Election in Rome 1
Katie Grant
Election in Rome 2
R D Kernohan
It was easier to be gay outside Scotland
Being seven years younger than Keith O’Brien, I can have some sympathy for the dilemmas that he must have faced about his sexuality over the years. When he was 19, the Wolfenden Report recommended the de-criminalisation of homosexual activity – except in Scotland. Far from this being ‘another English outrage’, it probably fairly accurately represented the views of Scottish popular culture towards the love that dared not speak its name.
Ten years later, when he was 29, he will have noted the fact that while gay sex was partially legalised in England, it remained illegal here. When he was 31, he may (or may not) have noticed that a campaign was set up to end legal inequality and it was soon organising branches and social events all over Scotland. When he was 42, he took up a post as a head of a seminary in Aberdeen just about the time when the law began to stop criminalising gay men in Scotland. Apart from the law, these were the years when the worst thing that you could say about a Scotsman was that he was a ‘poof’ or an ‘uphill gardener’. Coming to terms with your homosexuality – never mind coming out as gay – was not an easy thing to do.
But we made choices. I was part of the gay diaspora (even though we’re never mentioned in any of Tom Devine’s studies) that left the country and worked things out for ourselves in big, anonymous, cosmopolitan cities. Being young, able bodied, well educated and employed made it possible for me to do that openly with other like-minded people. Those people who stayed on in Scotland had a much tougher furrow to plough. People led double lives and were almost forced to be dishonest to the people they loved. Alcohol abuse and mental illness were widespread. Gay Scotland in the 1980s was never in the running for the world championship for hedonism. People did live lives of integrity but many of the sacrifices they made were enormous.
The choice that Keith made, however, was to have sexual contact with men who had a lot less power in the world than he did; men whose livelihoods and vocations were, to a very large extent, dependent on his authority. And this, it seems, is the sort of sexual conduct that he has made an apology for. It is to be hoped that he has also made personal apologies to the four men whose complaints led to them being traduced by all sorts of kneejerk commentators over the last week. Any such dialogue is, however, between them and is probably best left out of the public domain.
The choice that he made in relation to the political campaigns on issues such as same-sex marriage is altogether another matter. Even the editor of the Catholic newspaper, the Tablet, has described the language he used on this topic as being intemperate. To a gay man like myself, to hear same-sex marriage compared with slavery is nothing more than hate speech.
A psychologist could have a field day with a case study into a man who was homosexually active and could yet inflame such public hatred against people who had similar sexual feelings to his own. There has long been speculation that queer bashers on the streets are motivated by a hatred of part of their own identities; instead of seeking to resolve this within themselves they turned their feelings outward into a campaign of hatred against people who share these characteristics that make them so uncomfortable.
My primary concern, as a historian and activist, is much more about the impact that this promotion of hatred has had on people who are trying to develop a model of meaningful, honest living for themselves. My concern is also for the Catholic parents and siblings of gay people; the hatred that they have heard from Scottish pulpits must have been unbearably painful for them and will have contributed to additional family conflicts and distress. He has been a major propagandist of homophobia in recent years and none of us deserve to be subjected to that. His apology stops well short of any reference to his conscious efforts to stigmatise a whole minority community. Does he really believe that while sexual behaviour merits a public apology, demonisation of people who seek to obtain full citizenship for themselves does not?
I am just one individual and I am in no position to make a statement on behalf of anyone else. But knowing what I know about the years when he was growing up does give me some insight into the struggle that he may have had with hatred of his own sexuality. Gay people may well understand the problems that he has had with self-hatred better than other members of society. He now needs to make some form of public redress for the ways in which he has sought to brutalise people whose sexuality is so similar to his own.
He may well want to withdraw from public life but it is not acceptable that the damage that he has inflicted on so many Scots people should remain unacknowledged. I hope that he does make a full apology but the choice is his. It will be painful but, once he has made that apology, he may well be surprised by the generosity of people who have long made the choice to be unashamed and honest about the place of sexuality in their own lives.
Bob Cant is the editor of Footsteps and Witnesses: lesbian and gay life stories from Scotland
