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.
