On this day 30 years ago I attended my first ever Pride…

Straight cis people will never fully understand the previously-unknown sense of belonging I felt as an 18-year-old newly-out gay man, realising I was surrounded by thousands of kindred queers.

I started secondary school in 1986 and went to university in 1993. In early 1994, I came out at university. I had gone to study UEA in Norwich with a very vague sense that I might not be straight — I had had a girlfriend in fifth and sixth form but was aware enough of my queerness that I didn’t highlight the LGBT Society in the students’ union prospectus in case my mam saw it. Coincidentally, I had chosen one of the queerest universities in the country at the time. But, while I didn’t have the confidence (or self-awareness?) to join the LGBT Soc as a fresher, I had come out — to myself and my friends — in time to join them with the coach down to London for my first Pride.

This photo is UEA’s LGBT Soc at 1994 Pride; unless I’m mistaken I’m the guy in the white shirt almost visible between Phil Clegg (the guy on the right with the orange whistle cord) and Gregg (in sunglasses) 😅

I genuinely cannot explain, to someone who has not experienced it, the sense of welcoming community that I felt, on the march and in Brockwell Park. I had a pretty good childhood on the whole and my parents were accepting and supportive when I came out. And as I already mentioned, UEA had a healthy LGBT Society. But British society 30 years ago was far less accepting of queerness than we are now and representation in popular culture was very rare. British TV’s first m/m kiss (on the cheek) was in Brookside in 1987 (Stifyn Parry and Mark Burgess); the first mouth-to-mouth kiss between men was in 1989 (between Michael Cashman and Nicholas Donovan) and was so controversial that some MPs called for EastEnders to be taken off-air! Before that, queer characters were generally camp caricatures (such as [John Inman(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Inman)]'s character Mr Humphries in Are You Being Served?) and often the butt of jokes, as well as being the target of tabloid slurs, often in front-lead headlines, and horrifically insensitive coverage of the Early AIDS Crisis.

In 1987, the British Social Attitudes Survey reported that 75% of people felt homosexual activity was “always or mostly wrong” — up from 60-some percent 5 years earlier — compared with 11% saying “not wrong at all”; October that year saw Margaret Thatcher decry to the Tory party conference that “children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay”; Section 28 arrived the following year.

The sex that I was having at the time, at age 18, could have had me gaoled, because the m/m age of consent was still 21 until that November. I could also have been gaoled because sex between men had to be “in private” — and university residences and shared student digs didn’t count as “private”. My relationship with Scott, who I met that September became legal when the age of consent crossed over us, but only once he had his own flat the following year.

I’d had no real safer-sex information, because Section 28 meant teachers were often afraid even to mention homosexuality in British schools. I’d been taught how to put a condom on a cucumber (no, really) but I only knew what lube was from having shagged an out grad-student at uni.

And this was before the protease revolution, so an HIV diagnosis was, for most people, still a death sentence. (And one that you waited a terrifying week or two to find out about, no rapid-testing in nightclubs or by post back then.) But in 1996, a drug trial showed that combination therapy could allowing people living with HIV and AIDS to live a normal life — and we have since discovered that antiretroviral therapy can lead to a normal life expectancy and means people cannot pass on the virus. Indeed it’s possible to take a pill a day, known as PrEP, to protect yourself against acquiring HIV even through unprotected sex — though only after a fight to get the NHS to offer it. It’s a very different world now from when we had tombstones on TV and through our doors, with amazing work being done by organisations like Dean Street Express.

It would be a full decade before I had legal protection against a British hotel denying me a room just because I’m gay. (Something Scott and I were very conscious of when we went somewhere with his parents one weekend.) And even that only because of backbench amendments to the Equality Act 2006 from Endemol Shine founder Waheed Ali and Brighton MP Des Turner — note that Tony Blair’s govt hadn’t included provisions against homophobic discrimination in the original draft of their first Equality Act, though they did introduce regulations in 2003 meaning I couldn’t be fired just for being queer.

It was over a decade before I could have “civil partnered” with a boyfriend — another decade before the state would call it “marriage” in name too. It’s only since 2004 that trans people can apply for documents in their lived gender — and that only after the UK was successfully sued in the European Court of Human Rights.

And, while some of the world has moved on enough that I was planning a queer film night for work colleagues when I first wrote this as a thread on Twitter, it’s still pretty shitty for a lot of people. Despite the Yogyakarta Principles being over a decade old now, 6 countries still execute people for consensual same-sex acts; another 6 have it as a judicial option. All the yellows, oranges and reds in this image from the Wikipedia article LGBT rights by country or territory are countries where it is illegal to be queer; the reds could execute me for it:

LGBTQ+ people in Russia are subject to pogroms and democide. In Poland and Hungary — EU member states — state-sanctioned homophobia is rife (thankfully reducing since the cryptofascist Law and Justice party lost power). Less than a decade ago, the countries in red in this image from the article LGBT rights at the United Nations supported a declaration against LGBTQ+ human rights.

And those of us in the Global North don’t get to rest on our laurels.

1 in 2 Black queer men in the USA will become HIV+ at some point in their lifetimes. US trans women of colour are still being murdered and mutilated — at least 2 a month in 2019. In the US, the Human Rights Campaign are aware of at least 17 trans and GNC people murdered so far this year, almost all of whom were people of colour.

And things are getting worse again and not just in the US — the UK has become so hostile to trans people over the last few years that the NHS effectively no longer provides gender-affirming healthcare to anyone who doesn’t already receive it, our entire media landscape amplifies transphobia, our outgoing government has commissioned a review of gender-affirming care that has been criticised by healthcare organisations around the world, Westminster used its first ever veto of devolved legislation to block Scottish gender reforms that reflect an international norm. And hate crimes against trans people have increased 186% in the last 5 years. (Though, given I’m “politically restricted”, I sha’n’t call out any politicians right now.)

We’ve come a long way since I was a teenager being overwhelmed by the sense of kinship and support I felt marching on Parliament and partying in Brockwell Park, seeing for the first time in my life not just a handful of queer people in one place but tens of thousands of us.

We’ve come a long way but — for so many of our queer brothers, sisters and kindred of other genders and none, especially our queer siblings of colour — we’ve got a fucking long way still to go.

Even so, Happy Pride Month everyone. And don’t forget that nobody wants cis kids to become trans; we just want trans kids to become adults.