When I came out, I was both legally and emotionally still a boy. I was 16, and the year was 1990. The landscape of societal attitudes towards gay people in the UK then was very, very different to that of 2014. Tolerance and acceptance, bigotry and prejudice were talked about in almost colloquial terms. We were still very much an Island Nation because our personal world was national. Today, LGBT rights inhabit a global stage – for we now live within a global society.
Perhaps it was the case, all those years ago, that we had to put our own house in order to some degree before we could understand the difficulties other gay, bisexual, lesbian, transgender and intersex people had to endure in other nations. In 1988, two years before I came out, a rather pernicious piece of legislation had come into force: work of the Thatcher government. This was Section, or Clause 28. In its crudest form, Section 28 could be seen as a law that enforced the “legal but not approved” status of homosexuality. One of the most noted aspects of this legislation was that it became illegal to discuss homosexuality within school Sex Education modalities, effectively this was a tacit form of teaching denial to school children, and also sending a clear message to young people that the only “right” kind of sexuality was heterosexuality. Section 28 was both confused yet deeply invidious and sinister. It stated that homosexuality could not be promoted. Within a school setting this gave latitude to the notion that homosexuals were a kind of “threat” to children, reinforcing a deeply misplaced, but in the minds of some, trenchant, view that homosexuality was tenuously linked to paedophilia. Thankfully for the UK, this nasty belief has almost died out. The unarguable truth remains that statistically the overwhelming proportion of men convicted of sexual acts against children self-identify as heterosexual. But mud sticks, and Section 28 was a gift for the mud-slingers.
Startlingly, Section 28 was not repealed in England until November 18th, 2003 – a mere ten years ago, thereabouts. This was following years of demonstrating and campaigning. I vividly remember attending many peaceful demonstrations calling for the repeal of this law. Shamefully, it took a Labour government almost six years in getting around to removing it from our statute book. The real shame must lie with the Thatcher government for thinking up such an odious and tatty piece of legislation.
It seems even stranger, looking back, that until I was twenty, homosexuality was only legal for those over the age of twenty-one. This of course made all of my relationships, until the law was changed, illegal. Just shy of my seventeenth birthday I had to endure a humiliating physical examination by the police in an attempt to establish whether an older man who was in his early forties had had sex with me (which, although a grey area, would have been somewhat equivalent to the older man being assumed to have had sex with a minor. It would have been likely that him, not me, would have faced charges of some kind). They discovered nothing, yet this gives some indication of the oppressive atmosphere of the times in 1991, and the incredible invasions into the private lives of others which were then both legal and socially accepted by many. This is the first time I have written about this “run-in” with the police.
HIV/AIDS in the early 90′s cast a long shadow upon every single gay man within every single LGBT community. Between 1990 and 2000 I personally knew of more than thirty people who would lose their fight against this disease, which, in those earlier years, was still being combatted with highly experimental drug regimens that were almost as deadly as end-stage illness caused by AIDS. Watching one friend after another, or maybe someone you knew to say hello to on the gay scene gradually wither and then disappear, because of its relentless repetition, took on a horribly mundane aspect – as though it just became a part of life. This terrible pattern was especially notable to me until around 1997, when Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART, or combination therapy) was introduced as an extremely effective tool against HIV progressing towards AIDS. In a quite abrupt manner, many people who were already extremely ill, began almost magically and miraculously to improve and regain their health.
However, whilst HAART is now seen in hindsight as a quantum leap in combatting the virus, social attitudes towards those living with HIV were slow to change, and misconceptions still abounded. I knew of two people who lost their life to AIDS and had to be buried in a body bag, then hermetically sealed in a lead lined coffin, as it was still believed at that time by the uninformed or wilfully ignorant that the virus could survive in the ground – a wild fallacy as the virus can not exist outside of a human being for more than an extremely short duration (a fact already known at the time, yet oddly overlooked). The old tropes about contracting HIV from shared tea cups to toilet seats were still bouncing around. Some of those claiming to be religious asserted that HIV was a punishment to gay men for their “deviancy”, many of them dangerously convinced that heterosexuals were somehow immune. Families and communities regularly turned their backs on those seen as possessing a kind of incomprehensibly immoral double-whammy – of being both gay and HIV positive. This is not make-believe, although it seems that way now in retrospect. Wider support outside of the gay scene and HIV/AIDS charities was in many cases non-existent.
It would be a mistake to view this period in a completely dystopian manner, however. HIV/AIDS within the LGBT community had, in many, many ways, an extremely unifying effect. No one was untouched either directly or by association and therefore the majority of those in the LGBT were extremely empathic. Lesbians donated blood, as gay men were not allowed to (and still are not able to unless they have been celibate for 12 months. Prior to 2011, gay men were entirely barred from donating blood. Even as the law stands now it remains non-sensical as it tacitly presumes that heterosexuals are in someway immune from HIV/AIDS, and this differentiator sends out that subliminal message by dint of the current legal status). A large proportion of HIV/AIDS charities and services are peopled by gay men and women, and thousands of gay men who are no longer here gave their lives in order to advance medical treatments. In many cases in the mid-1980′s to the early 90′s the experimental drugs killed the person before AIDS did.
In 2014, an individual diagnosed with HIV can very reasonably be predicted to have the same or similar life-span to a person without HIV. To have HIV these days, loosely speaking, is to be a person living with a chronic condition – rather like a diabetic, perhaps. But the downside to this otherwise positive scenario is complacency. As in other areas of life, there are no guarantees. Young people between 16-30 are actually less likely to have safe sex than was the case during the peak in the UK of those dying from AIDS. Retro-viral drugs remain heavy-weights in terms of their toxicity and side-effects. For most a successful combination of drug therapies can be achieved, but not for all. The gay scene, for all of its travails doesn’t seem to have learnt it’s lesson, as unsafe sex has almost become de-rigeur. Heterosexual people are no more careful. The story of HIV has not fully been told. Whilst good news stories are rare – the recent release of an HIV prophylactic that appears to have seriously good efficacy is great – but until a vaccine or cure is developed it will continue to impact the lives of millions.
So now that gay people have the choice to marry in the UK, to adopt and foster in the same arena as heterosexuals, to have the same age of consent, to have the same legal rights: these things have all occurred since I left home as a young gay person twenty four years ago, and it speaks volumes about how flexible and inclusive society can be with time and and tolerance. But now we must look to our friends in different places, on the global stage. We can not afford indifference when faced with regressive attitudes or laws in other countries. Three significant countries, Russia, India and Poland have recently adopted regressive laws that will significantly impact on the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary LGBT individuals. Whilst they are by no means the only nation states to invoke bigoted laws, they stand out because they are moving backwards, rather than standing still, and becoming less tolerant. Making other people aware, as has been the case recently due to Russia hosting the Winter Olympics, is a good place to start. No one who is trying to simply get on with living their life, who is harming no one else should be exposed to prejudice, bigotry, verbal or physical violence. We may live in an atomised world, but we can draw together and make our voices heard in ways that were impossible only ten years ago.
As a society the UK has come a long way in embracing those in the minority, yet we still have some way to go. But as a gay man I know my life is immeasurably easier than it was twenty years ago, and this tolerance moves forward here all the time. Let’s not just remain silent whilst a bigoted few make life impossible for those living in very different circumstances in other nations.
