A state of not being visible. Or of walking in and out of invisibility. It is the early 2000s and I am wearing a wedding ring. It is interpreted in different ways by different people. Strangers and some colleagues assume I am married, perhaps a traditional Christian in a sober suit. Being a mother of a small child wraps me in a magic cloak– I have joined the undifferentiated ranks of mothers of small children juggling work with school collection times.
For others, I am visible. For many who know us as a couple, at church, or our child’s primary school, or in the local shops or the hairdresser’s – we are the lesbian couple they know. We fit into a neat box with a label. We have been there more than a decade. We are part of a complete set of Happy Families cards, so they have the full collection. We are the token lesbians. We are the visible proof of their liberalism or of local diversity or of the assertion that they do know people who are not just the same as them. We are the acceptable face of lavender Britain. They do not want to know the complexities or ambiguities of our lives.
For some, even that is too much. One morning at church, in the year 2000, as my partner shuffles in her robes into the choristers’ stalls, another chorister whispers into her ear as she passes. “Do not think we approve. Your behaviour is shameful.” My partner rushes out. She walks back up the aisle and through a side door, leaving it ajar. I am sitting in a side room, breast-feeding my small baby, talking to the woman who is preparing to take the children for Sunday school. My partner marches straight past me, in full black and white surplice and gown, and out through the open vestry door and onto the heath.
The vicar has to intervene. The vicar who is invisibly gay. He is outraged. He comes round to our flat on his bicycle. He wants to make a stand and I have to calm him down. It is the whisperer who is cold-shouldered by the choir. I feel sorry for her husband, a distant colleague of mine. He came round drunk one evening to our flat a year or so past, when work drove him to depression and alcohol. I talked him round. Now he is not allowed by his wife to speak to me for more than a few seconds. How far do we want to rock that shaky boat?
This state of visibility has taken some effort. The senior manager, when I join the civil service in the 1980s, is an ex-teacher. He has been trained to entertain teenagers. He has decided to explain to me just how positive vetting operates if you want to work directly with Ministers. And this afternoon he wants to make my Glaswegian supervisor smirk.
I must be frowning. I am not sure I can face the full ‘Yes, Minister’ with some of the people who lead us. “Don’t worry,” he says. “The only thing they care about is if you’re queer.”
“I failed my positive vetting first time,” he continues, then pauses on that cliff hanger. He is married. “Which was really difficult, because basically that’s the end of your career. They send you somewhere where nothing matters.
“But I’d been on a student scholarship to Prague.” As he is speaking, the Berlin Wall has not fallen. You still have to get written permission to go on a camping holiday in Eastern Europe.
“Iron curtain days. And, of course, I used to hold a few parties. One of my friends, a really charming man, they told me was a ‘well-known homosexual provocateur.’ News to me.
“’Well, I never knew that!’ I said.” I can imagine him then, slightly long-haired, a good fashion sense, clean-shaven, his cheeks soft like a girl’s, defending himself against taint by association, against third-hand rumour, against the faint sense that beneath the macho surface of motorbike oil and long-term girlfriend, there might be the faintest whiff of something more complex. “I told them we mainly talked about politics,” he shrugs.
But the road might be rocky. I have been warned.
Keep your head down. Avoid the jobs that require vetting. Avoid the good, high-profile jobs.
The Saturday night advice in the Barley Mow from the women who work in defence, is to lie through your teeth. And if your back is against the wall, or you are found out later, say that when they asked you, you were young, you didn’t know, or you hadn’t ‘decided.’ You definitely hadn’t lied. Because they could get you for lying, even if in the future you were allowed to be gay. And if you didn’t lie, they would get you for being gay.
It is not until 1991 that the incoming Prime Minister John Major announces that homosexuality is not ‘of itself’ grounds for failing the vetting process. Some kinds of queer are OK now.
“You are not much of a badge wearer,” our personnel manager comments, when I am in my twenties. I think this is the nearest I get to a stamp of approval. Invisibility, and mutability, seem to be marks of suitability for the civil service. There should be nothing about us that marks us out, should the government of the day change its colours, or the colours grow darker.
“Nobody cares,” the ex-teacher offers in the early 1990s, when we go out to the local vegetarian café for lunch, and I ask him his opinion. A shift of position. “So long as you don’t frighten the horses.” It is not clear which horses I might inadvertently startle, and I wonder whether I have startled him.
Emily Hay
Emily Hay has been writing most of her life, but much of it has been anonymous. She is a lifetime Londoner, insider-outsider, gay parent and community volunteer. She worked in Westminster in the civil service for over thirty years. Growing up gay in the intolerant 1970s and 80s, in a London of high unemployment and anti-minority politics, drummed into her that the personal is political.
Riggwelter 