Thank you all very much, and thank you, vice chancellor, for that very generous introduction there is something about coming back to Oxford
that makes me regress to a 19 year old friend of mine just asked me if I'd invited.
That's Professor Salim Epstein now. I was in Oxford giving this lecture.
There is no way I would be letting him up St. Lawrence this evening because the simply would not be able to speak.
It is. It is a huge honour to come back to Oxford and be part of this evening.
I will in the next half an hour,
also be talking about what I think the remaining challenges are for the LGBT movement in the United Kingdom and abroad.
The context with which I speak is based on the last ten years of working at Stonewall,
which for those of you who know Stonewall has a particular perspective. It's also a perspective.
As someone who's a thirty four year old gay woman who has been out since she was 14, I came out in school and navigated sixth form in Birmingham,
which was all girls sixth form college and came to St Hilda's very much out and quite incredulous at the thought that I should be anything but.
And I was very struck in those days at the suggestion that although sleeping with women was fine,
did I have to be quite so gay about who was the the prevailing concern of my, of my peers?
Because stakeholders who I adore has a very uncomfortable relationship with its reputation for producing lesbians?
I think Val McDermott's and I hold hold that title very proudly and certainly did so at the time.
Stonewall was set up 25 five years ago in response to something called Section 28.
Now, for those of you who are new to this world of LGBT history,
Section 28 was a piece of legislation that prevented the promotion of homosexuality in schools, leading to the banning of books.
Now, all of you who've done GCSE history know that banning books never bodes well for any any kind of social movement,
and what it led to is a very real anxiety about sexual orientation and sexual diversity.
At a time when we were seeing increasing legislation in relation to gender,
race and disability, there was almost a step backwards in relation to sexual orientation.
And the reason why I start at that point is because it's very worth remembering exactly how lesbian,
gay, bisexual and trans people were experiencing their identity in the late 80s and 90s.
There was a generation of men who had been actively pursued by the police for taking part in same sex activity.
Persecuted, arrested and had a string of convictions against their name.
And if they didn't, there was a constant fear that they might.
The next generation had come through at a time when they were single handedly held responsible for the significantly damaging and destructive
play because it was HIV and the whole of our nation was given to encouraged to think that gay men were singularly responsible for that.
And then we had a new generation of young people who were told that same sex relationships
would pretend and that promotion of their sexual orientation would be completely unlawful.
At the same time, in relation to gender identity where people had been able to change gender with relative discretion and stealth,
a court case where a woman tried to gain more from a divorce of her husband,
the judge ruled that she was never a woman in the first place and her marriage was invalid.
Therefore, setting back decades of very informal provision for trans people.
So Stonewall a a challenge to organisations, was set up to change the law.
And that's what Stonewall started with lots of other people in lots of different ways.
But we are now in a position where the United, well, Great Britain, not the United Kingdom.
Great Britain has the most comprehensive legal framework for lesbian, gay, bisexual people in the world.
We have the best legislation in relation to lesbian parenting.
For example, the Human Fertilisation Embryology Act enables same sex parents to get legal parents of the child from the conception.
For those of you who are fans of Last Tango in Halifax, they have broken the law in that programme.
Sarah Lancashire is not the legal parent of that child. It is going to cause chaos in Series four.
Notwithstanding your inability to just become power because you decide to be Sarah Lancashire, we still have very,
very extensive legal frameworks in this country and the introduction of same sex marriage last year,
which was which was an interesting battle that I could talk about at length in another department.
But what was different about equal marriage is that it came first and foremost driven by legislation, not by popular opinion.
It was the first piece of legislation for LGBT equality that came about in that way.
And that's quite an important thing to remember, because what it highlights is how loosely held some of these legal changes are.
But we have full legal equality. The Gender Recognition Act is not accurate and good for trans people.
There are significant gaps in legislation around trans, but certainly sexual orientation.
Legislation is pretty, pretty good. That is that lots of people to go what?
It's all right, Mary, what's the point of Stonewall now? We've done what we need to do.
But I think therefore we're at a very crucial moment in our civil rights movement, in our LGBT civil rights movement in this country.
It is a moment where most civil rights movements falter when it seems that we've achieved what we've set out to achieve.
But arguably, it is actually not the case that lesbian, gay,
bisexual and trans people can benefit from full equality in terms of the social lives that we live and in terms of people's hearts and minds.
It is OK to be gay. We would argue if you are a certain type of gay, if you are white, middle class, educated,
assertive with access to affluence or at least affluence, there is, it could be argued, a state where you have achieved full equality.
Well done. Carry on. You don't have to get the night bus home anymore.
You can get a cab home.
You don't have to walk down the dodgy streets holding your partner's hand because you just wouldn't have it go down that street.
If your nice, fully paid employment with all your rights and benefits, you experienced discrimination.
There will be processes and procedures in place to help you get through that.
If you experience discrimination from your GP, you will know how to make complaints about your GP because you can follow the website and understand
the dramatic and complicated processes through the General Medical Council to make complaints.
Those of us who are privileged are able to access full equality, and that's brilliant.
But it is very dangerous because it is easy, therefore, to assume that we are dumb in our work and we know it so well.
There's lots to do. So we know that half of young, lesbian, gay, bisexual people get bullied at school routinely.
We know that that's so gay is used by 98 percent of young people about everything from trains to computers.
And whenever I speak to anyone, this world language is very complicated where language is complicated.
Yes, we agree. But coding something crap means gay is very damaging to young people who think they might be gay.
That's that's not a high level analytical approach to language formation.
It's just that if you call something rubbish and say it's gay, that's not very nice.
So we have a very significant situation for young people at schools.
And it's not just young people, it is the young people who are perceived to be different.
So if you're young and gay and head boy and likely to go to Oxford and small,
you've got your three A-levels and someone says, or you're gay, you turn around and go, Yes, I am.
If you're 12 and ginger and quite like maths instead of football and someone calls you gay, you respond with, I don't know what I am.
I just know I quite like maths. The odds of you getting bullied as a result of that are significantly higher.
So what we see is young people who are different and other.
They're the ones who are experiencing homophobic bullying, the girls who like playing hockey, the girls who like playing rugby.
But sense of otherness that pervades is actually much more tricky to handle than empowering our lesbian and gay people to take care of themselves.
For young people who are bisexual, they have no role models and nothing to turn to at all.
So if you're very lost and confused and trans young people,
it is pretty damn impossible to try and navigate the school system when you wish to transition your gender.
Hate crime remains as high as ever. Hate incidents remain as high as ever.
We still don't report it, and we still don't trust the police when we do report those incidents.
We still experience inequalities in health and social care.
For those of us who are older and may rely on social workers to support us, we are likely to go back into the closet as we reach that older age.
Having spent a lifetime being open about our sexuality,
we put away pictures of our same sex partners when the social worker comes to deliver us our meals.
When you become vulnerable, you are more exposed as a result of your sexuality.
Of course, this is not to be true in sports. My team tell me this is something I must get very excited about.
Of course I therefore do. There is no Premier League footballers who is open about their sexuality.
There are plenty of them. They don't want to come out.
The reason why they don't want to come out is because of sponsorship, because they do want to be the gay one.
So it's all very complicated and very important. What's more worrying about sport?
Is the amount of homophobic abuse that goes on in the terraces? And how unsafe it is for young people and families to exist in places like that?
Football becomes the institution in the space where it seems racism, sexism and homophobia is common parlance.
And of course, where you see homophobia, you tend to see racism and sexism too.
So what we find is that, yes, there are categorical institutions, examples of discrimination and homophobia that need to be tackled.
So we will therefore develop a series of policies and interventions that help people go from good to great.
And we help institutions who are struggling to really get to grips with that.
And we work with organisations at five different levels, and I tend to work with the organisations.
You hate gay people. That's where I get deployed. And so I'm doing a lot of work at the moment with religious institutions.
More on that in a moment. And we go in and we say, Do you have any gay staff? And they say, No, we have no gay staff make up next organisation up.
We say, Do you have any gay staff? Yes, we've got this stuff. We've spoken to him and he's really happy.
He's really he's he's really great. He loves, he loves being gay and certainly got their problems.
So we work with them third level of institution. Do you have any gay staff?
Yes.
And we've got an LGBT network and three gay men go to the pub every Friday and talk about how hard it is to be gay when we go back and forth level.
Do you have any LGBT staff? Yes, we have an LGBT staff network.
We've got a lesbian who started completing the same work as quality index. She's persuaded to the gay men to do some of the work too,
and we're eventually going to present that to our department and see if they're interested in fourth level.
Yes, we have LGBT staff, but we're not quite sure what the issues are because we think we're a meritocracy and we
think it's absolutely brilliant to be gay here and we really don't really see any problems.
And we like what Stonewall does, but we don't think it quite suits us because we've got our own way that we know is better and we go, That's great.
That's fantastic. So what do you do? Well, lots of things do what we do when we find the fifth stage of organisation is the fifth stage of
organisation sees an intrinsic link between people being able to be open about their sexual orientation,
authenticity, performance in the workplace because people who are open about their sexual orientation enjoy going to work,
enjoy being at work, make better connexions,
make better friends and are able to be themselves in a way that immeasurably improves the environment for everybody working in that organisation.
So being open about who you are is an intrinsic part of actually what it is to be gay and what you will see is an increasing number of white,
privileged, middle class, educated, affluent people being open about their sexuality and people more and more know lesbian gay people.
They know lesbian and gay people because they work with them, they socialise with them, they pray with them.
There is a general acceptance on at Stonewall. What we are therefore aware of is the existence and advancement of what we call the good gay,
and the good gay is someone who doesn't push too much, doesn't challenge too much, acts appropriately, isn't to count, isn't to Butch.
Certainly doesn't wear a tie to a lecture she takes on him up her might turn up.
I know you are a good presentation and you are a safe presentation of gay and you are probably like you say that we've got equality now.
There's not too much to worry about.
You're not really going to mention the fact that someone spotted you on the way home last night because it feels like you're making too much fuss.
And it wasn't that big a deal anyway. So we have this reception of gay people who heterosexual people perceive as being all right and it's OK.
And when the Sun comes out, it's alright because they've worked with John for the last five years, and he's lovely and he got married two years ago.
It was a beautiful wedding and his mother had a great heart and it's all OK and that is really dangerous.
And it's time when we know that's really dangerous because it hides an underbelly of something quite serious that's going on.
And at Stonewall,
we're therefore moving into a state now where we're trying to move deeper into our communities and what we mean by deeper into our communities.
It means acknowledging the people from low income backgrounds who have very limited access to role models who are on short term zero hour contracts,
who work for small to medium enterprises who don't do anything around equality are probably not in the same
position of privilege as those who work for a big organisation and are educated and have an opportunity to work.
I mentor a young woman who is applying to Oxford and her parents.
Let me meet her every three weeks in a library where we talk about applying to Oxford and she's a Muslim young woman.
And every three weeks she reads my copy of the magazine and leaves, and I desperately hope that she's actually doing her Newcastle at some point.
It's really making me tense that I'm being a bad role model, but there is.
There is a hidden community that we're not tapping into and that we're not talking to.
And of course, trans falls into that more than anything.
Because if you are a certain type of trans person, a person who passes a person who presents well,
who's not too challenging, then it would be OK to be trans, according to you.
But if you're not those things, if you're desperately on the three year waiting list for the NHS to possibly
possibly give you hormones after you've possibly jump through the 10 hoops,
as someone who's on the autistic spectrum is struggling to express what they mean by gender identity in a 21st century idea of modern gender notions,
it's not going to be easy for you. You are not going to say our work here is done.
So the challenge of Stonewall is how can we get everybody who has a sense of privilege?
And I use that word loosely, and I include heterosexual people in that to to actively play a part in trying to
nudge and support those deeper communities to be more accepting of LGBT equality.
How do we help heterosexual women who are on the governing bodies of every primary school in this country to say,
I wonder if we can just talk about the fact that every book in this primary school has only got opposite sex couples in it?
Can we talk about that and how do we talk and help the people who work in the children's wards of the country to say,
actually, that's a same sex couple. They're not sisters. How can I help you understand that?
And part of my role as part of my secret role at the moment is doing a huge amount of work with the Church
of England because they are desperately trying to get this right and desperately unsure of how to do so.
So how can I help LGBT people and their mums and dads and their brothers and sisters who belong to this community to help nudge that in their own way?
Because this is no longer going to be achieved by one organisation playing the game of the House of Parliament and the House of Lords.
It's a particular type of politics to achieve that change. The change we need now has to come from the communities where we live,
and that requires heterosexual people to play a leadership role in that, and it requires gay people to look beyond their peripheral vision.
Look beyond a sense of what? I'm alright. It's all right. What you going on about to think?
What is it alright to the youth group down the road? Can I go and volunteer for the LGBT youth group?
Is it a mentoring programme I can get involved in? Is there a school? I can be a in a role?
Is there a health and wellbeing board I can get involved in? What can I actively do to try and nudge this a little bit beyond our comfort zone?
And that is the challenge. And when I talk to big corporations,
I say go out and go and find three people to mentor whom you've got more power over who you've got more power than they have.
And they go, Well, you know, I'm a junior member of staff at JP Morgan. It's like you didn't find my.
Three people in your local community who you can support and help go and do something, I'm glad you can get married.
I'm really glad you found a surrogate.
I'm really glad that you have these opportunities and we fought very, very hard for you to have these opportunities.
Think beyond just want to say something on international on that basis.
So the response we get is, well, what about the let's do international?
How do you see what's happening in Russia? Have you seen what's happening in Uganda? Come on, Stonewall.
When are you going to sort out Putin? And an email I got last week is, what are you doing about Oasis?
If I have solved the problem of ice and more of my skills are better served elsewhere.
There is an assumption and that is born out of the fact that we have seen considerable dramatic change in the last 30 years.
We are all gay rights campaigners now, brothers and sisters, because we have all played a part in marriage,
in adoption, in same sex people being able to enter a civil partnership.
Gay people in the armed forces. We have all played a part in that. So we are all experts on how to achieve equality internationally.
Now, as a servant to new acting CEO, I got myself into incredible hot water over our international work and I will just share
that in a slightly off record way as I'm recorded about exactly exactly what happened.
So talking about Brunei, so Brunei has introduced Sharia law.
Sharia law means that people can be stoned to death or stoned if they break the rules in order to be prosecuted.
Under Sharia law, you have to have more than one witness,
so you have to have multiple witnesses who come and say this is what's happened and you are condemned by a religious court.
Gay people are included in a whole long list of people who are persecuted under this law.
The very vocal, very able, very well-connected,
very media savvy because we've been creating online communities way before it got trendy through Twitter.
Because when you're the only gay in the village, you love to talk to people quickly online.
Suddenly, 10000 people will say, Well, you don't want to do something about this now.
What are you doing about the gay marriage or not? And the answer to that question was nothing.
And the reason why we're doing nothing is because a gay man in Brunei is like, This is brilliant because I'm with my boyfriend.
There's no witnesses. I can't get them for them but tell you what the problem is.
Women who again sexually assaulted by one person, they can't be prosecuted because there's no witnesses to that.
So we're really worried about women who are raped, who are then prosecuted for sexual immorality, but there's no witnesses.
We're really worried about that. I remember the gay stuff, this one, we'll sort the case of the victim, but I want the best you can do.
No shock. Can you say nothing?
So assembled LGBT activists on the internet, a stone was going to do nothing because we're quite worried about women now.
For a lesbian who's just taken over an LGBT organisation to say to a predominantly gay male internet force, we're not that bothered about gay men,
we're worried about men and was possibly the most career suicide bombings have failed to do that I have ever made in my life.
And so we learnt from that time we reflect because that's what good leaders do.
But it was very indicative of the power behind the LGBT movement in Britain compared to, say, the power behind the women's movement in Britain.
And so there something about how do we use that power and how do we take that responsibility seriously?
Russia is another good example. So everybody in this room will know that Russia has introduced draconian laws around sexual orientation.
You have seen it on every headline around Sochi. You'll learn about this.
What are we going to do? Well, you can boycott vodka made in Latvia if you want to.
But let's think about a different route. So we spoke to LGBT activists in Russia.
What should we do? This is terrible. They say that the only reason why Putin has introduced laws on homosexuality, though,
is because it stops the Western media obsessing about the level of corruption, fraud, financial mismanagement that's happening in Russia.
The whole world and the Western media is getting ever so excited about the games while they are making the most dodgy,
dodgy government decisions ever. So well done.
Starting well done last. Because you have completely played it to Putin's agenda.
OK, so but LGBT people are going to not because of it.
Yes, of course.
The spike in hate crime is terrible because the whole of the Western agenda is lecturing Russia on what they should do about sexual orientation.
OK, so how can we help you? Well, you can shut up and you can then take to you by LGBT activists into your organisation for three weeks.
Train them, give them good communications. How do they tell them how to write a business plan?
Introduce us to the guys. Nobody else we can use that offices some practical ideas and most importantly, don't tell anyone about it.
The. Because it will cause us more persecution. So that's exactly what Stonewall did.
So we didn't call for a boycott of Sochi. We didn't call for the riots in Russia.
We very gently and very quietly did everything we could to support those raptors on the ground.
Those human rights defenders on the ground. We are terrible on communicating that there is no way we can heal that.
And therefore, the modern LGBT movement in Britain says What is stone will do?
No international, nothing. So what is an organisation run by a mafia only interested in gender issues
and neglecting and ignoring the issues affecting gay men in these countries?
What are you going to do? And that is the challenge of the modern LGBT movement.
Those are the challenges of inequalities facing LGBT people in 21st century Britain.
They are subtle. They are deep.
And they are deeply rooted in our communities in a way that is so complex it is easy to dismiss and boycott rock vodka instead.
And we are so tempted to sign a petition or boycott now or say this is wrong or get crossed because somebody
gets kicked out of Sainsbury's for kissing all the while ignoring the fact that we have a massive sub community
in this country who are not experiencing the full benefits of the equality that we are and ignoring the fact
that there are activists in other countries desperately trying to do what we've done over the last 25 years.
Against a backdrop of huge noise from the West, that is not a challenge that lends itself to the side of a bus.
It's not something that lends itself to a tweet,
and it is a huge challenge for stone in this modern age about how we can really start enabling and empowering those strongest LGBT
members of community to start playing an active role in a way that is slightly more sophisticated than we currently suggest.
And that is the challenge, but is really what this is about.
So at Stonewall, we're going to keep finding ways, better ways and big ways for average standard LGBT people,
what we call straight allies to start making a difference in their communities to start saying in their church.
Actually, when you talk about gay people like that,
you're talking about my son and I don't see anything in the New Testament that supports what you're saying.
And actually, that's not how we feel as a congregation and as a Catholic, I am the Catholic Church in the same way you are the Catholic Church.
So don't tell me what God thinks. Don't tell me that this school that is majority Muslim is not ready for discussions
about sexual orientation because you are white and you are making assumptions. Let's actually talk to Muslim parents.
Let's see what they say and see how they work. Let's look beyond our own assumptions, our own peripheral visions.
And that also means standing up and challenging transphobia that exists in the lesbian, gay, bisexual community, racism that exists in the lesbian,
gay, bisexual community by phobia that exists in the lesbian, gay community and accepting that we are not all good gays.
I had a very long conversation with a woman the other day who was gay, who spent a long time telling me how important it was, how normal she was.
I am a normal lesbian, a normal lesbian. I have never worn dungarees.
I do not understand this work will be done when we are all normal.
Have accepted this kind of mainstreamed and I thought, No, how can you tell this woman that?
I said, Well done on being a normal lesbian. I'm fine.
Thank you. So how we've got to get to a stage where you acknowledge the pain actually,
that affects all communities with complex histories and not give up now because that
bit is done and think about how we can make a wider and more significant impact.
Thank you very much.