I quickly found a church in Oxford that I loved, called The Vineyard. It was a denomination founded in California by a man named John Wimber, who was passionate about faith healing and God’s ability to do miracles today. It felt a lot like the Pentecostal church I was raised in. Vineyard congregations were springing up all across the UK, known for their contemporary-style worship music, informal atmosphere, and the fact that they served donuts and coffee after every service.
This particular Vineyard congregation believed that women should not be allowed to preach or be senior pastors. Its view on homosexuality was equally traditional. Its outer aspects looked very contemporary—guitars and drums, casual clothes, and plates of donuts—but on the inside its belief system upheld the views I’d been raised with. While other Oxford students were playing sports, joining clubs, sitting at the bar, and generally getting a wider experience of life, my extracurricular activities only involved attending church or spending time with other Christian students at Wycliffe. Somehow, I’d managed to re-create my Christian bubble in a new city.
One thing proving very difficult was watching my fellow students pairing up. When I thought back to high school, those days seemed simple in comparison. Mine had been a girls’ school, so dating had only happened outside of the classroom. Now, at Oxford, it was happening all around me.
Every university event seemed to involve inviting a “plus one.” Coupledom reigned. There were dinners and dances and summer balls, and I wanted to go, but nobody went alone. I could attend with a male friend, but they would often end up getting the wrong idea and the friendship would be ruined. Heteronormativity (the assumption that heterosexuality is the only societal norm) was everywhere, and I was realizing it more and more.
I did go on a few dates in Oxford. When a charming trainee priest named Will invited me out for dinner, I was curious to see how we’d get along. He was popular—tall, blond, sporty, and passionate about his faith. Will and I went out for dinner and had a great time. It was clear that he was one of the nicest guys on the planet. But even with someone this intelligent and attractive, the feelings I thought I might experience just weren’t there.
Other male students asked me on dates: picnics in the park, boat rides on the river, and long evenings of fascinating conversation over coffee. I certainly couldn’t have been accused of not trying. Friends said, “Don’t worry. You just haven’t met Mr. Right yet.” But deep down I knew it wasn’t about that—I knew I was gay. Men were great company—in fact I often preferred male friends, because they shared my tomboy interests. I never felt anything beyond platonic affection for them, though.
Unknown to me, another world was only streets away. St. Hilda’s was, at that time, the university’s all-female college, and it attracted a large number of gay women. One of them, who would study in the year below me, was Ruth Hunt. Ruth would go on to be CEO of the UK’s largest LGBT organization, Stonewall. We never met during our student days; I only got to know her when I was thirty-four. Looking back, I’ve often wondered what might have happened if I’d met her back then and been introduced to her circle of friends and the university’s LGBT Society. She would, I’m sure, have shown me a different way of viewing things. Who knows what my life’s path would’ve been then? It’s funny how near, and yet how far, we can be from monumental change.
I would manage to go my entire three-year degree course without talking to or getting to know anyone who was openly LGBTQ+. This wasn’t hard as, in my first year, I was creating a pattern that I would maintain, and it kept me locked away among my evangelical community. I was either at Wycliffe Hall with the seminarians and priests, or at The Vineyard church, or in lecture halls where students barely spoke. If I had been introduced to any lesbians or bisexuals, I’d probably have run a mile in the other direction, concerned they would lead me into temptation. In my mind, it was a battle to fight, a slippery slope, a risk of being led astray—so the further I stayed away from it all, the better.
I knew nothing of LGBTQ+ history and the steady pace of change happening in the UK and beyond. I had no clue that there were thousands of other people out there like me, and that they were gathering together and challenging the status quo. Only years later would I read the rich history of the global LGBTQ+ rights movement and learn how many people had been fighting for my rights before I even arrived on the planet.
I would learn that, on a hot summer night in 1969, ten years before I was born, police raided the gay bars in New York on a mission to shut down those “rogue” establishments. An LGBTQ+ fightback took place at the Stonewall Inn that would give birth to the modern-day LGBTQ+ rights movement. One year later, in commemoration, five thousand people marched down Sixth Avenue, beginning the tradition of Pride marches that continue around the globe today.
Before 1962, homosexuality was classed as a felony in the US in every state. A few states had shifted on this by 1979 (the year I was born), but by no means had they all. In 1980, it was decriminalized in New York and Pennsylvania. By 1992, it had become legal in another handful of states. In 1996, homosexuality was decriminalized in Tennessee—a place I would later live and work in my twenties.
In the UK, some progress had been made with the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, but as one influential campaigner noted:
The criminalisation of homosexuality in the UK did not in fact end until 2013 … Not only was homosexuality only partly decriminalised by the 1967 act, but the remaining anti-gay laws were policed more aggressively than before by a state that opposed gay acceptance and equality. In total, from 1885 [to] 2013, nearly 100,000 men were arrested for same-sex acts.
The 1967 legislation repealed the maximum penalty of life imprisonment [for gay sex]. But it still discriminated. 1
The 1967 act applied only to England and Wales, not to Scotland or Northern Ireland, and they adopted it only in the 1980s, so it was slow progress.
In 1988, when I was nine years old, Parliament passed the notorious antigay law known as Section 28. This stated that local authorities must “not intentionally promote homosexuality” or “provide teaching” on “the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” At that time, Section 28 received strong political support from Christians in the UK who saw it as defending God’s standards for sex and marriage.
The act applied to all local authorities, including councils and the schools they were responsible for. Many teachers saw Section 28 as a ban on talking about gay relationships in their classrooms. As a result, at high schools like mine, same-sex relationships were never mentioned in any classes on biology or social education. It felt like an outlawed and taboo subject.
Because of this, if students thought they might be gay or bisexual, it was unlikely they’d feel safe confiding in staff or talking about it at school. From the teaching many of us received, it seemed like there was only one model of acceptable romantic relationship: heterosexuality.
Section 28 wasn’t repealed until November 2003, when I was twenty-three years old. So my formative teenage years were spent in a country where homosexuality was not just a taboo subject but one that parts of society were prohibited from discussing. During the process of repealing Section 28, Christians were a strong force behind the campaign to retain it as law.
Thankfully, in London, activists like Ian McKellen, Peter Tatchell, Michael Cashman, Lisa Power, Sue Sanders, Pam St. Clement, Isaac Julien, and Christine Burns were working tirelessly to get laws like these changed. Their tenacious work and that of many others led to the eventual repeal of Section 28 and a brighter future for everyone.
It would take until 2001, when I was twenty-one, for same-sex marriage to be legalized anywhere; the first country to do so was the Netherlands. In 2014, same-sex marriage legislation came into force in England and Wales, and the US legalized it nationwide in June 2015 as a result of the Obergefell v. Hodges case in the Supreme Court.
Those radical shifts all lay ahead. But for me,