I am trying to get better at making an entrance. I imagine being the kind of person who shows up to the party dressed like nobody else and pulling it off. Lighting up a room with sheer force of presence. It seems like a life skill, this way of carrying oneself, useful for making impressions, forging connections, flirting. A mark of self-acceptance, too, the conduct of someone who knows exactly who they are, who asserts it without fear or apology. But it could also be a sign of something else: a mask, an armour, a way of overcompensating. Some may interpret it as false or ostentatious, as indulgent or simply a nuisance, and those attitudes can reveal something about the people looking, too, their own hang-ups or insecurities. Commanding attention carries with it a demand to be seen, and this demand can be confronting. However it may be received, this art of self-presentation has a long lineage. It has been known, at least for the last two hundred years or so, by the word flamboyant.

I am not a very flamboyant person, although I still fantasize about one day embodying its qualities. The Oxford English Dictionary describes a flamboyant person as someone who attracts attention for their “confidence, stylishness and exuberance”, a holy trinity of qualities often prized in contemporary life. I have had my moments: loud outfits here and there, flashes of self-belief on a stage, uninhibited movements on a dance floor, loosened by chemicals. In reality, my instinct most of the time is to move towards the background. And yet, I still find myself drawn to the glow of flamboyance, its sense of fun. I want to be the one to walk in the sun, as Cyndi Lauper¹ once sang, with her shock of orange hair, dressed in a pink pimped-out prom dress, strutting down the street.

To be unleashed on the world without restriction may seem like an infantile desire, the stuff of child’s play and adolescent rebellion. Flamboyance is often an embrace of your inner child, an unruly love of the colourful and ridiculous, a recall to the defiance of a teenage self. For this reason, it runs deep in many of our personal histories, whether we are aware of it or not, beginning as the exuberance that might be encouraged and accepted in our childhood, only to be extinguished by the responsibilities and restrictions of adulthood.

1. Cyndi Lauper released “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” in 1983, though it was originally written by Robert Hazard in the late 1970s. Lauper rewrote the lyrics to subtly change the meaning from disparaging women’s freedom to advocating for it. When she claimed herself a co-writer, Hazard issued a cease and desist letter. He claimed to have made millions from the royalties, and the song revived his otherwise faltering career.

This is not to say that flamboyance, which is associated with feathers and furs, glitz and glamour, is always seen as a quality to aspire to, an index of what is fashionable or acceptable. For those largely excluded from normative ideas of respectability, the word flamboyant can be thrust upon us in a different way; an old-fashioned, heavy-handed euphemism for deviance, a reductive label that will not come unstuck. Many queer people, and commonly boys and men, feel discomfort around this word, perhaps because it recalls the derogatory charge that it held in our early years, when it was synonymous with femininity and same-sex desire.

Growing up in the UK in the late 1990s and early 2000s, any sense I had of flamboyance was mediated by a different word, one you were much more likely to hear used by other children on the playground or in the changing rooms. The phrase “that’s so gay” has an unmistakable ring in my ears. Typing it out still makes my shoulders tense up a little. The word gay back then meant limp wrists and loud, lisping voices, but also anything that was deemed lame or lacklustre. As a child I felt the magnetism of these things, the boys who weren’t like other boys, the men on TV who minced and preened, but I also knew that they were uncool. In fact, it paid to be suspicious of them, although I sensed they held the key to something about who I was.

I remember befriending a flamboyant boy at school because I saw him dancing in the playground, performing the full routine to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” while a group of girls clapped along. I was ten years old and drawn to his confidence and showmanship. That young friendship, although it lasted just a few years, was a formative one. I can still recognize echoes of the dynamic between us—him as the outré performer, and I the sturdy sidekick—in how I express myself today. How I felt towards him contained the stirrings of desire, but also admiration. He seemed able to transform qualities that were already coded as gay, in boys of this age, into a charming social currency. I was not unhappy or unlucky in school. I had friends and I mostly kept my head down. But this boy cast a different light. He seemed, for a while, like the main character in my world view, a portal to a different, more grown-up place.

Much of what I learned about being gay at this age I learned from other kids (a sometimes brutal education), or from pop culture. These were the dying years of Section 28² in the UK, the 1988 act which forbade teachers from “promoting” homosexuality or the “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. (No one was ever prosecuted under this act, and it was repealed in 2003, but the repercussions of the fearful atmosphere it created can still be felt today.)

These were also the years, at the beginning of the new millennium, when a new kind of reality television began to take hold, and talent shows like Pop Idol fed us with aspirational images of celebrity and pizazz. Although I often found myself as the sidekick to bigger personalities, I loved singing and dancing and daydreamed, like many children, of one day being famous myself. The premise of these TV shows, that someone ordinary could be projected to superstardom, fed my own private whimsies, and inspired me to do after-school dance classes, as well as a few later flirtations with musical theatre.

2. Section 28 was a law passed by the Thatcher government in 1988, which prohibited schools and councils “the promotion of homosexuality” and “the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” The law coincided with the peak of the HIV/AIDs epidemic, when sex education was arguably at its most necessary, and was not overturned until 2003.

There was something quite gay about Pop Idol, it seemed to me, although I had no language for it then, from its celebration of showbiz to the jazzed-up looks of some of the contestants. But it was mostly implicit, hidden in plain sight. The winner of the show’s first season, in 2002, was Will Young, a musical theatre student in his early twenties. I remember watching him avidly in the live final, singing the song he had made a mark with earlier in the series, a cover of “Light My Fire” by the Doors (in the slow-tempo, Spanish guitar version by José Feliciano). Dressed in a black sleeveless jumper and cargo trousers, he grinned warmly at the camera, pyrotechnic flames dancing in front of him. Pitched as a lounge singer with diva affectations, Young seemed less appealing to the tween demographic than the other finalist. Gareth Gates was spiky-haired, baby-faced and just seventeen, the heart-throb of the show. I definitely had a crush on him, too.

Young won the show, and when he came out as gay quite soon afterwards, my ten-year-old self reacted with the force of homophobia turned inward, as if I could no longer let myself love him. I remember going to my then girlfriend’s house for tea one Friday evening. The conversation over dinner turned to TV, and her mum asked me what I thought of the winner. I volunteered that he was fine, but “when I found out he was gay, it put me off”. I could tell from the look on her face that I had said something edgy and uncomfortable, but I failed to register why. I thought that was the correct public take, and I was just repeating something I had heard someone on the playground say, someone who was parroting his own dad. It was the most awkward fish and chips of my life.

Pop Idol was the kind of TV spectacle that could grip a nation in the era before streaming.³ This was just a few years after George Michael had been forcibly outed after his encounter with an undercover policeman, and Young’s decision not to make a pretence about his sexuality was courageous, particularly given the consequences it might have had for his post-Pop Idol career. His win signalled a shift towards out gays and lesbians being assimilated into the television mainstream.

In the US in the same era, there was comedian and sitcom star Ellen DeGeneres, as well as Richard Hatch, winner of the first season of Survivor. None of these new TV stars were particularly flamboyant figures, in either dress or personality, which was perhaps what felt momentous. Hatch was ex-military, while DeGeneres had a certain girl-next-door appeal. When she came out as a lesbian, via an interview with Time magazine in 1997, she recalled a conversation with her father about this decision, in which he said to her: “You’re not going to go all flamboyant, are ya?” She replied, in jest, “Yeah, Dad, I’m going to completely change, I’m going to start wearing leather vests. I’m going to get one of those haircuts they all have.”

Compared with the long tradition of flamboyant, gender-bending entertainers of the twentieth century—the singers, comedians, and drag performers who were often defined by their difference—the new generation of gay and lesbian celebrities appearing on TV seemed novel precisely because they were, by straight standards, less eccentric or transgressive. Ellen could be out and famous without being flamboyantly lesbian, while Will Young could become a TV-vetted gay pop star without the expectation of being flamboyantly gay, which is to say, campy and effeminate. His sexual orientation seemed separate from having the “X” factor that Simon Cowell always talked about, neither a barrier to star power nor the basis of it. By the specific metrics of gay and lesbian representation in show business, this cultural moment could be seen as one of progress. Will Young had certainly lit a fire in me, an uncomfortable mix of desire and recognition. But wherever things were progressing was not somewhere that I, as an increasingly confused pre-teen, wanted to go. .

3. Will Young was the winner of the inaugural series of Pop Idol, a talent show on ITV running from 2001 to 2003. Though the show was only on for two seasons, it paved the way for American Idol and The X Factor. Since winning, Young has released nine albums and has remained a stalwart figure on the theatre and pantomime scene, and was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award in 2013.