Attitude’s Matt Cain: ‘Bullying led me to drink and self-destruction’

Novelist and Attitude contributor Matt Cain has opened up about his struggles with alcohol, which developed after suffering years of homophobic bullying and abuse as a teenager.

In a candid article for Buzzfeed, the former Channel 4 culture correspondent reveals how battling his own self-destructive behaviour helped inspire the plot of his new novel, Nothing But Trouble, which is out this week.

Revealing he turned to drink after realising it made him confident in social settings, he writes: “I was desperate to reinvent myself. I needed to discard the person I had been. For more than 10 years at school I was subjected to horrific bullying for being gay. This was not merely name-calling or being excluded by the other pupils. This was hearing their disgust directed at me several times a day, physically as well as verbally.

“This meant not being able to walk down a corridor without hearing the kids lined up on each side spitting their insults at me or shoving me away. This meant eating my lunch in a toilet cubicle every day – I was too frightened to show my face in the playground. It meant sitting on the school bus home desperately trying not to cry while the entire bus pointed at me and chanted a single word filled with hate: queer.”

Saying that alcohol eventually turned him into a “performing seal”, he goes on: “Yes, I was having fun – of sorts – but it continued right through my twenties, and as I approached 30 my life was revolving around an endless cycle of drinking, casual sex, and unhealthy relationships with unsuitable men. I was constantly having to up the ante by getting drunker and dirtier just to maintain the momentum. On more than one occasion I found myself going home with a man with an unusual profession just because I thought it would make a good anecdote.

“My debts were spiralling out of control. I was robbed several times by men I’d taken home and my health began to suffer. The risks I’d taken sexually meant I had to undergo several HIV tests, although luckily they came back negative.

“I was desperately unhappy and heading towards rock bottom. I vomited on a plane. I woke up in a hotel room in Beijing with a man I could not remember meeting. I collapsed at work.

“But I could not see how to break out of the behavioural patterns I’d so willingly jumped into. Being an entertaining drunk had become part of my identity. It was what people wanted of me.

“Just after I turned 30, however, a survival instinct kicked in. I knew that if I did not change I would end up killing myself. I decided to give up alcohol.

“In the end it wasn’t hard – I was sick of it. But it meant overcoming an ingrained fear, that the popularity I’d built up would be demolished, that I needed drink to be liked, that without booze I would be alone again.”

He adds that he now recognises the same behaviour among others, writing: “You don’t have to look far among gay men, particularly those brought up before attitudes began to change, to see this self-destructive pattern repeated and repeated.”

Matt’s new novel Nothing But Trouble follows the story of a rising pop star who battles her own demons as she becomes embroiled in a life of partying, and he says his own experience partly served as inspiration for the tale.

“My own story of self-harm, and those of so many I have known over the years, became the inspiration for my novel Nothing But Trouble. The title has personal resonance – it was what people used to say about me. The book, a comedy thriller, focuses on a group of characters each convinced they’re not good enough. The low self-worth leads them to take it out on themselves or the people around them, through drug abuse, drinking to oblivion, or sleeping with bad men.

“It’s a story I know too well.”

Nothing But Trouble is out now on Pan Macmillan.

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