Javier Hau Dzib took a nighttime drive around his Denver neighbourhood, his mind in a suicidal thought loop.

Several years later, Kenneth Wayne Felts was at home alone in nearby Arvada, Colorado, contemplating death by a different means. Chemotherapy for a Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis was robbing him of life’s pleasures. “I thought, I’m 90 years old,” Mr Felts said. “Am I going to live the rest of my life this way?” In March 2020, after four months of chemotherapy, he voluntarily ended his treatments.

When the two men met later that year, both were in better places psychologically. Mr Felts, a Navy veteran who served in the Korean War, had recently come out as gay. Mr Hau, an IT specialist for Denver Public Schools, hoped to follow his lead.

Mr Hau is 34. Mr Felts is now 93. He was born in the dust bowl town of Dodge City, Kansas, one year into the Great Depression in 1930. His parents, Clyde and Ruth Felts, were devout Christians. A youth spent in fundamental Christian churches caused him profound guilt over two secret romances with male schoolmates before he graduated high school in 1948.

In 1950, he enlisted in the Navy despite never having seen the ocean. It was long before the era of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He recalled several men he served with being court-martialled for their homosexuality. To avoid the same fate, he said, “it was important not to even associate with other gay people.”

In 1957, when he took a job as an insurance investigator in Long Beach, California, after graduating from the University of Kansas with a bachelor’s degree in social sciences two years earlier, he adopted the persona of a straight man.

During that time, however, he had a secret love affair with a male colleague named Phillip Jones, who also attended the local Church of God with Mr Felts. “He was in the choir, and I was in the pews,” Mr Felts said.

Mr Jones was able to square his sexuality with church doctrine; Mr Felts was not. One Sunday, he said, “out of the blue, I was bombarded with guilt. I knew I was going to go to hell, that I would burn in fire for eternity.” Overcome with shame, Mr Felts left California in 1958 and returned to Dodge City. He never said goodbye to Mr Jones, though Mr Felts was sure by then he was the love of his life.

Over the years, Mr Felts would intermittently search for Mr Jones in every California phone book he could get his hands on. “I called every Phillip Jones and every P Jones I could find,” he said. The search was never successful.

Mr Felts continued to present as a straight man. In 1962, while living in Colorado Springs and working for the state as a rehabilitation counsellor for the mentally and physically disabled (from which he retired in the mid-’90s), he married Mary Guinn, a schoolteacher. In 1973, their daughter, Rebecca Mayes, was born. The marriage didn’t last – they divorced in 1980 – but Mr Felts’s commitment to appearing straight did. His resolve didn’t soften even when Ms Mayes came out to her parents in the mid-1990s.

“‘It won’t last six months,’” was the first thing Ms Mayes recalled her father saying when she told him she was gay. She and her then-girlfriend, Tracie Mayes, treated his prediction as a challenge. In 1999, they were married. The couple are now the parents of Mr Felts’s grandchildren, an 18-year-old boy and 14-year-old girl, and the family lives near Mr Felts in Arvada. (Ms Guinn died in 2022.)

To occupy himself during the early months of the pandemic, Mr Felts started writing a memoir. “I got to the point where I started writing about Phillip,” he said. The memory sent him down a rabbit hole of regret. So he told Ms Mayes about the relationship, essentially coming out. “He doesn’t open up much, but he was obviously very sad,” she said.

Ms Mayes handled the news of her father’s sexuality differently than he handled hers decades earlier: She was happy for him. “I completely understood why it was so hard for him to come out, given the time he grew up in,” she said.

Mr Felts was done with the secrecy and regret and ready to come out publicly, which he did with a Facebook post in June 2020. The story of the newly out 90-year-old went viral. “I started hearing from people from around the world who wanted to interview me,” Mr Felts said. “And each day I got new messages from people saying how much they appreciated me.”

One online acquaintance offered to help track down Mr Jones, only to learn he had died a few years earlier. Mr Felts was heartbroken. “It is so terribly frustrating to be so close to and yet not reach my lost love,” he wrote on Facebook. “My heart has turned to stone and I need my tears to wash away my sorrow. Rest in Peace Phillip.”

Another online admirer was Mr Hau. Like Mr Felts, Mr Hau was taught early that homosexuality is a sin. He grew up Catholic, the youngest of eight children born to Josefa Hau de Dzib and Nemesio Hau Poot, in Yucatán, Mexico. By the time the family moved to Colorado when he was 11, he knew he was gay.

“I tried to hide it,” he said. “I would ask myself, ‘What’s going on with me? Why am I this way?’” He was 27 before he kissed another man. He had made attempts at relationships, “but I just felt tremendous guilt creep in. The guilt told me to end it every time.”

College at the University of Colorado Denver, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2014, was a welcome distraction. But thoughts of suicide were a constant companion until the night he drove through his Denver neighbourhood in 2013 and met an older man who had immigrated from Japan years ago to work in mining.

The man had missed his bus. Mr Hau saw him crossing the street. “It was late,” Mr Hau said, so he offered him a ride. In return, the man offered him friendship.

Mr Hau’s friend, who died of leukemia in 2023 at the age of 90, became a mentor and father figure. He was also the first person Mr Hau said he came out to. The friend, who was not gay, “looked at me and said, ‘It’s OK. Be who you are.’”

Mr Hau struggled to do so until October 2020, when he got a response to a note of support he had sent Mr Felts via Facebook Messenger two months earlier. In it, Mr Felts included his phone number (Mr Hau said he lived locally and hoped they could speak someday). On 16 October 2020, the two met at Namiko’s sushi and Japanese restaurant in Denver to talk about their sexuality, and the trauma of hiding it.

They continued talking after the restaurant closed. In Mr Felts’s car, Mr Hau took Mr Felts’s hand. “Ken was just extremely supportive,” Mr Hau said. He helped Mr Hau past a second source of secrecy and shame. “I’ve always been attracted to older men,” he said. “And I always felt like, how will people react if I start a relationship with someone older? Perhaps the gay community will see it as odd.” Before he met Mr. Felts, “I looked online trying to find out, Is this normal?”

A first kiss at Mr Felts’s home the same night pushed him past that worry. “It was such a comfort,” Mr Hau said. By the end of October, Mr Hau, who had never before spent the night with a lover, was spending every weekend in Arvada with Mr Felts. In the summer of 2021, he moved in.

Talk of marriage, initiated by Mr Felts, started soon after. But the cost of legal fees for a prenuptial agreement slowed it. Then, the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe vs Wade, with its implications for potentially disrupting gay marriage rights, rekindled those conversations.

On 20 May, Mr Hau asked Mr Felts to marry him in their living room. “I felt like, I had found this great guy, and the laws were changing, and it triggered this fear,” he said. “I really wanted to solidify the relationship, to make it legal.” Mr Felts, given a second chance at marriage, was fully at ease saying yes. “I love being with Johnny, and I love being loved,” he said.

On 8 July 2023, with a prenuptial agreement in place, Mr Felts and Mr Hau were married in a brief, informal ceremony in their backyard. (In Colorado, couples can legally marry without a formally registered officiant.) Jason Eaton-Lynch, a friend and the director of elder services at the Centre on Colfax, a Denver LGBTQ community centre, led the ceremony.

Mr Felts donned a pink jacket over a purple button down shirt; Mr Hau wore a tan jacket and blue button down. Their 20 guests, which included Ms Mayes and her family, dressed casually at the grooms’ request. (Mr Hau’s family was not present, but when he came out to them last year via text message, he said “they were very supportive.”) Before Mr Eaton-Lynch pronounced them married, Mr Felts read a poem he had written for Mr Hau.

“Near the end of my days and in the heat of my night, I found a great love, whom I shall ever hold tight,” he said. “We explore our new world with breathless delight.”

After the ceremony, the grooms cut a brightly frosted cake picked up from a nearby grocery store. Ms Mayes had organised a light lunch from a local sandwich shop. The couple skipped dancing to focus on mingling.

The cancer Mr Felts was being treated for before he met Mr Hau is “pretty well not there anymore,” he said, though he is still seeing his doctor and getting regular PET scans. The memoir he started writing during Covid, “My Handful of Stars: Coming Out at Age 90,” was self-published in 2022.

After the wedding, Ms Mayes said her father had never seemed happier. She had started thinking of Mr Hau as a member of the family well before. “We were suspicious of John for a while because of the age gap,” she said. “But just watching them together – John takes really good care of my dad. They continue to be just so happy.” Coming out three years earlier enabled Mr Felts to express himself in multiple ways, she said. “He used to be such a conservative dresser. Now he wears the loudest stuff.”

I’ve been in correspondence with Kenneth. This was his latest message: “Thank you. It has been a wonderful year. Johnny and I were married in July, took a honeymoon to Taos, New Mexico, and have been together for over 3 years now. He is IT Tech for Denver Public Schools and I miss him every day when he goes to work. Wish you a really great 2024. Thanks for writing.”

How we met after 60: ‘I could not have met anyone better. Life is so exciting now’

As a teenager, Norman was very confused about his sexuality. “I thought I was gay because I fancied men, like pop stars. But later, I started to like girls as well,” he says. When his parents found out, he was sent to a psychiatrist for electro-convulsive therapy and aversion therapy, and although his feelings for men never went away, in 1972 he met and fell in love with Marilyn, the woman he would later marry. When she died in 2017, he was devastated. “We lived for each other and loved each other. I was totally lost because we’d done everything together.”

It wasn’t until two years later that Norman began to think about coming out as bisexual. “I’m a volunteer cultural champion at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester,” he says. “A new coordinator organised a talk from the LGBT Foundation and they said they were looking for volunteers aged over 60 to make audio cassette tapes about what life was like in the 1950s and 60s for gay people.” Ever since he was young, Norman had wanted to be open about who he was, and it finally felt like the right time. “I just wanted the world to know I was bisexual,” he says.

Around the same time, a friend at the theatre introduced him to Out In The City, a support group for older LGBT+ people, which was supported by Age UK Manchester. He received a call from Tony, who was running the group, to explain more about what was involved. “I wanted to meet like-minded people, so I went along and immediately felt very relaxed and at home,” he says. “It was such a friendly group.”

Tony, who also lives in Manchester, says Norman seemed very sociable. “I wasn’t immediately attracted to him but he was easy to talk to. We got on straight away.” Not long after he joined, the meetings paused for the pandemic. “It was a terrible time for me and I felt very isolated,” says Tony. “In the summer, Age UK advised us to start meetings again, subject to some restrictions, so we sat in this huge circle, 2 metres apart from one another.” It was then Norman and Tony began spending more time together and they discovered they had a lot in common.

Although Tony had known he was gay from a young age, he had also faced backlash and was sent to a psychiatrist. “I was ostracised by my family, except for my sister, but then I met Phillip and we lived together for 31 years,” he says. Ever since 2011, when his partner died from pancreatic cancer, Tony had been comfortable with his single life, but by the end of 2021, he realised he wanted something more than friendship with Norman.

“I invited him to the cinema and, on the way back to the station, I told him I had feelings for him,” says Tony. Norman admits he was in shock – he’d never had a relationship with a man. “It really threw me, so I asked if we could be friends.”

Over Christmas, Tony went to stay with his sister in Slovakia. They texted each other every day and Norman soon realised he was waiting for Tony’s message to arrive. “It dawned on me that I must like him,” he says. “We met up and I told him I wanted to give it a try, but that he’d need to give me time. He told me to take as long as I wanted.”

The pair have been a couple ever since. Now retired, they go to lots of Out In The City events together, as well as the cinema and various art classes. “We’ve tried ceramics, and go to lots of exhibitions,” says Tony. “I love his sense of humour. He’s always telling corny jokes but we laugh a lot. We have so much fun and really enjoy each other’s company.”

Norman appreciates his partner’s patience and compassion. “He’s so caring. He’s always there for me to talk to and he’s so understanding. I could not have met anyone better. Life for me is so exciting now.”