Scholar Perspectives on Societal Change: Sexuality, Gender, and Identity

50+ Years A Gay Man: A Personal Life in A Historical Context 

Wesley Gryk (1967, CT)

Introduction

The arrival in mid-March 2021 of an invitation from the U.S. Presidential Scholars Foundation to submit a proposal for an article focusing on ‘societal changes regarding sexuality, gender, and identity experienced by U.S. Presidential Scholars over the past fifty-plus years – and how Scholars have been affected by those changes’ was certainly well-timed. By then, almost exactly a year had passed since the beginning of a series of lockdowns which left plenty of time for personal reflection. 

In my own case, near the start of the pandemic I had rushed back early to London from what was meant to have been a six-week mini sabbatical in the U.S. when President Trump had announced the imminent closing down of travel between the U.S. and the U.K. My plan had been to retire on 30 March 2021 from the law firm which I had founded 25 years before, specializing in U.K. and European immigration law with particular emphasis on cases involving international human rights and domestic civil liberties issues.  From its inception, the firm had included a specific focus on LGBTQ+ rights, including the struggle by foreign same sex partners to remain with their British-based counterparts and the recognition that LGBTQ+ asylum seekers fearing persecution in their home countries because of their sexuality should be afforded political asylum in the U.K.

It soon became clear, however, that it would be churlish on my part to remain in post as senior partner for that extra year, given that the uncertainties in the immediate future might well mean that one or more of the young lawyers at the firm – who could least afford it from the point of view of their personal economic situations or their professional development – might as a result face long term furlough or even permanent layoff (redundancy in British terms). I was fortunate enough to be able to afford to retire, was approaching 72, not an inappropriate age to do so, and had three excellent law partners who, while all 20-30 years younger than myself, had spent a combined total of more than 50 years working with me in building the firm and its ethos. So, I quickly took the decision to retire officially from the firm on my 72nd birthday in May, although I continued to work in finishing up various cases for much of the rest of the year.

It was also of course the case that, to the extent that one was engaging in reflection about one’s life during this period, any such thoughts were tinged with a stronger than usual dose of intimations of one’s mortality, given the vagaries of COVID’s targeting and the uncertainty, particularly for those of us who were older, as to whether a diagnosis might lead to death. It seemed the right sort of time to be evaluating one’s life. In my own case, this led me to publish an article in the professional journal of immigration lawyers in August 2020 ruminating on such things,[1] as well as to my sending innumerable meandering e-mails to long suffering friends and family recounting and sometimes evaluating bits of my past, and often setting out more than such recipients needed or wanted to know about my evolution as a gay man.

The challenge in responding to the U.S. Presidential Scholars Foundation request, it seemed to me, would be to be write something useful from a personal perspective, which would go beyond outlining from an objective point of view the remarkable evolution of the recognition of gay rights, at least in some pockets of the world.  It seemed important to me to demonstrate as well that whether and how such developments impacted on a particular individual depended to a great extent upon accidents of where one was born, the cultural and religious background in which one was raised and, finally, matters of luck and fate as to relationships formed and the opportunities which one is given to participate in moments of change as they arise. That is what I have endeavored to do in this essay.

This intent has been motivated partly by desire to stymy complacency amongst those of us lucky enough to have benefited from these changes and who might therefore think that the problem is solved.  Clearly, it has not been solved in large swathes of the world, such as Africa and the Middle East and even in parts of Europe where, if anything, the situation has worsened in recent years. Furthermore, in our ‘liberal democratic societies’ we have witnessed how swiftly the pendulum can swing in the opposite direction. And, of course, even when this swing backwards hasn’t occurred at an institutional level, LGBTQ+ individuals continue to find themselves at risk from elements of society which do not accept the legal rights and protections provided to such individuals by the law.

 The historical context: Never a better time to be gay?

Certainly, I count myself fortunate that the period since I was a U.S. Presidential Scholar in 1967 to the present has coincided with what surely must be the most remarkable period in recorded history with respect to the institutional acceptance of homosexuality – at least for those of us fortunate enough to live in one of these ‘liberal democratic societies.’  

Indeed, in the U.K., the country which I have called home since moving here in January 1980 to take up a position at the London Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), it was precisely in 1967 that the Sexual Offences Act 1967 legalized ‘homosexual acts’ in England and Wales provided that they were consensual, in private and between two men who were at least 21 years of age (with Scotland and Northern Ireland only following this lead in 1980 and 1982, respectively). The civil legal prohibition on such acts dated back to the Buggery Act 1533 passed during the reign of Henry VIII (such matters previously having been dealt with by ecclesiastical courts); convictions were punishable by death until that penalty for acts of sodomy was abolished in the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, which prescribed a minimum of ten years’ imprisonment. 

Interestingly, lesbian acts were never illegal under British law. A legislative attempt to make them so in 1921 failed to pass either of the Houses of Parliament, strong arguments being put forward that the enactment of such a prohibition would only serve to encourage an interest in lesbianism amongst a female population deemed (at least by the overwhelmingly male Parliamentarians) to be largely ignorant of its existence! It is worth noting as well that the age of consent for sexual activities between heterosexuals – and indeed effectively for lesbians – was 16 at the time that the Sexual Offences Act 1967 came into force, so an inbuilt discriminatory bias existed even in this concession.

Of course, the decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting 21+ year old men, on its own, clearly did not constitute institutional and societal acceptance of gay men and women and members of other sexual minorities, as the immediately following decades were to demonstrate. In the context of the U.K., which overall has a relatively progressive record on the issue, many impediments remained in place to ensure that such individuals felt far from ‘accepted’ in the society in which they lived.

Gay men and women were prohibited from serving in the military. No legal recognition of their relationships was available anywhere under British law. Policing powers were exercised energetically to ensure maximum intimidation. (I can recall vividly how, during the first years after my arrival here in 1980, one was regularly met by a contingent of police on leaving The Coleherne, a pub in Earl’s Court then probably London’s leading gay meeting place, and one was urged to ‘move on’ to avoid arrest for ‘obstruction.’ ‘Pretty policemen’ were regularly stationed at public toilets for entrapment of gay men lured by them into sexual activity. Further, during a period when I was practicing criminal law in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was able to help defendants to prove – by visiting the site and photographing the layout of such ‘loos’ – that police ‘witnesses’ to alleged indecent activity in such locations could not possibly have viewed the activities claimed.)

Matters took a turn distinctly for the worse in two respects before they got better.

The emergence of AIDS.

The first case of AIDS in the United Kingdom was detected in a gay man in December 1980, the first death recorded in 1981 and, during the decade and a half which followed until the advent of effective combination therapy in the mid 1990s, thousands of deaths occurred. The AIDS pandemic, unlike COVID-19, mostly affected specific minorities – gay men, injecting drug users, foreign migrants and persons with hemophilia – and therefore attracted nothing like the universal mobilization to combat COVID-19, particularly given the general disapprobation of many in society to members of at least the first three of those minority groups. This was despite the fact that, at the time, an AIDS diagnosis was seen as ultimately leading to death, but often a lingering death over a period of months or indeed years during which the individual concerned might randomly confront the reality of diverse symptoms including rare forms of pneumonia and disfiguring cancer; other cancers including lymphoma; dementia; blindness; body wastage and an array of opportunistic infection horrors. Amazingly, it was not until 1986 that the Department of Health in the UK launched its public information campaign and screened the following year it’s very dramatic albeit informationally contentless television ‘Tombstone Advert’ followed by distribution of a leaflet to every UK household.[2] The gesture by the late HRH Princess Diana being photographed, ungloved, shaking a patient’s hand while opening a new AIDS ward at Middlesex Hospital on April 9, 1987, probably had at least as substantial an impact on the public consciousness.[3]

Both of these initiatives, it should be noted, occurred more than a half dozen years after the first case detected in the U.K. and in the meantime deaths were multiplying. There prevailed a similar hesitancy to address the same issues arising in the U.S.[4]

This was in such very stark contrast to the overwhelming governmental reaction to the current COVID pandemic. This contrast cannot go unnoticed by surviving members of those groups most affected by the AIDS pandemic whose lives and the lives of those they loved were so horrifically impacted and who felt entirely disenfranchised in terms of governmental failure to react meaningfully for years. Memories of this era have been evoked with searing accuracy for those who lived through it, by the recent U.K. Channel 4 series ‘It’s a Sin’ re-broadcast by HBO Max in the U.S.[5]

Enactment of Section 28 of the Local Government Act.

No doubt capitalizing on the public mood of the time where 75% of the population thought that homosexual activity was ‘always or mostly wrong’,[6] in May 1988, under Mrs. Thatcher’s government, Section 28 of the Local Government Act was enacted prohibiting local government councils and schools from ‘promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.’

Ironically perhaps, it was these two challenges that served as the catalysts to the mobilization of the gay population and those who supported them to take matters into their own hands, realizing that if they themselves did nothing to overcome these obstacles to gain and protect their legal recognition in the society in which they were living and, indeed, their very health and well-being, they could not rely on anyone else to do so for them.

In the case of AIDS, following the death of Terrence Higgins, a 37-year-old gay man who died of AIDS-related illness on 4 July 1982, his former lover and a group of friends met to discuss the total lack of knowledge and action relating to the pandemic in the U.K. They turned to a group of activists who helped them set up an informal organization, the Terry Higgins Trust, which later that year brought together an association of committed volunteers from a variety of backgrounds. By August 1983, the Trust was formally constituted as an organization that went on to achieve charitable status under the name the Terrence Higgins Trust. It became and remains the leading U.K. charity providing information and action on HIV-related issues.

Similarly, the enactment of Section 28 inspired a host of significant reactions. On September 18, 1988, the well-known Shakespearean actor Sir Ian McKellen  (subsequently to achieve more popular fame in Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ films) hosted a gathering of gay men and women who formulated the plan to establish a lobbying group that came to be called Stonewall to counter Section 28. Its establishment was formally announced to the LGBT press on May 24, 1989, the first anniversary of Section 28’s enactment into law, followed by a subsequent announcement to the mainstream press in September 1989. Another group, OutRage!, with an emphasis on activist initiatives rather than lobbying, was founded in May 1990 in direct response to growing violence against sexual minorities. These were long term institutional initiatives that occurred amongst dozens of other actions, including tens of thousands marching in the U.K.’s major cities and activist lesbians abseiling (rappelling) into the House of Lords[7] and invading an on-air BBC news broadcast.[8]

There then came a cascade of positive developments in the following years that would previously have seemed unthinkable:

  • 1991 – Sir Ian McKellen meets Prime Minister John Major, the first official meeting between a prime minister and a gay activist.

  • 1994 – While a House of Commons vote to equalize the age of consent for same-sex relations between gay men to 16 is defeated, the age of consent is reduced to 18.

  • 1997 – The very first recognition of same sex relationships anywhere in British law occurs when, in October, Home Office Minister Mike O’Brien announces a concession whereby the foreign same sex partners of British nationals and others with indefinite leave to remain would, like unmarried heterosexual partners, be given permission to live in the U.K. with their partners upon demonstrating that they had been living in a relationship ‘akin to marriage’ for at least four years.

  • 1998 – Seven gay and bisexual men, ‘the Bolton Seven’, convicted of ‘gross indecency,’ bring a claim to the European Commission on Human Rights (ECHR), arguing that their right to private life had been violated and, following a campaign by Outrage! and Amnesty International, are awarded compensation by the British Government.

  • 2000 – The ban on gay men, lesbians and bisexual individuals serving in the armed forces is lifted. Section 28 is abolished in Scotland but a move to repeal it in England and Wales is unsuccessful.

  • 2001 – The equalization of the age of consent is enacted.

  • 2002 – Equal rights are granted to same-sex couples applying for adoption.

  • 2003 – Section 28 is repealed in England, Wales and Northern Ireland; legislation is enacted making it illegal to discriminate against gay men, lesbians and bisexual individuals in the workplace.

  • 2004 – The Civil Partnership Act 2004 accords same-sex couples entering into civil partnerships the same rights as married straight couples and the Gender Recognition Act 2004 gives trans people full legal recognition in their appropriate gender.

  • 2009 – David Cameron, Leader of the Conservative Party to be elected Prime Minister the following year, apologizes on behalf of his party for the enactment of Section 28 during their time in government.

  • 2014 – The first same-sex marriages take place in England and Wales, pursuant to legislation passed the previous year, and legislation is passed in Scotland to allow same-sex marriages there.

  • 2017 – A posthumous pardon is granted to all gay and bisexual men convicted under sexual offenses laws in England and Wales in the past, which had enabled police to criminalize people for being gay or bisexual.

  • 2018 – A similar pardon is issued by the Scottish government but broader in scope, covering all gay and bisexual men, living or dead, who were convicted of having consensual sex with other men before decriminalization in 1981.

  • 2020 – Same sex marriage becomes legal in Northern Ireland. 

  • 2021 – Plans announced to legislate to ban conversion therapy.

The personal story: participation in change but only following a belated and slow emergence as a gay man

As a gay man, I feel very fortunate that my adult life has coincided with such a sea change in societal attitudes and legal acceptance of being gay, at least in some parts of the world. Indeed, I also count myself lucky that, as a lawyer here in the U.K., I was able to make some contribution to this process.

Work with the Terrence Higgins Trust

My own first involvement in ‘legal gay activism’ was with the Terrence Higgins Trust beginning in the 1980s, and centering upon three areas:

Discrimination by the insurance industry. Initially, I worked on issues relating to discrimination by the insurance industry, which at the time was deeming gay men and bisexuals uninsurable or insurable only at significantly elevated rates, on the basis that they were likely to fall victim to AIDS regardless of their individual lifestyles.[9]

The Living Will Project. Subsequently, I had the good fortune to participate, under the chairmanship of Robin Dormer, still a good friend, in a working group of lawyers from the Terrence Higgins Trust and from the Centre for Medical Law and Ethics at Kings College London. Following the lead of similar organizations in the U.S., the group drafted and in 1992 published a standard living will and advance directive to ensure that the wishes of those who fell ill and their partners would be respected regarding their care and treatment, and would override immediate family members’ wishes where appropriate.[10]

The protection of foreign nationals facing return to countries where combination therapy was unavailable. A few years later, as combination drug therapy became an effective treatment for preventing the death of those affected by HIV, the Terrence Higgins Trust brought about a dramatic legal breakthrough when, in 1996, it lodged an application with the European Commission of Human Rights against the U.K., arguing that a decision taken by the government to deport foreign nationals affected by HIV to home countries where such treatment was unavailable was, inter alia,  contrary to Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights which provides that ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’. The Commission in turn referred the case to the European Court of Human Rights. In a decision dated May 2, 1997 the Court upheld the complaint unanimously, holding that ‘the implementation of the decision to remove the applicant to St Kitts [a country where it had been demonstrated that he could not continue the lifesaving treatment he had commenced in the U.K.] would violate Article 3 of the Convention’[11]. While I can’t take any personal credit for this ground-breaking initiative, my firm went on to work with the Trust to use this decision to prevent the return of dozens of individuals to countries where it could be demonstrated that lifesaving treatment would not be available.

Work with Rainbow Migration

Separately, through the work of an organization that I helped to found in 1993 (now ‘Rainbow Migration’ but initially ‘Stonewall Immigration Group’ and subsequently ‘United Kingdom Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group’)[12], I became involved in the work leading to the first recognition of same sex couples in British law, which occurred in the context of immigration law in October 1997, when foreign partners in same sex relationships won the right to apply to remain in the U.K. based on their relationships with British or permanent resident partners. (This was some 16 years before the same result was achieved in the U.S.) Information about this work has been written up by myself and others[13]. Once that mission was achieved, the group went on to concentrate on guaranteeing the rights of refugees fleeing persecution on the basis of their sexuality, work in which my firm continues to be active.

The slow ‘coming out’ process which preceded activism

In considering how best to frame this essay, however, it seemed to me that I could perhaps make a more constructive contribution - not by writing at length academically about such positive developments or my personal involvement in bringing about change - but rather by focusing on the painfully slow process of my own personal acknowledgement that I was a gay man, which in turn allowed me to participate in such activism. This, it seemed to me, would be worthwhile for at least two strong reasons:

Firstly, I am sure that now, for many young LGBTQ+ individuals, the relative tolerance of today’s society, at least in some places, seems normal and a ‘given.’ That definitely wasn’t the case when my generation was coming of age and I think it would be a mistake to think that things couldn’t revert back under the wrong set of circumstances (Poland and Hungary today). Certainly, there remain large chunks of the world where there have been no such positive developments (much of Africa and the Middle East). I – rather paternalistically – think that the ‘youngsters’ in our community need to be reminded of this from time to time and alerted to guard against backsliding on the home front and to extend what support they can to their oppressed peers elsewhere.

Secondly, notwithstanding the progress in the contemporary relatively liberal societies some of us are fortunate to live in, I am convinced – and indeed from my work, I know – that there remain substantial swathes of LGBTQ+ young people in those societies who do not have the self-assurance to emerge as fully formed ‘out’ individuals. This may be because of the cultural or religious or family environment in which they have been raised or lack of self-confidence or other issues. I would hope that narratives written by individuals who have had similar impediments to achieving self-fulfillment, and successfully overcame them, can be helpful.

It seems useful for such purposes to tell the tale of a U.S. Presidential Scholar, presumably someone therefore with a modicum of smarts, who for a variety of reasons, largely cultural and religious, which I will touch upon below, came late to the game of acknowledging his own sexuality.

In my own case, I only had my first gay sexual experience in 1974 at the ripe age of 25, when I (very willingly) was seduced by a housemate in the New York brownstone we were house-sitting for a Columbia professor, while doing summer jobs in New York City before return to law school and business school respectively. Something starting as a pillow fight became another thing entirely and suddenly I understood what all of those cravings which had been part of me since childhood were all about.  Notwithstanding my wishes to the contrary, it proved to be only a summer romance.

My first longish relationship of three-four years followed, starting when I lived in New York City again from 1975 to 1978, working first as clerk to the Honorable Constance Baker Motley, the first black woman appointed to be a federal judge, and next at what was then the city’s largest corporate law firm. The relationship was with a European who was very much not ‘out’ (and neither was I). His suggestion was that, if we were ever to live together, it would be in two apartments in adjoining buildings with a secret passage connecting us. We are still friends and sadly he is still not ‘out.’ When I was invited to join him and two of his woman friends on holiday several years ago, he told me that he had mentioned to his friends that I was gay and ‘they didn’t mind.’ He subsequently had no qualms, however, sharing with me the Grindr exchanges he was having with a shepherd in a neighboring village while his two woman friends were left to entertain themselves!

My time in New York City was followed by two years in Hong Kong helping a partner from the law firm to establish a branch there to take advantage of overtures being made by the People’s Republic of China to establish greater business links with the West. Still a colony of the U.K. at the time, Hong Kong still retained the anti-sodomy legislation put in place by the British in 1865, section 377 of the then applicable Penal Code proscribing ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man…’ Too close to home for comfort, the owner of the disco where my boss’s daughter DJ’d was sentenced to prison for such an offence. Some travels with the European lover and a very occasional discreet liaison had to suffice, and it gave me some limited understanding of the threatening conditions under which vast numbers of gay men need to live their entire lives in some parts of the world today.

My real ‘coming out’ finally occurred at age 30 when I moved to London in 1980 and had the good fortune to meet my partner of the next 21-22 years, Peter Chadwick, who was of a very different ilk from partner number one. He and his ex-partner Andrew Hodges, a mathematician but at the time writing what was to become the definitive biography of the then mostly unknown Alan Turing[14], had been and remained active in gay politics and continued to live together for the first few years of our relationship, I being fortunate to be a part time member of their household. Quite literally, on our second ‘date’, Peter gave me homework to read, prior to date number three, the pamphlet ‘With Downcast Gays,’ written by Andrew and a colleague in 1974.[15] Its central premise was that much of gay oppression sprang from a kind of self-loathing that the society around us nurtured in us. Reading this was probably the key turning point in my own self-perception, the concept of ‘gay pride’ suddenly becoming concrete for me and informing who I went on to become personally and professionally. It no doubt made it easier for me that I was doing this in a country other than that in which I had been raised, and no longer faced the cultural, religious, and societal restraints imposed on me when growing up and which I accepted. 

From that time onwards, I was there on every Gay Pride March and proud to contribute to the work of organizations such as the Terrence Higgins Trust, Stonewall, and indeed, to have been one of the founding members in 1993 of Rainbow Migration.

Interestingly, although my second job in Britain (following my stint at the UNHCR and before requalifying as a lawyer in the U.K.) was at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International where I served as Deputy Head of the Research Department, during the years when I was employed there (1981-1986), that organization did not include LGBTQ+ rights in its mandate. It was only in 1991[16] that Amnesty agreed to recognize individuals imprisoned for consensual sexual relations between two adults as Prisoners of Conscience, which gives some indication of just how late even stalwarts of the human rights world were to adopt LGBTQ+ rights as human rights. 

Some reflections on the delay in ‘coming out’

So why such a delayed ‘coming out’ process?

The starting point is that, from a young age, there was certainly self-recognition that I was ‘different.’ My best friend was ‘Terry next door,’ a girl a couple of years my junior. I had no real interest or facility in athletic activities but enjoyed learning the piano and drawing. I recognized that I was drawn to looking at the lads fighting in the ‘hustle tussles’ featured occasionally in my Boys’ Life scouting magazine but never thought for a moment about getting involved in playground frays (and was lucky enough to avoid any real bullying, shy and quiet lad that I was). The long-term failure to recognize all this for what it was derived partly through an innocence laughable by today’s standards, and no doubt partly from willful avoidance of a difficult personal issue.

One must then factor in twelve years of very strict Catholic education by the nuns. It was excellent in many ways. I still believe that having to diagram all those sentences in English class has made me a better writer (although you, reader, must be the judge of that). Retrospectively, I have nothing but admiration at how, throughout my eight years of primary education, the good Sisters of Mercy were able to maintain both discipline and high educational standards in classrooms that never included fewer than 48 pupils of a wider spectrum of ability than one would usually find in a classroom today. But this education was totally devoid of any instruction relating to sex or sexuality. (This meant, I am afraid, that when I was sent by my secondary school to spend a summer at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. to study journalism as prospective editor-in-chief of the school paper, I was ill-prepared when asked to contribute to a textbook on sexual morality for Catholic adolescents. In retrospect, I fear that I came down rather hard on what my heterosexual counterparts shouldn’t be doing with one another, my strictures no doubt being all the harsher as a result of my having no natural inclination to break the rules I was setting! Other brands of sexuality, so far as I can recall, didn’t earn a mention in said moral guidebook.)

Coupled with such educational deficiencies was the fact that I was the only child of parents who were loving and supportive, but strictly Catholic, and themselves the children of no doubt even more strictly Catholic Polish immigrants, neither generation feeling comfortable discussing such issues.

The story most illustrative of this point involves the one instance where my parents had no choice but to deal with matters sexual. Having just come back from my first two week stay away from home at Boy Scout summer camp at the age of 11 or 12, I was out for a car ride with them and, genuinely puzzled, sweet naive lad that I was, asked them what the boys in the top bunks could have been doing when they were having a competition to do ‘it’ the fastest, with figures like 45 seconds being mentioned. I posed the question since I had been too timid to get up and take a look or ask questions at the time. After an embarrassed pause, they proceeded to explain that, in fact, babies weren’t just placed in a woman’s tummy by God when a couple loved one another and married, as I had previously been told by them, but that there was a physical element of connection involved in the process which they sketchily described. Once home, my dad – probably rather proud that he had prepared for this occasion – produced a little leaflet that he had been saving up for just this moment. It explained that ‘wet dreams’ were not a sin of any kind, but that what those boys in the top bunks had been willfully doing was most definitely a mortal sin. (As an aside, I might add that it was only during my first year as an undergraduate at Harvard, at a loose end one afternoon in my room at Weld Hall, that I figured out the mechanics of just how the adolescent lads in the upper bunks managed to achieve such quick results – yet another example of how an Ivy League education can bring unexpected enlightenment, and yet another example that Presidential Scholars are not always as adroitly clever as one might expect them to be!)

During most of the period of my adolescence until I became ‘a fallen-away Catholic’ while at university, for a variety of reasons not really directly connected to matters relating to sexuality, I was certainly a victim of that legendary Catholic guilt. It centered, however, much less than one would imagine on the fact that I recognized that I was ‘different’, which somehow I thought would pass away as a phase or that I could diminish through sheer will power. Instead, it focused upon the sinful damnation attached to what those lads in the top bunks had been up to and the fact that, even if I managed to wash away any previous mortal sins at a Saturday afternoon confession, if I then repeated the act before receiving the Eucharist at the following day’s Mass, the mortal sin of taking communion while ‘out of the state of grace’ would constitute a yet more grievous sinful infraction. Quite a heavy load of guilt to pile onto an adolescent and, looking back, this genuinely was the issue which weighed most heavily on my mind during this period.

A final key point to address must be the importance of role models and the individuals one meets during the course of forming one’s self-identity. Until that revelatory bout of wrestling with pillows in the professor’s borrowed brownstone on New York’s Upper West Side, I had never really engaged with another gay man on a meaningful level. And neither in that relationship nor in the more substantial relationship with the European who hypothesized about having apartments  in adjoining buildings with a secret passage tunnel, was I encouraged to engage with the idea that being an ‘out’ gay man was a real possibility. This concept was put further on hold by a stint of nearly two years in Hong Kong, where to entertain the idea was unthinkable given the very real possibility of imprisonment.

In my own case, it was a matter of great fortuitousness that, within months of arriving in the U.K., I found myself in the household of Peter and Andrew, both of whom were veterans of the radical gay movement in the United Kingdom initiated by the 1971 Gay Liberation Front Manifesto which stated: ‘Homosexuals, who have been oppressed by physical violence and ideological and psychological attacks at every level of social interaction, are at last becoming angry.’[17] I would like to think that, without their tutelage – most particularly the ‘homework’ set for me by Peter at the end of date number two – I would have, in the fertile environment of the U.K. at the time, sooner or later developed into a politicized and activist gay man, but I cannot be certain.

It was with some envy that, in the third serious long-term relationship in my life, with Oliver Davis, I was able to observe firsthand during the decade or so we were together at the beginning of this century something of what it means to be a young ‘modern gay man’ in the U.K. He was ‘out’ to his parents in his mid-teens and tentatively seeking sexual adventure in the leafy hilly cruising ground near his home. While not officially ‘out’ at secondary school, he was brave enough to invite a speaker from Outrage! to address his fellow students in his last year there and in due course never felt the need to conceal his sexuality during his university studies or during his professional career as a university professor. He has been able to pursue intellectual research directly related to sexuality. The life he has been able to lead is to some extent a product of the work of the generations before him[18].

All that being said, I would only reiterate that, notwithstanding any such achievements and the greatly improved lives which they have afforded many gay men in our ‘liberal democracies,’ it is likely that the vast majority of gay men in the world have yet to reap such benefits. These include those living in situations where gay rights are not recognized or, indeed, where there is outright persecution of those endeavoring to exercise such rights. They also include, however, those living in societies where the rights are theoretically available but where those who might otherwise be taking advantage of them find themselves constrained by culture, religion, or membership in social circles that cause them to remain far from having achieved the full human existence to which they should be entitled.  

…Finally, of course, we must remain steadfast in seeking to retain those rights which we have achieved. In the very week in which I completed the first draft of this essay, The Guardian reported that, since 2015, hate crimes related to sexual orientation and gender identity have increased year on year in the U.K.[19].

It also happened to be the same month in which the newly configurated U.S. Supreme Court failed to intervene to challenge the constitutionality of a piece of Texas state legislation which, effectively, seeks to deprive women in Texas of the rights over their own bodies accorded to them by the decision in Roe v Wade nearly half a century ago[20]

And in the intervening months since that first draft of this essay was completed, a document purported to be a first draft of the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade has been circulated.[21]

Chillingly, a key argument put forward at page 5 in that draft decision as to why that case should be overruled is that ‘The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision….’ and furthermore, while the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the  Constitution ‘has been invoked to protect some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution…any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty”’.

It does not take an enormous stretch of the imagination to envisage similar reasoning being put forward in a future Supreme Court consideration of whether LGBTQ+ rights should be constitutionally protected at the Federal level or rather are excluded from such inclusion and left to the states because whatever Federal rights exist in the U.S. have been firmly set in aspic according to the societal and scientific norms that informed the thinking of the Founding Fathers of the Nation some two and a half centuries ago.

Clearly, this is not a time for complacency.

___________________________________________________________

[1] https://ilpa.org.uk/46400-2/

[2] https://youtu.be/iroty5zwOVw. My former partner, Oliver Davis, on reading a preliminary draft of this essay, recalled his reaction to his first viewing: “I still remember seeing this age 9 on the sofa in Croydon and asking Ma and Pa what it was all about. It was interesting to hear Norman Fowler waxing lyrical on Radio 4 recently about his great achievement as Health Secretary in getting the thing aired at all, in the teeth of Mrs. T’s disapproval.”

[3] https://www.insider.com/photo-princess-diana-shaking-hand-aids-patient-1987-2017-8. Princess Diana achieved a sort of sainted status amongst many gay men in the U.K. in the years following, not for this single important gesture but because of frequently circulated reports that such visits were by no means one-off publicity events for her. She was reported to continue friendships she formed with AIDS patients during such official visits and to follow them up with repeated no publicity private visits to them, often in the evening, in hospitals and hospices. Whatever faults The British Establishment might ascribe to her, she remains much loved by many in our community. And we would all like to think that the story of her spending an afternoon watching The Golden Girls with Freddie Mercury and chums, followed by a visit in male drag disguise to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern,  a historic South London gay pub, is fact rather than urban myth. A stone’s throw from where I live, I like to say that the Tavern was the site of my misspent middle age, my having frequented it most Sunday afternoons through my 50s and early 60s. https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/a34739514/diana-freddie-mercury-the-crown/

[4] This recent article records a similar delay and reluctance to address the AIDS issue by the Reagan White House. President Reagan first publicly uttered the word ‘AIDS’ in response to a reporter’s question at a press conference in September 1985 but only delivered a speech addressing the issue in spring 1987, by which time 20,849 Americans had been recorded as dying of the disease. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/04/full-story-nancy-reagan-and-aids-crisis/618552/

[5] https://youtu.be/hnR5DxP2e2g Virtually all of the scenarios depicted in the series ring true for anyone who survived that period: closeted men falling ill and effectively choosing to die quickly rather than to be ‘outed’ by the disease; healthy individuals losing their jobs just because they were members of potentially affected groups; difficult access (at least in the U.K.) to definitive information about the spread of the virus; parents rejecting their children fallen ill or taking control of their lives in terms of isolating them from those closest to them; friends and lovers of the deceased prevented from attending their funerals; isolation and denial of compassionate care from care workers uninformed about the limited modes of transmission of the virus; etc. I recall being hospitalized for a minor surgical procedure in the mid-1980s and, when visited by my then partner, informed that there was a notice on my hospital door informing anyone considering entry ‘Danger – Risk of AIDS’ placed there on the sole basis that I had mentioned to the admitting team that I was a gay man. One would like to think that things have moved on in terms of public reaction to such issues and, indeed, this segment of Gogglebox, a Channel 4 audience reaction show, seems heartening in that respect: https://www.facebook.com/Channel4/videos/243398524162516/

[6] https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/latest-report/british-social-attitudes-30/personal-relationships/homosexuality.aspx

[7] https://youtu.be/LoTtl8hNBNk

[8] https://youtu.be/DGNrg-RYGIc

[9] Gryk, Wesley, ‘Wanted: a new insurance policy on AIDS’, The Times [London], November 24, 1987, page 14; see https://bit.ly/3CaxKl9. Such discrimination was particularly detrimental in the U.K. context because one of the most popular forms of mortgage in the U.K. at the time was a so-called ‘endowment mortgage’ that involved repayment of interest only on the amount borrowed plus a substantial regular premium towards a life insurance policy which, if deemed valid on the holder’s death, would pay off the mortgage so that beneficiaries of the deceased would inherit the property covered mortgage free. Aside from other deficiencies subsequently uncovered with respect to such mortgages, these simply were not appropriate in many cases for gay men who were at the time less likely to have dependents needing the security of such insurance coverage and for whom a ‘straight repayment mortgage’ paying off both principal and interest over a period of years made more sense. Yet all too often they were persuaded by brokers (who received a commission upon sale of the underlying insurance policy) to purchase such endowment policies at rates grossly inflated because of their sexuality alone.  (Ironically – and in retrospect almost amusingly – bisexuals during this period were more likely to be deemed totally uninsurable because they were, by definition so to speak, ‘promiscuous’!)

[10] At least some of the working papers of the Living Will Project should be preserved in the Kings College London Archives. https://kingscollections.org/catalogues/kclca/collection/m/10ki4506/1ki45061, the chairman of the Project having handed over all of his working papers to the Terrence Higgins Trust.  This was in fact the first such widely distributed document in the U.K. and for many years appeared in U.K. standard form books as the definitive such document. Interestingly, when the document was first introduced and publicized by the Terrence Higgins Trust, demand for copies of it from elderly individuals unaffected by AIDS but having similar concerns about their eventual treatment in the event of their becoming unable to express their desires frequently seemed to outstrip demand from those directly affected by HIV and AIDS.

[11] http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-58035

[12] https://www.rainbowmigration.org.uk, formerly the ‘Stonewall Immigration Group’ and the ‘UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group’ (UKLGIG).

[13] See https://www.gryklaw.com/https-www-gryklaw-com-lgbt-history-month-coming-of-age-same-sex-relationship-immigration-rights/; https://www.freemovement.org.uk/wesley-gryk-retires/; https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/people/ minority-report/5069373.article

[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing:_The_Enigma

[15] https://www.outgay.co.uk/intro.html

[16] https://apnews.com/article/23f8584e65ecaf6e84962d4942b1ecf8

[17] https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/pwh/glf-london.asp

[18] I am happy to report that Oliver, having read the first draft of this essay, has confirmed that he is prepared to give some credit to his antecedents for the life as a gay man which he has been able to lead.

[19] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/aug/29/spate-of-attacks-across-uk-sparks-fear-among-lgbtq-community.

[20] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/02/us-supreme-court-refuses-to-block-radical-texas-abortion-law.

[21] https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000180-874f-dd36-a38c-c74f98520000