A discussion with Karen my editor prompted me to think about changing social attitudes towards same sex relationships over the last twenty years.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working with my editor Karen Holmes on my third novel, Veering Off Course, which I’m hoping to publish shortly.
The book is the first part of a planned four-part series, The Navigation Quartet, which will track the developing relationship between two main characters (MCs) David and Alan. It opens in 1997, then jumps six years to 2003, from when the narrative will be pretty much continuous until the present day across the four books. Set partly in the Yorkshire mill town where they both grew up, and then in London, the development of the two characters and to track their relationship as it grows.
The book's 1997 opening takes place on the night before Alan is due to leave to start a new job in London. David and Alan are both nineteen, have been close friends for over ten years, and have one last night out – which ends with them in bed together. Alan leaves the next morning but David remains behind to cope with what has happened.
By the time the two meet again in 2003, David is a bus driver who is married with two sons, whilst Alan is a gay man who has risen through the ranks at his company to be a successful executive in an advertising agency. He has outgrown his Yorkshire roots in the six years he has been away, as his tastes and attitudes have been shaped by his life in London and the friends that he has met.
Meeting Alan again after the gap, David realises that he made a terrible mistake when he married, and that he did so partly out of panic because of his feelings for Alan and his inability to cope with the possibility that he might be gay.
This first novel in the series is concerned with how that realisation comes about, how David copes with it and then tracks the development of his rekindled friendship with Alan. The discussion arose over the question of attitudes – whether by 1996 David would in fact have been as nervous of people’s reactions to his sexuality as the book suggests.
Karen worried that that the attitudes described in the book – and the homophobia – were more typical of the 1970s and 1980s than the new millennium. She discussed this in the context of her own gay friends and relatives around that time – in rural North Yorkshire, industrial West Yorkshire and the urban South. Karen said that the only people she came across who had problems with other people’s sexuality were “quite elderly and insular”.
This was an interesting observation and prompted some fascinating discussions with Michael here. After all, in our 40 years together – including 25 living in a small village in rural North Yorkshire – we could honestly say that we had never encountered any overt hostility because of our sexual orientation. Was I overstating things?
Well, maybe, But the fact remains that such hostility clearly does still exist, and manifests itself in bullying, verbal abuse and sometimes violent attacks. Gay teenagers are still made homeless because parents throw them out when they come out.
As part of our discussions, I did some further research - particularly on the question of attitudes towards gay people. Fortunately, the British Social Attitudes survey have been tracking attitudes towards same-sex relationships for more than 30 years, going all the way back to 1983. This means that it is possible to track the development of attitudes in some detail.
In the context of Veering Off Course, the survey shows that, in 1996, 50% of respondents thought that same-sex relationships were ‘always or mostly wrong’, against only 23% who thought them not wrong at all. Clearly, this would be the backdrop to David's perceptions at the time of the opening scene in 1997.
By 2003, things were shifting: the number saying that same sex relationships were always or mostly wrong was down to 40%, with 37% saying they were not wrong at all. By 2012 the 'not wrong at all' figure had moved to 47%, whilst the “always or mostly wrong” figure had fallen to 28%.
By 2016, the proportion responding “not wrong at all” had reached 64%. This is a huge advance, but we must remember that this means that 36% - more than a third – of the population still disapproves to some extent.
The other important analysis by the National Centre for Social Research focuses on different attitudes depending on education. The 2013 article noted that the most marked distinction was between those with and without qualifications. Graduates were the most tolerant: in 2012, for example, 19 per cent thought homosexuality was always or mostly wrong. On the other hand, amongst those without any qualifications, 47 per cent still thought homosexuality was wrong.
On the basis of this research and anecdotal evidence, it seems to me that David’s perceptions and fears about what he faced if he acknowledged his sexual orientation are pretty near the mark. After all, as many will attest, it only takes one incident to undermine somebody’s confidence or feeling of personal security. You'll have the opportunity to judge for yourself by reading the book when it's published.
There is no doubt that we have come a long way over the last 40 years, but we must never forget how tough it seemed at times, and that there is still a huge amount of work to do. Ultimately, our aim needs be for LGBTQ people to achieve tolerance and then progress towards acceptance. As recent events in Tanzania reminded us, even achieving the first of these can be an uphill struggle.