When Patrick, a 73-year-old gay man from Manchester, worked as a teacher in a Catholic school in the late Eighties, he was confronted daily by the homophobia of the era. “We were sent videos to try and educate pupils about Aids,” he remembers. “I witnessed our head of PSHE opening up the package containing [the tapes] and throwing it in the bin in disgust. ‘We don’t have people like this in our school,’ she said. ‘We don’t have gay people’.”
For many young queer people, such an attitude might be unthinkable, but for the majority of older LGBT+ people, prejudice, fear and hostility was part and parcel of everyday life. New legislation, greater awareness and improved representation mean things have moved on – albeit slowly – since the dark days of the 20th century. While this doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels – rampant transphobia in almost all areas of life remains a critical rallying point for those invested in queer liberation, and there’s no disputing the continued existence of misogyny and racism – we also can’t deny that LGBT+ rights have come a long way in the past 40 years.
