My name is Chris, and I work in the Health and Safety team. I’d like to share my experience as an openly gay man. Some of it is deeply personal and may make for hard reading, but I believe it’s important to bring to light the experiences that I and many others in the LGBTQIA+ community have dealt with, and sadly still do.
I was born in Lancashire but moved to Bristol when I was six months old, staying there until my early twenties. We seemed like a fairly typical family, but there was a difference for me. I was raised in the evangelical church from around 4 or 5 years old. By the age of 8, I knew there was something different about me, but I didn’t understand what it was. All my boyhood crushes were on male TV or movie characters like Indiana Jones and Magnum PI (so sue me, I was an 80’s kid!).
It wasn’t until my teens that I realised I might be gay, and due to my religious upbringing, that terrified me. I’d always been taught that being gay was “an abomination”, that gay people were “evil”, “perverts” and were “headed straight to hell”. None of that language is included for dramatic effect; that was the actual vocabulary used with kids as young as 5, including me. By my mid-teens, the AIDS crisis was at its peak and was readily used by the church as ammo; “look what happens to you if you’re gay”, further adding to my terror.
Fast forward to my very late teens, and I was still in the church, still battling between my faith and my identity. I’d been going out with a girl for a few months; let’s call her Lisa (not her real name). Half the church were already buying their wedding hats. I genuinely loved her, in my way. However, I knew I couldn’t ever be what she needed me to be. I’d tried coming out a couple of years earlier but was forced to attend Christian gay counselling. There I was told getting married like God wanted, and having a “normal” relationship would “cure” me, so I went along with my relationship with Lisa, believing I was doing the right thing.
It was when I realised in time that Lisa was genuinely falling in love with me that my conscience overtook any sense of self-preservation. One evening, I broke both our hearts by ending the relationship and was honest about why.
The response from the church was horrific. The next day I was called into the pastor’s office along with some of the church elders and forced to undergo an “exorcism” performed by the pastor. The ceremony involved the pastor towering over me, holding my head in a vice grip and bellowing religious commands into my face for what felt like hours, while the church elders were loudly praying and chanting in the background. The sheer terror of that experience cannot be overstated. Shockingly, to this day, such practices continue despite repeated promises by successive UK governments to ban conversion therapy in all its forms.
But it’s not all a doom and gloom story. I came to live in glorious Yorkshire via university in Huddersfield, where suddenly being me was totally allowed. I found friends who loved me for who I was, not who they thought I should be. I learned that throughout my entire childhood and youth, I’d been lied to and who I am was valid, important and crucially was enough. Most importantly, I met my partner; an amazing man who I’ve been blessed to share the last 26 years with!
Some people ask why Pride events are needed, or worse, “why isn’t there a straight Pride”? The answer’s pretty simple in the form of a reciprocal question: what child or young person would go through even a fraction of the experiences described here because they were straight?
These are not unusual events. These are not historical events either. Right now, every day young people are terrified just to be who they were born to be. I was one of the lucky ones who found acceptance and inclusion in time. There are many who don’t.
This is why Pride is so important. It demands that stories like mine, and many others like it, be rightly confined to the history books; that everyone should expect acceptance, inclusion and celebration for being their amazing selves, no matter who they are.