Original subtitles

On 27th July 50 years ago, the decriminalisation of sexual acts between consenting males

over 21 - in private - in England and Wales

was given the royal assent by a young queen.

And I can only imagine what my father would have thought

as he took the 8.17 train from Witham into Liverpool Street,

and then the news, homosexuality had been legalised,

not knowing that, far away across the country,

I was sitting there in my little shorts,

plotting and preparing for a long career as, you know,

a screaming queen!

Since then, a lot has changed for gay people in Britain.

There we go. I do.

What do you call yourself now, then?

An accidental lesbian. Right.

Tres-bien. Tres-bien!

But in the long journey towards mainstream acceptance,

has something also been lost?

It was rare to be gay, and it was fun finding a world that was.

Have we sacrificed community and the spirit of the outsider

for the rather conservative values of the straight world?

Never in a million years would I have thought

that I could marry a man.

I'm taking a trip around the country to see just how much a nation

that used to lock men up for being homosexual has really changed.

Excuse me, sir. Do you know that he's bent?

Well, I do now.

Is Britain finally able to accept the full 50 shades of gay?

To many people, the idea of being criminalised for being gay

might seem like ancient history, but even after decriminalisation,

gay men still risked police persecution and disgrace.

In Manchester, I'm visiting a now boarded-up public convenience

with former police officer Roger.

And you were a young police officer. Yes, I was. Yes.

And you were sent down there to do what?

We were in what was called the plainclothes department.

It was a licensing vice department and we would look

into complaints and take whatever action we thought was necessary.

So you would come down here and what would happen, exactly?

Well, you'd come down the staircase here and see men using these

toilets in and out, in and out,

but then you'd notice that some men weren't going in and out

and we would wait and watch, see what they were doing.

Did they have to do something that was incriminating?

What we would find sometimes, the men were masturbating. Hm.

Not each other, that would be an offence of gross indecency,

but what you'd find, they'd be standing, facing the wall

and masturbating, and staying there for a period,

looking sideways and that would... That would be enough?

That would be our... Yeah, importuning.

So you'd go and stand next to somebody, I'd be here,

observed by you coming and going as someone who's not leaving. Yes.

And then you move up towards here...

Probably here. I love you saying there.

How are you going to see if I've got an erection from over there?

We can see over the top. If it comes up high?

And we can probably see your arm moving for masturbation.

And then, so, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank,

and then look, look, look, look, look, and then you'd say...

I'm a police officer,

I'm arresting you for importuning for an immoral purpose.

And what were their faces like at that point?

Aghast. Aghast? Yeah.

When these things happened and you saw that aghast face,

and you knew someone was going to get a criminal record,

basically, for these things, didn't they? Yes.

It's quite a responsibility, in a way.

It was, and I wasn't happy about it because my true feelings were

live and let live, but that was my job at the time

and I had to do that. I didn't have a choice, really.

It's kind of unimaginable that you'd have to...

You'd think people would even think of going down to a

public toilet to have sex, really.

It's like being in the Titanic here, almost.

It wasn't probably to have sex, it was more to pick up. Yeah.

We used to be arresting people for importuning

because we thought they were then going to commit... An immoral act.

It must have seemed like the end of the world for a poor guy

who's already hiding his sexual identity to be suddenly faced with

the, kind of, spotlight of a court appearance and in the courts,

always, there were journalists from the local paper

just on the off-chance that something exciting would happen,

so you really had a chance to be quite...

..ruined by these experiences, right up, I think, until the '70s.

But this dangerous and illicit atmosphere didn't put any of us off.

In fact, in some ways,

it strengthened the sense of solidarity we felt.

You walked into the shadows and found a whole new world.

My parents sent me to a sixth form college in London

and I was what was called a PG - a paying guest -

in a very nice house, and they had two dogs called Samson and Biscuit.

I would take Samson and Biscuit for a walk and, one day,

I saw this extraordinary figure in total black leather

and I had never, ever seen anything like this before. He squeaked.

He had, like, high boots on, he had a biker's hat, and we couldn't

believe what was happening, me and Samson and Biscuit, and...

He turned left in this road, and we followed,

and then he went into this pub and we followed and we went,

looked through the windows of this pub

and it was full of cowboys and Indians...

..and more of these people in extraordinary leather outfits.

The next day, I decided I'd go in myself.

Right in the heart of respectable West London,

this scene of fantasy and defiance would open my eyes.

I'm now on my way into the renowned ex-Coleherne Arms,

which has now been renamed The Pembroke.

It was quite an extraordinary place and every time I used to come,

I used to walk around the block about five times

before coming in to get the courage up, to make sure there

were no friends of my parents or something who would see me going in

because it was a well-known den of iniquity.

Coming to the Coleherne meant so much more

than just coming for a drink in a bar.

You were joining a community with its own codes,

its sense of identity and belonging,

and even its own language.

I'm meeting up with some of the other surviving stalwarts

from the old days.

I loved Polari.

Can you speak any Polari? I remember it.

Vada your eek. Vada your eek, yeah.

If someone gives me a phone, I should read you the beginning

of the Bible in Polari cos it's absolutely brilliant.

Yes, "In the beginning, Gloria created heaven and the earth.

"And the earth was nanti form and void,

"and munge upon the eke of the deep.

"And the Fairy of Gloria trolled upon the eke of the aquas.

"And Gloria cackled, 'Let there be sparkle.' And there was sparkle.

"And Gloria vardad the sparkle, that it was bona.

"And Gloria medzered the sparkle from the munge.

"And Gloria screeched the sparkle journo,

"and the munge she screeched nochy.

"And the bijou nochy and the morning were the first journo."

LAUGHTER

It's genius.

The thing I remember about coming in here was that there

was something about, you counted just for daring to come in, somehow.

Yes. Because we were still...

We weren't illegal in the '70s and '80s,

but it was still a difficult position,

so the whole feeling of community, which there really was in the '70s,

particularly since it was such a small community, that seems to me...

It's all gone.

That community that we had because of it, the joy was finding

other people who were like you in those sort of situations.

It was exciting to meet people, to find people who were gay.

It was rare to be gay and it was fun finding a world that was.

Even after the change in the law in '67, all through the '70s,

the television imagery was still either screaming queens

or people who were deviants. It was so negative.

There were no positive role models. But it made us resilient.

Even the feyest queen is actually quite macho in a way

because they knew how to protect themselves. Oh, absolutely.

If you're going to be camp or drag or semi-drag or anything,

you had to be tough as nails.

One of the things that was marvellous about the time in here,

everyone would be standing, quite a lot of people on their own,

you could just go up behind them and fiddle with their bums

or touch their cock and stuff like that, and no-one really minded.

If they didn't want it, they would just push you off.

Let's go outside and go around the corner.

All the motorbikes were here. Yes.

And everyone stood at this corner.

That was quite intimidating, arriving at this corner. Yeah.

And then cruising would happen round here.

And this is where my friend Tom Bell lived,

and we used to just sit in this window at closing time in the pub

and if we saw someone we fancied,

we'd come beetling out and follow them around,

cos everyone just went round and round and round the block.

You'd go to the end here, and then you could go into the mews

back there, and then that's where, quite often,

things really kicked off. This was great.

Oh, yes.

You used to go through here and then you'd be found like this.

It used to look different in the dark.

You'd disappear round the corner, get arranged and then...

LAUGHTER

Happy memories? Yes. Without a doubt.

Really, really happy, yeah.

Although I loved the camaraderie and the spirit of defiance of the

gay scene in those days, it's hard to convey at this distance just how

weird and conflicted wider British attitudes to homosexuality seemed.

It had been legal to be gay for ten years, but I don't think that

really had changed very much, to be quite honest.

I think it was still seen as...

..something quite horrific.

I find them to dress very effeminate,

plus speak very effeminate as well, you know?

The way they walk and the way they talk.

And yet, at the same time,

the likes of Freddie Mercury and David Bowie were massive stars.

Extraordinary things happening in mainstream television,

it's all about drag.

England was a very, very peculiar place because it was

just a huge, mass of different standards and contradictions.

APPLAUSE

Oh, what a gay day. How are you? All right?

So did that sexually messed-up and deeply hypocritical nation

I remember really vanish into thin air?

I'm setting off around Britain to find out.

she had an elaborate kind of, erm, ritual which she had lovely...

She was lovely, my mum.

She had hair like this and she'd pull up strands

and she backcombed then, like this, and they'd stand up

and then she had this big can of Elnett hairspray and I would hold

the Elnett and she would backcomb the thing and I'd go, kssssssh!

Like this and I was obviously enthralled by this process

and one day she said... We caught each other's eyes in the mirror

and she said, "I'll kill you if you're queer." And I went, "Oh!"

So I knew by that point there was going to be some

kind of battle ahead.

Of course she didn't mean it and mother came round in the end.

Since those days, gay visibility has become part of the cultural mainstream

but I wonder if it's been on terms dictated by the straight world.

My own career took a new turn as Julia Roberts'

gay sidekick in My Best Friend's Wedding.

And he comes towards you, the moves of a jungle cat

and although you quite correctly sense that he is...gay,

like most devastatingly handsome single men of his age are,

you think, "What the hell. Life goes on."

Maybe there won't be a marriage, maybe there won't be sex...

..but by God, there'll be dancing.

As this scene shows, it was a gift of a role

but on the other hand, my character was the heroine's witty

sidekick and not, unfortunately, the romantic lead.

20 years later, there's possibly a greater range of gay

characters in mainstream film and television.

WOLF WHISTLE

Oh, my God!

Looking pretty hot there in your Marigolds.

Want me to keep them on?

I'm watching Hollyoaks and basically this is like porn.

Well, the reason I'm so fascinated by Hollyoaks, is that it's full of

young people, some of them gay, but a lot of them straight and play...

Playing in mainstream television,

going into the houses of everyone around England.

You know, amazing gay stories including crystal meth

addiction and HIV. There's no holds barred in the Hollyoaks approach.

Kieron is gay and plays gay character, Ste.

Parry is straight and plays Ste's gay lover, Harry.

I've come to visit them on set in Liverpool.

It's been challenging at various points in my career being gay,

at least certainly for when I was younger,

it was suddenly a much more complicated thing.

How does it feel... How does it feel for you?

Before I came out publicly, I ended up coming out on a television show.

Oh, right. Hang on, let's go back. So when you came into this show...

When I was first in the show, my character was straight.

Hadn't explored his sexuality and I wasn't out publicly, either.

But you were gay then. Yeah. Right. But not publicly.

I remember before I did it, there was one person that was like,

as soon as you do this, you're going to end your career.

And I'll never forget those words.

But in actual fact, it was completely the opposite

and I can't believe that I was ever in the closet, as they say.

You, for example, aren't gay. No.

So that must be quite a pressure in one sense. How does that feel?

Erm... I don't really know. To me, because I've had no...

Anyone that comes up to me in the street and says,

I like your character and stuff,

I've been really lucky that no-one said anything negative or

no-one's come up to me and said anything homophobic

which I thought would be if I was on their screens every day.

Who, for example, is the fan base? Is it girls, is it gays or is it...?

A lot of teenage girls, I think, love it but the female fan base

are the ones that obviously get involved on the social media.

They have this thing called FanFicts where

they create their own storylines... You should be doing.

What they should be doing. Lots of them are sexual ones, as well.

It's a lot of teenage girls that write these FanFicts.

Maybe straight sexuality, because of porn and everything,

it's become quite shocking to young girls and maybe this is slightly...

There's a little bit of distance for them and they can observe men but

without feeling that, God, they're going to have to do all of this...

Fantasy to it. It's strange, though.

For all the shades of gay on display in Hollyoaks,

it's striking that some of the most popular gay characters seem

to appeal to teenage girls.

But enough of youth and beauty in Liverpool.

I want to go to a conventional British wedding.

To many, the clearest indication of a gay friendly Britain was

the legalisation of gay marriage in 2013.

I'm not a particular fan of marriage in general.

Either straight or gay, to be honest.

In my day, they were kind of slightly gruesome events where the

stag do, some poor hookers would be got in to give blow jobs

to men on coke under the table

and I always found it quite horrible and none of the marriages lasted.

And I remember thinking, thank God, I'm gay

and I don't have to go through all this.

I'm on my way to one of the most impeccably respectable gay

weddings of the season.

Paul Burrell is the former royal butler

and the man Princess Diana called, Her Rock.

At a five-star hotel in the Lake District,

he's preparing for his wedding to his partner, Coop.

Until recently, Paul was in a heterosexual marriage

and has two grown-up sons.

Here we are today and you are getting married. Tell me one thing.

Was civil partnership not enough? No. So why is that?

Because marriage now between two men,

after all the struggles that people are enduring and everything

else, and everything that's happened in history,

now is a time to stand up and say, "Yes, we can get married, yes,

"we can stand side-by-side in public,"

and that is fantastic for me.

Never in a million years would I have thought that

I could marry a man.

I'm in my element as I help Paul with the floral

arrangements for the day.

Pull it through their like that and then pull it up like that. OK?

Fill me in on the format of the day.

OK, ceremony is going to be in that room, there.

And then we come down and I think that's when it's going to

really hit me that I'm actually getting married to a man.

This is the man!

To that man. How embarrassing. And do you know?

It's only been, for me, a couple of months since I...

I hate this word, came out. It's horrible, it's horrible. Is it?

Yes. Oh, right. Yes.

Because I wanted to marry Coop,

our bands had to be read and then the media found out and I was outed.

Oh, they didn't think you were gay before?

I mean you're very butch, I understand,

but I thought you were married but gay-ish. Gay-ish.

What is gay, Rupert? Well, I don't need to give you a geographical...

You see I think we are all on that sliding scale.

How did being gay hit you when you were aged 18, 19?

When I was reaching puberty, of course,

you begin to realise then who you're attracted to and I was going

to a boy's school and I thought, there's something wrong with me.

Why do I feel this way?

After football and rugby,

getting changed and going into the showers was a nightmare for me.

You should've come to my school. Was it much fun at your school?

Unbelievable, my school.

I had sex with almost everybody in the school before I was eight.

So when did you have your first...

When did it kind of hit you being properly gay?

When you came to London?

Coming to London, of course,

as a young 18-year-old having no sexual experience at all, was

an eye-opener and going to work at Buckingham Palace, of course...

Was that aged 18. 18. My first job.

The royal family seem to be rather gay friendly to you

if you ask me, it seems.

I met, of course, every member of the royal family

and all their friends too. And it is a very flamboyant society.

The thing is, the institution of marriage,

as the Queen said to me one day whilst we were feeding the corgis,

she said, "Do you know, Paul, marriage is a fine institution

"and when you have children inside a marriage,

"it's a wonderful foundation on which to build your life.

"Have you thought about getting married?"

And I said, "Well, Your Majesty, I have, yes,

I'd love to have children." She said, "Well, look around the palace.

"There's some beautiful young girls around the palace."

And your wife was one of them?

My wife was one of them so I went into the Queen's bedroom one

day and there's this young girl pulling over-the-counter pain

over the Queen's bed and she says, "Could you give me hand with this?"

And I did. I pulled over the... And I thought, you are very sweet.

And that was my wife. I met why wife in the Queen's bedroom.

Will she be coming tomorrow? No.

I don't think it would be appropriate for her to be here.

Because this is another world, it's a different world.

Rupert, I am absolutely amazed that you do not

believe in the institution of gay marriage.

As a gay achievement, I absolutely see it as being a major thing.

For me, personally,

I suppose I was just brought up not to like marriage.

But that's sad and you'll never wake up with a partner whom you've

just married and say, "I'm going to spend the rest of my life with you."

Yes, but I could be saying that to someone I hadn't been married to.

Yes, you could, but it's still transient.

The whole of life is transient. We mustn't get into a fight about it.

One other question. Is it very rude?

Do you think I could see your outfit?

There we go. I do.

Yes, well, you see tomorrow, you said, "Will Diana be with me?"

She will because she had those made for me and so I'll wear those tomorrow.

They're gorgeous, aren't they? Yes, they're lovely.

Is this everyone...? Yes, this is my family.

Hello, hello.

Good to see you. Are you good?

Rupert, this is my little baby, Nick.

Hi there, how are you? And Alex. Hi, Alex, how are you?

Thank you very, very much. Have a lovely time. We well. Bye.

It's a long road from the coal hearne to a wedding in the Lake District.

But when it comes to gay acceptability in Britain,

I sense there's still some way to go.

I think everything at the moment is Alice in Wonderland in our country.

Nothing is quite what it seems

so there's Paul Burrell's wedding accepted by everyone around.

The hotel, the people working in the hotel, no-one raised eyebrows

but elsewhere, you can just never tell how things are.

Now that you can't say faggot or poof or all the things that you

used to be able to say, you now don't really know who's

thinking faggot or poof.

So the gay world should not just think, "Oh, the job's being done."

but being an outsider brought with it a marvellous sense of freedom.

You felt you belonged nowhere and everywhere.

It feels as if there's no sense of community in the same

way as there was.

Now, on Grindr, you just send a picture of your arsehole

and say, "I'm five minutes away."

Hooking up for sex is now infinitely easier.

We've all become more virtual.

The world is a screen where anything is available at a swipe,

and I wonder about the consequences for gay life.

At a nightclub called Heaven in London,

I'm meeting my old friend, DJ Fat Tony.

A self-described former junkie, he now helps other gay men

who are addicted to chem-sex, drug-fuelled sex parties.

The gay scene at the moment, the way it stands,

you don't go out to pick up men.

You don't go out to find sex. You don't go out for a date.

It's all done by iPhone. It comes to you.

The sad thing about it for me

is the fact that the gay scene has lost that intimacy.

Sex parties took over, so people stay in now.

They stay in and they do their drugs at home.

They kind of think it's glamorous to slam.

They think it's glamorous to have these sex parties where

they've got 20 guys in the house all weekend,

that rotate from house to house.

These kids, they don't go to one sex party.

They go out on a Thursday or a Friday,

they go to a sex party, they stay there for 24 hours.

From the minute they go in that house, they are all on Grindr.

They're all sitting there on those apps looking for the next party.

They exhaust the drugs at that party, they go to the next party.

What is the solution?

Do you, for example, agree with the legalisation of drugs?

That's a tough one, because, you know, for me...

Drugs aren't the problem for me.

I'm the problem. What made you stop?

I got to that point in my life where it was either stopping or dying.

Right. I literally weighed 7st, I had no teeth,

I'd pulled all my teeth out. I had a thing called meth mouth,

where, when I smoked cigarettes, I used to have to literally

open my mouth, like that, because my cheeks would stick together.

Do you think a need to conform is driving people to excess?

Oh, without a doubt. We don't have tribes any more.

We don't have that look. We don't have punks.

We don't have all of that freedom of the way we are,

but what we do have is, we have this conformity to be a gay male,

to go to the gym, to take steroids, to be as pumped

and ripped as possible, and to do as many drugs as possible.

That's our aim.

That's kind of, like, the gay lifestyle that we have today.

You know?

Growing up around that and being a 16-, 17-year-old kid that

strives to be the perfect gay male, it's conforming.

Of course it is.

With some gay men in Tony's world behaving in self-destructive ways,

perhaps we can't really say that the problems of being

gay in Britain have entirely gone away,

and in some communities, the path to acceptance is much slower.

The lyrics and performances like this show that

overt homophobia is still seen as OK in some Jamaican music, for example.

I'm meeting rapper Jay Rouge and his friend Hannah,

whose plucky reaction to the hostility they'd experienced

strikes a powerful chord.

# When will the change The change gon' come?

# The change is gonna come

# I swear down I will make your pussy run

# If you regret, say you've fucked it, this one

# You're over there shouting Yo, suck your mum

# Batty boy, he take it up the bum

# I'm looking like she's got the wrong one

# Tolerance? I ain't got none

# You seein' me I'm a gangsta gay. #

So, were you always out gay? No?

Not at all? No. No.

I was outed.

My cousin, who I was really close to, she knew.

We had a disagreement... Right. ..and then she told my family.

My family are from Jamaica. Jamaica,

that's the one thing I really don't understand,

is the homophobia in Jamaica.

It's more of a thing where they are just set in their ways.

It's been there for so long. It's one of the most homophobic places,

and it's got such a large homosexual population,

but growing up in my community,

I listened to hip-hop,

it was very homophobic, so even if no-one said to you

being gay is wrong, the songs told you gay is wrong.

So, when I was outed, everyone who was close to me,

like, in my family, I lost.

Coming out, not through choice, I dated someone at my church.

I really, really, really was in love with them, but then

a deacon at my church found out and ended up going to the person's...

well, my ex's house, and telling her mother and threatening

to tell my mother, and having the pastor talk to me and stuff.

It was ridiculous. Yeah, my mother struggles with it. Still? Yes.

I think she always will.

What about the music business and being gay?

What's that like?

It's one of them taboo things, especially rapping as well,

because obviously it's more seen as a butch thing,

more of like, you know, homeboy thing, girls and money and stuff,

but when we talk about dick and stuff, it's like, "Wow!"

So, it's a bit of a controversial thing. Tell me about the lyrics.

They're quite explicit, these lyrics.

My lyrics are explicit because when I spit

I feel like I shouldn't have to dumb down or water down anything

that's got to do with me,

because of how I was treated in the black community,

and because I feel like no-one should have to

suppress their feelings, or be oppressed or be depressed,

and I've been through all those stages.

So I'm basically unapologetically gay and, also,

literally just saying, "Fuck you, it is what it is."

# You puts it in my mouth I'm gonna feel you growin'

# Sink it in deep Feel it in my throat

# The face fucking me You know I'm not gaggin'

# And when you're bustin' nuts You know I'm swallowin'... #

In the black community, things can still be fairly complicated,

and I think his way of dealing with it,

his way of giving himself courage is, in a way,

to make his lyrics very, very explicit

and very, very shocking, so that at least, in the middle of that shock,

he is out there saying, "This is who the fuck I am, and get used to it."

The feeling of gay identity still being a struggle,

and perhaps a source of secret shame,

isn't always to be found in the places you might most expect it.

In 2007, former Chief Executive of BP, Lord Browne,

was forced to resign after a scandal involving a male escort

he'd met on a website called suitedandbooted.com.

I'd made my mind up that I was absolutely

going to keep my sexuality to myself.

I had decided that I was going to run two lives - a public life

and a private life -

so I decided to have an escort once in a while... Heaven.

Then I found one, and I made a relationship with him. Mm-hm.

The big mistake of course was, this was not really a relationship,

so we stopped it,

and then he sold his story to the Mail On Sunday.

So, in 2007, I think, right at the beginning of the year,

I get a phone call from the BP press office,

I'm on New Year's holiday,

they're saying, "Well, John, the Mail On Sunday is on the phone..."

This was a Friday.

"..and they've got 39 questions, or something,

"and they're all about you being gay. Is that true?"

What was the feeling of sheer cold terror?

Terrifying. Terrifying?

And on May 1st 2007,

I had decided that I would resign from BP.

What you think about the City of London? Is it easy...

It's mixed. It's very mixed.

What I'm struck by, I think it is the case still,

that two-thirds of gay graduates

who have been open at university

go back into the closet when they go into business. Really?

And most of that's in finance. Still now? Still now.

Hmm. The top 500 companies in the entire world,

you'd think that there are a few gay people running those,

statistically, you know, 25, maybe 5%.

Actually, there is one, and that's Tim Cook.

Everyone is either in the closet, or no gay person made it

to the top of one of the big 500 companies in the world.

Which is impossible. Which is impossible.

I mean, I don't think my role model was a role model

I'd want anyone to follow, in hiding their sexuality,

and now you don't have to. You really don't have to. Hmm.

In your head, you have these terrible fears that, you know,

now everyone knows I'm gay, I'm an open homosexual,

no-one will take me seriously, no-one will talk to me.

All my friends will go away,

people will cross the street, no government will take me seriously,

they'll try and put me in jail in the Middle East...

Uganda. ..and Russia and so forth. Actually, none of that was true.

And people would stop me in the street and want to shake my hand

and say, "We're right with you. We're right with you."

If Lord Browne has realised that his world

isn't as prejudiced as he feared it would be, all across Britain

gay men and women have been making a similar discovery.

Well, here I am again.

Now I'm in Southend, dragged up in my hard hat again, as usual,

and I'm off to find a gay carpenter called Steve

on this building site on the Chichester Road in Southend.

So, let's go.

Excuse me, I'm looking for Steve.

I'm Steve. You're Steve? I'm Rupert. How are you doing, Rupert?

How are you? How many people are working on this site?

There's probably about 30 builders at the moment, I think.

And are these people you work with all the time?

No, they change every day. They change every day?

Yeah, so sometimes when you're coming out as gay, I might sit

in the lunch room and someone will go, "What's your wife's name?"

And I'm like, "I'm into guys."

And it's one of those things - I either say or I just keep quiet

and don't say. I don't lie, I just don't say anything.

That's quite interesting.

Because I'm sort of coming out every job that I go to, yeah.

When I first came out, there weren't any gay builders around,

so this young labourer that was working for me

at the time came into work and said to me,

"I heard you're a bit of a batty boy, you like it up the arse,"

and I just stood at the top of this scaffold thinking, "Shit."

It was like a pause moment for ages, and I said to him, "Why?

"Have you got a fucking problem with it?"

"No, no, I've not got a problem with it,"

and he just suddenly backed down,

but for about three months no-one spoke about it.

I knew people knew, but they didn't know how to talk to me

until the youngsters, I think

it was more the youngsters who started with a bit of banter,

then it became more acceptable

and they could communicate through banter. Right.

Excuse me, sir. Do you know that he is bent?

I do now. Did you know before? No.

Is he the first bent person you have ever come across on a building site?

Yes. Yes? To be honest, yeah.

And what you think about that?

It's all right. It don't matter to me.

And have you ever come across anyone else?

No, not that I know of. But you never know, do you?

Steve here is gay. Did you that before? This morning, yeah.

This morning? Yeah. Was it a shock? Not really, no.

Did these reactions surprise you? No, not really. I think nowadays...

Talking about your sexuality, no-one's really that interested.

Bothered. Everyone just wants to know that they can get on.

No-one's really bothered what you do back at home.

It's always nice to come back to the town you were brought up in.

But I never thought I'd come back to the lesbian capital of Britain.

They reckon it could be as high as one in ten

declaring themselves lesbian.

So, I'm watching Bernard Ingham,

Margaret Thatcher's former press secretary,

returning to Hebden Bridge 15 years ago,

and he's absolutely appalled that there are so many lesbians there.

He's pretty appalling.

I'm surprised he's not in the Tory government right now.

I'm on my way to Hebden Bridge myself,

and Bernard's words make me more, not less, keen to experience it.

I'm very much looking forward to letting my inner lesbian come out.

I joined the local women's choir for a rousing rendition

of I Am Woman.

# If I have to, I can do anything

# I am strong

# Strong

# I am invincible

# Invincible

# I am woman. #

THEY LAUGH AND CHEER

I feel really empowered!

THEY LAUGH

Hebden Bridge looks like any gritty, Northern, former mill town.

But it's also a vision of how much Britain has changed.

At the school gates, I meet mums, Amanda and Debbie.

In this school, how many of the kids are from same-sex couples?

I'm not sure about how many, in terms of percentage of this school,

but the primary school that the kids came from last year... Mmm.

..over 50% of the kids - there's about 20 kids in that class -

about 50% of them had lesbian mums. Right.

So we didn't have to explain anything, cos it was done for us.

And what about... Between children themselves, obviously,

there's some children who have two mothers, and then some children

who have a mother and father. How did they talk among themselves,

for example, when they talk about fathers and stuff like that?

Some kids here have two mums and two dads. Right.

So they might have used a gay male as a donor.

A friend or some sort of... A friend. Yeah, right.

So they might have two dads, two mums.

We've also got friends that have said to us their kids have

come home and gone, "It's not fair, Billie's got two mums

"and I've only got one." But actually, you know...

One of the issues we've got in Hebden, though,

which probably doesn't happen anywhere else, is quite a lot

of lesbians use the same clinic in Manchester.

So we have this kind of conversation about, "OK, what was your

"donor profile? What did it look like?"

"OK, well, I went for the fireman, I went for the GP,

"I went for the security guard."

And then we kind of go, "Oh, OK, great, they're not...

"biological siblings."

Hello, gorgeous. Hello.

How are you?

Hiya. Hello!

That's Rupert. Hello, Rupert Everett.

THEY LAUGH

How are you? Good. What's your name? Alfie.

Excellent. Hi, there. Hello. I'm Rupert. Nice to meet you.

What's your name? Billie. Billie. Will we walk through the park with

you all? ALL: Yeah. Absolutely.

Are you applying for the job, Alfie?

THEY LAUGH

So when Debbie and I decided that we wanted to have children,

at that point we had to pay for magic seed, didn't we?

So we went to a doctor who could get us some magic seed,

and your donor offered to come along...

Sperm. Oh, Billie.

THEY LAUGH AND GIGGLE

What's a sperm? They've obviously discovered it. Oh, my God!

Our kind of attitude towards it is that we just keep talking

when they ask and stuff like that.

And they can meet him, if they want to.

I mean, I think Hebden's been fantastic for us.

So when we first had Billie, we lived in a different town

and we got quite a lot of...

Harassment.

When you've experienced homophobia from an early age,

it's really exhausting. And to come here, it just feels like

you can recover. That's how I feel.

I feel like I've recovered. Living here, your sexuality doesn't matter.

You're seen as a parent first, and you can just get on with

being a parent.

And that's all we've ever wanted, really. Yeah.

Can't get a better place, can you?

No, you're right. I think it's just really lovely.

Are you happy here? Yeah.

And it isn't just lesbians who feel freed up by the atmosphere

of Hebden.

The owners of the local tea shop, Charlie and Kim,

moved here four years ago to find a place they could be themselves.

When you met...? I was still living male, yeah.

And did you always think, in the back of your mind,

that you wanted to...? Yeah, I had been thinking it for quite

a long time.

It was kind of a process of sort of getting up the courage, I suppose.

Dunno, it seemed to have, like, a stigma attached to it, you know.

We thought we were gonna lose the business.

I had to sort of, like, prepare myself that my transition

was gonna be seen by the whole town and everybody was gonna be

involved in it.

You know... I mean, but Kim presented quite male, really,

when we first met, you know.

A lot of people were really quite shocked.

It's such a difficult journey you're negotiating.

Did you ever, at any point, think of splitting up,

or did you always think of going straight on through?

I always wanted to be with Kim, that's never come under question.

You know, it's just whether or not I could handle everything

that came with that, really, you know?

And, you know, throughout the whole journey, we've not known

how I'm gonna end up feeling towards Kim,

if the attraction's gonna fade.

And, luckily, you know...

Which has been a strange experience for me.

My sexuality's completely opened up, you know, throughout this journey.

Really? Yeah, you know. So, it's like, obviously, I'm in a

committed relationship with Kim, so I can't really go and explore,

you know, the women. But I do feel differently about

my own sexuality now.

What would you describe yourself as now?

An accidental lesbian, tresbian.

Tresbian. Tresbian!

I don't know. I don't really see myself in any boxes, really.

Right, just the same as... Just happen to love Kim. Yeah.

Do you think here was a key place for this to happen,

or do you think you could have done it anywhere?

I'll tell you a funny thing that happened once.

So I was in there and I was scooping ice cream,

and I was like bent over the ice cream freezer, scooping away.

And a woman came in with her granddaughter and she said,

"Oh, do you want an ice cream? We'll get the lady to get you one

"in a minute." And I was like, "Oh, brilliant, lady."

And then I turned round and she was like, "Sorry, man."

And then she went...

And then after that, she goes, "I mean, lady. Oh!"

And she got herself really upset.

She was really upset!

And I'd forgotten all about it.

And then about a week later, she came in with a card,

she was mortified that she'd offended me.

And I was like, "You haven't offended me.

"If you were doing something to be cruel, that would be offensive,

"but you just didn't know what to say."

Being in Hebden, I mean, on the whole it's been so supportive,

we've been so well received, you know.

It's just such an extraordinary place.

How does the straight community...?

How does everyone work in with each other?

It just is. I never give it a second thought,

in any way, shape or form.

Nobody does, do they? I don't think...

I think if you're...

I think, in a privileged position, you don't realise

what a privileged position, you know...

lesbian people have, and I'd never considered that, actually.

That it is just as it is.

You know, and how comfortable everybody feels. That's remarkable.

It's just an amazing, kind of, success story.

In a way that the whole world has managed to create this place,

this cafe, you two.

It's incredible, really. Yeah.

For some young gay people, the painful experience of coming out

is still a million miles from the welcome of Hebden Bridge.

But the town represents the best of modern Britain.

A place where it's acceptable to be any shade of gay or straight.

Where sexuality becomes just one part of who you are.

Now, 50 years after decriminalisation,

there's clearly no going back.

45 of the MPs in this place, 14% of the total, are out gay -

a new record.

And none of the major parties, at least, would ever dream

of reversing the direction of travel.

We are, of course, a minority. We will always need to be vigilant.

But in 2017, there's no better place in the world than Great Britain

to be gay.

Subtitles by Ericsson