Joe Lycett, comedian
I spent most of my school years under section 28 [a clause banning schools from “promoting homosexuality”] – something I only realised this year. I thought it had been ousted long before. So it’s no wonder homophobia was rife and there were very, very few openly queer kids in my year group. As my 20s unfolded, I felt things were unstoppably changing for the better, with gay marriage and public attitudes altering rapidly. My feelings about the present are more unclear; LGBTQ+ rights, like many rights, seem under threat in a way I’ve not seen in my lifetime. The attacks on organisations like Stonewall, which of course makes mistakes like any big organisation does, are of concern. Yet the new generation and their love for TV shows like Heartstopper are the brightest light and my hope for a more equal future.
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‘I’ve felt a profound loss of casual gay spaces’
Jake Shears, musician
We have gained a lot of space culturally, but have lost so much of our physical space in the real world. My move to London last year has been thrilling, but I’ve also felt a profound loss of casual gay spaces. Most bars I loved have gone, or become gay-themed, frequented by a straight majority. On a random Thursday night, I’m at a loss as to where to go to meet other gay guys. That kind of socialising has been relegated to massive event parties which proritise people with disposable incomes and flexible work schedules. I miss the days of simply chatting up a cute guy I see leaned up against a bar. Losing spaces has been a pattern in our history, but we’ve always been able to carve out new ways to congregate for our politics and pleasure.
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‘Acceptable discrimination was coming at me’
Stephen K Amos, comedian
As a teenager I was paralysed with shame, fear and paranoia. Navigating a society that devalued, socially and legally, a huge part of my identity was a nightmare. Acceptable discrimination was coming at me with “gay abandon” based on my sexuality, my race and my culture, buoyed up by a hostile press, legitimised by a government under Mrs Thatcher and made worse by the HIV epidemic and the outright hysteria surrounding Aids. Ad campaigns told you that you were going to die, yet at the same time section 28 sought to forbid any discussion about sexual health. Growing up, it was the definition of trauma. Fast forward to today and those laws have been repealed and new ones introduced. There have been advances in medical science, meaning an HIV diagnosis need no longer be a death sentence. Visibility and representation have improved, particularly with the onset of social media. But that same social media means people are emboldened to say what they want. We have to continually strive for equality, and complacency is not an option.
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‘Britain then is barely recognisable today’
Alan Hollinghurst, writer
From the time I came out, aged 20, I knew being gay was something I wanted to write about: not just my own experience but the longer history of gay life in Britain, the challenge and adventure of it. I’m slightly amazed to find my first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, was published 35 years ago. It appeared at an extremely difficult time, at the height of the Aids crisis, with hostility to gay life enshrined in law by section 28 – a Britain barely recognisable today. Over the following decades my personal experience of being gay has evolved into near-total unselfconsciousness about it. What I am conscious of, increasingly, is the challenge to such happy normality in cultures where authoritarian rule is on the rise. Anti-gay feeling is licensed and exploited with alarming ease, and is easily exportable, even to the socially liberal cultures of the west, where the freedoms of such minorities have been protected for decades. It’s hard to know where the story goes from here.
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‘We are visible and proud and varied’
Cyril Nri, actor
When I was in secondary school, it was essentially illegal to be me. I was going to write an angry piece about the way politicians like Margaret Thatcher played dog-whistle politics and vilified gay people for being themselves, inciting violence and hate. But even though Thatcher, the church leaders of those times, section 28, unequal ages of consent, gross indecency and other such laws have since died or been rescinded, and even though HIV/Aids has been recognised as just another opportunist virus and not a “gay plague”, those politicians, religious bigots and homophobes are still present today.
What has changed is that (in this country at least) laws protect the equality of the person, their age of consent, their right to partner whom they love. What has changed is that from The Killing of Sister George to Queer as Folk, Cucumber, It’s a Sin, Metrosexuality, Noah’s Arc and many more places and programmes, we are visible, and proud and varied and seen representing more than just a sexual drive. What has changed for me is that the shame and guilt that, as a child, homophobes would have foisted on me for being myself, has changed to pity for them that their sexuality is so fragile, it could be threatened by mine.
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‘We were pushing an open door’
Colm Tóibín, writer
For me, the biggest change in being gay in my lifetime came with the referendum on same-sex marriage in Ireland in 2015. It was a watershed in several ways. One: the campaign was run on both sides with civility. Few on the “no” side felt free to insult gay people or imply we were not equal citizens in Ireland. Two: we took the words “love” and “family” back from the Catholic church. And we asked – and we let our fathers and mothers and siblings ask with us – if our love was to be less valued in Ireland than other love. And if so, how come? Who says? And we made clear, as homosexuals, that we were born into families and we wished not to destroy the family but to enrich it. Three: we knew this was happening in a changing society, a place becoming more liberal. We were pushing an open door. We were almost fashionable. Four: I don’t think this could have happened in Ireland without the women’s movement, without women who had known oppression wanting their gay and lesbian siblings and children to be not only protected in Ireland, but cherished and treated as equal citizens in a republic.
