Back in 2006, Danny Oakley had the dubious honour of being the youngest person ever to appear on the Jeremy Kyle Show, after he and his brother AKA the Asbros and the Demon Hell Kids became two of the youngest kids in the country to receive Anti Social Behaviour Orders.
Danny, from Wolverhampton, and his brother Ricky, were front page news at the time as they ran riot on their estate, terrorising the neighbourhood with crimes including arson, burglarly, shoplifting and racial abuse.
But Danny, now 29, says he’s turned his life around and believes the root cause of his behaviour was that he was secretly gay, and had been hiding it since he was a young boy.
Danny recalls:
“I broke so many ASBOs, there’s only so many places you can be banned from.
People don’t believe I’m gay, I grew up with straight-acting chavvy lads doing drugs and moving drugs.
I wasn’t raised with someone saying ‘you can be a princess’.”
Between them, Danny and his bro racked up 70 offences, but no one in the community or system ever tried to understand or help. Instead, he was forced into homeschooling, which he says only isolated him more.
“We were effectively told we were scum by a judge, so we carried on.
When I found out I was on the front page of a newspaper, it was such an adrenaline rush.
If I’d had the right attention, I could have achieved anything. I could have been a politician.
All I needed was a boost. Going to college gave me confidence.”
Inevitably, Danny ended up in prison for a month in 2014, where he finally realised he needed to fix up. Sadly, that meant cutting off his family, including brother Ricky:
“I’m more intelligent than the rest of my family and feel like I was swapped at birth.
People still recognise me on the street and say, ‘You’re the ASBO kid’. I would love to be living a peaceful and calm life.
Everyone’s dream is two kids, nice home, nice car. I look out for my friends’ kids because of my childhood.
I want to start doing charity work, it still isn’t easy being LGBT in the Midlands.”
Fair play to the lad. Can’t have been easy growing up poor in a rough neighbourhood, without support at home or anywhere else, and be gay on top of it. No wonder he had all this suppressed rage, and acted out in a violent, ‘masculine’ manner in order to throw people off. Although I’m guessing his brother isn’t using the same excuse.
Who knows? If this was 20 years ago Danny might still be hiding the fact he’s gay and getting himself into stupidness around Wolverhampton. Fortunately we live in a world where LGBT acceptance is only getting better, even if the Midlands has some catching up to do, from the sounds of it. Go Danny Go!
Meanwhile, rapper Ghostface Killah is being shamed by his gay son for ‘ghosting’ his children for the last 15 years. Sad.
