RG

For the first eight years of my life, homosexuality led to a prison sentence. My first real boyfriend was a week off his eighteenth birthday, and I was twenty-three. Now, if that had been made known to the police, I could have gone to prison. He told his family, and he panicked the life out of me — I was waiting for the police to knock on my door.

The “pretty police” thing is barely believable now, but they used to send in the most attractive young policeman dressed in leathers. It wasn’t illegal to be gay by the mid-80s, but it was illegal to ask anybody to have sex with you, particularly in public places.

In terms of asking in the street, “Do you fancy coming back to my place?” it had the same legal status as prostitution. It was soliciting for immoral purposes, and people would be arrested — mostly of course in cottages, public toilets. But sometimes you got a policeman leaning against the wall outside the Coleherne, which was a leather bar, and you’d say, “What about it?” and he’d pull out the handcuffs.

When I was at Newcastle University, in 1980, there was a gaysoc. You had to get ten names to get funding from the student union. But none of the gaysoc members were prepared to write their names — none of them were going to give their names to the university. So the tradition was to go round all the left and liberal groups, and they would put their name down. So I was a founding member of Newcastle gaysoc when I was completely in the closet — as secretary of the Labour Club, I put my name down. Then I was, “Oh, what have I done?”

I’d come out two years before the strike. I wrote my mother a letter, I couldn’t do it face to face. My mum collapsed, she fainted. Fainted. I had to go and visit my mum and dad to face the music — that scene with the young lad Joe coming out in the film is very real. We had all that table-slamming and wailing stuff.

In the end my mum completely came round to celebrate my being gay, dad came round as far as accepting it. Mum used to stay with me in London — on one Sunday morning she brought breakfast in bed to my two astonished flatmates, the two of them in a double bed together, pulling the bedclothes up to their necks. I remember my mum in various gay pubs completely surrounded, a middle-aged woman, by twenty-something gay men.

But there were people who never spoke to their parents again. When I wrote to my mother, I actually included a paragraph saying, “I will completely understand if you never want to see me again.” The story in “Small Town Boy” by Jimmy Somerville — that was from real experience. People ran away to London. London was full of people from everywhere else who came to London to live an openly gay life.

Gay’s the Word, the bookshop in the film, had been raided by customs and excise because it was selling indecent novels — not pornography but trashy novels, S&M sex novels called Cum , and so on. The Customs and Excise actually raided Gay’s the Word and took their stock away. It’s inconceivable now.

In terms of work, during the strike I wasn’t out at work. Can you imagine? I was working in the building works department at Islington Council. Some of my colleagues sussed out that I was gay, I didn’t confirm or deny it, and they would go on and on about what fun it was going queer bashing and how all these fucking disgusting queers should be gassed, or put on an island and blown up.

I would just sit in my office, typing away, listening to this. Eventually, I did come out — I was the first person in the building works department to come out, and I came out to everybody against the express instructions of my shop steward, who said I’d be killed. But I did it anyway, and I did really well — no one cared. We had all these bizarrely frank sexual discussions with these men in the builders’ yard.

It absolutely was. There was curiosity and a certain wariness when the first speech was made. That was very nerve-wracking — we were feeling our way.

We actually arrived very late, at one in the morning the day before — that’s why we slept on [Dulais miner] Dai’s floor. We had a day being shown round the castles and the countryside being told the local myths and legends, and about how important coal and the mines were. Then we turned up at the do in the evening.

In the film there is a frostiness when we first arrive in the hall. In fact when we arrived in the hall, after a kind of pin-drop moment, we got a round of applause. There was no question of anybody walking out.