I grew up in the straightest place in England and Wales: Rochford, a small town, in Essex. Last week, in figures revealed by the Office for National Statistics from its 2021 census, just 1.6% of the people living in my town said they were LGB+ – it was probably even more straight in the mid-90s, when I was about 15 and realised I was gay. Then, it felt like a complete taboo. My way of dealing with it was to try to put it at the back of my mind. I went through school, college and university doing exactly that.
When I left university and got involved in politics, I didn’t meet many openly gay people. At the time, there were a few out MPs in the Labour government – people such as Chris Smith, Ben Bradshaw and Stephen Twigg – but none in the Conservatives, the party I joined when I was 18, until Alan Duncan came out a couple of years later. It still felt like a taboo. I was petrified about coming out or even telling anyone I was gay.
I was elected to the district council in 2006, and got a lot of local press attention because, at 24, I was the youngest councillor. Then I started hearing whispers that some people thought I was gay, and I would laugh it off. I was still in denial, but it got to the point a couple of years later when I became interested in the LGBT community.
Rochford, unsurprisingly for the straightest town in England, did not have any gay clubs – for that you had to go down the road to Southend or, as I preferred, to Heaven, the gay club in London. For me, like many other young people finding out about their sexuality, it became the place I could be who I really was. It felt as if I was living a double life – as a country boy in Rochford during the week, and a different person on a Saturday night in London. I didn’t worry, because I thought I’d never bump into anyone from Rochford – the straightest town, remember – at Heaven, but sometimes it did happen. “I’m not gay,” I would immediately tell them, “I’m just here with friends.”
I stood for re-election in 2010, and decided that if I won, I would come out. I did. I told close friends first, then my family. Nobody was bothered, or particularly surprised. It might not, thankfully, be considered a big deal now, but 12 years ago, in a small rural area, it was and so I was advised to tell the leader of the council too.
Nobody treated me any differently, most local people either didn’t know or didn’t care. I was aware that I represented a number of older people, who may have had negative attitudes about LGBT people, and I had to tread carefully, but I never experienced any hostility in Rochford. I did, though, from my own party. I planned to stand for election again in 2014, but some local Conservatives took a dislike to me and tried to stop me standing. I believe it was because of my sexuality – one mentioned, disparagingly, an interview I’d given to a local BBC radio station a few months earlier, in which I talked about coming out.
But this is not an accurate picture of what the wider Conservative party is like. People have asked how I can be a member of the party of section 28 – and I have also campaigned for the Republicans in the US and been accused of promoting homophobic policy – but I believe Conservative attitudes have moved on, including legalising same-sex marriage. Apart from that one incident with my local party, I’ve never felt unwelcome. At one Conservative Pride party, I was on the dancefloor with Liz Truss, then foreign secretary, to It’s Raining Men.
I still live in Rochford, where I’m now on the parish council, I’m a property investor and finishing a master’s on US foreign policy. I don’t feel the need to move away from the supposedly straightest town in England. I’ve never felt any overt homophobia, although it’s not somewhere I would necessarily walk around holding hands with a partner.
There are other LGBT people in the town and surrounding area, and probably many more than the census revealed. Maybe the people who were marking the tick boxes felt they couldn’t be honest, even to themselves.
Rochford has an older population than Brighton, which has the highest proportion of LGBT people. You tend to find that in these rural areas, there are a lot of older gay couples but they keep themselves to themselves and you know that they will never come out publicly.
I find it sad that people still feel they can’t be themselves. But if the Conservative party has changed, one day so will Rochford.
James Cottis is a Conservative district councillor and property investor
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
