Ooooo you are awful
When I gaze back into my dim and distant past, I see a great deal to be embarrassed of. There were the terrible mullets and unflattering fashions (first the baggy loons and then the over-tight drainpipes), the bands I followed, the cherry-brandy I consumed, the girls I didn’t have the nerve to ask out and the lost causes I championed as opposed to the just-causes I didn’t. But what rankles most is the realisation that the younger me was a raging homophobe.
Growing-up in an archetypal northern mill town in the 70s, where Danny La Rue, Liberace, John Inman and Dick Emery provided much of what passed as entertainment, it was accepted wisdom that gays and lesbians were perverts and weirdos. My pals and I, seemingly along with the rest of our society, constantly taunted each other with easy homophobic insults and slights, and I have to admit to carrying this trait on way too long into my ‘adult’ life. And then, sometime later the penny finally dropped, and I realised that we’re all not a million miles away from one-another, with similar and, thankfully, dissimilar tastes in love, life and everything in between that makes it all a bit of a hoot.
To my mind, people all over this country have undergone a similar awakening in recent years. Initially via civil partnership and latterly with legalised gay-marriage, our understanding and acceptance of different lifestyles and cultural norms continues apace. As millions of us now realise, it’s difficult to consciously, or sub-consciously, support discrimination of any sort when you appreciate they’re not some frightening Other but your friends, family, associates, peers and co-workers. And long may this continue.
