Fifty Years of Periodic Pride and Perennial Prejudice
Why we’re not quite there yet.
Although I wasn’t there, I understand there was much more celebration than usual at the London Pride event marking the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act which was given royal assent on 27 July 1967. This law was passed at a time when I was not long out of nappies and way before I was aware of my sexual orientation. So it would be easy to deduce that I’ve more or less lived a whole life of optimism and mutual respect.
There’s so much to celebrate in the 21st Century in the UK— poofs (I’m allowed to call them that as I am one) are generally more able to express their sexuality openly and with more confidence. There’s no longer the need to hide away in gay bars — the whole of London is one big gay bar for Gok Wan’s Sake. They can choose to marry or have a civil partnership (which gives them more rights in that respect than straight people). It’s illegal to discriminate against people due to their sexual orientation. They’re even handing out pardons willy-nilly to people who were prosecuted in the past for homosexual acts. Large corporations have their own gay networks where all those of a pink persuasion can meet together after work and talk about football (ahem) and companies fall over themselves to get a presence at Pride and chase that Pink Pound for the money-making opportunity that it presents. Sometimes, our annual gathering now even gets featured on the BBC news. So what’s there to moan about?
Well, you only need to scratch the surface a little with a well manicured nail to see that not everything in the garden is pink and rosy. Most gay people still migrate to a major city in order to get some semblance of anonymity and protection as it can be quite dangerous at times to be the Only Gay In The Village. And whilst many employers will not give two hoots about a person’s sexuality, there are some individuals that still use the stereotype to form an opinion as to others’ suitability and future promotion prospects. And let’s not forget that there’s still some industries, premier football being the much quoted one, where statistically there must be some players that are gay but do not feel confident in sharing that secret in the changing room — look what happened to Justin Fashanu.
The truth is that although I have now spent as much of my life out of the closet, than I ever spent in there, I have always felt marginalised, to a lesser or greater degree. In my late teens and early twenties, just when I was becoming confident enough to explore my sexuality and the likes of Jimmy Somerville, Boy George, Marc Almond, the Pet Shop Boys and Frankie Goes To Hollywood were in the Top Ten and there was a glimmer of social acceptance on the horizon, AIDS came straight into the charts at Number One and stayed there for years. I dare not think of the amount of people that would immediately assume that I was HIV+ just because I told them I was gay. This assumption has loosely continued amongst the wider population right up to and during my recent employment at an HIV charity. And despite it no longer being a death sentence if detected and treated early, there is still an associated stigma with being HIV positive in many communities.
And while we think that all forward-thinking nations have now approved gay marriage, Germany is only just in the throes of approving it and Australia, home to Queen Priscilla and Princess Kylie is still embarrassingly lagging behind. And if you’re British but live in Northern Ireland, sorry you still can’t marry someone of the same sex.
But while the David Camerons and Theresa Mays like to see themselves as gay champions (of course nothing to do with wanting gay votes (?) but because they absolutely believe in equality) and tut at the evil Vladimir Putin in Russia who says he only believes in traditional marriage and that no institutions should promote gay lifestyles, we don’t have to delve too far back in UK history, to Margaret Thatcher, (still worshipped in many leafy areas of the UK) who introduced Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 which prohibited the publishing of “material with the intention of promoting homosexuality.” This was a very contentious issue of the 1980’s and 90’s which was still law in the UK until its eventual repeal in 2003. And under Cameron’s watch, it’s arguable that the wave of historical pardons that were handed out (not apologies which many had called for), would not have been given, had one of them not been Alan Turing, the mastermind behind the Enigma code breaker and overall war hero, immortalised by Dominic Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game.
The first five decades have been spent fighting. Fighting for recognition. For acceptance. For equality. And though we’ve now won most of the legal battles, there are still ignorant and hateful fences we have yet to tear down and prejudices we have to challenge.
When I was unemployed in 2009, I went for an interview at a family-run business. I can’t even remember what the company did now but I can still picture the owner who interviewed me. He was delving into my CV, asking me as much about what I had left out of it as to what I had included. Smart move, you might think, until he started asking me about my family. Not being sure what to make of the question, I told him about my mum, dad and siblings. Until I realised that he didn’t mean them, he meant my wife and children. When I said I was single, he could have just absorbed the information and said nothing more but he looked me in the eye and told me that he was looking for a “family” man. I made some attempt to question him about how that was relevant but he had already made up his mind and I could see that he thought my question confrontational and impertinent. Back at the job centre, I reported him to the muslim girl who administered my claim the following week and she just shrugged her shoulders, failing to understand the enormity of my complaint and that it would have been the same as him telling her “I only employ whites.”
I recently watched and shared a video on Facebook about a young man who recorded the moment he came out to his mother. Thankfully the mum said she had known all along and that she loved him no matter what. It was sort of heartwarming. A male heterosexual friend of mine (who is himself a father) expressed surprise that the boy felt the need to hide it from his Dad (as the video had already explained) and to apologise to his Mum for being gay. However, to me this was totally explainable. Because today’s society is quite content to accept you on the one hand but still reserve the right to treat you differently on the other.
Despite all the progress that has been achieved, I would always glance in four directions, before I deemed it safe to give my partner even a peck on a cheek, yet people do not bat an eyelid at heterosexual couples swapping tongues and groping each other in public. And there are still only a handful of streets in the UK when I would feel comfortable enough to hold hands with the person I love.
Fifty years on, there are still restrictions on gay people. And unfortunately there will be many more young men that, despite the advancements made in the past five decades, will still feel they have to hide their sexuality from certain people and that they need to apologise for being different.
