The Fragile Acceptance of Queer Lives
Progress is not inevitable, universal or irreversible.
I first realised I was different to other boys when I was 4. In that year, 1987, only 11% of the British public agreed that same-sex relationships were “not wrong at all”. By 2013, when the Same Sex Couples Act was passed, that view was held by the majority (and today, by two thirds). As one of Thatcher’s children, witnessing the Tories, the actual Tories, legalise same-sex marriage blew my mind.
Through the 90s and 00s, queer representation in Western media underwent a revolution. As a self-hating gay teenager, I remember sneaking into the living room to watch Queer as Folk. I’d sit 6 inches away from the screen of our battered telly, poised ready to change channels as soon as I heard someone come in. Today, there are literally hundreds of nuanced depictions of modern queer people in the media.
In 2003, Section 28 was finally dropped. Throughout my 14 years of schooling, it had ruled that schools could not promote “the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. And while recent protests in Birmingham against the No Outsiders programme have made the news, a landslide vote in parliament passed LGBTQ+-inclusive regulations for Relationships and Sex Education earlier this year.
This great leap forward has taken place across the West. Belgium, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg and Serbia have all had openly LGBTQ+ heads of state; and there’s a small chance that the USA might have their first in 2020.
But the scars of growing up gay in a homophobic society don’t dissipate as fast as the intolerance has. Queer people of my generation suffered episode-after-episode of slights, snubs and insults. These subtle, sometimes nearly imperceptible messages were consistent in their contempt of homosexuality. These would now be known as microaggressions — a concept you may have heard sneered at by straight, white, privileged men like Piers Morgan.
My secondary school Chemistry teacher was amazing, the best I’d ever had. She was empathic, energetic and super smart. I idolised her. So when I overheard her and a couple of members of the Christian Union discussing the medical dangers of gay sex after class, it felt like a dagger to the heart. It was a good few years before I learnt that these dangers were a homophobic fallacy.
In my early twenties, the BBC rejected a complaint that radio DJ Chris Moyles’ reference to a ringtone as ‘gay’ was homophobic. The BBC confirmed what my childhood had told me over and over again: gay means rubbish, lame, weak, shit.
Even at our most vulnerable moment, when we come out to our family and give voice to a lifetime of internal battles and angst, we queer people often find ourselves being the ones educating and comforting. And decades after coming out, our close friends and family still occasionally drop in a comment that suggests queerness is still weird or amusing to them.
All these experiences add up, in the psyche of the recipient, to trauma. Every occurrence of homophobia creates distance between you and the rest of the world. Every instance reinforces the message that being queer is, at best, strange and, at worst, deviant, disgusting or plain wrong. I can only imagine the compounding effect I might have suffered had I not been white, cisgender, middle class and able-bodied.
Queer people react differently to these experiences and their reactions evolve and morph with age. It might be a desire to only be with other queer people, a desire for safe spaces. It might look like defiance. It might be righteous anger towards straight people (“pay for our therapy, motherfuckers!”). Heartbreakingly, it can also be self-hate and suicide.
As a 35-year-old gay man I no longer wish, like a young Pete Buttigieg, that I could cut out my gayness with a knife. But the legacy of homophobia lives on in me.
I quietly neglect to mention my sexuality in the company of straight people who don’t know me for fear that their reaction (observable or not) might be negative. I can imagine straight readers thinking “I don’t mention my sexuality, what’s he complaining about?” But I would venture that, in referring to your partner, a gendered pronoun will slip into your patter without even thinking about it. We are always thinking about it. We’re thinking about whether we’re safe enough to be open. It’s not only about being free from physical attack, it’s about being free from judgement, from exclusion. A woman who has partnered with my social enterprise Year Here for 6 years once asked me if I had a wife and kids. That moment was my opportunity to tell her who I really was. I’d known her as a lovely, kind woman, so what was stopping me? But the question crossed my mind: might she be slightly less likely to work with us if she knew that I was gay? As I often do, I let the window of opportunity pass by and found myself feeling like a coward.
Keeping schtum for fear of others’ reactions can reinforce a sense of shame. Society’s homophobia, perceived and real, becomes internalised. This homophobia manifests in our self-talk, in our behaviours, even within our relationships.
While the swing towards a more tolerant society within my lifetime has been astounding, the effects that have accumulated in us aren’t so easy to shift. A straight person’s cognitive and emotional journey of shaking off their homophobia is significant but it’s nothing compared to the journey from traumatised queer child to self-accepting adult. Today, institutions accept and celebrate queerness as if society were ever thus. But we grew up surrounded by scorn for our identities – and that leaves a scar.
Perhaps it’s this juxtaposition that leaves me with a feeling of distrust. I don’t believe that society’s new-found tolerance is reliable. As dramatic as it sounds, I don’t believe that we’re truly safe.
I recently met criminal justice activist Baz Dreisinger. She talked about racism’s evolution from slavery through the Jim Crow era to mass incarceration today. After years of campaigning, mainstream consensus is beginning to accept that mass incarceration is a) real and b) fucked up. But where next? Yet another iteration of structural racism? I shared my worries about the fragile nature of queer acceptance and we wondered together: what if the same pattern of transmogrification happened with other prejudices, like homophobia. Perhaps that’s already happening under our noses.
It can feel like we’ve climbed the mountain when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights, especially for those seeing progress through the lens of their own privileged gay identities. But we’re far from the peak. Some people still face horrendous discrimination – trans people, gay Muslims, queer people of colour and LGBTQ+ citizens of any one of the 71 countries where homosexual relationships are criminalised. And I see no reason to assume that the progress we’ve seen in the West is permanent. The rise in race hate incidents post-Brexit, the resurgence of anti-semitism in the Labour Party and Islamophobia around the world serve as cautionary tales for any minority group. The fight isn’t over. It’s never over. Staying vigilant and looking out for each other is perhaps the best we can do.
I wish I could finish with some rousing call to arms but I don’t have one. I’d love to believe that progress is inevitable, universal and irreversible. But acceptance is not a given. They can take it away just as easily as they gave it.
