Introducing: Dan

In celebration of Pride Month, we have been releasing some special pieces of content from our community and collaborators. Amplifying these voices and the stories of those close to us is at the core of what Reform Radio is all about. For LGBTQIA+ History Month, our staff member Evie shared her story on her journey to becoming her true self as a genderfluid transfeminine woman. Inspired by Evie sharing her story, Reform’s Mental Health and Well-being Manager Dan has written a piece that shines a light on the darker side that Pride can conjure up.

Introducing Dan…

My name is Dan Owens-Cooper. I am a qualified psychological therapist and take pride in my role as Reform Radio’s Mental Health and Well-being manager. I am also a gay man, though (as will be explained) feelings of pride do not always easily accompany this fact.

This Pride month I invite you to read my experience of the darker side of LGBTQ+ pride, an aspect sometimes assumed to be confined to the past, a silent pain still felt by so many but so rarely acknowledged.

We need to talk about shame.

Once consigned to little more than 1 of 7 seven deadly sins, the term ‘pride’ in 2021 is synonymous with celebrations of the emancipated (or emancipating) LGBTQ+ community. Conjuring up images of rainbow flags, parades, social action and (for some of us) hazy recollections of dancing to B*witched ‘C’est La Vie’ in Piccadilly’s underground car park…but the less said about that the better.

Questioning the community’s attachment to the term Pride is understandable, and whilst Google may have its own answer, let me tell you what pride means to me.

Pride means the absence of shame but exists only in its relationship to shame. The two are co-dependent, much like day and night, hot and cold, Ant and Dec – one cannot exist without the other. They are, like it or not, opposing sides of the same coin. With being gay so publicly aligned with Pride in 2021, you may be forgiven for assuming that shame and the LGBTQ+ community have shared little more than a passing glance at each other. But for me and many others in the community, such a position of blissful ignorance is something we could have only dreamed of. Because for many in the LGBTQ+ community, shame has been inescapable. It’s been intoxicating. Doing to our self-concept what sour milk does to a fresh hot beverage. And as anyone who has taken that first enticing sip of such a concoction will know – it kind of leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth.

This is gay shame. A pervasive feeling of (at best) inadequacy and (at worst) worthlessness.

As a child and teenager exposed to an onslaught of anti-gay messages, I was helpless to prevent shame from being woven into the fabric of my identity, and colouring my sense of worth in all aspects of my being (not just sexuality).

Unstitching that, has been a decades long endeavour, and one that will continue my whole life. My appearing at ease with my sexuality, perhaps confident even, belies the truth that is this – Pride is something I continually aspire to. Shame is an unwelcome reality.

I was 15 years old when I came out. I’m proud of that. There’s a fine line between bravery and stupidity and coming out to anyone whilst in my final year at a Bolton Catholic High School could, in hindsight, be considered the latter. Because, for context – being gay then and there was unthinkable. Literally. Gay was nothing beyond a slur. Packing, in just 3 letters, a knockout punch that most 4-letter curse words could only dream of. To self-identify as it would be as incredulous as self-identifying as excrement. No-one would do it. No-one in their right mind at least. And no-one did.

There was barely a context I experienced then in which LGBTQ+ identities were discussed in anything but derogatory terms. Section 28 (an actual law, making it a criminal act to promote, in British schools, same-sex relationships as a moral equivalent to heterosexual relationships) made damn sure that this hostility extended even into my classroom. This meant that as a schoolboy who would become a gay man, I was denied any education on safe same-sex practices. Talk about unprotected. I mean, just imagine if there had been a sexually transmitted killer virus spreading like wildfire through the community. Raises eyebrow.

No discussion of HIV and AIDS. No discussion of gay sex, gay deaths, gay life, gay people (if we were classed as people), gay love, gay relationships, gay … anything. Unless of course gay hate was your thing. This was not only legal, but virtually prescribed by acts like Section 28, and seemingly all the rage.

Thinking back to those months and years after coming out, my stomach flips. To come out at that time meant embracing shame. It meant accepting you were unacceptable to society, and just sticking 2 fingers up at them, revelling in the disgrace of it all and just doing being gay anyway. As a seasoned people pleaser, this position of rebellion was not one I would have willingly chosen. In an offering that was about as desirable as ‘Sophie’s Choice’, I found myself forced to choose between living a shameful life or living a shameful lie – and so it was the former on which I settled. It was every bit as exciting as it was mortifying and a shame infused thrill was my default emotional state, with self-loathing and excitement tussling constantly for poll position. For a while at least. It was a lot … for a 15 year old.

Believe it or not – I know what it’s like to loathe the LGBTQ+ community. I know because I was there in the 80s and 90s, subject to the same anti-gay messages that conditioned so many others at the time and decades before.

Being gay does not prevent society’s prescribed moral code seeping into your conscience. And being gay does not make that associated shame budge easily. Even when you realise that you are the thing you were raised to hate.

You see, I learnt like everyone else that gay was disgusting. Only for me, learning that gay was disgusting meant learning that I was disgusting. Adults, teachers, newspapers, politicians all taught me that I was disgusting. It was a lesson that would see me, aged as young as 11, fearing the sickening possibility that I might be attracted to men. Lay in my childhood bed weighing up my severely limited options, which included (as far as I could see) maintaining a sham marriage just long enough to conceive children. Having heard my mum talk about how one day I would pass my toys and books onto my children, it broke my heart to think I might disappoint her. Not that I expect any child of the future would be interested in a 1989 Neighbours annual anyway, but I suppose you never know.

Other ‘options’ included disappearing to a remote country, cutting off friends and family, or – if push came to shove – ending my life. If you’re worried about the distress I felt, contemplating this as an 11 year old, then you shouldn’t. Because it wasn’t distressing. In fact, the idea that I had a ‘get out’ if things ever got so bad was a comfort, not a fear. Which tells you something about the value I placed on my life then. “I had those exact thoughts and fantasies” said my gay friend James when we became friends almost 10 years later. It seems he too had endured this shameful strategizing as a child. Knowing this might have brought comfort to me, had it not come 10 years too late. That 11 year old could have done with knowing he wasn’t alone after all.

In my later teens, then openly gay to increasing numbers, I took a regrettable path that was and still is well trodden by those within the community. A path leading to a position I like to call “I’m not one of those gays”. I wasn’t one of those gays that always went to gay bars. I wasn’t one of those gays that was ‘camp’ (thankfully the time I paraded downstairs dressed in my mum’s wedding dress was pre-social media – no body, no crime). I wasn’t one of those gays that was ‘just about being gay’. Because – heaven forbid, right?!

This was me clinging to scraps of mainstream societal acceptance that may have still been available. I recall my position being endorsed by an older heterosexual acquaintance, telling me how he’d “seen them all down at Soho” and that I wouldn’t want to be doing all that. Of course, it didn’t matter that this nameless acquaintance had a track record of extra marital, uninvited groping of females – it went without saying: gays were worse.

I didn’t recognise the harm I was doing to myself, playing a willing and active role in the process of gay shaming. One foot in the community, the other aligning with the homophobic party line that had plagued me my whole life. I know better these days and I feel very sensitive to ongoing divisions centred around homophobia within the LGBTQ+ community, and listen out for them in myself. Profiles and conversations on Grindr are too often littered with terms like “str8 acting”, “no camp”, “no fems”, “non-scene”, and the practice of “slut shaming” is common. The fact I’ve yet to see a profile that says “no str8 acting” is indicative of the unspoken consensus (be it conscious or otherwise) that “str8” ways of being, carry greater cultural currency even in the gay world. If in any doubt about the pervasiveness of this bias, ask yourself how you would feel if you heard someone say to a gay person “you don’t seem gay!”, compared to how you’d feel if they said “you don’t seem straight!”. Incidentally, I’ve been on the receiving end of both, and hate the fact that part of me feels flattered on hearing the those words: “you don’t seem gay”. It’s a feeling that was put there by society. It’s indicative of shame and I don’t want it.

It’s 20 years since I first said the words “I’m gay” to another person. I wish it didn’t, but writing those words still evokes an inkling of shame.

Partly (no doubt) because I recall the overwhelming tidal wave of shame that first conversation brought crashing down on me, but also because my personal process of ‘gay shame detox’ is far from complete. I’m proud to say that the shame that once sounded like a deafening heavy metal concert (with me in the mosh pit), is now more like a faint unwelcome whisper. It’s an echo from the past, quiet enough to not provoke a reaction, but loud enough to be heard and cruel enough to still sting.

It saw me get to the age of 34 before I felt able to be open about my sexuality in all my employed roles, by which point I had been married 3 years (… to a man). 34 years walking this endless walk of shame, dodging particular questions, squirming at being asked in front of a captive audience of colleagues whether or not I would want my wife to take my surname, swerving conversations that might invite any personal disclosure. You can only imagine the barrier this presented to forming any kind of meaningful social connection to colleagues. It’s no wonder that, even after 10 years service, “he keeps himself to himself” was a phrase so often attributed to me in my last role before Reform Radio.

This veil of silence extended to some personal relationships too. Having felt paralysed by such overwhelming shame after coming out to my mum at 16, neither of us mentioned it again for almost a decade. A big rancid elephant by the name of shame in the room that was our, otherwise close, relationship. Shame stopped her from really knowing me for so long. Speaking more openly has come later than I would have liked, but better late than never.

Incredible advancements by the LGBTQ+ movement in the UK may have accompanied my healing process but it did not deliver it. It’s true I’m healing, but there is no protective legislation in the world that could give me my childhood back. No amount of attended Pride weekends can bleach the shame of weeks, months, years on end being battered with anti-gay messages from the mouths of everyone from my Prime Minister to my Lollipop Lady, both (incidentally) tasked (in their own particular ways) with the job of serving and protecting me. Both (incidentally) failing.

As a therapist I often say that the process of healing from shame is a difficult one to articulate, but I will try. It’s not a pretty picture, since it invariably involves one becoming (for a period at least) fully submerged in the sea of shame one has been treading water in for so long.

Healing from shame for me involves an ongoing process of relationship building with my inner child (that part of me still wounded, housing the shame, blaming himself). I try to provide to him now the acceptance society denied him then. He informs my tastes still too, as any casual glance at some of my Spotify playlists would confirm* (*those averse to 90s female singer songwriters and/or Victoria Beckham’s solo material might want to steer clear).

I have moved towards relationships in which I feel wholly accepted and asserted boundaries that safeguard me against anything less. I am open about my sexuality most of the time, because ‘outing’ our shame is the ultimate weapon in the fight against it. I resist wherever possible the urge to hide my sexuality, even when being truthful creates awkwardness and discomfort. If those inner workings of my psyche are to ever fully accept that being gay is not shameful, then I must behave consistently with that position. I try to build good relationships with gay people, and discourage within-minority prejudice. I try to live authentically to avoid colluding with shame, and to embody in as far as possible my belief that ‘it’s okay to be who you are’ (even if that means admitting to an unhealthy familiarity with the script of Spice World: The Movie … you know, if that were your thing).

I’m not perfect, but I like myself. I didn’t deserve the onslaught of gay denigration that characterised my childhood, but it was a toxicity that touched all of us who lived through it, gay, straight or otherwise. Lessons are hard to unlearn. Inherited beliefs are tough to shake. Despite the amazing progress made by the LGBTQ+ community and the pride we profess, generations who have digested anti-gay messages see the lingering shame that still divide family relationships, still breed inner turmoil, and still give rise to immeasurable barriers to long overdue acceptance. Acceptance that should never have been denied in the first place.

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read about my experience.

I do not pretend that it is representative of every LGBTQ+ individual who experienced a less inclusive time, but I hope it may encourage discussions that bring into focus those ripples of shame still felt today.

So as to out gay shame from the fabric of our lived experience, stich by stich, and to shine a light on the silent internal battles ongoing in an era when one could be forgiven for thinking the battle was all but won for the LGBTQ+ community.

Happy pride everyone.