OUTcast S1, Ep 6 • 01 Nov 2021 • 25:44

[00:00]

Rosie: Welcome to OUTcast, the podcast where we catch up with some of the most engaging, courageous and inspiring LGBTQ+ people from all over the world.

We ask our lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer guests where their coming out journeys began, what they’ve gone through along the way – the joy and the pain, but we promise there will be more joy – and what gives them hope.

I’ll be interviewing people from all walks of life, from hardworking queer people behind the scenes, to more familiar faces you might have never known even had the coming out stories they’re about to share.

You can follow us on social media @OUTcastLGBT and you can find us online at outcastpod.com. 

[01:00]

Rosie: Welcome to another episode of OUTcast. It’s Episode 6, I can hardly believe it. I remember just this summer when OUTcast was just a kind of dream in my mind; an imagination, so it’s incredible to be bringing you the sixth episode. 

And for this episode we have a very inspiring guest – a leader from the British military. 

[01:22]

Wing Commander Mark Abrahams OBE is a strategic engagement and international relations specialist at the UK’s Ministry of Defence.

He is responsible for formulating and advising on British Royal Airforce engagement strategy, policy and defence for the Americas, Canada, and the Asia-Pacific. 

He was formerly the president and chair of the RAF LGBT+ Freedom Network, which works to ensure that the LGBTQ+ community in the Royal Air Force is supported, valued and empowered. 

The context for this is that homosexuality was actually banned in the military until 2000. Mark is married and has a fascinating story of being gay and working his way up the ranks of the British military over a time when homosexuality went from being banned, to being treated with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and finally to being celebrated today.

[02:18]

A small disclaimer for Mark’s interview as well. We had some technology issues between the two of us and I spoke to Mark via speakerphone, so you’ll notice that the quality is slightly lower than in other episodes of this podcast. The conversation is no less enlightening and fascinating, so do bear with us.

Also, in a rather fitting turn of events, there seemed to be little light planes flying over where I’m recording in my little home studio, so whilst I was speaking to an esteemed member of the RAF, there were planes flying over.

[02:53]

Rosie: Mark, welcome to OUTcast.

[02:56]

Mark: Thank you, first and foremost, Rosie, for having me. I’m delighted to be able to take part in the podcast. 

[03:02]

Rosie: Your background is as a leader in the British military, and the Ministry of Defence, and you’re gay and you’re married. Let’s take you back – where does your coming out journey begin?

[03:13]

Mark: I guess, a very long time ago in many ways. I recognised that I always thought that I was probably slightly different, and I may potentially have been gay, from a very young age to be honest with you. But, you know, when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, the world was a very different place. 

And the reason I pushed all these thoughts away from me is because I had always wanted to join the Air Force. My uncle had been in the Air Force in the Second World War and after the war, and always encouraged me to do it as a good career choice.

I was in the Air Cadets as a youngster as well, so I’m a sort of product of the Air Cadet system joining the Air Force afterwards. 

[03:52]

Rosie: Am I right in thinking homosexuality was actually banned in the UK military until relatively recently, about January 2000?

[04:00]

Mark: During the 80s and 90s, being gay and being in the Air Force was illegal. It just wasn’t a compatible choice, so given that, first and foremost, I wanted to join the Air Force, I guess I was driven further and further into the closet into denying exactly who I was and what I was. 

Whilst I was successful in achieving my career aims, I was less successful in, I guess, realising who I was and what I was, because I put my opportunity to join the Air Force first and foremost. 

So I guess that’s where my journey really started. But I never realised the full me, if you like, until much later in life.

[04:47]

Rosie: You were focusing so much on your career you didn’t necessarily even think about your personal life, and go down that road really. So, I’m guessing you weren’t exploring it as a teenager or a young person at all to speak of?

[04:59]

Mark: I did experiment a little bit, very very rarely, whilst I was a teenager as well, which I guess further fuelled the idea that I was potentially gay as well. But I put that very much down to just one-offs, and part of life’s rich tapestry and experimentation.

And because I wanted to join the Air Force, I never saw that as being a choice for me, if you like: that I could accept who I was if I was going to accept being gay. I couldn’t be gay and be in the Air Force, and first and foremost I wanted to join the Air Force.

Rosie: Mm hmm.

[05:40]

Mark: Society was very different then as I say, in terms of it wasn’t as accepting, certainly in the 80s during the prime of the Thatcher years, it wasn’t a place where you would have necessarily have wanted to be gay.

[05:55]

I grew up in quite a, dare I say it, homophobic household, in terms of my parents being very traditional. So it wasn’t a very conducive environment at home either. So, it wasn’t something that I could broach with my parents at that stage either.

[06:13]

Rosie: That makes sense. It sounds like it was a very difficult environment to be gay in. For context, for listeners of the podcast who might not have as much experience with the military, and the military apprpach to being gay, to being homosexual, or LGBTQ+ – what was the context once you were starting your military career?

[06:36]

Mark: There were stories all through the 80s and 90s of people being hounded out of the military, effectively, I mean it was a very corrosive atmosphere in the 80s and 90s. Things started to change with the change of government in the late 1990s. Clearly, they did a huge amount in terms of changing the public perception of the LGBTQ+ community, and they put the appropriate legislation in place as well.

And you’re right. The legislation prior to the 12th January 2000 was that, ultimately, you would have been discharged with dishonour, you would have lost all your pension rights, any financial remuneration that you would have left with having done a full service for, anything like that. It was just absolutely atrocious.

[07:18]

Attitudes started to change in the 90s as societal attitudes started to change. But it was still incompatible until there was a challenge through the European Court, and the legislation was changed in January 2000 and the LGBTQ people were able to serve with impunity in the British military. 

[07:38]

Rosie: Am I right in thinking there was a “don’t ask, don’t tell” kind of feeling after that?

[07:43]

Mark: There was sort of, I guess. If you take my circumstances, yes the rules changed in January 2000, but you can change the rules of an organisation overnight, but you don’t change the culture. 

[08:00]

And whilst it was great for me knowing that because I’d sensed I was beginning to challenge who I was and what I was even at that stage, when the legislation changed I knew that I was safe and I could no longer be discharged from the military. 

So I could potentially begin that journey proper in terms of my coming out and being who I was. But I judged the culture wasn’t right in the organisation, because there were still a number of people around who were still overtly displaying homophobic phraseaology or language. 

So, my view was, even then in 2000, that whilst I’d gone through a period of counselling by that stage, I was content with whom I was and what I was, that being a gay man in the military, but just because the rules had changed and I could no longer lose my job over admitting and being open with who I was and what I was, my judgement was, at that stage, I didn’t feel safe to come out in that environment. 

And indeed it would be another five years, actually. It was 2005 when I formally came out in the military. So, whilst I’d come out to my nearest and dearest family, by that stage in 2000 around the change of legislation in the Air Force, I didn’t come out publicly in the Air Force for another five years.

[09:22]

Rosie: And how did your family react?

[09:26]

Mark: Again, interesting. I have got one sibling, an older sister, and we were always very close during growing up. Not the stereotypical sort of brother-sister relationship where you generally squabble a lot – we’d always been very very close and shared secrets with each other that even our parents don’t know to this day.

So, I’d planned my coming out, if you like, to the family that I would come out to my sister first, knowing full well that she would be supportive. And that would help me then go to my parents.

[10:02]

I was always considered to be a Mummy’s boy whilst I was growing up, and therefore I knew my mum would be most supportive as well, out of my parents. And the hard nut to crack, if you like, would have been my dad who was going to be the final one that I was going to have to go to. But I would go to him after having got the support of both my sister and my mother, so that there was safety in numbers if you like.

[10:25]

Mark: And that was principally because, Dad being a stereotypical alpha male in terms of being a sportsman, carpenter and joiner, and being in the building industry all his life and all that sort of thing. 

It didn’t really happen that way. I ended up being in a social situation where my mum challenged me because she’d seen changes in my personality and the way I’d been behaving and there was clearly something on my mind.

She challenged me and I ended up coming out to her and telling her first, and at that stage she then said, “well you need to tell your father,” because we’re both here together, we were at a family function together. 

And once I told my mother and my father, I then ended up telling my sister, so the person I thought I would tell first ended up being the last one to know. 

In terms of their reaction, they didn’t disown me or anything like that, which I’m very grateful for clearly. And they were quite understanding. My mum had basically done some analysis on the situation, and she either thought that the change in my behaviour and personality was down to a number of things, and it was either that I’d got myself into some sort of financial conundrum that I couldn’t get myself out of. And both she and my sister had been talking about that, and realised that I’d always been pretty good with money and said, “well, it can’t be that because he’s always been good with money.” 

But I’d also been very supportive of a very great colleague of mine, Caroline Paige, who’s the first transgender female to serve openly in the British military. I’d worked with Caroline before she transitioned, so when this broke in The Sun newspaper, I’d been very vocal in my support. And I guess that sowed a seed in terms of my mother’s mind, and she said to my sister, “I think it’s either money, or it’s his sexual orientation.”

And then when I obviously did the whole coming out thing with her, she said, “well, I probably knew to be honest with you,” given what had been going on the previous six months in terms of some of the things I’d been saying.

[12:28]

But, you know, they were supportive initially. I think they found it quite difficult to come to terms with, because of the generational understanding. My parents were both born in the 1940s, they had the time of their lives in the 60s and all that kind of thing – sexual liberation, blah, blah blah – but, their backgrounds and their upbringings were very heteronormative.

[13:00]

Rosie: So, you had this reckoning period with your family, and the military was going through its own reckoning really, with sexuality and with LGBTQ+ issues. You were the former chair and president of the Royal Air Force’s LGBT+ Freedom Network. Could you tell us a bit about the network, and your involvement with it?

[13:21]

Mark: Yeah, sure. I was working in Bristol, and as I say, this dates back to 2002, so by this stage the Air Force had been finding its feet, I suppose, in terms of the LGBT+ community and formulating policy, and writing regulations, and all sorts of things for two years by this stage, following the change of legislation in 2000.

I was working in Bristol and I had already started networking amongst the military community, not just in the Air Force, but across the Navy and the Army as well, and knew that there were other people out there who were looking for support, more than anything else.

And there was a growing view, certainly from where I sat, that the Air Force was formulating policy on a whim, with the best of intentions, but they were formulating policy that was affecting a part of their personnel and community without really talking to the people that it really affected. 

And this was charting new territory, to be honest with you, because gays had not served in the military openly prior to this, legally anyway.

So, I approached the policy staff with a view to trying to assist them with formulating this policy. So rather than just writing it through a heteronormative lens, the “pale male stale” view, that they would actually consult with the community they were writing rules and regulations for, so that they would be understanding of that community more than just applying arbitrary rules and regulations.

[15:07]

So, that’s where it all started, way back in 2002. We started these very discreet conversations, and those conversations went on for about four years until the network, which started with a bunch of… well, not a bunch really – it was just three people who started the dialogue with the policy staff initially. And as word got out, it was three gay guys that started the initial conversation, so obviously we then wanted to try and encompass a broader perspective and more elements of the LGBT+ community. 

So, a number of people then started showing an interest and wanted to get involved with the things that were going on, and from that initially we grew what was called the LGBT Forum, which was effectively a small group of people, half a dozen of us, who would be used as a sounding board, like a smart customer for the policy staff. So when they were starting to look at LGBTQ policies, they would use us as a sounding board. 

[16:09]

But in 2006, we got Air Force Board endorsement of the network, or the forum, which then grew into the network, and it’s grown just exponentially from there to be honest with you. And I then effectively ran the network for the next eleven years, before standing down as chairman, and then was president for another couple of years as well.

And it’s all been really, to be honest with you Rosie, about informing, educating and empowering. And those are the three key words I would probably use. Informing the broader Air Force about what the LGBT+ community is all about; educating them and dispelling myths more than anything else, and popular misconceptions; also about empowering the individuals of the LGBT community to ensure that they can reach their full potential within the organisation; but also about empowering the heterosexual community in terms of understanding it, as much as anything else. 

[17:08]

Rosie: I love that it’s got that element of allyship and educating people within the community, and supporting people within the community, but educating outside it too. It’s really inspiring. Have you got any pieces of advice that you would give allies, or members of the heteronormative community, to support LGBTQ+ people?

[17:30]

Mark: You have to be authentic in everything that you do, and it’s about following words with deeds. Because being an authentic ally, and an authentic organisation supporting a  protected characteristic, is not just about having a statement or a vision, or a poster on a wall.

It’s about following up with real, hard evidence of how you support that community. And yes, you’ve got to have all of that legislature, and that policy framework in place to provide you with the governance process by which people work and live and exist within our organisation, but at the same time allies need to be vocal and visible in their support. 

So it’s not just about having a poster on a wall saying the good word, it’s about being leaders as much as allies in terms of providing support for the community. That works right from the very top levels of any organisation, be it the management board level, to the most junior ally that you can have on the shop floor or wherever in the organisation. 

[18:43]

Rosie: And what do you think the biggest challenges facing the LGBTQ+ community today are?

[18:50]

Mark: I think the biggest challenge is so much change has gone on in the last thirty years, with regard to LGBT legislation, and it’s not all a bed of roses out there, I absolutely get that, but in terms of where we were when you look back to the 1980s, the late 1980s, the final tenure of the Conservative government and Clause 28 and all that sort of vile period that we went through, there has been a huge softening and there has been a huge amount of progress. So there is an awful lot to be thankful for. 

And I think the biggest challenge now is, now that there is so much that is equal, if you like – there’s been such a long fight for equality – it is ensuring that we remain relevant within society as much as anything else. 

And when I say, “relevant”, it’s maintaining a profile within the broader community, because there are still issues out there where there is homophobia going on, there is still inequality, but we tread a very fine line these days because there is so much equality that people perceive that it is all now yesterday’s news. So it is a very fine balancing act that we have to tread. There is still work to be done, but we need to be very careful about how we take that forward as a community I think, to ensure that it remains credible in society.

[20:25]

Rosie: Absolutely. I mean, it’s so true, I think [about] starting this podcast, and also just situations in my life, the number of times people have sort of said, “you’re gay, get over it.” Which I think is both positive and negative: positive only because it shows that there is that perception of how much equality we have, and how far we’ve come. It’s negative because it cancels out the nuanced issues within the community now. And I think you’re right, I think there’s so much equality, I think especially for being gay and for being cis gendered. The next frontier is looking into this current backlash and transphobia that’s happening now that trans and gender rights and equality are more under the spotlight. 

[21:27]

Rosie: What gives you hope today, and for the future? 

[21:31]

Mark: I think there’s a new found confidence in the generation of people that are following behind me, which really pleases me. And the evidence of that is the fact that those people, those members of the LGBT+ community that I have seen joining the Air Force and getting involved with the network, are following their career aspirations and they’re progressing through their own careers. Be that in a number of ways, just in terms of their own personal growth and their own self-confidence, but they’re also being rewarded professionally with promotions, and other career opportunities.  

So, they are being their true selves in the workplace, and they’re bringing their authentic selves to the workplace. They don’t have to hide anything of who they are or what they are. They can perform to the best of their ability, because they are able to be who they are, and be their authentic self in the workplace. And that reaps benefits not only for them in terms of their personal development, but also for their employer, the Air Force. The Air Force gets the best from its individuals, because it’s allowing them to be who they are.

And, as I say, the remuneration that the Air Force is giving those individuals for performing well, being great professionals, and delivering both in terms of service at home and on operations overseas, around the world, is that they’re getting promoted and they’re carving their own career paths as much as anything else. And they will go on to be incredibly successful people. And that really does give me hope, in terms of, you know, I’m coming to the end of my RAF career now, but I can leave feeling really quite satisfied that the LGBT+ community in the Air Force is in a pretty good place.

[23:21]

Rosie: Absolutely. And I think what struck me then as you were speaking as well is, that as well as the military side and the defence side, there’s also this wonderful ‘soft power’ being communicated: the soft power of Western countries to have all colours of the rainbow in its people and these incredibly strong, successful, inspiring people.

[23:43]

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. We are ambassadors not just for our service, but for our country when we go overseas. I’ve served all round the globe, much like anybody else who’s in the British military to be honest with you. And, yes. I mean, I guess you can be candid in some areas, but you have to be less candid in others, in certain circumstances.

But at the same time, you can be an ambassador for your service and your country, and when you are in those situations where, perhaps one of the countries that you’re working with in a certain operation is not necessarily so forward leaning in terms of its outlook with regards to LGBT+ community policies and serving in the military, or just in general, then you can be an advocate and an ambassador for the service and your country in that sense. 

[24:43]

Rosie: Absolutely. And even it’s just bringing that extra level of empathy as a service man or service woman. It’s fantastic. 

[24:52]

Rosie: Mark, thanks so much for giving us your time today and sharing your story. I know it’ll resonate with so many listeners with military backgrounds, or partners with military backgrounds. 

I’m just feeling incredibly grateful that we’ve managed to make this work in spite of our technology woes! 

[25:11]

Mark: Yes! We got there in the end.

Rosie: Thank you for listening to OUTcast, a podcast with interviews and coming out stories from inspiring LGBTQ+ people.

I’m your host, Rosie Pentreath. I hope you can join us again next week.

OUTcast S1, Ep 5 • 25 Oct 2021 • 42:04

[00:00]

Rosie: Welcome to OUTcast, the podcast where we catch up with some of the most engaging, courageous and inspiring LGBTQ+ people from all over the world.

We ask our lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer guests where their coming out journeys began, what they’ve gone through along the way – the joy and the pain, but we promise there will be more joy – and what gives them hope.

I’ll be interviewing people from all walks of life, from hardworking queer people behind the scenes, to more familiar faces you might have never known even had the coming out stories they’re about to share.

You can follow us on social media @OUTcastLGBT and you can find us online at outcastpod.com. 

[01:00] 

This week we’re speaking to Jessie Grimes. 

Jessie is a clarinettist based in London. She balances a busy schedule performing as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestral player with teaching, presenting on TV and radio, and leading workshops. She teaches at the Royal College of Music Junior Department, and is a contributor to BBC Radio 3 as well as presenting on BBC TV.

[01:23]

When coronavirus hit in 2020, she used lockdown to establish Jessie’s Homemade Garden Jam, which is eight live-streamed concerts performed in her fruitful London garden. It looks big in the videos – it’s very tiny apparently, but abundant nonetheless. It has garnered thousands of views online, and some passionate and loyal fans. And in 2021, Jessie won the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Trailblazer Award for the series.

Jessie was born in Dublin, in Ireland, and came out to her parents when she was still in School. She’s now married, and they’re about to start their journey to having a baby.

[01:58]

Rosie: Jessie, welcome to OUTcast. Where does your coming out journey start?

[02:01]

Jessie: Oooh, um, well first of all, thank you for having me on. This is lovely, and I’m always excited to talk about all things queer. My journey began – it’s quite a typical one… well, I don’t know, there’s no typical anymore… When I was in school. I thought I was doing everything right, I had a boyfriend, and then I kissed a girl in my class, and it absolutely blew my mind. 

And I came home to my mum, and I was like, “okay, I’m going to do it. I’m going to do this.” And I said, “Mum, I’m breaking up with Andy to go out with Emily!” in this big kind of drama way, and Mum just kind of looked at me, and went, “You’ll do a lot more than that to shock me.”

[02:38]

And it was the best kind of response or rebuttal for this huge thing that was in my mind, I think I was 15 maybe, and it was all over. I’ve got a stack of journals from when I was a kid. I think I started doing diaries maybe when I was 12 – if I need some content for therapy I know where to go. 

I am very much trying, as a kid, to assimilate, I’m trying to just be part of the binary and the normal, and “I really want a boyfriend”, and “why can’t I blah blah blah?” And I talk all about all these boys that I want to kiss, but I’m not really interested in it. And I never talk about the people, I never talk about them apart from a boy’s name. That’s as far as it ever goes. 

And then suddenly this person that I meet in school appears, and then it’s totally different. All of the energy is different, and I’m suddenly like, “Oh I don’t know what to do” and it’s this huge turmoil and angst. 

And yeah, so I split up with this lovely guy, and then went into the stereotypical secret relationship. 

I think kids these days are so – in most British schools anyway – so lucky that, you know, there’s LGBTQ clubs and stuff happening in schools now. It’s so much more normalised, and out in the open. But when I was a kid, we were holding hands under the table, and it was a big secret. And in that trope that’s there in so many queer films, particularly from the 2000s, of the, “oh, we shouldn’t.” If you think of any kind of queer literature even, like Tipping the Velvet, it’s all about this shame stuff, and hiding. 

I had that experience and, I’m sure she won’t be listening so it’s fine, we went away on a trip to Italy, and on the trip we were secretly together. And we were put in a room, sharing a room, oh my God the excitement of it, and then on the plane home – I was Head Girl, humblebrag – she sat beside, and snogged, Head Boy. Can you imagine?!

[04:33]

Rosie: That’s horrible!

[04:35]

Jessie: Right?! It was awful! And, to be fair now, I think they’re married and have kids and they live in Australia, and they’re still together. So, like, I’m happy for her that that happened, and whatever. But I also often have a laugh at the idea that, if I was the last relationship, there’s so much unexplored things for that person.

But anyway, that was my first big gay experince, and the coming out, I was like, “will you tell Dad?” to my Mum.

[05:02]

Rosie: It always feels harder to tell Dad for some reason. The secret relationship, definitely I can relate to that. The, “I need a boyfriend”… In my diary I had ‘Top 3 Hottest Boys’.

[05:14]

Jessie: Nice, yeah.

[05:15]

Rosie: Yeah. I don’t remember actually attributing any kind of value to these people. We just perform heteronormativity I think, just to fit in. I think things are difficult enough as you’re sussing yourself out anyway. 

[05:27]

Jessie: Yeah. If someone had to give me a million pounds to go back to being that age, I would absolutely say “no” because it’s all of this thing of trying to survive socially while understanding, like, you’re sprouting from everywhere, and everything’s changing, and there’s all these insane hormones. 

And then on top of that, to try and discover who you are within a sexuality that’s been, particularly growing up in the Naughties with the Spice Girls and all of this hypersexualised girl power, which wasn’t really real feminism – it was a sort of a wave of it, but it was completely heteronormative and as a kid that age you’re just trying to survive. And I didn’t have the language for it either.

[06:05]

Jessie: You know, my uncle is gay. And I’m from a very open and accepting family in terms of that sort of stuff. I have a very strong memory of twigging and realising as a kid that Carl’s friend Tom wasn’t his friend, when they came over. And I think I maybe was 8 or 9 or something, and they came over to visit, and I remember I hid in my room. I was scared of the difference and Mum had to come up and say… I don’ t know what she said or what I said, but I kind of was like, “Are they gay?” It really weirded me out as a kid because it was not something I saw anywhere. 

[06:41]

I grew up in Ireland, which was still kind of under the spell of Catholicism that it’s finally starting to shake off. I had never seen it on the telly or anywhere else and it was, “oh my gosh, this is in real life”. And maybe in the Naughties, the only gay person you might see is the sort of tropey, flamboyant gay man. 

And I remember the reality of it being in my head as freaking me out in a way that I find really interesting now. It resonated quite strongly with me. Then I was like, “okay, I’m going downstairs”, and then I was like, “oh, that’s just Carl and Tom. That’s fine.” I know, I think there’s a lot about having a model as well, when you’re a kid, or having something there to see. 

[07:18]

Rosie: Yeah. 

[07:20]

Jessie: That certainly wasn’t there when I was a kid.

[07:23]

Rosie: So it’s kind of coming out to yourself, like we all kind of do that I think. We kind of slowly realise. I wonder if perhaps if you’ve never had to think about it, if you’re straight and happy and just it’s not on your radar, you probably don’t appreciate that I think for most of us, we have to overcome this perceived shame – or it’s real shame, actually I think. 

I feel like it took until 2012 or so, before there was more diversity in the kinds of queer people you were seeing. So suddenly the supermodel Cara Delevigne was with a woman, and suddenly there was that slight variety, and lots more men of different fields were coming out it felt like, instead of just having a stereotype to kind of say, “well, that’s not me, so I don’t really know what I am, and what’s happening.” Or “I’ll have a secret relationship”.

[08:10]

Rosie: I did the same – I had a secret relationship for about four years. It’s really damaging. If you haven’t gone through it, it’s hard to explain how damaging it is and how much shame it creates. And I think it lasts – I think even being out now, it’s a painful memory of having to hide that.

[08:27]

Jessie: Yeah. There’s loads of things in that. For a start, we grew up in different countries – where did you grow up?

[08:33]

Rosie: So, I grew up in Cornwall.

[08:34]

Jessie: Not in England England, that’s a different place, Cornwall. Culturally and all that sort of stuff.

But Ireland, again, is definitely a different country! Particularly, during that time. And it may be the same for you, but to be called a Lesbian as a slag was like a really dark slur. Like, I grew up… we did – I know this is definitely similar in the UK – that, “that’s so gay” as a thing was said all the time.

[08:56]

Rosie: Yeah.

[08:57]

Jessie: Oh, her shoes are so gay. And now, and you’re probably right – there was a little shift in maybe 2012 – where I started being like, “is it gay, is it?” I started calling it out when people would say it casually like in an office: “Is that gay though?”

But there’s such a heaviness, for particularly an under-18-year-old, to hear that in the environment they’re in, that to be gay is a casually thing is the same word as shit. To be a lesbian has got this dirty, masculine, like, really bad connotation. 

And even still I often when I’m identifying myself, I’d probably say I’m gay or I’d be queer, before I might say lesbian. Even in the way we use language, you are “a lesbian” and you’re “gay”.

[09:39]

Rosie: Yeah. I think in the context of the patriarchy, lesbian is the ultimate way of pushing back against a male power structure, or a male preference. So it’s deeply offensive in that way and it was always used as such an insult. I still struggle to say lesbian. And I sometimes struggle to say wife, because I’ve been told that introducing yourself as having a wife is subversive – it took me a long time to realise how homophobic that was.

As women, as gay women and lesbians, we’re often minimising ourselves in the way that we are just as women I think.

[10:12]

Jessie: Yeah, yeah. And this is a thing that I’ve been really thinking about because I’m reading it at the moment, about the use of the binaries. Like, I’ve found to say my wife is the easiest way. We’re permanently coming out, all the time. If you don’t fit into a heteronormative place, you’re permanently having to explain yourself, justify yourself, come out, in every new scenario. Particularly as a musician, you meet new people every other day.

And I have that moment, and I find it’s like a power thing to be able to say, “my wife”. Because it immediately identifies, a) I’m comfortably with my sexuality, and b) it’s clear I’m gay, becasue I have a wife and there’s no two ways about it. 

But I do feel slightly uncomfortable about having to set into those kind of heterosexual norms in order to justify myself, because I also think in terms of gender, which is not the same as sexuality, but there’s an intersectional thing happening there, that it’s possible that in another few years my wife won’t want to identify as wife.

She’s on a threshold of ‘she’ to ‘they’. It’s all so complicated isn’t it? You’re identifying yourself within a binary that might not necessarily maybe a binary that you identify with. But for everybody else that identifies generally with that binary, it just makes life almost easier for them. My wife – there you go, let’s just say that!

[11:27]

Rosie: It’s like we have to translate constantly, and try and slide into different ways of understanding things. Maybe one day everyone will speak our language, or there won’t have to be a language; we’ll all just be accepting and not need binaries.

[11:55]

Rosie: It would be interesting to talk about being out in classical music, or otherwise. How do you find it?

[12:02]

Jessie: I have had a big old journey with this. I did a degree in Ireland and then I did a degree in Music Education – it was a weird mishmash, basically qualified music and history teacher, whilst also having a performance major, almost in an American style.

And then I was like, “okay, I don’t want to teach. I’m going to go to the UK”, and I went to the Royal College [of Music in London] and I was like “I’m going to do a Masters”. 

And I remember standing outside it. It’s quite an imposing building, as well, if you stand on the steps of the Albert Hall and look at it. It’s like, “oh Jesus”. 

I tried very very hard to assimilate – it’s the same thing again as in school. My goal was to kind of succeed in terms of what I thought people wanted. And I did very well. I graduated with a Silver Medal. 

But I think about it alot now because I would always perform… the name on my passport is Jessica. And I think for the longest time I used that name, Jessica, as sort of my stage name because I assumed, in this wealthy, white, privileged world of classical music that the audiences and people who were giving me marks, or awards, or whatever wanted to see what was most palatable – which was going to be a femme, posh, kind of person. That’s definitely not me.

I would filter myself quite a lot. You go to these sort of mingle-y events where you’re supposed to meet people. I was always hopeless at it. Now thinking about it, I was trying to filter myself, and trying to not be me in order to be what I thought they wanted me to be.

[13:29]

So, on the one hand in the recital-y, get to know all the big wigs in classical music so that you get gigs and stuff, I was trying to be a concept of posh that I didn’t really understand what it was. And then, on the other side of trying to get gigs, all of my teachers – every single one was a straight white man. They all were the people who had the jobs, and I know there were a couple of women in different colleges who were amazing in that they managed to battle through that, twenty years ago to get to the top of their game. But everyone that I came across was a straight white man.

So I’m trying to fit into what they want of me, as a young, twenty-something. I didn’t go the flirting with them route, but the whole thing is, don’t stick out, fit in and go to the pub so that when you get booked for the gig, they’re going to want to have you back.

[14:16]

All the way through college, things went well, but I wasn’t me. And even up until… I was in a trio since I started, so that was in 2009 and we went on an won all sorts of big chamber music prizes. It was pinned on my Twitter for a long time, us winning Overseas League, which was not that long ago, and I’m in a big old dress. And I’m still Jessica I think, probably, on programme notes and stuff. 

And it probably wasn’t really until I met my wife, Emma, which is now nearly seven years ago. She’s from a different world. She went to Cambridge, so another white, privileged world, but within that she found a pocket of gay women, and played rugby with them, and had an incredibly close, tight community. 

We just came back from a wedding with these guys and they’re all like super high-flying doctors and all sorts of stuff, but proud, confident gay women, and that was just part of who they were. And they connected. I didn’t have a queer comminity like that, so I think Emma was a lot more confident within her queerness, that she would happily walk into a meeting room – she ran a business with her sister for a long time, she makes films now – would walk into a room and completely be herself. Sometimes mistaken to be a boy, you know if she was from an Indegionous community somewhere, maybe she might have been identified as two spirit, or third gender, or something. She just doesn’t sit in your standard binary. 

[15:35]

But she always held herself quite confidently in that space, and I found that really inspiring. 

And it wasn’t until probably five or six years ago, I went on stage for the first time in a suit, and I played better than I’ve ever played. There were these super high-flying, classical music people at this festival, and Emma was with me – she stayed with me at the festival. So I was publicly out, I would go to the concerts of other artists with my wife. It was the first time I just stopped filtering myself, and I was finally just Jessie, and the students that I taught knew about my wife, and I performed on stage in a suit. It was like everything just changed.

[16:10]

Rosie: Mmm.

[16:11]

Jessie: It was such a struggle, and it took a long time within classical music for me to stand in a place of authenticity and say, “this is who I am”.

[16:18]

Rosie: Yeah.

[16:19]

Jessie: And it was terrifying! There’s a voice of a standard audience of classical music, the traditional audience, that says, “why does it matter that they’re gay?” But they’re also, I think, offended by it as well. 

So, there was some post – it was on Classic FM – about trans opera singers or something, and there was this big pile-on in the comments, of like, “it doesn’t matter. I don’t care what they had for breakfast”. That sort of voice. 

[16:48]

Rosie: Yeah, it’s really complicated. So, for listeners to the podcast who might not listen to classical music, who might not know the kind of ins and outs of being in it, it feels like it’s a decade or two behind where you might place mainstream society with pop culture, or media role models we might have. So that’s the context. 

[17:07]

These comments where classical music lovers say, “So what? We don’t care who you’re sleeping with, we don’t care who you used to be”. They’re exactly the people who have made it that it matters that we’re that thing. 

These straight white heteronormative people have made it illegal to be gay throughout history, have made it a completely punishable offence. And now that the tide is turning, and we talk about it openly to try and make ourselves genuine and be the people we are, or be role models for other people who might be struggling to come out, it’s suddenly our fault that everyone’s talking about who we have sex with or how we identify, or whether we’re binary or not.

[17:47]

Rosie: It’s the only time I’ve ever been at work, looked at social media comments… this was when Classic FM had a new show for LGBTQ+ composers, presented by Rob Rinder – quite a well-known music producer jumped onto Twitter to make that very arguement: “who cares who these composers had sex with?” And it’s the first time I lost it at work.

[18:10]

Jessie: I think it’s the same argument as, “I don’t see colour” when you’re talking about racism. You can only say that when you come from a place of privilege. “I don’t see colour because I haven’t had to. I don’t see colour because I haven’t had to ever move through the world, and be othered, or experience what it’s like to be on the receiving end of racism”. So it’s very easy for someone who is straight and never had to question. But it’s from this place of privilege that you can say, “it doesn’t matter”, because why would it matter? Because they have moved through the world and no one’s ever given a shit, or challenged or made them feel awkward about being different, because they’re not. They are perceived as the norm, so they walk through the world – they glide through the world – with no issues whatsoever. And then they can’t get their heads around why it might feel important to make things like these incredible trans artists, who have struggled so much to try and get a foothold into a career, and have gotten there.

[19:07]

Rosie: Yeah.

[19:09]

Jessie: It’s not the same, but these amazing women who, when I was studying, were at the top. Janet Hilton’s a clarinet player who is Head of Woodwind at the Royal College of Music. She was in a world of men and that is baller that she got there. The same as, I’ve got a really really talented Black student at the Royal College at the moment, and I know that her mum – her mum is awesome – basically has to say to her, “you need to be twice as good in order to get half as far, because you don’t look like the rest of these kids”.

[19:37]

Rosie: Yeah.

Jessie: And there is slowly a tide is turning, but it’s not turning quick enough for them. But that’s the reason we need to shout about amazing trans singers, or you know like this Garden Jam I just did, in drag, celebrating queer composers. 

There’s a small side of the argument that’s also true. It doesn’t particularly matter that Samuel Barber was gay, in how you listen to the music, but it also really really really does. Because of all of the struggle of the LGBTQ community throughout history, it is important to find important, prominent figures, and say, “look, they have succeeded and managed to move through the world” and understand within their expression of emotion, or whatever, within their music there is a struggle that they did go through. 

[20:24]

I just know, as an artist – I’m still struggling to say that! – that bringing my identity into is 100 percent part of it. So it is inextricably linked, it cannot be separated, and it is important. 

[20:36]

Rosie: If anyone is tempted to use that argument, I think remember that the prejudice made it matter. We didn’t choose to make it matter, we only have to make it matter now that we are open about sexuality, or gender, or whatever it is, because you guys made us do it. We’re just simply responding, and then, yeah, the third step is perhaps it won’t matter any more, but we’re not there yet.

[20:57]

Jessie: What I’ve decided now, and I can do that, it’s also from a place of privilege having worked and stablised my career enough, that I can confidently be like, “okay, all I’m going to do from now on is stuff that has an integrity to it.”

If I have any say in a programme, it has to have a certain number of women in it and on the list of composers. You know, it has to fulfil a criteria and I’m never going to not speak up when I get approached to do something, and I’m shown a cast list, and it’s all white people.

I’m always going to be the person now who says, “that’s bullshit”.

[21:33]

Rosie: Yeah.

[21:34]

Jessie: And if it means that I don’t get a gig, or I get sacked from it or whatever, it’s from the place of grafting enough that I feel comfortable like I can do that now. It’s really difficult, I think, for younger kids, or kids coming just out of college, to be able to have that same kind of ability to hold strong, and stick with what you believe in. Because it’s so difficult, particularly in the classical music world. There’s always going to be somebody else – there’s always going to be another flute player or another clarinet player that’ll do the gig.

[22:02]

Rosie: That’s so true I think it takes having a certain level of power or achievement within your field to then be able to start making those decisions. 

[22:10]

Jessie: What you said about it being like twenty years behind is totally true. You have to be brave, in any sort of – not that we’re huge whistleblowers or anything – but in any sort of whistleblowing scenario, there’s a real risk to that for the person who’s going to call out bad behavior. You can only do that if you can be confident enough that you can deal with the consequences. 

[22:31]

Rosie: The trouble with classical music is the powers that be do tend to be of a certain generation, even still. I mean, we’re kind of – I think we’re a similar age – but we’re still sort of the new new guard, almost. 

It sounds crazy, but at our age even though it would be relatively mature in other industries, it’s almost like we’re sort of the new kids, you know, sort of able to have tattoos, able to be gay, able to talk about feminism all the time.

The other problem is, the audiences we cater for are traditional audiences. So, whereas the, say, pop music record labels, they have the old guard protecting the brand, the old men at the top still, which is what we have, but at least they have to change – because their audience demands it. Whereas we’ve always got the excuse not to change, in classical music, because we might upset Old Mrs Miggins, and Old Mr Noel, or whatever his name is, so it’s very frustrating. But there is hope, there are such inspirational people and there are so many arts leaders and classical music leaders that are gay, and that are trying to open it up a bit more. So, it’s getting better. 

[23:35]

Jessie: It definitely is and I think the more us crazy tattooed people get to the top, or suddenly become in positions of being able to hold some power and privilege, I do hope the people who get there are willing to share the platform and share the power. Because that’s the most important thing to be able to do is to share what you have. 

Because, I think again, in classical music, and in a lot of industries, the kind of cut throat nature of it, and the fact that you can be easily replaced, means that people don’t want to take a risk. 

But if every person, no matter what industry they’re in, gets to a place where they have some sort of power, that they can share that platform instead of saying, “well, I’m going to take it”, and it might mean that you end up getting a little bit less, but it means that then your actions are much more meaningful as well.

[24:35]

Rosie: You mentioned your Drag Kings and Queens Jessie’s Homemade Garden Jam episode. What’s it all about?

[24:44]

Jessie: Lockdown. Let’s take you back to summer 2020… We had no work, there was no music, there was nothing. But more kind of importantly, for me and my community, we weren’t getting to play together. More than a lot of industries or whatever, being a musician is also a bit of a vocation, and when you don’t get to perform you sort of lose a sense of self. 

A lot of orchestras and a lot of organisations were presenting stuff from home, but I was asked to do one early enough in the pandemic that it was still a bit of a novelty. And I volunteered the garden, because I was terrified of COVID and didn’t want to do anything inside – because my wife has quite bad asthma and health stuff, so I was like, “I definitely would rather not kill my wife to do a live-streamed concert”. 

So we did it outside, but it was really fun and silly and it rained. I put the bassoon player in the shed, the oboe player balanced her music on courgettes, so it was really fun and really funny, and it got quite a lot of attention within that small art community.

And I then spent another couple of weeks being like, “maybe I could do something from the garden”. For years, I’ve presented things for other orchestras, so I can be Jessie Grimes on behalf of the Ulster Orchestra, or whatever, and created things – even writing songs, I do a lot of creative workshop leading. But I’ve never really done something as me, just presenting something – this is my stuff, this is who I am.

And I called it Jessie’s Homemade Garden Jam. Little pun… it’s wholesome, and it’s a really long hashtag! I have regrets about that.

[26:10]

Rosie: Yeah.

Jessie: I want to do something completely different. So basically it became sort of a madcap, vegetable garden-themed show. My first season was sort of my good friends, and we played music but we also did really silly games. We got funding from the Royal Philharmonic Society, which sounds very posh but actually is run by some real legends who are looking to support the kind of outliers and the people who are doing something a bit different.

[26:38]

We did a jazz episode and we had people who are amazing musicians, from Ronnie Scott’s; we did a toddler one where we wrote songs for people, with an organisation I work with; we had a very well-known, prize-winning string quartet to do a more posh, classical one, but even then we got them doing silly stuff; and the most recent one we did was Drag Kings and Queens of Classical Music.

And my good friend Lynton Stephens and I came up with a programme of all-queer composers, and we performed all in drag. And, I might be wrong, but I feel like it was the first classical performance in this country all in drag. It was awesome! It felt really great, and I had one of my students from the RCM came – they’ve watched all the way through, all thirteen episodes we’ve done, they’ve been a really loyal fan of the show – but they came in person to this one. And it was so amazing to be there, like fully in drag, talking about all these queer composer who, when I was growing up or when I was studying, I had no idea that these people were gay. I had no idea!

The one argument of “I don’t see race” or “why is it important?” can’t be correct, because it was such a profound realisation for me to find out that these composers of pieces that I’ve played for over twenty years now – Saint-Saëns, Poulenc, Bernstein, Copland – these people have huge concertos, or big pieces for us, that I teach regularly, and I didn’t know half of them were gay. That has to be important. 

[28:04]

Rosie: It’s so important! I really struggled with being gay. I did a music degree as well, and I’ve moved in the same sort of circles that it sounds like you have and, if I’d known that Bernstein, Ethel Smyth, Copland, Barber, et cetera, were gay, I know I would have felt better. I know I would have done. 

[28:24]

Jessie: Yeah. And I’m really kind of angry about it, actually, because I can remember sitting in these stuffy lecture halls with people talking about Hugo Wolf, or Wagner or whatever. A lot of these composers who are venerated are actually really shit people. 

Yes, they wrote masterpieces, whatever, but lots of people wrote masterpieces! So, it shouldn’t just be those people who get to be celebrated.

[28:48]

I had to work really hard to find queer women. We programmed Jennifer Higdon, who’s an incredible composer. She’s finally getting the recognition she deserves, that she doesn’t have time to teach at the Curtis Institute, like she’s a big deal, Pulitzer Prize winning.

But, I hadn’t heard of her. I’m a queer teacher at the Royal College of Music, my job is to also research music for my students to be able to play, and I hadn’t heard of her. 

You know, I can name the men – because they’re men and they’re from the past, so at least the men got somewhere – but the fact that Ethel Smyth… I get stuck after that, to find people who are like me, from the past, or even the present.

[29:40]

Jessie: You’ve mentioned that you guys are thinking about starting a family. For people who might not know, what is it like being a lesbian couple – can I say that?

[29:49]

Jessie: Yeah, I think so. 

[29:51]

Rosie: Yeah. What’s it like thinking about starting a family, and what are you guys going through?

[29:54]

Jessie: Well, before I say anything, I want to say that it’s even harder for men. For men, currently if they want to have a family with kids, they have to go through a legal adoption process still. 

At least for me and Emma, when we finally do have a baby, both of our names will be on the birth cert, and we don’t have to go through that legal shit. So, for the first time, maybe, women are actually slightly more privileged than the men in this scenario of trying to have a family when you are not straight.

[30:23]

But it’s really really really hard. We have also chosen, maybe, a slightly more complicated route, but when I loop back to it, it also shouldn’t seem complicated at all. 

From a position of straight privilege, also saying that with an awareness that a lot of straight couples really struggle and go through a lot of heartache and cannot conceive, but the general standard of, “let’s have a bottle of wine, have sex and the, hey presto, have a free baby!” 

I have a brother, who’s a beautiful human being, and we asked him would he donate? And I have also always wanted to carry the baby – therein lies the problem! Because it’s my brother. 

The way we’re going to do it is the closest to sort of genetically how a straight couple may have a child: Emma is donating her eggs, it’s going to be my brother’s sperm, and I will carry. So I’ll be the surrogate, kind of, but in all the paperwork, Emma is named as a donor, which is also difficult, even in the conversations we have – Emma is a donor, my brother is a donor, and I am the birth mother. So even in all the language it’s difficult. 

It’s also knowing where to start is quite overwhelming, and even friends that we do know who have started a family have all done it in different ways. We’ve got friends who have adopted, we’ve got friends who just bought sperm and have done what you call IUI so just kind of ‘turkey baster’, and we’ve got friends who have done IVF. 

It’s a bit like if you want to get your two friends dating, you can either set them up, give them each other’s phone numbers and say, “go for it!” You could arrange the date, so bring them to the place. Or, you could literally hold their hands and put them in bed together, and that’s kind of the three steps within baby-making. 

You can either just shove some sperm in there and hope for the best; you can have the next step which is IVF, which is petri dish, sperm and egg in the dish; and then you’ve got the next step again, which is injecting the sperm into the egg, which is called ICSI.

So what we’re going to do is called Reciprocal IVF, so hopefully just IVF – sperm and egg in petri dish – and then it’ll get implanted into me, and hopefully it won’t fall out. And then we’ll have a baby, that’s the plan.

[32:29]

We ended up choosing King’s Fertility, which is connected to King’s College London, because it’s the only place that we in our research – we may also be wrong – but in our research, one of the only places that doesn’t take any profit, all profit goes into research so there’s nobody getting a Masarati out of all the fucking thousands of pounds that we have to spend. Because it does feel strange to pay money to get a human life, so at least the money is going into research for fertility science. 

But it’s been an absolute struggle from the beginning, because we didn’t go maybe to a gay women’s fertility place, where we would be seen as normal. We’ve gone to somewhere that is still basically a heteronormative environment. There’s no kind of, “urgh, two women!” But when you get a little beyond the surface of it, it still is quite awkward and difficult and has been challenging from Day 1. 

With the caveat that I know that they’ve been stressed out with COVID or whatever, but it’s been really shit. The whole way through, it’s been really hard to say what we want, to have anybody talk us through or walk us through. There’s sort of an assumption, maybe, that you already know what’s going on. I don’t know, like we sort of expected at some stage we might get, you know, a leaflet or a welcome conversation, but none of that really happened. It was like, “Yeah, you need to pay £500 is the first thing you need to do, so that you both get yourselves checked out to see what your ovarian reserve is like”. 

And all of it was kind of, “you need to pay money before you have a consultation”. “But I don’t know if I want to be with you guys yet”.

[33:54]

Rosie: From the outside, you imagine that you kind of get inducted, lots of explanation, yeah.

[34:00]

Jessie: You’d think! We’ve gotten to a stage now where we’ve gone so far we’re like, “fuck it, we’re just going to continue here”. It’s easy to get through from where we are, and that’s an important element of when Emma has to go through her getting her eggs out, she has to be in and out quite a lot. So you also need to choose your clinic based on your ability to get there as well. 

So there’s lots of stuff, like there’s a list, an A4 page long, of problems we’ve had. As for my brother, there’s an extra complication in that he’s in Ireland. It’s weird, I feel like I need to justify. “We’ve chosen to make this a bit difficult for ourselves, just so we can be genetically related, so we have made it hard for ourselves, so that’s why it’s difficult.” Like, I even feel that within what we’re doing there’s some sort of inequality that’s making me apologise for how we want to make a kid, and why it’s so difficult and complicated. It shouldn’t be, but it seems to be. 

So my brother finally managed to get over in February this year, after fucking months of trying, booking, and then COVID cancelling or whatever. So he came and donated. That in itself was a weird experience, to have my brother stay for a week and know that at the end of the week he’s just having the most high-pressure wank of his life. 

We had to have counselling – it feels like I’ve had to be turned upside down, shaken and explored in every option, in order for them to say, “yes, fine, we can do this”.

[35:10]

Rosie: Yeah.

[35:11]

Jessie: There’s all these ethical questions about like, “have you considered who the legal guardian of your kid is?” Our kid’s not fucking born yet, but you have to basically tick their boxes in order to satisfy them that you have thought enough, that you’re responsible enough. It’s shit. You have to be tested in all sorts of different ways.

[35:28]

Rosie: You can be heterosexual, have sex and accidentally get pregnant, even if you’ve got no suitability and no planning behind you. 

[35:35]

Jessie: It’s really shit, and it takes so long. I know, and I’ve been told by straight and gay friends, that IVF is brutal. We haven’t even got to the IVF process yet – it’s been a year-and-a-half of battling and fighting to be recognised and to be respected, or whatever. And, there are elements that are nothing to do with the fact that we’re two women – it’s COVID and everyone’s back-to-back – but it feels just so invasive, that we have to compulsorily do all this counselling, you have to compulsorily have  all these blood tests. And I know again it’s covering their backs so they’re not legally going to get sued. 

For example, if we don’t put down on a form if either of us have any family members with a disability, our child can sue us and-or the clinic, if they then have a disability. So it’s all this shit that we have to basically tell them every single thing about ourselves, in order for them not to get sued. And it’s really awful.

And maybe there’s probably somebody listening who runs a welcoming queer fertility clinic who’s like, “fucking hell, they should have come to us!” And maybe we should have, but that’s also a thing – even researching it is difficult. You don’t know where to start – like, what do you Google? “How do I make a baby? London”.

[36:48]

Rosie: Yeah. 

[36:49]

Jessie: Any time I talk about it with my therapist – I’m a massive advocate that everybody should have a therapist and look after your mental health – she just is just angry on my behalf, and annoyed that I’m still having to go through this, and every single step feels like a fight to get to the next stage.

[37:04]

Rosie: I’m a massive advocate of therapy and things. I think talking about things helps you purge the hurt and things that are really impacting on your mental health. Yeah, it sounds like a huge, huge challenge; a minefield. Is there any other way that you and Emma have found that you can kind of unwind from it, and support each other? 

[37:24]

Jessie: Both of us are separately in therapy. I journal every day as well, so I’m still doing my three A4 pages in the morning. For me, I run and I meditate. And then, for Emma, she is a writer. She’s written three books now – they’re all brilliant. That’s her creative outlet, is writing. So it’s definitely creativity. And then doing the garden. I’m out there every day, you know, battling squirrels!

My biggest piece of advice for anybody who’s trying to go through it is to take it one step at a time. At the same time as saying take it one step at a time, I’m also hoping I might be pregnant by Christmas. But the problem with making that, “I hope I might be by this time” is that you’re setting yourself up for even more disappointment. 

And this is a debate I have a lot within therapy – is it better to defend yourself in advance by not thinking these things, and hope that the disappointment won’t be so big, or is it just reality that it will be a disappointment anyway and you have to ride through it, and maybe having those little glimmers of hope help you get there. I don’t have any good answers for it yet. The big advice is try and take it one step at a time.

[38:26]

Rosie: It sounds so hard.

[38:44]

Rosie: What one or two pieces of advice would you give allies to LGBTQ+ people?

Jessie: The first thing that comes to mind is don’t assume that you understand what somebody’s experience is. And don’t assume that you know what they want or need. I think communication and consent is really really important. And being aware that everything is on a spectrum that’s always moving. 

And perhaps just because you fit quite neatly into a binary of, for example, identifying as a cis female who is straight, doesn’t mean a) that at some stage in your life that might change for you and that spectrum might shift too, but also that my experience might shift, and the person you knew ten years ago – Jessica who wore a dress – not making an assumption that the person you know a few years ago is not always on a journey and shifting and changing.

And always just to ask, and if you’re in doubt, ask what somebody’s pronouns are. But also, if you use your pronouns or make them visible on social media, or whatever meeting or work that you have, it just makes that space a little bit easier for someone who might need to use it. 

Whether it’s because their name is not from this culture, and somebody British might not know whether they’re male or female. There’s so many reasons why, for example, using pronouns can help lots of people. Also, not assuming that everybody wants to use that as well! 

It’s kind of just about consent and communication, and that everything is always changing. And some people also don’t want to be put in a box.

My other advice is probably to do the work yourself. Don’t rely on the person in a marginalised place to inform you – do it yourself. It’s great to have conversations, but maybe the trans, or the gay, or the bisexaul person that you’re talking to is fucking sick of talking about it, and just wants to have a coffee.

You know, go and read.

[40:40]

Rosie: Yeah, that’s amazing advice. Let’s end on a really positive note – what gives you hope for now and the future? 

[40:48]

Jessie: Young people. The kids that I teach. Our younger generation who are just open to everything. The fact that I did a Drag Kings show, and my young, talented Black student came, because there’s all sorts of tropes about race and homosexuality and everything. Just that everybody is, of that younger generation – most of – are just so much more educated and open, and willing to step out of a binary and understand that things are more nuanced. That gives me hope. And that there are a lot of people in older generations that are trying.

[41:25]

Rosie: Yeah, definitely. 

Well, thanks so much. Thanks so much for coming on to OUTcast, it’s been amazing having you. 

Jessie: Pleasure. Thanks for having me on!

[41:36]

Rosie: Thank you for listening to OUTcast, a podcast with interviews and coming out stories from inspiring LGBTQ+ people. 

I’m your host, Rosie Pentreath. I hope you can join us again next week.

OUTcast S1, Ep 4 • 18 Oct 2021 • 34:53

[00:00]

Rosie: Welcome to OUTcast, the podcast where we catch up with some of the most engaging, courageous and inspiring LGBTQ+ people from all over the world.

We ask our lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer guests where their coming out journeys began, what they’ve gone through along the way – the joy and the pain, but we promise there’ll be more joy – and what gives them hope.

We all remember when we weren’t out as queer people, and in need of strength and inspiration to make the first step being open about who we are. It’s all about having role models and stories we can relate to, ultimately. 

[00:42]

I’m Rosie Pentreath, your host. I identify as a lesbian woman, and I have shared my coming out story in personal settings, in online articles, and as part of LGBTQ+ panels on coming out and being queer at work. And now – I want to hear other people’s stories. 

I’ll be interviewing people from all walks of life, from hardworking queer people behind the scenes, to more familiar faces you might have never known even had the coming out stories they’re about to share. 

That’s what it’s all about: OUTcast is me and my guests sharing stories, creating a space for us all to talk, to listen, and to celebrate being proud queer people in the world today.

You can follow us on social media @OUTcastLGBT and you can find us online at outcastpod.com.

[01:44]

This week, I’m speaking with Gogglebox Australia star, Tim Lai.

As well as appearing on the popular Australian reality show, Tim is Marketing Manager at The Pinnacle Foundation, a charity that provides educational scholarships and mentoring for young LGBTQ+ Australians.

Tim was born in Penang in Malaysia, and moved to Australia with his family when he was nine. He now lives in Melbourne with his fiancé, Mark, and their Boston Terrier, River.

I first met Tim when I worked for Gogglebox Australia, and I can’t wait to catch up with him again and find out about his coming out journey.

Tim – welcome to OUTcast.

[02:22]

Tim: Thank you so much for having me. I’m absolutely besotted to actually work with you again.

[02:28]

Rosie: Yeah! I loved working with you at Gogglebox, and I’m just delighted to have you here. Thanks for giving us your time. 

Tim, what’s your coming out story?

[02:38]

Tim: Well, my coming story actually happened a very, very long time ago. It was actually in high school. I attended a private all-boys school, Haileybury College. Like all good Asian boys, or Asian kids, I was academic. But I also excelled at sports: I played tennis in summer and I was on the first hockey team in winter. My mum actually played hockey for Malaysia, in her youth.

[03:01]

Rosie: Oh wow.

[03:02]

Tim: So, carrying on the family line. And like other good Asian kids I played violin. But I had an inkling that something didn’t feel right through high school. When my other classmates, my friends, my circle, would start talking about girls and going out on dates, I didn’t feel that urge to comply.

But also, apart from sexuality, I really struggled with my ethnicity; with being Asian. 

I had this, I suppose, internalised racism against myself. I felt that I was continually stereotyped in pop culture, in public, and even at school, for being Asian. 

[03:42]

So I tried to break the mould by playing sports, singing, acting, all my friends were white – I was always the token person of colour in all our social circles. I didn’t want to be Asian.

And my best mate through school actually couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to embrace my heritage, and he said, “Tim, I’m a redhead so I totally understand where you’re coming from, because we are both persecuted equally badly.”

[04:06]

Rosie: Okay. 

[04:07]

Tim: But anyway, I remember I was in Year 12 and we’d just finished our high school musical – it was ’Oklahoma!’ Don’t ask how a bunch of white Aussies and one Asian kid pulled it off.

A bunch of us crashed at my best mate’s mum’s house in St Kilda. It overlooked the bay, it was just gorgeous. I woke up early – I’m an early riser – and I went into the kitchen and his aunt was there. And we started chatting and, all of a sudden, I blurted out to her – I don’t know why I blurted it out to her – I said, “I think I’m gay”. 

[04:38]

And it was actually the very first time I said it out loud. And I was worried because I wanted to get her opinion and her counsel on whether my best mate could handle it, and whether I should tell him or would I risk losing him as a friend?

And at that point she didn’t say anything. She just got up and marched out of the kitchen and I thought, “Oh crikey! What have I done?” But then she came back, grabbed my mate who was still hungover, came in and she said, “you two need to talk, and be honest to each other.”

[05:08]

So I told him I was gay and that I was struggling with it, and that I should have told him because didn’t want to lose him as a friend. 

And at that point he then told me he was gay too!

[05:17]

Rosie: Oh wow. 

[05:18]

Tim: It was like a mutual coming out story and it just felt so right. We’d been in each other’s pockets pretty much through our entire high school. It was so cathartic, and then he said, “Tim, did you know that my aunt is also a lesbian, my other aunt’s a lesbian, my mum’s gay, and my sister’s gay too?”

So, I really won the jackpot there.

[05:40]

Rosie: Yeah, so you really didn’t realise his family had so many LGBTQ+ people in it? I’m guessing that chat went well?

[05:55]

Tim: Pretty much! “I’m not the one you should be talking to. You should be talking to each other!”

And we did, and it was the best thing ever. We clubbed together and pretty much our gay lives were kind of just synchronised. He was like my brother, so nothing happened in that regard.

Probably one of the saddest days for me was when he met his current partner and decided to move to the UK and now lives in Bristol.

[06:14]

Rosie: So you had that beautiful synchronicity with your best friend also coming out to you as gay at the same time as you first came out to him. That meant you could support each other around being out more and more to other people, which would have been amazing. 

But, separate from coming out to people, we do all come out to ourselves internally first: the journey of realising about ourselves, how we might be different, and then the self-acceptance that we all work on being LGBTQ – can you identify when that process of self-realisation and self-acceptance started for you? 

[06:50]

Tim: It was maybe a few months after we moved to Australia, so I was nine. I was an early bloomer, and I remember I was bringing the mail in and I just recall glancing down at the catalogues and I saw the Myer and David Jones catalogues. I suppose they’d be the equivalent to your Marks & Spencer and your Debenhams. I saw a few of the male models and I thought to myself, “ooh, they look good.” Like, it didn’t actually dawn on me what it actually meant. But I know that I wasn’t looking at the female models. I just felt an instant attraction to the men and the boys in the catalogues. 

I think that was the first time I realised that I wasn’t like the other boys in my school. And then I remember, I was still in primary school, and I remember I got a scholarship to attend an all-boys school in high school, and for some reason I felt that I had to go out and find a girlfriend. Because I didn’t want to be a stereotype; I didn’t want people to even assume that I was gay. So I deliberately spent grade six looking for a girlfriend.

[07:54]

Rosie: Aw, Tim. How did that go?

[07:59]

Tim: We actually dated for a few months, through the summer holidays and we kind of just drifted apart before I even started school at Haileybury, but before then I actually then got another girlfriend. I don’t know how I even met her! We must have met on a chat board, and you know, I got a second girlfriend before I even got to high school. And we obviously broke up because I didn’t want a girlfriend. I was using her as I suppose you’d call it a beard, a protection. 

Yeah, so none of that worked out. And it got to a point where I had to either embrace my sexuality or bury it. And, unfortunately for me, I buried it. I didn’t acknowledge my sexuality because I went to an all-boys school. I used my academics, I used my education, as an excuse to not date. I said, “Oh, I’ve got no time for girls, I’ve got to focus on my studies.” Until I came out to my friend.

[08:55]

Rosie: So, when abouts was this, and what was happening around you at the time? 

[09:00]

Tim: It was the 90s, so oh my goodness it was a difficult period. And one of the reasons, I suppose, I had such a hangup about my sexuality was because when I was in high school coming to the point of wanting to come out, it was really towards the ember end of the AIDS epidemic. Here in Australia there was this really God awful, bone-chilling advertisement that had the Grim Reaper spreading HIV and killing everyone. 

[09:28]

Rosie: Oh wow. Of course, there would have been campaigns like that still around then. 

[09:32]

Tim: That was during my formative years. Anti-gay hate was at its absolute height then.

People used religion, HIV epidemic, weaponised it and scapegoated the LGBT community. So I grew up in a time when gays were bashed, beaten and murdered. And the police didn’t help, because some of the police were not innocent and were the ones who perpetrated a lot of the hate, in the name of law and decency.

[10:00]

Rosie: Mm hmm. I’ve got shivers going down my spine right now. It’s just awful. It seems like that should be so long ago, but that’s within your lifetime and within your coming out journey. It’s so poignant and it’s so sad.

[10:15]

Tim: Revolution happens through fire, and we’ve all gone through that, and I want to say we’ve learnt from it. For the most part, we’re so much better for having gone through those growing pains: as a community; as a world.

[10:30]

Rosie: Yeah. During your teenage years, you kept yourself busy like you said. I think lots of us did a similar thing. But the good thing about kids now in school at that age is that people in school are now talking about being gay, are coming out, and being gay in school. Which is so refreshing, so it’s a very hard journey, and there’s a lot of pain, but then you do make progress. And to look at the current generation, kind of yeah being out in school, or probably not having a gender identity even… having this wonderful openness, and this wonderful sort of liberation away from horrible traditional restraint is incredible. 

[11:06]

Tim: I actually foresee a day when coming out stories are no longer needed.

[11:12]

Rosie: That’s ironically my goal with OUTcast Podcast. At the moment I feel like we all need coming out stories, or certainly I do still, to feel I’m not the only one who’s been through this stuff. And I know that so many other people need support. But I’m hoping by telling more and more coming out stories, and by adding to the stories already out there on the internet, on other podcasts, et cetera, we’ll help create an openness and inspiration and role models, that all helps change discourse and experiences around LGBTQ+ people. 

Hence not needing coming out stories any more! One day we can look back and say, “remember when we made podcasts about this stuff? That’s not needed.” 

[11:58]

Tim: Aw, I see that within our lifetime. I feel optimistic. I have faith and hope.

[12:05]

Rosie: Me too.

[12:23]

Rosie: One of my guests Sarah Jones put it beautifully the other week that we’re always coming out, even to ourselves. Where do you find it hardest to be an out LGBTQ+ person, if anywhere at all?

[12:38]

Tim: Well, I’m out to my entire family – here in Australia, and even in Asia. I created this fantasy, this narrative, in my brain that Asians err on the side of conservatism. They’re not very open minded when it comes to sexuality, so I was always fearful about coming out to my grandparents. 

But the reality was that I actually didn’t have to come out to them. My partner and I just celebrated our 22nd anniversary. 

[13:07]

Rosie: Oh, congratulations!

[13:09]

Tim: And I remember one of my cousins was getting married in Penang in Malaysia where I was born. And I invited my partner to join me as a friend initially, as a friend to my grandparents. But all my cousins, all my aunts, they all knew I was out and I was gay, and it was fine in Malaysia. It was just my grandparents. 

And they met him, they were so impressed that he could use a chopstick, they absolutely loved him, and they said, “Oh, you’re a very good friend to Tim.”

And I remember a few years later I was working in Singapore, so I would fly back to Penang every weekend to visit my grandparents and they would always ask, “Oh, where’s Mark? Why isn’t he here? Is he in the hotel room? Tell him that he can come visit us whenever he wants.”

[13:52]

Rosie: Yeah.

[14:53]

Tim: So that was their way to say, “we know he’s not a friend, we know he’s more to you and he’s welcome here because we want to feed him.”

Asians show community and family through the stomach: if they’ll feed you, it means we care about you. 

[14:08]

Rosie: That’s beautiful. 

[14:10]

Tim: Yeah. So once again I was this one who created this barrier by thinking that my family, or my grandparents, wouldn’t accept it. But they did. They did, and they were so embracing of my partner. 

[14:24]

Rosie: I was speaking to somebody the other day and they said it in such a nuggety special way, but they said, “we all seem to have a bit of a blocker when it comes to our grandparents, or our grandparents’ generation, but it’s perhaps the wrong way to look at it because they’ve been through so much. You’re going to have to do a lot to shock them.” 

That hit me a bit, because I had a similar situation with my grandparents. I had lots of close female friends, some would be partners, some wouldn’t be. And I never really came out to them, but they must have realised that I never had a special man in my life the way my sister did. I always had special women. And eventually my, now my wife – she was my girlfriend  at the time – she came to my auntie’s wedding. So my grandparents had it put in front of them and they didn’t seem to be particularly happy about it. 

But, over time, gradually they’ve got used to the idea and they absolutely love my wife, and they’re really supportive and sweet. And I think if I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t have had that doubt and I would have just come out to them. Me not giving them the respect of telling them was worse than just telling them.

[15:34]

Tim: Absolutely. Yeah I have a similar I suppose coming out story to my parents. I once again didn’t give them the benefit of the doubt of that intellectual intelligence to accept my sexuality so once again I created this false narrative about whether they’ll accept me or not. And I remember when I actually did come out to Mum, she’d just picked me up from ballroom dancing – a), that should have been a clue! – and we were arguing in the car. And I used my sexuality as a weapon. I thought that I could hurt my mum and win this argument by saying, “I’m gay, you’re never going to have grand kids!” And in the heat of the moment I threw out my sexuality to her.

And she said, “Tim, I’ve known about it since probably before you realised you were. Like, I have no problems with it. That’s your hang up, not mine. And did you know that your Dad’s best friend was the first person to contract HIV in Australia, and is a huge advocate and supporter of the LGBTQI movement in Australia?”. I had no idea any of this.

[16:39]

Rosie: That’s such a connection and, yeah, sometimes we don’t realise our parents had lives before us and that was your dad’s experience.

Tim: Yeah.

[17:04]

Rosie: You mentioned that through school struggling with your sexual orientation, but also you talked about being an Asian in Australia. What has that journey been – accepting yourself in that context, and then embracing your heritage?

[17:20]

Tim: I grew up in a primarily white environment. Back in my days I didn’t have any Asian friends. At the private school I went to, there weren’t that many Asian classmates in my year, and even if there were, I deliberately stayed away from them because, once again, I had this internalised racism against myself.

I even recall recording Neighbours and  Home and Away and replaying the tape so that I could actually change my accent, so I sounded more Australian. That’s how much I wanted to fundamentally change myself. And looking back in hindsight, that was absolutely so wrong.

[18:00]

Rosie: Yeah, it’s heartbreaking.

[18:03]

Tim: But, the unfortunate thing is racism within mainstream Australia was prevalent back then and it still is.

Rosie: Mm hmm.

[18:10]

Tim: But discrimination within the LGBTQI community was even greater. And it’s hard to believe that when you’re on apps or you’re in clubs, that lines like “no Asians”, “no curries”, even “Gooks go home.” I had that when I went to a gay club here in Melbourne. 

[18:31]

Rosie: Oh my God, that’s awful.

[18:33]

And that actually hurts me because it’s unbearable to think that such a heavily marginalised group of people voluntarily discriminate against another minority demographic.

I just find it challenging, as well, when you look at boards and management teams and decision-makers for LGBTQ+ charities and not-for-profits, and the diversity ends with white cis-gendered men and women.

Rosie: Yeah.

Tim: And it’s just a slap in the face. These not-for-profits are meant to represent all of the Australian community, and represent every colour of the rainbow. And to this day, 2021, I still feel marginalised. 

[19:14]

Rosie: Is it getting better in any way?

[19:16]

Tim: I think it is. It’s definitely better in 2021 versus obviously 1996, because I remember in Australia we’d be driving down the street and people would be winding the windows down, yelling, “go back where you came from, get back on the boat, we don’t want you”.

In fact, I want to say a year-and-a-half ago, Leanne used to manage our social media. So, when we first started Gogglebox Leanne primarily managed our Gogglebox social media, but about a year, year-and-a-half ago, a few months into the whole COVID, coronavirus back then, pandemic started, there was a rising anti-Asian hate.

[19:58]

Rosie: Mmm. I know that happened in the UK and US and elsewhere as well. 

[20:05]

Tim: Leanne actually was at the butt because she was managing our social media. A lot of DMs and a lot of messages and posts about our ethnicity, and it just got so much that she actually says, “Tim, I can’t do this any more,” and she says, “Tim, either you take over our social media or we just shut it down”. 

I took over and I now manage it, and I’ve got a much thicker skin. I won’t hold back from calling BS: I’ll call these people out.

[20:34]

Rosie: Good. I mean, it’s born of ignorance so all you can do really is, in a constructive way, call it out. And I suppose your experience perhaps of being LGBTQ+ gives you that extra experience in dealing with these kinds of comments perhaps. Even though it’s horrible to have to say that.

[20:55]

Tim: Mmm. I’ve got a lot of indigenous Australian friends, so I’m also aware of, whether it’s intentional or non-intentional, the racial microaggression of our First Nations people. It’s painful. So I think it’s anyone who doesn’t fit into this mould of people’s expectations of what they think is ‘normal’ is just scapegoated. They don’t understand us so we are going to be at the butt end of their jokes. 

In fact, it was today I just read an article that a prominent Channel 7 News reporter – and I say that very loosely, you can’t see me use air quotes – but she was off reality shows in Australia, she’s an influencer, and she only recently posted a video of a cat in a Chinese restaurant, saying, “is this a customer or is this lunch?”.

[21:48]

Rosie: Oh wow. 

[21:52]

Yeah, I mean thankfully she was called out, and I don’t like using the terminology ‘Cancel Culture’, but she’s been cancelled. She’s lost all her sponsorships and she’s been suspended.

[22:02]

Rosie: Yeah, I’m the same. I’m sensitive about the word ‘cancel’ because I think people have backlashed against it and used it as a criticism of the ‘Woke Left’ – I’m kind of doing air quotes, for the benefit of the podcast. But it’s good. I think it has to have consequences, because then if you look at the harsh consequence – someone no longer reading the news, whatever it is, losing their sponsorships – you then look at why, and then you might stop and think for a moment, and think actually, “why did they suffer such a consequence to what they just did? Oh, I understand now.” Then the behaviour should gradually stop.

[22:37]

Tim: Hopefully. I think we’re seeing less and less prevalence of this within metropolitan Australia. I think when you go to more regionalised areas where exposure to diversity is less, I think you’ll find more fringe discrimination.

[22:53]

Rosie: Yeah. Yeah. And in terms of the LGBTQ+ community, what do you think the biggest issues facing the community are today?

[23:03]

Tim: Wow. I think there is this huge misconception that since Australia achieved marriage equality that life for LGBT people has become easier. For some, that may be true, but not for many. 

I work for, and I donate a lot of my time to, an LGBTQI+ charity here in Australia, and our research actually has shown that young LGBTQ+ adults are up to 11 times more likely to attempt self harm and suffer psychological distress – in terms of experience of stigma, prejudice, discrimination, bullying and abuse – than normalised youths. And it’s painful. It’s 2021 and we’re still having this conversation, but once again, we haven’t got gender equality here either. There is still a significant gap between the opportunities for men versus women, and until we can have equality across the board, we have not reached equality. 

[24:09]

Rosie: Mm hmm. And you mention the charity you work for. What work do they do?

[24:16]

Tim: I work for The Pinnacle Foundation. We provide scholarships, mentoring and support to underprivileged LGBTQI+ youths here in Australia. And we’ve got some great corporate partners as well as great social initiatives from our board. Our chairman is the CEO of the Arts Centre and we have a very diverse group of executives and leaders, who believe that education is what gives young people of Australia the opportunity to succeed and to contribute back to society.

[24:51]

Rosie: It must be amazing to do this as your day job and get to really fly the flag.

[25:01]

Tim: Well, yeah. It’s a 180 for me. I used to work in big tech. Prior to the Pinnacle Foundation, I was the Asia-Pacific Director for an agency called Mi9 and it was all about analytics and deep-diving into information, and trying to get as much out of people, through data that we’d collected about them. And I felt dirty and I felt that I wasn’t ethically doing the right thing. So much so that I almost gave myself a heart attack. 

I remember I was on site and I actually blacked out. As I went down, I smashed my head against the boardroom table and I came to in the hospital. And that was a cathartic lightbulb moment, “Tim, you need to do a 180 because if you continue down this path you’re going to kill yourself.”

And I did a 180, completely did a career change, moved from technology to philanthropy. 

[26:05]

Rosie: Such a good move. And, you’re on Gogglebox Australia, which is now back for Season…

Tim: Fourteen!

Rosie: Season Fourteen. How has Gogglebox changed your life? 

[26:19]

Tim: It has but it hasn’t. One thing about Leanne and I is we don’t watch Gogglebox. We used to, and before we got on it was one of our favourite shows. In fact, Gogglebox UK is one of my favourite shows. 

[26:32]

Rosie: Ah, so good.

Tim: I love it. We were supposed to have a road trip around the United Kingdom, you know, down from Penzance right up to the Scottish Highlands. We were supposed to go on this massive road trip this year. Obviously with COVID that didn’t happen, so I’ve been re-watching Gogglebox UK, just as a, I suppose, an auditory road trip for me, so I can hear the beautiful accents and all the sense of humour.

But for us, we don’t watch Gogglebox Australia. I just cannot stand hearing my voice. 

[27:04]

Rosie: I know the feeling, and I started this podcast! So every time I edit it, you know, it’s a lot to get used to.

I feel like we’re living parallel lives as well – when we had the first lockdown in March 2020 I went right back to the beginning of Gogglebox UK and started re-watching it, and became such a huge fan, and my lockdown is characterised by these long work hours, from home, in front of the computer, and then moving just about a metre to the couch. And sitting down and binging Gogglebox, and it really did get me through, because you feel like you’re friends with everyone. And it’s the same with Gogglebox Australia: us watching it, we feel like you’re our friends, and we know you, and we’re catching up with you each week. It’s really incredible.

[27:50]

Tim: Well, I suppose that’s the thing, because the main premise is we’re not celebrities. And I don’t see myself as a public figure. I don’t. I feel that I am still your next door neighbour. And I think that’s what’s endearing about all of us – there is that sense of naivety where we’re not media trained, what you see and what you hear us say is not produced, we’re not prompted, we’re not scripted. So whatever rubbish I say, unfortunately is what I said. So I’ve got no excuse or I can’t blame anyone. 

[28:23]

So because of that, I think people feel that they know us. I’ve been approached quite a few times. In fact, a few people actually approach me and say, “How do I know you?”. I remember once at my local Woolworths supermarket, my partner and I were going through the self-checkout and one of the team members walked past, saw me, screamed at the top of her voice, and ran away. And then came back ten minutes later and said, “I’m so sorry. I love you guys. Oh my God, I cannot believe you’re actually real.”

[28:54]

Rosie: Awww. That’s so nice.

Tim: Some people still believe we film in a studio. I said, “no, I live in Dingley. This is in my lounge!”.

[29:03]

Rosie: Yeah. It’s incredible what conceptions people have of the show actually. Some people totally get it. I think they know that film crews come to your house, and sort of how it all works. But others, yeah, they’re sort of… there’s all these, they’re not conspiracies, they’re sort of gentle conspiracies and theories about how the show is made, or why it works and things like that. It must be funny to hear those.

[29:26]

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. I love the ones where people think that Leanne is my girlfriend.

Rosie: Interesting. Interesting. 

Tim: Yes. Which is wrong on so many levels. 

Rosie: Yeah.

Tim: Um, I had this gorgeous old lady walk up to me when I was in the shopping centre once and she says, “Oh, I love you on the Googlebox”.

[29:46]

Rosie: Wow.

Tim: And you and your girlfriend are beautiful. When are you going to propose to her?

Rosie: How did you handle that?

Tim: I actually then just said, “Oh, you know that’s actually my sister. So, probably won’t be proposing to her until I move to Tasmania.” 

Rosie: Oh, brilliant.

Tim: I think that’s the beauty of the Gogglebox followers. They understand that we are normal people.

Rosie: Yeah.

Tim: And for the most part they are so supportive of us, and I love that.

[30:14]

Rosie: Yeah. It’s so beautiful to watch how people interact with the show. 

[30:35]

Rosie: How can we all be allies to the LGBTQ+ community, or the diversity of people within it?

Tim: I have an acronym for this. I call it my L.L.E.

Tim: Which is Learn, Listen and Educate. So this is for our extended rainbow families and our allies. Actively listen when someone comes out to you, or tells you about their life and their story; their struggles and tribulations. Actively listen. 

Be respectful when you ask your questions, and just use your own initiative and actually read up and learn about the LGBTQI+ community: about the struggles that we’ve had to face, and I think it’s through that. Listening and educating yourself I think will put you in good stead with most of us, because there is nothing worse than someone coming up to me, and asking inane questions about sex versus my sexuality. Because, what they really want to know is, “are you a top or are you a bottom?” and that’s just not a suitable topic of conversation that I want to have with a stranger. 

[31:39]

Rosie: Yeah. It’s a really good point and it often goes back to that, which is bizarre because we don’t grow up asking our parents what their favourite position is, we don’t hear someone’s engaged to be married as a heteronormative couple but need to find out what happens under the duvet. It’s very strange.

Tim: It really is. Yeah.

Rosie: I love that. L.L.E. Yeah, once you do know the struggle it doesn’t hurt to try and pass that on as an ally. I love that. 

[32:07]

Rosie: If you could tell your young, not-yet-out self something to comfort yourself, or reassure yourself, what would that be?

[32:16]

Tim: I don’t want to sound cliché, but I actually wouldn’t want to say or do anything to change my younger self. I went through a lot of emotional turmoil, and a lot of self doubt and self hate. 

But I’ve also watched a lot of science fiction horrors to know that the Butterfly Effect is real! And I’m proudly the byproduct of all my experiences: my trials, my tribulations, my pain. I’m the sum of my hangups, my self doubt, anxiety and victories, and if I change anything in my past, I’m not going to be who I am today. I’m not going to have my life, my opportunities. Yeah, I’ve got all this because of who I was and what I’ve gone through. And I wouldn’t want to change a single second of that.

[33:01]

Rosie: Amen to that. That’s a really, really good point. Really good point. And what gives you hope today, or for the future?

[33:11]

Tim: I live in a traditionally non-diverse white suburban community here in Melbourne. I’m surrounded by retirees or young families with children. My partner and I have been here coming on 12 years, we’ve bought this house, and we’ve been embraced by everyone in my suburb and in this street. My neighbours have become my friends. We WhatsApp, we Facebook Chat, and we’re part of the street, we’re part of the community, and I think that’s what gives me hope.

You know, I agree that positive change needs to happen on the Federal level, in Federal courts. top-level down. But, for me, I believe in the macro of the suburban street, and that’s what gives me hope: that I’ve never experienced any sense of homophobia or discrimination from my home and from my street or my suburb.

[34:06]

Rosie: Yeah. It’s really beautiful to find a community like that.

Aw, it’s been amazing to chat. Thanks so much for sharing your story with us. 

[34:17]

Tim: No, seriously, thank you so much for having me on. I’ve absolutely loved reconnecting with you, and also sharing my life story with your listeners.

[34:28]

Rosie: Thank you for listening to OUTcast, a podcast with interviews and coming out stories from inspiring LGBTQ+ people. 

I’m your host, Rosie Pentreath. I hope you can join us again next week.

OUTcast S1, Ep 3 • 11 Oct 2021 • 54:40

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00]

Rosie: Welcome to another episode of OUTcast, the podcast where we share coming out stories from inspiring LGBTQ+ people all over the world. 

I’m Rosie Pentreath, your host. I identify as a lesbian woman, and I’ve shared my coming out story in personal settings, in online articles, and as part of LGBTQ+ panels on coming out and being queer at work. And now, I want to hear other people’s stories. 

I’ll be interviewing people from all walks of life – from hardworking queer people behind the scenes, to more familiar faces you might have never known even had the coming out stories they’re about to share. 

That’s what it’s all about: OUTcast is me and my guests sharing stories, creating a space for us all to talk, to listen, and to celebrate being proud queer people in the world today.

You can follow us on social media at @OUTcastLGBT and you can find us online at outcastpod.com. 

It’s great to have you with us.

[01:13]

Rosie: This week, we are joined by Victor Iringere. Victor is a Nigerian refugee who lives in Birmingham with his husband. He works at Coventry Refugee and Migrant Centre, and campaigns for refugee and LGBTQ+ rights. 

He was born in Lagos in Nigeria, and was from a religious family. He has been subjected to conversion therapy, exorcisms, starvation and violence due to his sexuality, and he sought asylum based on his sexual orientation in 2017 in the UK. 

He was granted asylum in 2019, but not before becoming homeless due to the current UK legislation preventing asylum seekers from having employment. 

Victor’s story is honest, heartbreaking, shocking and just harrowing. But it ends with hope – he is happily married, a proud gay man, and living here in the UK safely. 

Before I start this episode, I do want to warn listeners that Victor’s story does contain triggering details around mental illness, conversion therapy and violent homophobia. But it is also incredibly hopeful and loving. He’s truly an inspiring and beautiful human, and I feel privileged to have met him.

He also had some building work going on in the background of our chat, so there may be some fluctuation in the quality of this recording. But it’s not a story you’re going to want to miss, so I had to include everything. 

[02:40]

Rosie: Victor – welcome to OUTcast.

Victor: Thank you. Thank you, Rosie.

Rosie: You have an extraordinary story to share – it’s heartbreaking, but I think it’s important that people hear it so we can spread awareness of what it’s like to be an LGBTQ+ person from Nigeria. 

Victor: Absolutely.

[02:59]

Rosie: Tell us a bit about yourself. You identify as gay, and you’re married and you live in Birmingham…

[03:04]

Victor: That is correct, yes. I’m a 27-year-old gay refugee from Nigeria with a mental health illness and I’m Black. I think I tick a few diversity points to be honest!

I was born in Nigeria to a medical doctor, my mother is a doctor, and my father, he never quite landed on any profession. He didn’t have a very easy life, so I grew up with my mother and my sister in Lagos. 

And I lived in Nigeria until I was 19, when I came to the UK – Coventry, specifically – for university. And I did that for four years, and then went back to Nigeria for ten months and then, after that, I had to flee and come back to the UK and start over here and try to make it my home. 

[03:55]

Rosie: And we’re going to find out more about your story as we chat. What was your childhood like, first of all?

[04:02]

Victor: There was a lot of love. My mother is an amazing, amazing human being. I think of her as a superhero, almost. You know, when we were very young, she never expected to be a single parent. She had to make the decision for her safety and for the safety of me and my sister, to become a single parent. And that was incredibly difficult for her, a young unmarried, or divorced woman, raising two children in the 90s in Nigeria wasn’t very easy.

We were under a military dictatorship at the time as well, and so even though she worked for a government hospital, there was so much corruption that sometimes she wouldn’t get paid for months. And so she had to take, at one point, two extra jobs, two evening jobs in clinics, and I think she did that for years, just to take care of us and ensure we got the best education and we didn’t suffer a lack.

[05:04]

So she worked a lot, she worked very hard and she gave us everything that we could possibly need. She kind of carried it all on her own, so, you know, for a large part it was happy.

[05:20]

Rosie: Mm hmm.

[05:22]

Victor: You know, it wasn’t without its challenges, especially as I started to hit my teen years. Things started to go downhill as I started to realise more and more that I was different from all the people around me. And I didn’t understand why, lots of people didn’t understand why, so there was a lot of pain as well, sort of in my later childhood. So it was very mixed, it was very mixed.

[05:47]

Rosie: Mmm, your mum sounds like an extraordinary woman.

[05:51]

Victor: She is. She is, absolutely.

[05:54]

Rosie: Yeah. So, you describe feeling different. When did it start to creep in that you knew you might be gay?

[06:01]

Victor: I didn’t have a word for it. Even before I knew I was different, everybody told me that I was. The earliest incident, or one of the earliest incidents I can remember, I was five, I was in nursery, and I remember I’d come to school wearing girl’s socks. They were very flowery. I don’t know why I chose that sock, or why those socks were chosen for me, but I liked them. And I got made fun of by my friends and teachers for wearing girl’s socks.

And through the years, there were a lot more incidents. People told me I acted like a girl, I looked like a girl. It wasn’t like an innocent observation, it was almost like an accusation.

[06:43]

Victor: I didn’t understand what I was guilty of. In school I wasn’t interested in a lot of the things that the other boys were interested in. I had no interest in football, I wasn’t as strong as they were, I didn’t want to play the same games as the boys wanted to play, so most of the time on the playground I’d be with the girls playing. 

I remember one time, for example, while the other boys in the neighbourhood were out downstairs playing football, I was with the girls sewing clothes for Barbies. That was the sort of thing I was interested in, so I knew I was different. I didn’t understand why, and I didn’t have a word for it.

Rosie: Yeah.

[07:25]

Victor: I think the first time I had a word for it was in church, when I was about 11 or 12, and they preached against homosexuality. And it dawned on me, “oh my God, that’s me.” But also, actually, when I got into secondary school at 11, that was the first time that people called me gay or homosexual. But I didn’t internalise it, I think, until I heard it in church, and they preached against it, and I started to think, “hold on a minute, I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel.”

Because when I started to hit puberty, I wanted to hang out with the boys, but not because I wanted to play the same games as them. I just, you know, liked them and I wanted to be around them, you know. That was when it started to dawn on me that I was gay.

And I will say, as well, that, up until I was 16 or so, even though I had had the language for it, and I’d understood it as a sin, I still felt very alone. I was convinced that there were maybe ten gay people at a maximum in Nigeria. I didn’t think that there was anyone around me who was feeling the same things, or who understood the same things, or who was the same.

[08:34]

Rosie: Yeah. Of course you know that’s not true now, and I think it’s so important to know that there are people going through the same thing as you, and that’s a crucial part of self-acceptance and coming out. In terms of the way they were preaching against homosexuality, was it quite passionate, strong preaching against it specifically? Or was it sort of more mentioned within sermons?

[08:58]

Victor: Oh, it was very passionate. I think the only thing that was more vilified than homosexuality was being transgender. 

I was a Sunday School teacher, I think from the age of 14 or so. Before Sunday School, we would meet on Saturday – all the teachers – to kind of discuss the material and prepare the lessons that we were going to teach on Sunday. 

And I remember one of those discussions, the topic was sexual immorality. When you talk about sexual immorality, the top thing that comes to mind is homosexuality. I remember they said all other sins are sins, but homosexuality is an abomination. And that was lifted from Leviticus, you know, so it was considered worse than any kind of other sin as far as I was taught. And the only thing that was worse than it was being transgender: the way that they explained it was that, when you decide that you are better able to create humans than God, and you’ve taken the body that God has given you and you’ve spat in God’s face and said that He’s wrong and you change yourself into something that God hasn’t made you to be, then you are a living, walking abomination.

[10:11]

Rosie: We have an incredible episode of OUTcast featuring a transgender Anglican priest, who explains her approach to this question really, really well. She explains how her belief in God works side-by-side with her gender, and how she made that journey, and it’s an incredible listen. 

For listeners of the podcast as well, for context it is illegal to be homosexual in Nigeria. Victor, where do you think such a strong, anti-LGBTQ+ approach comes from, in Nigeria?

[10:49]

Victor: I think it’s a mixture of a lot of different things, you know. And I have spent some time thinking about it. One thing I know is that homophobia was not our culture, it was something that was imported with colonialism. That’s absolutely true.

However, as happens with a lot of trauma, I think one of the things that happens is, when you’re made to feel like you’re less than – for example, Nigerians living in Nigeria under colonial rule couldn’t do certain jobs, their lives were very limited, they were very much second class citizens – one of the only things you have to hold on to is the fact that there’s other people you are better than. 

And, religion served up that scapegoat on a platter. There’s very much that sort of, “yeah, I might be suffering, yeah things might be bad for me, but I’m still better than that person, they’re a walking abomination. At least I’m doing my best to be right with God but they’re not.” So I think there’s that.

Obviously there’s patriarchy as well. The reason why – and this is something that is seen across a lot of homophobic societies, certainly in Nigeria – lesbianism is more permitted than homosexuality, because it’s not taken as seriously. But then I believe that’s also due to patriarchy, because patriarchy says that women don’t own their sexuality. Women’s sexuality is a tool to pleasure men, and so if a man thinks, “actually I can be okay with two women getting along, it gives me pleasure”, that’s more permissible. 

On the reverse side, when you’re a man in a patriarchal society, and it’s almost like you’ve won the DNA lottery, you’ve kind of won a lottery at birth where you have more privilege by virtue of your gender. One thing that we know about oppressive power structures is that they are very, very weak, very, very susceptible to threats, because they oppress people by the very nature of being oppressive. So one of the only ways that you can hold on to that power is by keeping other people in line. So when a man does things that a man isn’t supposed to do, quote unquote, you know when a man decides to take on the role of a woman, sexually, in a relationship, what have you, it’s almost like a slap in the face to the patriarchy because it says, well, “why have you decided to give up power? What is wrong with you?” And then other people who are benefitting from that system feel threatened, as well. So I think that that misogyny is a big part of it, as well.

So there’s the religion, there’s that culture or there’s that history of trauma and oppression, and how Christianity and Islam were introduced into Nigeria, and how people were scapegoated. There’s that fear, there’s that patriarchy, and also, you know, there’s just the lack of understanding. We fear the things that we don’t understand.

When the only gay people that you’ve ever heard of are described as peodophiles or as abominations, people just think, “well if you’re that depraved, what else won’t you do?” So I think there’s also a lot of fear of the unknown, and I think it’s a very complex thing that can’t very easily be explained or solved, but there are a lot of factors that have created this system and those factors continue to feed it. 

[14:42]

Rosie: Yeah, it is incredibly complex and I think it’s such a demonstration of how one issue leads to another issue leads to another issue, and this trauma that you speak about is creating this sort of will to survive in people. It’s almost like a survival mechanism to create that hatred and pulling people down, because you want to just get by, and that’s almost what’s happening in the leadership, by the sounds of it. 

Victor: Absolutely. Absolutely. 

[15:25]

Rosie: Once you realised that you were gay, you’ve spoken about confessing that to a priest, is that right? 

[15:33]

Victor: The first time I spoke to my pastor about it, I think I was about 14 or 15, but I realised I was gay when I was about 11 or 12. So those years were years of silence, because as far as I knew, there was a sin inside of me. I had all these sins in the Bible that I had to take care of by praying, by getting closer to God, by practicing the things that I’m supposed to practice: speaking in tongues, and praising God, and dedicating my life to the service of God, and begging God to heal me of this sin. 

I did that on my own for three or four years. The first time I spoke to my pastor about it, I think I’d gotten to a point where I’d been praying and fasting for a long time, and I felt like I needed some help, so I went to one of my pastors and I told him.

[16:27]

I will never forget the look on his face when I was explaining to him the things that I was feeling and what I was doing about them. It was almost like a puzzled disgust. It was almost like, I don’t know, it was almost like I’d been explaining to him how I go to the sewers every day and drink a bucket of poo. It was that kind of reaction that you would expect to see when you said something like that. 

He said to me I needed to fast and that he was going to pray for me and help deliver me. And one thing that he said that puzzled me – and I don’t know why he said it – he said he wasn’t going to pray to God to take away my feelings, because taking away my feelings would make me inhuman. But he was going to pray to God to give me the grace to deal with them. 

Now that flew in the face of everything that we’d been taught, that I understood, that they taught in church; that he taught in church. So I didn’t understand why God couldn’t just take away the sin. Even if I didn’t do anything about it, when I saw a boy I was attracted to him. I felt that I was committing the sin of lust, but it was worse than the sin of lust because I was lusting after another man. So it was the sin of lust and homosexuality. And so it’s like, “okay, but you’re not actually taking away the sin. You’re just telling me to cope with it.”

[18:02]

Rosie: Did it change your view of God? Did it change your religion? 

[18:05]

Victor: No. No. No absolutely not. Absolutely not. Because one thing that I’d been taught about God was that God was loving and God was merciful and God was kind. 

So by the time I got to 16, about two years after this, that was when I had my first relationship with another boy in my class. We became friends, we were very attracted to each other, and then we started to explore with each other sexually. 

There was a lot of guilt around that, you know, I felt very guilty. And in all of this, of course I never blamed God because I’d been taught, I knew that God was perfect. It was described to me that when you consistently live in sin, God will turn his face away from you. 

At the time I was dealing with a lot of depression, but I understood this as God turning his face away from me. So, really, I just kept going on and on trying to find my way back to grace with God. So I was not angry at God, I was ashamed at myself. I felt unworthy. I felt like a fraud. 

It got to a point when, every time I would go to church on Sundays, and they would start the worship, which is the slow music that helps you to connect with the spirit of God, it would get too difficult for me to be there and I’d run into the bathroom and I’d stay in the bathroom for about half-an-hour just crying, because I felt so horrible, I felt so guilty, I felt so unworthy. How dare I stand in the presence of God, how dare I stand with all these holy people knowing what’s inside of me.

[19:45]

You know the Macklemore song, ‘Same Love’, that bit where it goes, “I’m not crying on Sundays”. That hit me, and I was like, “wait, crying on Sundays was literally my teenage life.” I was like, “I connect with this so much.” I was crying on Sundays because I would go to church and feel like I was unworthy. 

[20:04]

Rosie: I’m so sorry, that’s so awful. It’s awful. That terrible choked up depression you felt. I think I can guess what the answer is to this, but are you still religious in any way?

[20:16]

Victor: I’m not religious, no. I consider myself a humanist. However, I have made my peace with religion. My husband is a Christian, and I’ve been able to come to a place where I can appreciate the benefits that it has for other people – the solace and the succour that they get from it. What I get from meditation or mindfulness, a lot of people will get that from religion.

I think I’ve got to a point where I can actually see the benefits of it for other people, while saying this is not for me. So, no I’m not religious but I’m not anti-religion either. I think it has its benefits for people certainly. 

[21:02]

Rosie: Mmm, that’s really strong and inspiring – to see the value for other people, whilst you’ve made your peace and don’t necessarily need it any more. 

So, going back to your story and to the battle inside you between religion and your sexuality when you were younger, what did the conversion therapy you’ve talked about involve?

[21:23]

Victor: There were quite a few, of varying degrees. The first one was obviously just praying and fasting, but they started to get intense after I came out to my mother at 16. That was when the conversion therapy started. 

I don’t remember all of them. I think one of the first ones was, my mother had brought a prophet. He brought this bottle of very dirty water – I don’t know what he put in it – and he brought some really weird soap, and another small bottle of a more concentrated liquid. And so I was supposed to put that liquid in my bath, and I was supposed to shower with the soap, and I was supposed to drink that water every day, and those things were supposed to help cure me. Well obviously that didn’t work.

I also was taken to a church somewhere in Lagos where I had a one-on-one counselling with a pastor, and he put me onto the American-style conversion therapy. So this was actually run by a Christian ministry in America, and there was a number of courses that were supposed to help you change your mind and help correct what’s wrong inside of you. Obviously that didn’t work. That one was called Door of Hope, I remember that.

I was taken to another city where, as part of the conversion therapy, I had to fast every day for two weeks. And so I could only eat once in the evening. I’d spend the entire day in church about three times a week. There was all sorts of things. We’d put lots of denominations of currency on the floor, and there were little bottles of olive oil and I had to sort of dance around them, and break them against stones. I had to roll around the floor from one end of the church to the other. I was basted in coconut water and sand. There’s been a lot, there’s been a lot, and I think every time my mother would open up to someone else, they would suggest another pastor or another priest who they’d heard could cure me.

[23:25]

One of the ones that was probably the most dangerous – and I’m so grateful that I got to escape that – was, a priest was brought in from another city and my mother put him up in a hotel. And he’d come to our house every night and would do all-night prayers, but then he would talk about taking care of me. One of the first things he said to me is, “oh, are you on Facebook? We should be friends. I want you to be friends with me, I want us to be close.” And he also said to me, “I travel a lot, I go abroad for conferences and things, I can take you with me.” 

He was basically trying to groom me, to take advantage of me sexually. And thankfully this happened shortly before I fled. One of the things that he had said was that I was going to have to come to his church in the other city, and spend some time after he gets back from his trips. I knew what was going to happen when I went there, and I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to do anything to stop it. I just knew. This man was a creep. 

And he was doing all of this in a guise of converting gay men into straight men, or running an ex-gay ministery or what have you. And I keep thinking about how many boys have been sent by their parents to their abusers, in the name of trying to find a cure for homosexuality? And, of course, there was nothing that I was ever going to say to anyone that was going to make them believe a homosexual over a man of God.

[25:04]

Rosie: Mmm. Exactly, it doesn’t really bear thinking about. It’s so infuriating and hypocritical and just terrifying, Victor. Let’s bring it back for a minute – in terms of first speaking to your mum, do you remember her reaction?

[25:24]

Victor: It was one of the most horrible things that I have ever experienced and I’ve been through some horrible things in my life. It was the first time I felt that my mother was done with me. 

And when I told her, she didn’t say anything. It’s quite customary for her actually, when she’s faced with difficult emotion or difficult information, she goes away and she processes. And so the first time she spoke to me was, I think, later that night or a couple of nights later. She woke me up in the middle of the night, and she asked me, “what is it in boys that attracts you?”

And then I started talking about my, quote unquote, boyfriend. We didn’t call each other boyfriend, but he was the boy in my class that I’d been with. And I started talking about the things about him that attracted me, and I could feel my face lighting up. I could feel that there was a big smile on my face as I was talking about him. 

And then I caught myself, and I was like,”what am I doing?” and then I looked at her and on her face was this look of horror; of disgust. You know, seeing me talk so deeply about loving another boy. 

She tried, bless her, she tried. She tried to fix me, she tried to find help, you know. She told me that, “look, I know that you’re quite effeminate, and a lot of people have said to me that there’s something wrong with your child because he’s very feminine.” She said, “well no, some people are just creative”. And she said that when she was in uni, she had a classmate, and he as very effeminate, but he was a very lovely person and people used to say that he was gay, and she said, “well, no he’s not, he’s just a very creative person.”

So she said, there’s nothing wrong with being effeminate, it doesn’t mean that you have to be gay. I think that she believed that I had internalised the fact that people had been calling me gay because I was effeminate and then I’d manifested that in myself. 

She was trying to correct that. She spent a lot of time trying to correct that, mostly with religion. 

And then she got more… she would get more upset; more angry. I was 16 at this time, I left Nigeria when I was 19 for the first time, so over those three years, she would try. At first, she tried very hard. It didn’t work, obviously. And then she would get frustrated and she would get angry, and she would stop trusting me. 

I remember when I went away to college for the first time, I sort of started to explore myself and the things I loved, you know, because it was the first time I was away from home. I actually met other gay people – I realised that there’s more then ten gay people in Nigeria! 

One of the first things actually was I found a Facebook Group and there were over a thousand people. It was called Gay Men in Nigeria and I was like, “Oh my God, there are a thousand gay men in Nigeria?”

I actually made some gay friends. I went to a gay party. I started dating, you know, I was trying to explore myself. Obviously I was still conflicted with religion and all of that, but I just needed to find myself, you know? 

And things went downhill when I got outed in class. And it became very dangerous for me, and people were plotting to kill me, and a gun was pulled on one of my closest friends: there were people trying to kill me in school because I was gay. And I had to tell them everything I’d been up to, and at that point, I think, that was when she just thought, “this child is incorrigible.” We’ve been trying to help you, and you just don’t want to be helped. I believed that she was done with me. And the more I grew to understand and accept myself, the more I grew away from the person that she hoped I would be. And I think it just kept breaking her heart over and over and over again.

[29:26]

Rosie: Mmm. Mmm. It does sound like you do have a deep respect for her, in spite of that. Did you gradually manage to rebuild a relationship over the years?

[29:37]

Victor: Yeah. We’re still working on it. It’s been very difficult, but one thing I know is that she did everything she did out of love. And, yes, I carried anger for a very long time, and I might still have some of it. We’ve had a lot of conversations, and recently I started to realise a lot more about myself and my mental illness, and so, that allowed me to put a lot of things that happened when I was growing up into perspective. 

I think where our relationship started to turn around was about two, two-and-a-half years ago. I did an interview in The Guardian. It talked about the night shelter that I slept in when I came to the UK and sought asylum and became homeless. I was excited – ”I’m in The Guardian!” – you know? So I sent it to everyone, and I sent it to her.

And she didn’t respond. And then two days later I thought, “oh my God, you literally just told your mother that you were homeless on the streets of England.” I started to panic, so I called her and I said, “you haven’t spoken to me since I sent you that article.” And she was like, “how would you go through something like that and not tell me?”

And I got angry. And I yelled at her and I said to her, “how could I tell you? What has being honest with you ever gotten me, apart from pain and hurt?” It was the first time I was completely honest with her about the ways that she had hurt me, and the ways that she had taken my honesty and my trying to connect with her, and trying to share my truth, and used it against me. 

We spoke that day, she called me the next day, and she was in tears and she apologised to me. She said, “I failed as a mother” and hearing her say those words broke my heart.

Rosie: Mmm.

[31:26]

Victor: Because I knew that she hadn’t. As angry as I was – and I was angry, I was so angry at her – I knew that she hadn’t failed. I knew that my education, the person I am, my character, a lot of that comes from her. 

I saw the sacrifices that she made, and she wasn’t happy. She had a very difficult life and she was carrying it all on her own. And hearing her say, “I have failed as a mother”, that completely took away my anger, because I love her, and she’s amazing. I know she didn’t fail. She made mistakes and it took me a long time to deal with a lot of the mistakes that she made, and there were a lot. I had to get to a point of realising that she couldn’t do any better, because she didn’t know any better. 

She was as much a product of her surroundings, of her society, as anyone else. And she grew up in a society where she had been taught that this is the way to be a good, upright person.

She felt that she was trying to save me from wasting my life. I had to first of all heal from the hurt. I needed that apology from her, and then I needed to be able to forgive, and remember and realise that she did it all out of love. 

And I think that’s one of the most complicated and difficult things about dealing with homophobia, or about dealing with injustice from the people around you who love you. 

Somebody explained it like this: if you’re sitting in a crowded theatre, and you can see that there’s a fire, you’re going to try and save the people around you even if they can’t see it. If you say, there’s a fire, let’s go and they’re like, “well no, there’s no fire”, they’re going to stay, but you know if they stay they’ll die, so you’ll do whatever you have to do. You’ll punch them in the face if you have to, you’ll push them out, to save their lives. 

But a lot of the time, what the people who are trying to save us from the fire don’t realise is there actually isn’t a fire. And so, you know, in that situation, yes they’re doing it out of the best intentions, but they’re still hurting you. This person I love is still punching me and pushing me and trying to shove me out of the theatre, when I want to watch this film.

[33:54]

Understanding that, it helps, but it’s still hard. There’s still a lot of hard work that has to be done with forgiveness and reconciliation and self love. 

That’s one of the most difficult things I had to learn, was loving myself and valuing myself enough to put myself first.

[34:12]

Rosie: Yeah. 

[34:13]

Victor: And to say, “I’m not going to apologise for who I am. I’m not going to apologise for living my truth. When I’ve done that, and when I’ve made my space for myself, then I can be generous to other people and I can be understanding of them.” 

[34:29]

Rosie: Yeah, mmm hmm. 

[34:30]

Victor: Moving out, finding my own place in the world, starting to build my own life from scratch, that’s helped with that forgiveness journey. 

[34:39]

Rosie: It sounds like the time and space that you have created moving away has allowed you to be incredibly generous. The way you’re speaking is generous, and so open and so understanding. 

[34:52]

Victor: I think we’ve gotten to a point of tolerance, and it’s better than it’s been in a long time, but it still breaks my heart. 

[35:00]

Rosie: It’s such a sort of powerful and heartbreaking demonstration of how damaging homophobia is.

[35:06]

Victor: Absolutely, absolutely. It destroyed my family. It cost me everything. It cost me my home, cost me my family, cost me my friends, and so many times, it almost cost me my life. 

But I’m not the only one who’s suffering. The people around me, they’re suffering too, because of it. And then you multiply that by however many millions of people live in homophobic situations, or grew up in homophobic situations, and you start to appreciate just how much the damage it does in people’s lives is. It’s horrid.

[35:53]

Rosie. Mmm hmm. And it’s something… being gay, being LGBTQ+ is something that has nothing to to do with anyone else outside it, which is the most awful puzzle piece. Because, you know, who we love or who we are is our business, and we’re not asking anyone who’s not interested in; we’re not inviting them in. It’s such a nonsensical, devastating and just disgusting situation in the world, really. 

[36:37]

Rosie: So much did happen to you in Nigeria. You willingly and unwillingly did this conversion therapy. I know you’ve talked about exorcisms and really extreme approaches, but let’s talk about your escape if it’s okay to call it that. Did it time with university in the UK?

[36:55]

Victor: To go to Coventry University, I got a scholarship from the state government to come to the UK for university. And that’s because English universities are just better than Nigerian universities. The government had this thing where they were trying to train young people who were going to help make the country better. They were trying to develop talent, so they thought, “we’ve got to send them to the best schools.” 

So there was the UK, Canada, America, you know, the countries with better education. I sat the exams, I passed, I got on the scholarship. Before I left though, my mum’s best friend said, “I’m not sure if going to the UK is the best thing for him, because there, they celebrate this thing. What’s he going to become when he goes?”

In the end, they agreed it was best for me to have the best education, and that’s why I came to the UK. And coming to the UK really, really did change me. I was sat in a class with people who came from all over the world, who had completely different approaches to life than anybody else that I’d ever grown up with all around, than anything I knew.

It was quite a bit of a shock. It actually taught me, well wait a minute, there isn’t just one way to live and be good, there’s lots of people around you who are living good lives, and they’re happy, and obviously they’re good people, they’re not sinful people who are going to go to hell. 

It caused me to question my religion. It was a lot of things that I was seeing. I remember going to my Nigerian church when I was in uni and noticing that pretty much everybody in the church was Black and Nigerian. And it just made me think, “wait a minute, if our gospel is as powerful as we say, Black Nigerians are the minority in this society, but they are the majority in this church, so clearly maybe this is more about culture than it is about what’s actually right or wrong.” 

Through different lenses, because I was exposed to different information and different ways of life. There was a boy in my class, and we were friends, and he’s Indian and he’s Hindi. And he was talking to me about his Gods, and about his religion, and the fire, the passion, I saw in him as he was talking about his Gods was the same fire and passion that I had when I was talking about my God growing up. And I thought, well surely there’s not that much difference between us? Why am I right and he’s wrong? 

So I actually started to question a lot of things, and that led me down a path of self acceptance. It was slow, it was gradual, it was painful. I had to unlearn a lot of things, but I did. And then it got to the point where I finally accepted myself, and I was like, “I’m a gay man and there’s nothing wrong with that. This was how I was made. This is who I am.”

[39:58]

And then going back to Nigeria, I started to have conversations with my mother, you know, hoping that perhaps she would accept me, or she would understand. I sent her some materials from the American Pediatric Association, some scientific research. She’s a doctor so I thought, okay, she’ll respond to science that shows that, actually, people are just born gay. So, clearly, it’s not unnatural like I’ve been taught. We’ve been wrong. 

And so, going back home after uni, I really, really, really thought that finally I’m going to be able to have a conversation with my mother about who I am. And that, actually, I would be okay. That wasn’t what I got.

[40:38]

Rosie: What did happen?

[40:40]

Victor: I got more conversion therapy, more hostility, interventions… just horridness, which led by month seven of being there, to a depression and, you know, I was ready to die. 

[40:56]

Rosie: Victor, it’s so hard to listen to. I’ve read about your experiences of ongoing conversion therapy and things that were as extreme as exorcisms, so it’s not surprising that you were in that place; that you were ready to take your life. What happened next?

[41:14]

Victor: My life was saved by my friend. When I reached out to him, he didn’t try to convince me that it was worth living –  and I knew I was going to die that year; I was sure I was going to die that year. He just said, “well, you’ve got your graduation in a couple of months. How about you just do that first? Just hang around until then?”

I don’t know if he knew what he was doing when he did that, but I did. I decided I could give it another couple of months. What the heck. I’m going go to my graduation and have a good time anyways. 

[41:50]

I’d been here for a couple of days. I was on a train. I was sat on the train, looking out at the fields, and I felt safe. I had forgotten what feeling safe was. I thought, “I can’t go back.” 

It just, that was when it dawned on me: I can’t go back. 

I didn’t actually leave Nigeria with the intention of fleeing or seeking asylum, you know. Just being removed from immediate trauma and constant re-traumatisation, and of course you know the people around me – the friends who kept encouraging me – it gave me hope and it told me, “actually, maybe there’s a life for you beyond 2017 afterall. Maybe there’s a way to do it.”

[42:40]

Rosie: I’m so sorry, it’s so so sad. It sounds like that friend did truly change your life; saved you. So, you sought asylum in the UK. You’ve described how, when you seek asylum, you’re unable to work, is that right? Due to UK legislation?

[42:59]

Victor: Seeking asylum and coming to the UK, I was safer. There was no immediate physical danger or immediate physical threat to my life. What I didn’t realise was how much re-traumatisation I was going to go through. 

Because – I walked into the system that’s aptly named, ‘The Hostile Environment’. It’s a system that’s designed to keep people out, not to protect or save them.

And so the system works exactly as it is supposed to work. It’s a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of energy, has been spent trying to figure out ways to prevent people from trying to come to the UK to seek asylum. 

You take away people’s right to work, you take away their right to free movement – you can’t live wherever you want to live, you’ve got to go to the Home Office and report once a week, or once a month, and each time you’re going there is a threat that you’ll be taken and put in a detention centre and removed. You’re working in a system where you are not valued as a human being. 

[44:18]

There was not a single officer, in that system, who worked for the Home Office, or G4S at the time – now Circo – who I felt any shred of kindness from. Except one, one lady who worked for G4s. She only came around once and then she was replaced, I don’t know why.

And it’s a system that is deliberately designed to be hostile in every sense. And so, while fleeing homophobia, I was fleeing for my life, I then came into a system where my very worth as a human being was constantly attacked. 

[45:03]

Rosie: It’s vile and it’s completely backwards that you would treat people like that who are fleeing a dangerous situation, or who need humanitarian help. It blows my mind that you would lack the humanity at that point.

[45:18]

Victor: Yes, I’ve struggled with the question of, “how do people who do that to other people sleep at night?” And then I realised that it’s just human nature. 

Humans are humans wherever you go. Humans here aren’t better than humans back there. The government here isn’t better than the government in Nigeria. It’s humans, and human nature is selfish. And human nature has an incredible ability to be cruel. And all they need is a justification for cruelty. 

[45:58]

And, you know, I used to think that I could run and find a place in the world that could be cruelty free. Now I don’t believe that anymore. I think all of us – myself included – we all have the ability to be incredibly cruel, because it’s easy to not think about pain when it’s not your own. It’s easy to not think about suffering when it’s not your own. It’s a lot easier to turn a blind eye. 

[46:30]

Rosie: Yeah, Yeah. 

[46:31]

Victor: And sometimes actually, it’s healthier, because you can’t carry all the pain and the suffering in the world. So I think that the only way to actually ensure we don’t become the monsters we claim to be trying to protect other people from, is by actually taking a look at our own behavior in our life every day. 

And actually think, “who am I hurting, and is there a better way to do this?” Because, at the end of the day, the people who are pushing anti-immigrant and anti-refugee rhetoric, they’re not doing it because they want to be cruel. All of those thousands of people who work in the system are not doing it because they want to be cruel. They don’t consider themselves cruel people, and so, if I actually start believing that these are cruel people, these are enemies that I need to fight, what’s going to happen is they’re going to get defensive and they will become enemies.

I do believe that while we all have a capacity for incredible cruelty – and I’ve experienced a lot of that in my life – we also all have a capacity for love. That’s what’s been able to help me make peace with my mother: she did a lot of horrid things to me, but she didn’t do them thinking that she was being horrid, or wanting to be horrid. 

I do believe that, absolutely, there is a place for activism and I will help, you know, in any way possible to fight the good fight, for those who are less privileged than me, absolutely. I will donate money, I will go on marches, I will do all of that. 

[48:12]

But I think the real value lies in talking to people. And in reminding them of humanity. If I actually go to somebody who’s voting in a way that continues to harm people like me, I want to believe that if I put my story in front of them, and I say, “look at me, am I less human than you?” And I say, “this is how what you are doing is hurting me.” And then I say, “can we try to find a way where, you can get the things that you want, you can feel that job security that you love, and you can feel that my being here isn’t taking anything away from you, but you can actually make space for me to be alive, and to be safe.”

I think that’s the conversation we don’t have enough. And that’s why I want to take every opportunity to tell my story to as many people as possible, and get them to think.

[49:10]

Rosie: Mmm hmm, exactly. 

[49:12]

Victor: And, I still want to believe that there’s good in all of us. And that we all want to be good, and we just need to find a way to do it. 

[49:20]

Rosie: Yeah, yeah. People who hear your story will be changed, it’s guaranteed. And I wish more people did think more, all the time, about how their decisions are hurting other people.

Victor, you’ve been through more than anyone should have to go through in a hundred lifetimes, let alone one. What would you like to tell anyone listening to this podcast who may have been through similar experiences, or who may be going through similar experiences now?

[49:52]

Victor: I want to say the first thing, and the most important thing, is to be kind to yourself and to love yourself. And to not blame yourself for the horrible things that the world has done to you. 

I was listening to Oprah yesterday, with Prince Harry, and she was talking about what happened to you. She said, “rather than thinking about what is wrong with me, think about what happened to you. What are the injustices in life that have caused you to be in the place that you are?”

And I’m not saying absolve yourself of bad behavior. If you notice you have behaviour that’s hurting you, and hurting others, change it of course. But from a place of love and kindness. Because, as much as we can rely on other people, all that we’ve got is ourselves. 

And it sucks, and it’s horrible to think that the person who’s going through those horrible things still has to be the number one person taking care of themselves, but it’s the harsh reality of life that I’ve learnt. 

It’s not going to make all the problems disappear. But it’s going to give you the strength to deal with them, if you love yourself and you’re kind to yourself. So if you don’t know how to do it, learn. I didn’t know how to love myself, I’m still learning: I’m listening to tapes, I’m doing mindfulness, trying to remind myself of all the wonderful qualities that I have.

[51:25]

Rosie: Yeah. And now you’re in the UK, you’re married, you work for the Refugee and Migrant Centre in Coventry. You do have this life that, on the outside – and I hope it’s true – does have hope in it, hope and love. What gives you hope now, and what gives you hope for the future?

[51:48]

Victor: I’m a very broken person. Like you said, I’m a person who’s dealt with enough trauma for a hundred lifetimes: that leaves its mark on you. 

But in those moments, it’s the people around me who care for me. It’s my husband who, you know, I mean no one’s perfect, we fight a lot, like any other couple. But it’s seeing the way he loves me. 

It’s my friends who have got difficulties – I mean, when you’re a traumatised person you tend to be drawn to other people who share trauma as well, and so, my closest friends have had very difficult lives as well – and the way that they’re there for me and that I’m there for them. 

It’s my boss, who is an absolute trooper! No matter how hard I try, because of my trauma, because of my mental illness, sometimes I’m just not strong enough. He tells me, “it’s okay, you know. You’ve got to take care of yourself first before you can take care of other people.”

It’s the people around me who, in little ways every day just renew my faith in humanity. That’s what gives me hope. That’s what makes me feel like, “you know what, the world is worth living in and it’s worth fighting to make better, because all these people are amazing.” 

It’s the love that I’ve found, even after all of this or with all of this horridness. That’s what gives me hope.

[53:20]

Rosie: Absolutely, absolutely. Victor, thanks so much for sharing your story. Even if one person listens to it and it changes their life, that means everything. 

You’re incredibly inspiring, you’re so strong, and, you know, you’ve been very open about your mental health as well, your mental illness – I hope you keep having that strength and you keep sharing and finding ways to be strong and to survive that, and to keep enjoying the love you have, with your husband and with your friends. 

[53:51]

Victor: Thank you, Rosie. And thank you so much for just giving me the platform as well. Your time, and for this amazing work that you’re doing, I think it’s so important. And I really do hope that it helps a lot of people as well. 

Thank you. 

[54:06]

Rosie: Thanks so much.

Thank you for listening to OUTcast, a podcast with interviews and coming out stories from inspiring LGBTQ+ people.

I’m your host, Rosie Pentreath, I hope you can join us again next week.

OUTcast S1, Ep 2 • 04 Oct 2021 • 38:30

[00:00]

Rosie: Hello! Welcome to OUTcast, the podcast where we catch up with some of the most engaging, courageous and inspiring LGBTQ+ people from all over the world.

We ask our lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer guests where their coming out journeys began, what they’ve gone through along the way – the joy and the pain, but we promise there’ll be more joy – and what gives them hope.

We all remember when we weren’t out as queer people, and in need of strength and inspiration to make the first step being open about who we are. It’s all about having role models and stories we can relate to, ultimately. 

I’m Rosie Pentreath, your host. I identify as a lesbian woman, and I have shared my coming out story in personal settings, in online articles, and as part of LGBTQ+ panels on coming out and being queer at work. And now – I want to hear other people’s stories. 

I’ll be interviewing people from all walks of life, from hardworking queer people behind the scenes, to more familiar faces you might have never known even had the coming out stories they’re about to share. 

That’s what it’s all about: OUTcast is me and my guests sharing stories, creating a space for us all to talk, to listen, and to celebrate being proud queer people in the world today.

You can follow us on social media @OUTcastLGBT and you can find us online at outcastpod.com. Do get in touch if you’re enjoying the show, if you have any feedback, if there are any guests you would like to suggest… 

It’s great to have you with us.

[01:42]

Rosie: This week we’re welcoming Sarah Jones to the programme. Sarah is a transgender vicar, public speaker, singer-songwriter, and priest-in-charge at St John the Baptist Church in Cardiff.

Born in London, she grew up in the 1960s knowing she was “one of the girls”, but kept it to herself. She got married to a woman but divorced by her mid-twenties. 

She then had gender confirmation surgery in 1991 after, in her words, she squared it with God. She’s always been religious and she was ordained in 2004, becoming the first person to have made a gender change then ordained in the Church of England. 

Less than a year later, though, she was outed as transgender in the national press when somebody she knew tipped off a journalist. 

Sarah has spoken openly about her experience of being trans and being in the church ever since. 

[02:32]

Rosie: Sarah – welcome to OUTcast.

Sarah: Thanks.

Rosie: It’s great to have you with us. Start by telling us a little bit about yourself: how do you identify? 

Sarah: For many years I identified simply as a woman. The trans label was something that I had done and had finished, so it was about the crossing over, or establishing the true me in the world.

And in the last two or three years, I’ve had to pick up the trans label again, simply really because of the kind of pushback that there’s been: the anti-trans feeling in some quarters. 

And at first I didn’t really even want to pick the trans label up to be frank with you. I’ve got more used to it now because I think we need to pick it up – or at least I felt like I needed to pick it up – and say, “look, here I am” so I’ve now… in my head I identify as a woman but on public things, the trans thing comes out a bit more.

[03:32]

Rosie: Let’s go back to the beginning. Where do you tell your coming out story from; where does your coming out story begin?

Sarah: Well, I suppose in common with lots of LGBTQIA people, we’re always coming out, even to ourselves in a sense. You know, sort of like “here I am as a person in the world” and sometimes you have to realise that you’re not the person that everyone automatically assumes you’re going to be – or even that you assume you’re going to be.

[04:01]

I did realise when I went to primary school, very early on, that although I was classed as a boy, in some way I just was more one of the girls. That was a big moment in my head, maybe when I was maybe six or seven at the latest. 

But I never said anything to anyone, I never went home and told my parents, I never made a big fuss about it. And this was in the late 1960s, or mid-1960s even, so it’s just as well probably that I didn’t because it might have been a happy situation or I might have been sent off for some aversion therapy or something. Who knows what might have happened?

Later on, coming out wise, I made my gender change when I was 28, pretty much forgot about it and then having been ordained, I was outed in the media. So there’s a whole series of coming outs really. But I guess in my mid-twenties I began to realise that this was a massive issue in my life, and I had to do something about it. But it probably wasn’t until my late twenties that anyone else really knew about it. 

[05:05]

Rosie: For allies that might be listening, or for even LGBTQ+ people who aren’t trans themselves, is there a way of describing how you knew you were “one of the girls”? 

Sarah: Yeah, at school really, temperamentally, I just somehow was more one of the girls than one of the boys. I did play in the girls’ playground in primary school until an age where it kind of became unacceptable to do so. I don’t know what that was, but let’s say you know, the year below the top year or something. So maybe I was nine, maybe I was ten. 

And every time we’d line up, you know boys and girls, I’d sort of think “well, I’m in this line, but I really should be one of those.” 

And then even just in work life really, I remember once in my early twenties I was part of this fantastic troubleshooting team at work – I worked for a national organisation – and it was full of macho and really full of self-confident men. And there was me. And every time we got together, these guys would look at me, and like they couldn’t work it out. Because I was actually part of the team, and nobody actually disliked me, but it was kind of like, “this is weird. What is this about?”

And I was quite young looking – I have always looked younger than my years – and I used to joke that it was because I was on some sort of supercharged apprenticeship scheme, you know, still doing my A Levels. And we got around it that way, but I was definitely an odd appendage to the places I was in, you know?

[06:39]

Rosie: Fast-forwarding to when you were 28 then, what kind of support were you getting from friends and family?

Sarah: For me, and I think it’s true of a lot of trans people in as much as that we take a… often we take a long time to come to the point to say anything to anybody, because who wants to announce that they’re something in the world other than what is most obviously the case? You know, I mean it’s a big thing. How do you tell your boss? How do you tell a work colleague?

So I found, from my maybe mid- or early-twenties this was beginning to get a little bit more of an issue, but I didn’t feel it would dominate my life. I went to counselling, I told the counsellor let’s keep this in the box please. I don’t mind being feminine, but I don’t really want to do anything silly. 

So I sort of worked away under the radar at it, but eventually I realised that I kind of needed to explore my femininity.

[07:41]

And I bounced around between the gender lines a bit. I thought I might be a gay guy, and as luck would have it, I met a lovely gay guy. And he phoned me up and invited me on a date, and I had this kind of like all of a second “well, what the heck do I say? Well say yes, why wouldn’t you say yes, give this a go” you know. Over a period of years, even though the relationship was good in many ways, we slid past each other because I wasn’t a gay guy.

I got to 28 and I realised though that I had to do something. So I quit my job, sold the house – I had been married and we’d split up very amicably because she’d said to me “look, I love you and all that but it feels like I’m living with a gay woman. And I’ve nothing against that, but I’m not one.”

[08:24]

Rosie: Mmm.

“So we’re going to need to split. So we were selling the house anyway. I quit my job but I didn’t have any qualifications. No A Levels or anything, and so I went back to college essentially. I thought I could go to college, do some A Levels, because if I make a gender change, who the heck’s going to employ me? I mean this is the mid- to late-1980s, and there wasn’t really any trans representation anywhere. I thought I might be unemployable; I thought I might need some good qualifications. 

So, I quit my job, I went to college, did A Levels for two years and nobody cares there how scruffy you are or what the hell you’re doing. And I basically just grew my hair. So it started really short and, at the end, the people who didn’t know me had no idea what I was at all. 

I mean, they weren’t bothered by it. But I remember I went to the school office once to get a form, and the lovely receptionist said, “oh, there’s a young lady outside, wants so-and-so form”, and someone else stood up and had a gorp at me and came round and said, “that’s a guy!” And she said, “no, no it isn’t” and they both came and had a look around the screen. 

And they weren’t being nasty, but it was just like nobody knew. I’d get on the bus with my girl classmates, and get chatted up by the bus driver, and they couldn’t work out what was going on. Only me – only I knew, you know.

So anyway, it was a long, long, long, long process. And honestly, Rosie, I tried to do anything I possibly could not to make my gender change, because I thought it’s the biggest of the leaps…

Rosie: Mmm

Sarah: … and I can only do it if it really is the right place for me. So, it took me nine years. 

[10:05]

And along the way, I had some good advice and some bad advice. But the best advice was – I tumbled down to the doctor, and the doctor said “I’ve no idea. I don’t know.”

This was at the beginning of this whole thing, so this was maybe, mid-1980s, and he said, “I don’t know. But let’s work it out together.” 

And I thought that was great advice, because if he’d tried to pretend that he was in charge, or he was some sort of expert, I could have ended up being shoved anywhere.

I was quite religious, so I went to see my parish priest, and he was great as well. He said exactly the same thing, he said, “I have no idea about this whatsoever…”

As it happened, he had a friend who was also a Roman Catholic priest, and a clinical psychologist. So he sent me to his friend. 

[10:56]

Rosie: Wow. I love that. I really love this… “I don’t know. We don’t know” sort of attitude. Especially when the second part of that comes in, the listening. You know, “I’m going to listen to you. I don’t actually know, but I’m her to support you e and I’m going to keep listening.” It can be the best support that people give.

Sarah: It is.

Rosie: Yeah. In our lives, so many people want to give us their advice from their point of view, and it’s sometimes not quite the ticket, especially in times like this.

Sarah: Yeah.

[11:24]

Rosie: Let’s talk about your faith for a minute… so, you were religious pretty much all your life…

Sarah: My mother was a Roman Catholic. I was a happy Roman Catholic. I went to a Roman Catholic school. It gave me a nice kind of grounding in religion, but as long as I can remember, you know, maybe six or seven, I would go to church with her every Sunday.

And we would sit right at the front so I had a front row seat and I saw everything that was going on. And it all made sense. I mean, in an age-appropriate way, but it all made sense. And when, you know, the reading was about Jesus doing this or Jesus doing that, I could always kind of just imagine it. 

So I always pretty much went to church. I stopped going for a while in my late teens, largely because I was a musician, and I’d be out on a Saturday night gigging. And I’d get in at about two in the morning, or one, or something, and then nobody, you know, would want to get up for Mass. You know, first thing, so for a couple of years I didn’t go. But I missed it, and so I went back. And that was great.

[12:28]

And then when I was exploring my gender identity – this is going to sound really lame now, this is like the lamest thing anyone will say to you for a long while – I fell in with an Anglican crowd. I started running with the Anglicans!

So I went to church with a few of them. And this guy who invited me on a date, our first weekend away together, we went to church together on Sunday morning.

And I just… there’s something about the Church of England that I absolutely loved. So over the course of a few years, I made this commitment to the Church of England, and Anglicanism. I just love the way we debate things, and that it isn’t top-down. And that people can have different positions on women, or homosexuality, or “what does this verse in the Bible mean?”, or all of these things.

I absolutely loved it. I’m a very happy Anglican. 

[13:42]

Rosie: That’s good to hear! [Sarah laughs]

In a recent interview with Attitude magazine, you described God as “beautifully non-binary.” I saw lots of people kind of picked up on that. I think it’s a beautiful concept. 

I don’t know if you want to touch on that. But also, let’s talk about faith and how it directly supported your coming out journey.

Sarah: Faith in my coming out journey was very important to me because I did at my core believe that God loved me. Whatever that means. I mean, when we’re talking about God, no words suffice. And when I say “God loves me”… what do I really mean by that? I mean, even I don’t know what I really mean by that. You know, Philosophers have written thousands of pages on it. 

But I do believe that God actually does love me. And the nights – and there were nights where I sat up in bed, crying in the small hours of the morning wondering if, when people knew about me, that they would hate me, or beat me up, or mock me, or, if I’d never work again, or whatever – I always held on to the fact that I believed that God loves me. 

So, that was very important. And I also, in these times, would flick through the Bible and just see what was there. And I came across various passages. The Psalms are an obvious place for people in distress. I read a lot of those, and that was really helpful. So I prayed to God, I went on retreat as I was trying to figure out who I was and what I was. And I also had to square the really big question of “If God had made me a guy, did I have any right to change that?” 

Because, the truth of it is that, if there’s a God, and I believe there is, if there’s a God we should live in harmony with God’s will. And if I was going to do something that was in direct contravention to that, I’m not sure I could have done it. 

[15:50]

In the end, two things happened. A very, very, very old priest started off by saying to me exactly what the other wise people had said: “I don’t know, let me think about it.”

But on the last day I was in the retreat house, I had a meeting with him and he said, “I don’t really know anything about this,” he said, “but look, it seems to me, what you are is God’s gift to you, and what you become is your gift to God.”

And I just thought, “oh my word.” I mean, what he was saying is “don’t do anything stupid, don’t do anything cavalier, but if the way to be the most whole person you can be; the way to be a person who can love other people in the world, and all of this, if the way to do that is you need to make a gender change, then actually that’s what you might need to do.” 

And the second thing was, I just really came to realise that, if I’d had, let’s say a liver problem, and I might die. Or a heart problem, I wouldn’t say, “well, if God had wanted me to be well, God would have given me a good heart.” I would go and get it fixed.

Rosie: Mmm.

[17:05]

The thing about God being non-binary, there’s a couple of points. 

One is just because we are sexed and gendered, doesn’t mean that God is.

Whatever we say about God, language is completely, um, failing us. Like I say, if I say “God knows me” or “God loves me”, what on Earth does that really mean? We can’t really fathom it. 

I think one of our problems with God is that the Bible tells us that God made us in God’s image. But what human beings do is we flip that round, and we make God in our own image. So, for centuries if you’re a white, straight man, then God is a white, straight man. 

Jesus did call God our Father, I’m not queerying that at all. But then he was using human language, for humans, in a human situation. Interestingly enough, though, our Bibles in the original Hebrew, or the original Aramaic, there’s lots of little indications of femininity in God. 

I think the fact that we say “He” and all of this kind of business, I think that’s us limiting God. I think God has all the scopes, so, God is beyond our understanding. It’s lazy to think of some bloke in a cloud with a beard, who incidentally is not disabled, and does not have any inherent difficulties in one way or another with anything; perfect eyesight; square jaw; oh! All of these things, I think in a sense, small “b” are blasphemy. I think we’re getting it wrong. 

So we just have to say we have no idea. But I would say, within the potentiality, God is neither male nor female, or both, so non-binary. 

[19:03]

Rosie: Such a powerful concept. 

[19:20]

Now, let’s come back down to Earth for a minute. You’ve been open about the fact that you were outed in the media, so the decision to come out was made for you, essentially, in 2005. This was just after you’d been ordained by the Church of England. Do you mind me asking what happened there, and how it felt?

Sarah: So I was ordained in 2004. And in the Anglican church, you get ordained as a deacon one year, and then oftentimes the next year you’re ordained priest. So I’d been ordained deacon, so I was working in a parish in a market town, so everyone knew me. I was really visible, been in services, et cetera. 

And we always knew that I could be outed. Anything to do with sex and vicars, or sexuality and vicars, you’re a bit of a target. And I was sitting at my desk on Friday afternoon and I got a phone call – a very nice phone call – but a phone call from a journalist saying he was working for a national newspaper, he had all my old details and he said you know, “is it true?” 

And we’d always had this long-standing plan that because I’m not a professional in dealing with journalists, I simply refer him to the diocese to say “look, just speak to so-and-so.”

Anyway, this is what we did. But, they wanted the story. It was one particular newspaper at the time. We had an interview – we gave them an exclusive interview – and they didn’t publish for various reasons. And after three days of them not publishing, the diocese said to me that we couldn’t live like that. 

Basically, every morning I would wake up, go down and buy this particular daily newspaper, look at it to see if I was outed in it, and then try and live my life. So in the end we decided that we had to out me. So we sent the press release out on the wires. And then I had three days of the world’s press contacting me.

[21:17]

Rosie: It must have been a heavy burden to shoulder in the early days.

Sarah: Yeah. It was all quite difficult, because it was all sort of in crisis mode, in the sense that your diary just gets completely taken over by this. And I’d made my gender change many years before, and so there were a lot of people who didn’t know about my change, including some quite close friends. 

So I had to scoot around a whole bunch of people, to tell them that they were about to see me in the newspaper. I interrupted some close friends actually eating their dinner. I knocked on the door and said “can I speak to you?” and they said “can you come back in an hour?” and I said “I can’t. Because I’ve got to be somewhere else to tell someone else something.” So while they ate their dinner, I sat down and told them, and it was a bizarre situation. 

There was a lot of, kind of, “I need to tell you something; I need to tell you something now.” And, in fairness, most of the people hearing it didn’t need to hear it. They wouldn’t have wanted to hear it. It’s information that they would say, “too much information.” I mean, no one said that to me, but if you go to church, you might not want to know about the most intimate details of your vicar. You go to church, for a lot of reasons, not to think about someone’s medical history or their sexual preferences. It was a tricky time.

When I got this last posting now that I’m in at the moment in St John’s in central Cardiff, the diocese and the church were just great from the beginning. But they said to me in my first week, “look, we probably need to do the story again.” And I didn’t honestly particularly want to, because I’m already out. But their point – and they were correct – their point was “if we don’t do a newspaper article and put it out there, somebody else will and they might write it sloppily and get some of the facts wrong” and all this. So it’s just far better since we’re not ashamed of anything that we actually do a press release and do the story. 

And they were 100 percent right, but it’s these little things that kind of… in one sense it takes it out of you because you’re giving and it’s more vulnerable again… but, do you know the good thing? The good thing is that, every time I’m outed, and every time somebody says something to someone, or every time someone writes a blog post, it’s almost certain that there is someone out there who says to themselves, “oh my word, I’m not alone.”

Being visible is a bit costly, but also, it really helps other people. 

[24:05]

What is interesting too, is sometimes, particularly when I was outed in Ross, people sought me out for things nothing to do with sexuality and gender. 

I had several people come to me with problems, such as gambling or addictions, and they said to me, “I’m coming to you because I saw you in the newspapers and I realise that you have been through a difficult time. I feel I can talk to you about my difficulty, because I know that you have your gender change, or had it.” So it was very interesting that actually, it’s not confined to LGBT matters; people see people – certainly they saw me, as a priest, as being more approachable because I’d had to deal with something big in my life.

[24:54]

Rosie: Mmm, and perhaps that level of empathy as well. That you understand the human struggle, and different issues. How’s the church reacted overall? 

[25:04]

Church-going people have been really fine mostly. When I was outed there was no one in the congregation who actively sought me out and told me off or anything. 

I do think that there may have been a couple of people who were uncomfortable and maybe didn’t agree with it and gracefully pulled away or maybe found another church to go to. I mean, there wasn’t a mass exodus, but it was nicely handled in a sense. Most people are fine because they knew me; they knew me first; they knew who I was. 

The church has been, both fine, and not fine. I had great support when I was outed, the Bishop was wonderful. He’d always said to me, if you’re ever outed I will stand right by you because I’m backing you, because I do not see this as a, kind of, problem. And he was as good as his word. 

[26:02]

But then senior leaders come, senior leaders go, management changes. And some of the later key players in part of the church where I were liked me perfectly well, but actually it was pretty jolly obvious that they were not really looking at me as one of the key pillars of what they were wanting to build.

I had one very senior person who I liked very much and who liked me just say to me, “is it really surprising that some people don’t want to consider you for the next post?” It’s a kind of wake up moment, isn’t it? That somewhere there in this really nice person, who liked me, thinking well there’s, you know… of course some people are going to be prejudiced. 

On the other hand, there were lots of really good senior leaders who were very supportive. The diocese here when I applied for the job could not have been better – they support me along the way. So, it’s kind of mixed, and there’s work to do, but on the whole, I’ve had a lot more good than bad. But there’s definitely bits of the church where, really, it’s pretty obvious they don’t want a trans person around or anything. 

[27:20]

Rosie: Yeah. I mean a lot of that will come into them sort of not taking that time to read the scriptures and to explore how the faith works so well in tandem with everyone being different. And I suppose some people just haven’t dedicated the time to that.

What strikes me, and what I hope listeners of the podcast take away from this, is that there is so much positivity in the church towards LGBTQ+ people, and I think that’s refreshing to hear. And it’s really inspiring to hear from you within the church about how you’ve been welcomed and about your experience. 

[27:55]

Sarah: Yeah, thank you, thank you. And there is, there genuinely is. I mean, you can tumble down to your local church and if you’re unlucky, people will, you know, think badly of you. But, not so far away will be a religious group that would welcome you with open arms. So it is getting a lot better, and there is a lot more welcome and positivity out there than people might think.

[28:18]

Rosie: Yeah. Am I right in thinking in around 2017 the bishop of the Anglican church looked into welcoming transgender people, specifically? 

Sarah: Yeah. [In] the Church of England, you have to use certain services. You can write your own bits within certain guidelines and rules, but essentially, you’re not free to start from an absolutely blank piece of paper. 

And the Church of England realised that there were trans people coming forward, who were saying to them, look “I would love to be welcomed in my new name.” Even if that new name was, they’d made their change twenty years ago, or fifteen years ago. So the Church of England did repurpose an existing service, but having said they were going to do it, there was a conservative backlash. Lots of people wrote to the Church of England and said, “this is terrible, you can not do this” and in fact they backtracked. So it never actually happened. So that for me was one of the first indications that there was an anti-trans backlash on the way.

[29:26]

Rosie: It’s such a shame. I feel like for every step forward there are three steps back, which has been the case throughout LGBTQ+ history. 

Sarah: Yeah. It’s true. And certainly recently, let’s say the gender critical movement, has really pushed back against trans people a bit, on different levels. And it’s been a bit unexpected, because when I made my gender change, I was just making a personal decision. This is not a movement, it’s not a political ideology, it’s not an anything. I was just saying “how do I live in the world without crumbling inside, or living a lie?” So I made my individual gender change based on how I was in the world. 

But it’s sort of being portrayed now, by various groups, “oh there’s a big movement, you know there’s a trans ideology, and if you’re a kind of tomboyish potentially lesbian young girl, be careful because you’re going to come into contact with this movement, it’s going to convince you you’re really a boy because they’re sort of just trying to grow the movement.” 

But it isn’t true. It just isn’t true. Like any form of prejudice, it’s just wrong as a prejudgement. I mean, you can say someone behaves badly if they behave badly. But don’t take a characteristic like their race or their sexuality or their gender or anything about them, and say, “oh, well you know, you’re from this country, you must be bad in this sort of way. Or your tans, you must be this…” It’s ridiculous.

[31:06]

Rosie: Exactly. And it feels like once you take an issue or an experience, and shed light on it, everyone’s suddenly so worried about it. There’s this magnifying glass. And I wonder if that’s sort of what’s happening with politicising the trans movement or politicising any kind of trans identity at the moment. Perhaps as more people understand it and see it, and experience it and more of us are speaking about it, there’s going to be those people that say, “oh, it’s suddenly taking over the world.” Well, it’s not. It’s just, as you say, someone having their experience and going through the experience they need to go through. 

[31:44]

Sarah: Yeah, indeed. I remember when women were really not as visible in the workplace, certainly as managers, and I remember in the 70s and 80s, “oh women are taking over now, it’s all women this, it’s all women that…” and actually nobody really says that now. We’ve just realised that all that’s happening is the mix is getting slightly better and we’ve got a long way to go. So you’re right, there’s a kind of… because it’s lit up in lights at the moment, sometimes people are worrying more about it than actually the reality warrants. 

[32:20]

Rosie: Exactly. And you mention this backlash, but what else has changed over the time that you’ve been out as trans? Have you felt a shift or a change in society?

[32:31]

Sarah: I think there have been lots of positive changes. I mean I made my gender change properly in 1991, and do you know, you could turn on the television or the radio and you would never hear a trans person on it? And now, there are people in the media, and we’re a bit more visible and things. So that’s kind of nice.

And also I think more people know someone who has questioned their gender, or is somewhere on this kind of spectrum and not necessarily making a gender change, but is being non-binary, or is somewhere here, there, or what have you. And it’s becoming more, kind of, normal because the world is still turning. And people realise that they still love their colleague, or their boss, or their friend, or whatever, and not a lot has changed in so many ways – even though this person has changed a bit about them. So yep, there are some good things I think.

[33:28]

But imagine now, you were in that place of having to think about, do you need to change your gender? Maybe you’re 12, or you’re 21, or you’re 7, and you’re just realising, and you catch some anti-trans backlash or rhetoric. Oh my word, nobody needs that, in exactly the same way that gay men and lesbian women for years, in the 50s and 60s, caught this idea that society thought they were disgusting or perverted. How much harm can come to someone because their very core identity is overloaded with this, well, rubbish. It’s dangerous, it’s very dangerous. 

[34:14]

Rosie: It is dangerous, and I think speaking about it you attract that kind of criticism, feedback, horrible phobic comments. But then if we don’t speak about it, we can’t be the role models that help these people come out. So, it becomes this battlefield and I think it’s a battlefield that social media has completely… what’s the word? Well has given a platform to these kinds of battles, really – these battles of experience. Which is negative. 

You mentioned in the same Attitude interview that I’ve mentioned, that it can just be exhausting to be a queer person in a straight person’s world. That resonated. I think, you know, we’re here on a podcast that’s talking about coming out. But coming out is a bit exhausting, and with all the good that we can do, the bad comes with it. 

[35:01]

How do you keep your energy up? I know you do lots of public speaking, you do public engagements and you inspire so many people. How do you keep that energy up?

[35:10]

Sarah: Aw, that’s nice for you to say, Rosie. I mean, sometimes doing good things in the speaking, or something like the podcast here, actually that does give you a lift because you’ve done something. So I kind of like that. 

But you know, there, honestly, there are days, even now, when I sometimes sit and cry. I’m just so tired and so exhausted and so fed up. And it’s not like I’m depressed or there’s a massive problem, it’s just the sheer exhaustion all the time of carrying this extra kind of load. And I’ve just learned that if there are days like that, then you go with it, because, you’re not making it up, it’s what happens. And you get up and fight the next day, you know, you just do it better. 

I do find that my faith keeps feeding me, and I do find that actually I’d rather do something about a problem than be crushed by it. So I love doing the speaking, I love finding funny ways to introduce things, and make people kind of think, “Oh yeah, okay I get that now.” That, for me, is taking a bit more agency over what’s happening. 

[36:15]

Rosie: What gives you hope for the future?

Sarah: Well, do you know what? I actually think the future is more accepting and more diverse. I think it is an argument we’re going to win. You know, we’re not going to win every single day with every single person, but actually, ultimately, most people on the LGBTQIA spectrum are fine people. And people will realise that. And also I am just a kind of hopeful person, to be fair. I think part of faith is saying that there are terrible times, and actually, ultimately, we will tend towards salvation. 

[37:02]

Rosie: It’s such a positive note to end on.

[37:05]

Sarah: One of the reasons I wanted to do this podcast, is because I think OUTcast is all the things that we’ve been talking about today. It’s about being a positive influence; it’s about being a little bit of light in potentially a little bit of a dark place; it’s about supporting both the baby dykes and the people who’ve been doing it for years; it’s about sharing humanity and good stories, and all of this. So, I think OUTcast is going to be part of the reason I have hope. 

[37:48]

Rosie: Aw, thank you so much. 

Sarah: Thank you.

Rosie: It’s honestly so incredible to hear your whole story directly.

[37:57]

Thank you for listening to OUTcast, a podcast with interviews and coming out stories from inspiring LGBTQ+ people. I’m your host, Rosie Pentreath. I hope you can join us again next week.