Change is here already

(no matter how much the haters and the bigots try to deny or reverse it)

Photo by Dewang Gupta on Unsplash

A while ago someone I know a little wrote to me and said:

“I'm wondering if you would be interested in helping out a teacher friend of mine at Speyside High school in Aberlour. She is doing a project with her LGBT School group (32 lgbt and allies in s1-s3!!) their project is about lgbt safety in the community. A group of us local lgbt grown-up's will meet up with the kids to answer their questions and the kids will make a presentation and present it to our local MP/MSP Douglas Ross!! We'll be meeting them on Wed 25th of May. The kids will be making up a list of questions on the Monday and I'm wondering, if you have any time over that week, if I can send you a list of the questions, would you be able to answer and send them back to me?”

So there’s 32 members of an LGBT School group in a secondary school in Scotland. And gathering information to put into a presentation for their local member of parliament, who happens to be the leader of the Scottish conservative party.

How wonderful is that?

The mutual support. The self confidence… just wonderful.

And when I look back to my time at secondary school, to the crushing shame and loneliness, it seems miraculous.

So I said yes. And forgot all about it.

And then last night the questions came…

1.     Have you been bullied/not accepted because of your sexuality etc?

2.     How did you find out you were a part of the LGBTQ+ community?

3.     Were your friends and family supportive of you when you came out?

4.     What difficulties did you have to face growing up being part of the LGBTQ+ community?

5.     What advice would you give to young people who are part of the LGBTQ+ community who are afraid to come out?

6.     What does identifying differently change about how people interact with you and how accessible things are?

7.     How much more difficult was it to be openly LGBTQ+ back then compared to now?

8.     What was it like coming out?

9.     Do you feel unsafe in certain areas?

10.  Do you feel safe in certain areas?

Good questions. And they blew my mind.

Obviously the answer to question 1 has to be “yes”. But it implies the answer could be “no”. And how amazing is that?

And then question 2 is not about feeling miserable and ashamed because you knew you were gay or trans or whatever. But about asking how it felt to be part of a community.

That is such an amazing new angle on it all.

I’m only 72, but so much has changed in my lifetime. So fundamentally.

It’s as if I spent my childhood and schooldays on a different planet.

How to explain that it wasn’t a matter of knowing I was part of an LGBT community because when I was a school student there was no LGBT community to be part of.

How to explain what it felt like to fancy a man when to be in a sexual relationship with that man was against the law.

How to explain that even supposing I’d dared do such a thing for me to be out in public dressed as a woman was also against the law.

That even when gay men were able to risk becoming visible and form their community, there was no community for me as a trans person.

That when we eventually did begin to meet each other it was in private and so many of us led double lives.

How to explain that “coming out’ didn’t even exist as a concept back then when it was a question of “trying hard not to be found out”.

How to explain all this?

How to communicate what it felt like?

It was such a different world. And so deeply mired in self oppression and self hatred.

And how incomprehensible and bizarre it is that there should be feminists allying themselves with anti-abortionists to overturn trans rights - in the name of feminism! - and plunge young people back into that state of lonely misery.

I was so lucky to escape, somehow. I had absolutely no role models when I was these school students age and no realistic prospect of ever being able to do anything but stay in the closet for the rest of my life.

So how wonderful it is that for all the difficulties and for all the suffering they still have to go through, things are still so much better for this generation of school students.

And have got better, I think, somehow, because my generation in spite of everything were not defeated. Because we persisted in coming out and discovering our pride.

I know it would have helped me so much to have had someone like me around as a role model when I was young. And that’s why it makes me happy to try to answer these young people’s excellent (and o so impossible to answer!) questions.

Because these school students give me so much, too. Knowing they exist reminds me so strongly that things can get better and we can all do something to make them better, too.

However futile and exhausting it all sometimes feels.

And I go back, once again, to dear don Pedro Calderon in “Life Is A Dream”:

“The good you do is never lost….”