Since I got involved volunteering with the Liberal Democrats, I have done a lot of things which I would not have done previously. I have knocked on people’s doors to ask them to fill in surveys and spoken to total strangers about my political beliefs. This weekend, I did something else I never thought I would do.
I was invited to help out on the Lib Dems stall at the Mardi Gras, which was raising awareness of a Liberal Youth campaign. I had never previously seen the point of me going to the Mardi Gras, as I am straight, and in all honesty, I had never thought there was much of a problem with people being accepted due to their sexuality. I was brought up by very liberal parents, and grew up with an openly gay uncle, so I had never had any personal issues with gays, and I had (quite naively) assumed that nobody else had much of a problem with them either. However, almost everything that happened to me at that festival told me that this was one of the most idiotic assumptions I had ever made.
The first thing I did when I got to the Lib Dem stall was I read the campaign, and watched another guy canvassing people to sign the petition for it, so that I could build up enough confidence to do so myself. Then I read the relevant statistics and I was quite shocked.
According to Stonewall Cymru, only 6% of Welsh schools have specific policies for dealing with homophobic bullying. Of the remaining 94%, 75% of respondents said they had encountered homophobic bullying, 50% said they had been reluctant to go to school, another 50% had contemplated suicide, 40% had tried it, and 30% had tried it more than once. And then other things began to make sense. Out of all the openly gay people I know, quite a lot of them did not come out until they left school.
Our campaign was to encourage the Welsh Assembly’s Education Minister to force a specific policy on homophobic bullying on all Welsh schools, which linked up to the bigger campaign that Liberal Youth had been running for three years called “Homophobia is Gay”. And as I began speaking to people about our campaign and speaking to people about their own experiences of being openly homosexual in school, it dawned on me that there was a massive problem.
The other thing that happened to me was that I was talking to a lesbian couple about their experiences of school when they made a joke about me being gay myself, which was clearly an assumption they had made as I was canvassing people about gay rights at a gay pride festival. When I corrected them, one of the girls was so happy that a straight person was campaigning about gay rights that she gave me a massive hug!
So clearly, there is still a big problem with people being respected and accepted for being openly gay, and not many straight people are willing to stand up for gay rights. After my experience, I would encourage anyone who is tolerant enough to accept everyone for their differences to make a stand for those who are targeted by those who are afraid of their differences. And when gay-bashers such as the BNP have managed to get two seats in the European Parliament, there has never been a time when standing up for equal rights is so important.
Related posts:
Who’s in the picture?
Ow’s Williams, Matt Smith, Rachel Thomas and Dom Hannigan. *makes mental note to find out how to caption pic’s*
Thanks for writing this Matt, it’s interesting to see Pride from the ‘fresh to it all’ side, having been to more Prides than I can count!
Ali, I’m having the same trouble captioning, especially in WordPress. I may have to resort to putting the captions on the pictures using PhotoPlus before uploading.
Nearly forgot – ta very much for the info