GOK: As a fashion stylist, I tend to see everything in terms of colour. When I’m trying to remember how I felt about my sister, it’s the lilac of her bedroom and the dusty-pink dust jacket of her book Little Women. One of my earliest memories is of creeping into her bedroom, which I liked so much better than my Superman one, and lying on her bed reading her book, pretending to be her. I can remember with complete clarity the outfit she wore on her 14th birthday, including the jewellery. She wore a black-and-white 1980s-style animal-print dress and red pointy shoes with a small kitten heel. Her hair was in a bob and she wore red-and-black dangly earrings and I loved her so much, she may as well have been the Venus de Milo.

We argue like bitches now, because we’re both so opinionated, but when I was growing up she was the woman I wanted to be. Our parents worked all hours running a Chinese restaurant and Oilen was the most influential person in my life. She was strong, bossy, intelligent, arrogant, egotistical, crazily opinionated. Whatever was going down, Oilen always knew best. She was short-tempered and snappy, but she was beautiful in my eyes.

My mum is English, my dad old-school Chinese — he came to Leicester from a northern Hong Kong village where his mother would still have been catching fish for lunch. My sister is the first woman in our whole family to say: “I’m strong and independent and clever, and I’m going to have a life of my own.” And she did. She didn’t even notice me. I can recall the exact stitching on the back of the grey jacket with the lining coming down at the back that she used to wear when I was nine, yet I was so not in her orbit, she doesn’t even remember me being there. I was effeminate and camp, so afraid of people knowing who I was, I created this character to hide behind. I was straight out of Disney Club. I remember once leaping up and offering to help make sandwiches for her friends, just so I could be part of her clique, and she said: “Okay, then. You do it.” And they all marched out of the kitchen. Even now, she’s the only person in the entire world who can really get to me.

I was born in a trailer park and we grew up on one of the scariest council estates in Leicester. I’ve been back since for a drive-around and, honestly, I didn’t want to get out of the car. It’s like the front line out there. Mum is a big, apron-wearing Englishwoman, and we were fat, mixed-race kids. We used to get abuse shouted at us all the time. Mum was once stopped with Oilen and Kwoklyn in the double buggy and told they couldn’t possibly be her kids. I don’t know how we survived, but it made our family an incredibly tight unit.

We all have a terrible relationship with food. My parents don’t have a very contemporary attitude. It’s “If it makes you feel good, eat it!” If you go round to their house, within minutes food is either happening or being discussed. When they had the restaurant they’d come home from work at midnight and cook fried rice and steak — we’d smell it coming up the stairs, then we’d all get up and eat it at 2am. When a woman says to me “I cannot bear the thought of anyone seeing me naked,” I know how that feels.

Because the age gap between Oilen and me is quite big, she was going through puberty and adolescence while I was still very much a child. She paved the way for me and my brother. She was the only Anglo-Asian at school and she took all those issues on the chin before we even got there. When Oilen was going through her New Romantics phase in the 1980s, she said: “I hope you turn out to be gay, because that will make me really cool.”

Her influence on me was so strong that until I was about 22 I truly believed it was her fault I was gay. It’s only in the past 10 years that I’ve discovered my own personality. I came out to Oilen first. She said she always knew, but then it was hard to miss. She did what Oilen always does: she told me how I felt. She said: “You’ll feel better when you tell Mum and Dad.” When I phoned Mum she said: “It’s okay. Oilen told me.”

Dad was brilliant. He didn’t say anything, but when I first took a boyfriend home, he made us up a bed in the lounge.

I never thought of my parents as people with faults until recently. My dad could do anything in my eyes — I thought he and Mum could take over the world. I’ve just realised he can’t do his paperwork, and it makes me feel tearful. Oilen is much more grown-up, whereas I still feel like the youngest child.

We don’t really have boundaries in our family. I will tell Oilen if I think she looks hideous, and the other day she told me I have the most humungous head. Other people probably find this offensive, but it’s all done in love. When we all get together we don’t need anyone else around. Visitors are sometimes a bit of an intrusion. Because we care so much about each other, our method of communication is absolutely crap. We scream and shout all the time, but when we’ve calmed down we’ll all sit and laugh about what we’ve just done. It’s incredibly empowering. I know I never need to worry about pissing Oilen off by overstepping the mark. I don’t even think there’s a mark we could ever step over.

OILEN: Gok was the weight of a bag of sugar when he was born. He was smaller than his first teddy bear. We had to wrap face cloths round his bottom because he was too tiny for the smallest nappies. We called him Babe, and it’s stuck, even though by the time he was four or five he was as robust as the rest of us.

The women customers at our parents’ restaurant absolutely loved him. They made far more fuss of him than me or my other brother. He was really cute. And always incredibly tactile. He just doesn’t seem to have any boundaries. Almost the first thing he does when he meets women for the first time is hug them, which makes them feel safe. He learnt that at a very early age. He’s like a sponge — he absorbs people’s problems — which is why he’s so good at what he does. At primary school he used to sit next to his teacher and stroke her leg while she read the story. He’s never had a problem saying to someone: “You’re adorable.” And he means it. He used to tell our Auntie Dawn she was beautiful, and somehow from him it didn’t sound cheesy.

I was so absorbed with myself as a teenager, my memories of him are pretty sketchy. He was bullied a lot, because he was camp, chubby, mixed-race. Poor Babe. It wasn’t easy. We were all picked on, but our family was so strong that even when I was getting called half-breed I never wanted to be anything but mixed-race. Mum and Dad worked such long hours that most of our holidays were spent playing at the restaurant. Even now none of us can eat out without talking about how many covers there are and what the service is like. Catering is part of who we are, but there was no way any of us were going to follow our parents into it. I was into my books, Babe was always interested in clothes. As a child he’d change five times a day. Years before David Beckham wore a sarong, Gok was wearing one to a club in Leicester with a holey mohair jumper. I remember saying to him: “Promise me you’ll get a taxi right to the door.”

When he told me he was gay my first reaction was worry for his future. I didn’t want him to be subjected to problems and prejudices as a result of being a gay man. At the same time I wanted him to be able to live his life comfortably and freely, which is why I wanted him to be open with Mum and Dad. He was miserable when he first left home, and I was there for him as much as I could be. I just knew by the tone of his voice on the phone when he needed us, and I’d say to Mum: “I think we should go and see Babe this weekend.”

He started to lose the weight around the same time. It was all to do with trying to find out who he was, and I think he just feels much more himself as a slim man. It was quite a long transitional stage, and from it the butterfly emerged, and he’s happy. The attention Babe gets now when we go out is almost like ownership. It’s never hostile, but when he’s approached by members of the public there’s an urgency there, a need for approval. What he does is very pure: he just loves women until they feel better about themselves, and that’s a very powerful thing. For some of them, it’s the first time they’ve met someone who understands how they feel.

He doesn’t like hearing what I do. If I try to engage him in conversation about the horrible things I’ve seen and heard as a childcare solicitor, he can’t face it. He’s not that different to everyone else in that respect. Nobody wants to face the fact that not too far from where you’re sitting comfortably in your own home a child is being serially abused. I don’t need him to understand, but I do have a desire for this aspect of life to be acknowledged. The world of celebrity is make-believe; Babe and I manage to happily exist in a world that is somewhere in between.

We still laugh about the same stupid things we laughed about as kids. Babe loves to throw his arms round people, whether he knows them or not, and because it’s meant so warmly they like it. He flings his arms round Mum and Dad and my brother, who is this macho martial-arts instructor. And he cuddles me — he’s the only person who does, because I’m not a cuddly person. There’s never any awkwardness with him — it’s spontaneous and natural. He sits on the sofa, puts his arms around me and rests his head on my shoulder. He’s like a spot of glue — he’s the physical link that binds us all together.

Interviews: Caroline Scott.

Portrait by Ollie Woods

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