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I would like to speak to all the young people in particular from
small towns and all towns of course, but I think small town,
small mindedness is a particular problem if you’re young and
think that you might be gay. In an ideal world of course we
would just be as we are, just human beings who have feelings
for other human beings and we’d have no labels but society
does give us labels and one day I hope that changes and we
can just exist and love people. But if you are bullied for being
gay you have two choices. You can hide, run, pretend you're
not, or you can be brave and defiant and feel good about what
you are. And I like to think that people like myself and all the
other people before me and after me have done some things
that might reach young people and might help them, by being
very out and very open about who and what we are for many
years now. When I went to school in the 70s I was the only gay
women in the world. There were no others. There were
none on television. The word only existed in the dictionary that I
would look up in the library, there was one incident of male
homosexuality in the Jeremy Thorpe trials on television in 1979
and I really was the only, only person. Now that was very hard
and I was very badly bullied for a couple of years of my life. I
was kicked and spat on and my clothes were drawn on and I
was sent to an unsupportive panel of teachers who had never
met somebody like myself before and had to deal with
them. I was sent to a psychiatric unit at 16, I was suffering from
severe anxiety and I was questioned about my sexuality
thoroughly by somebody there. That went on, as you can
imagine, to make quite a young miserable life in a very, very
repressive era with the backdrop of Thatcherism. As you might
know in those days the Conservative Party introduced some
draconian laws, the most famous being Clause 28. Which
unfortunately attracted an enormous amount of right wing
bigots in favour of its campaign which was just a ludicrous
notion that you can teach homosexuality and of course we
know you can’t do that because we live in a world where we're
constantly told that the ‘correct’ and good thing to be is
heterosexual and yet many of us are not, so you cannot
programme the brain, the psyche, to be one thing. We are what we
are and how we became that way we don’t know yet. But, things
have changed enormously, as a young person; I have to say
my school experiences affected my life enormously. But I’m one
of the lucky people because I have an innate sense of survival.
I became a professional performer, comedian by the age of 27 in
an era, where again, I was the only lesbian, out, and open
performing on stage and I had to do, you know, incredibly
boisterous aggressive atmospheres in the early days of my
stand up career. The Belfast Empire on a Friday night with just
bottles thrown at me, there were very few women doing comedy
at all, let alone lesbians who were out and open. So I had to
take various comments and heckles and abuse in the early
days. And now I see and I’m glad to see that there are many
other women identifying as lesbians who are performing and
being comedians I like to think that perhaps they don’t have to
answer the questions that I had to answer in the first few years
of my career and indeed still do, which was always just about
being gay, when did you think you were gay, why are you gay,
you know, all this stuff. And I’m pleased that now there are many
other people to carry the baton after me and after other people
of my age, and I want to give a very strong message to say that
although things are hugely better in terms of legislation
throughout the world, you still can’t change people’s minds that
easily. You can legislate and now thank goodness if you walk
down the street and somebody gives you homophobic abuse or
racist abuse, you know, you can report these as hate crimes
and that is very, very important. I had beatings in my 20s I
would have never even dreamt of going to the police because I
knew they would do absolutely nothing about it because I was
gay or it was in a gay club or it was outside of a gay club,
and now things are very, very different. But what is still
happening, sadly, is obviously people are frightened and lets not
forget that the people who do bully you and do intimidate me,
really are just frightened because people are frightened of
what they don’t know about and what they don’t understand.
And the work that we're all doing, all gay people, Stonewall, all
the other organisations around the world is to try and fight
prejudice on many different levels. And that means putting
political lobbying, pressure into Government, it also means, it
means a vast arrange of things, expression in the arts. There
are people out there doing very small things to very big things.
But it doesn’t matter who you are we are all part of the struggle
to just try and open peoples minds and have a wider
acceptance of what we are. I think it’s very important to bear in
mind that there’s a lot of people out there working on your
behalf and there’s a huge world and when you grow up you'll
see that there’s lots of other like-minded people, so hang on, in
whatever situation you’re in and please use all the support
available to you, and just know those people who did bully you
are cowardly and frightened themselves and try in a way to
feel sorry for them because you are stronger than them. You
might have to educate them one day about what you are. But life
is harder for all young people gay or straight. I know it’s
particularly hard if you’re gay, and really hard if you’re black
and gay. But you know, hang on, because, it gets better today,
it really does. And, we can make it happen. You have to realise that.