I’ve been offline for about twenty hours and have just come back to the news of David Laws’ resignation. I am incredibly sad. Here’s why.
***
Imagine you have to live two lives. Imagine you wake up in the morning next to your partner, you get up, have shower, have breakfast, kiss your partner goodbye, and then go and live your other life. In your other life, your partner doesn’t exist. You have colleagues. You see them every day. You work with them, socialise with them. You go for lunch, or for drinks after work. They tell stories of what they did with their family at the weekend, show you pictures of their kids. You nod and smile. You stay silent. Perhaps you make something up about what you did at the weekend by yourself or with friends. You get well-meaning questions and suggestions about finding a partner. You nod and smile. You stay silent. You go out to the annual company do and everyone is there with their partner. You are alone. You nod and smile. You stay silent.
In your other life, you have friends too. You meet up with them for dinner, you get invited to parties, you maybe even go on holiday with them. They start settling down with partners. They offer to set you up with a date. You nod and smile. You stay silent. Your friends start having kids. You watch them growing up. Your friends are still inviting you to parties, still taking you on holidays with them, and sometimes they ask whether you’ll be bringing someone with you. You nod and smile. You stay silent.
In your other life, you have a family as well. Parents, bothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, nieces and nephews. You get together once or twice a year – Christmas, maybe a bank holiday weekend. Your siblings and cousins start bringing partners to these family gatherings. People ask, how come you haven’t met anyone yet? You nod and smile. You stay silent. Those partners start becoming husbands and wives. You get invited to weddings, which you attend alone. Not met anyone yet, ask the family again. You nod and smile. You stay silent. You start getting invited to christenings. And your parents start dropping hints – they would like to be grandparents too. You nod and smile. You stay silent.
And at the end of your day, after work, and drinks with colleagues, and dinner with friends; after perhaps a weekend seeing your family; you go back to your partner – to your first life. You kiss them as you enter the house. You share drinks over late night television, or they cook you a meal. You tell them you love them as you fall asleep in their arms. But your partner isn’t happy. They want to meet your friends, be introduced to your family. You keep going off to family weddings, or dinner parties with friends while your partner is left behind. Unacknowledged. A secret. Someone you’re ashamed of. You look at them with sadness. And you stay silent.
Imagine you are living these two lives for years, decades. Imagine you live in constant dread that one day, your two lives will intersect. A friend will meet a colleague or a family member, will figure out that you weren’t where you said you were at the weekend. Or perhaps one day your partner will realise that they can’t make the compromise anymore – that they deserve better than being your dark guilty secret for the rest of their life.
***
Surely, you ask, no one has to live a double-life anymore. Surely we are a tolerant enough society by now that people should just be able to be themselves. It’s not a big deal, right?
And yet, that’s not true. Kids leaving school even today will have spent some of their school lives in an education system dominated by Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which stopped teachers from even being able to intervene when they saw homophobic bullying in schools. It was only in 2003 that Section 28 was repealed, and not nearly enough work has been done since then to address the issue of homophobic bullying which has become endemic in the British education system. It was also only in 2003 that it became illegal to sack people for being gay. Think about it – that was only 7 years ago. Before that people could be and were sacked simply for who they were. If your whole life’s experience tells you that it’s not safe for you to be open about who you are – that you may get attacked verbally and physically, that people in positions of authority will not step forward to help you, that you may even lose your job – would you choose to be open about your sexuality? Or would you try to find a way – any way – of hiding it?
Social change doesn’t happen overnight. We have the legal framework, and in some parts of society we even have the cultural framework. But the situation is still patchy, and there are still far too many pockets of overt and hidden homophobia out there. Saying that it’s all fine now is not enough. We have to take an active step forward to support lesbian, gay and bisexual people – to make them feel safe, supported and included in our society, so that they too can live happy and fulfilling lives and simply be themselves.
David Laws is not the first victim of this, not even the first high-profile victim. I fear he will not be the last. I may disagree with him on policy. I may even think that the way he handled his expenses was not right. None of this stops me, however, from being incredibly sad for him as a person. The one thing I can hope for is that we all learn something from this so that we can stop ruining lives, relationships and careers. After all, one in ten of us is lesbian, gay or bisexual. That’s a lot of lives to ruin.