I was born in Accrington, in Lancashire in 1954. It was one of those communities where there was an extended family like this on every street. But it was a filthy town, completely industrial and almost a hundred per cent working class. Many of the old houses were made out of millstone grit, which is absorbent, so they were literally black. And the sky was this relentless grey – you only get sixty days of sunshine a year in Accrington – with constant drizzle. I remember that, when colour television was announced, I didn't quite get it, 'cause I'd never really seen colour. Beige was a bit racy.
I had quite a happy childhood but in 1962 my dad was killed in a car crash. And from being a working-class family that was doing rather well economically, we kind of tumbled down the snakes-and-ladders board.
I passed my 11-plus and was sent to a boarding school. It wasn't a public school but it was a state grammar school. My mother suggested this because she thought I was being brought up in too feminine an environment: her, my aunt, my grandmother – all of whom were strong matriarchs, who I naturally looked up to. She must have been a bit naïve to think that sending me to a single-sex boarding school would cure my nascent homosexuality.
I was bullied relentlessly at this school. I was the only working-class boarder and, being a little softie, I never fought back. I was petrified there. I remember walking along the banks of the river Ribble, looking longingly at the waters and thinking that would be release: suicide. Eventually, my mother withdrew me after a friend warned her that boarding schools were rife with homosexuality.
I absolutely doted on my grandma. When Winston Churchill died in 1965, I came home from school full of this kind of indoctrination about
him, and my grandmother hit the roof. She hated him because – in her words – ‘he set the troops on our own men.' She was referring to the coal miners: Churchill set the troops on miners twice – once in Tonypandy, in Wales, and once up in the north-east of England. She also used to tell me, ‘Don't let them tell you they were the good old days. They weren't: they were rotten.'
So she was really the first person to teach me about politics. But it wasn't from an academic point of view: it was literally her life that she'd lived and she hated the Tories because of that. She used to tell me that, in the days before radio sets in their homes, during general elections people would go into Accrington town centre to stand outside the Town Hall and the Mayor would come out and read out the election results. She said that people would sit down and weep if the Tories got in because they knew they would be on a hiding. So Grandma really taught me my ‘heart' politics. In my last year of school, when I was fifteen, I joined the Labour Party.
Because I wasn't very bright at school, I was in danger of ending up working in the huge factory in town. But I had always been interested in horticulture and, when I left school in 1970, I got a wonderful job working in the beautiful demonstration gardens in Worcester. So I left home at the same time as I left school. And two years later, when I was nineteen, I became a diploma student at Kew Gardens, which brought me to London.
I was born in May 1959 in Oldham. It's an old cotton town: although it had once had coal mines, these were long closed by the time I grew up there. It was a very typical working-class background. I was the oldest of four boys and my early childhood was a bit fractured because my parents had something of a troubled relationship. My father was a bit of a ‘Jack the lad' and often not around. He was nominally a painter and decorator but basically he was a labourer, who never really held down a job for any length of time. I once asked Mum what Dad's job was. She told me he was a ‘fret worker': he worked for one week and fretted for the next three. He and Mum got married very young and we all came along in
rapid succession: I think that Dad never really got to grips with the fact that he was a married man with kids.
Dad died when I was fourteen so my mum had to bring us up on her own. It was a bit of a struggle: not an unhappy childhood across the board but disjointed and sometimes a bit chaotic. Mum had to keep body and soul together and keep us all fed. The house we grew up in had leaks in the roof and the electricity was cut off on more than one occasion.
I would come home from school to find Mum cooking with a pan on a coal fire because the electric bill hadn't been paid. Eventually, when I was seventeen, Mum battered Oldham council into re-housing us in a brand-new council house with a downstairs and an upstairs toilet and central heating. We thought we'd died and gone to heaven.
Ours was a very traditional ‘tribal Labour' household: all my family on both sides always voted Labour. Mum wasn't overtly political but, when it came to elections, she was rabidly anti-Tory. It wasn't anything deeper than that we knew we were Labour and that the Tories were the enemy.
I went to the local junior school and did well. I passed the entrance for Manchester Grammar School. From there I went on to Oxford University to study French and Russian. But my time at Oxford wasn't a happy one. I fell head over heels in love with a boy who was on the same course as me. Sadly, my feelings weren't reciprocated and, as a result, I couldn't wait to finish my degree and leave.
I was born in Fulham, west London, in 1959 and have lived in London all my life. I came from a working-class family: big families on both sides, all from around the west-London area. Both my mum and dad were the youngest of nine in their families. I grew up in a very close community because there were so many family members around. I was one of four kids.
My mum, before she was married, had worked in the rag trade, making swimming costumes. My dad was a labourer with a very low income but we had a lot of support from the extended family. So I grew up with a big family around me: a very close family – the sort of family
that doesn't seem to exist these days. Our neighbours were considered to be part of the family and everybody knew everybody else's business.
I didn't come from a political family at all. They were Labour voters but on a lot of issues they were quite nationalistic, I suppose. My mum's sister married a man from Dominica in the Caribbean, so my cousins were black. The whole area where we lived was very cosmopolitan so I didn't quite get the whole racism thing. I mean, it was there – I knew it was there, even in my own family – but we all seemed to get on with each other very well.
I went to a local school, which was a bit notorious at the time. When I left school, I had the chance to go to university, but I'd fallen in love with a boy at school and we'd had a little thing going. When he decided to leave the sixth form, I was a bit forlorn and miserable. I was really lovesick and couldn't wait to leave school and so I went to work in the antiques trade.
I was born in 1959, the youngest of six children, and brought up in the Kingston-upon-Thames area. When I was thirteen, we moved to Banbury in Oxfordshire. My dad was an unskilled factory worker and, when the factory re-located, we moved with his job.
A whole new council estate was built to accommodate all the people who had moved out of London. And so I found myself as a little working-class kid in this relatively working-class part of town.
My dad was a lifelong trade unionist. He was a building worker in the 1950s but he was blacklisted for union activities and so he had to get jobs in other industries, while mum worked in shops like Woolworth.
I was probably no more than twelve years old when I first felt I wasn't like other boys and wasn't having the same sexual dreams as them. So I looked up homosexuality in the index of my little Pears’ Cyclopaedia, the book of knowledge (I've still got that edition of Pears'). It was listed under mental illnesses but it also said that I shouldn't worry because it was just a phase that many boys went through. So I went through years waiting to grow out of this phase.
I also remember watching a TV documentary around that time about one of the first gay-wedding-type ceremonies in America. It showed two
men kissing: my dad started making retching noises and even I found it a bit much to watch. And in any TV drama, gay characters (where they existed) always had sad lives. They might be amusing for a while but they always had sad lives and then they just died.
No one in my family stayed on at school past the age of fifteen, much less went to university. I did: I went to Newcastle University to read English.
I was born in 1959. I grew up in Twickenham, west London. My family was middle class: my dad was a manager at a factory but his father had been a miner in County Durham. I had one older sister. My parents were both members of the Labour Party. My dad was quite a solid supporter of the mid-1970s Labour government and there would be lots of arguments in our house between him my sister's boyfriend, who was much more left wing.
I was born in Hackney in 1946. I come from a very dysfunctional family. I've always been left wing: from a very early age I went on ‘Ban the Bomb' demonstrations. But I didn't get my politics from my family, that's for sure.
I had failed my 11-plus and went to a secondary-modern school before going on to a college of further education. The head teacher thought that some of us should apply for university. I remember saying that I didn't know what university was. I just wanted to get away as far as possible from home as soon as I could. So I chose all these universities that were as far away as possible. But I couldn't get into any of them because I didn't have an O Level in a foreign language, which you needed in those days. But I re-applied and I found myself going to the London School of Economics. I always think that I owed that to Harold Wilson because he opened up universities. He was quite important for all of our lives: perhaps if he'd known where we would all end up, he wouldn't have done that.
I wanted to read social anthropology but it was a very right-wing department and so I decided to do sociology instead. Right-wingers then
thought that wasn't really a subject. I was at LSE from 1966–70: it was an incredibly lively time to go.
Everything was exciting as things were kicking off – student sit-ins and riots through all the glory years of LSE, anti-Vietnam demos, Grosvenor Square. I don't know that I understood it all really but I went on loads of demonstrations – anti-Rhodesia, those sorts of things. It was a time when you were expected to have ideals. There was even a point in time when I was a Maoist but I don't think that lasted very long.
I'd always wanted to be a teacher. So I eventually took a post- graduate course in education and in 1970 went to teach in a primary school in Hackney. I became a trade-union representative at the school where I taught. I worked there until around 1980 when I'd had enough – and at that point, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll were playing a large part in my life.
I was born in Birmingham in 1949. I came from a traditional middle- class Jewish family: my mother's father was a Rabbi and he was Orthodox. My mother was born in Swansea, which is important to part of the story, but in 1914 she and her family emigrated from there to Winnipeg in Canada. In 1926 her father died, leaving them ‘borassic' so they had to sell everything and come back to Britain.
My grandmother's sister had married a man called Louis Silkin and they lived in Dulwich so my mother and her family came back and lived with the Silkins. He was a lawyer and, by inclination, a Tory but in those days Jews couldn't join the Tory party so he joined the Labour Party. For some reason he was ennobled – he was given a baronetcy, a hereditary peerage, the full works.
My mother hated him. He had a mistress so, as far as she was concerned, he was the pits because her aunt was being cheated on. And so, for my mother, this tarred the whole Labour movement. Even though she was a natural socialist, she said she could never vote for the Labour Party. So I grew up in this conservative (with a small C) household in Birmingham.
My dad was in the house-furniture business. His family had obviously had money at some point because they lived in big houses and had
servants but he was a shopkeeper basically, though with all the pretensions that had been given to him. He had been sent to a public school and he was determined that we should all go to one as well. So I went to Oundle public school.
I knew as a kid that I was homosexual: I was ‘other'. So, for me, it was bliss: I was in a public school where there weren't any women, and boys were boys – they liked to have sex so that was the norm. That was fine by me – I was happy with all of that. But otherwise, I didn't enjoy school: I suppose I was part anarchist really. The only saving grace was that Oundle did plays.
My mother loved theatre and ballet and took me off to Stratford to see plays there. I remember turning to my mother and saying, ‘I want to be an actor.' She replied, ‘Well, I hope not like John Gielgud.' Gielgud had been caught ‘cottaging' [soliciting for sex in a public toilet]. That went completely over my head at the time – but I remembered it later.
I left school in 1967 and went to drama school in Sidcup in Kent. This school also gave out teaching training certificates and this, for my parents, was the olive branch: I could always be a teacher if I failed as an actor. In 1972 I got a part on a BBC TV series, The Regiment, set in South Africa during the Boer war. The outside scenes – which were set in a concentration camp – were filmed near Neath in the South Wales valleys.
I was born in 1952 in a mining community in Ouston, County Durham in north-east England. I'm the youngest of three brothers. My family was traditional working class with a mining background. My grandfather was a mining hero. He rescued his mate when they were caught in a rock fall; his mate was completely buried and my grandfather dragged him free and pulled him to safety.
My father was the first man in the family not to work as a miner in the pit: when he first left school he went down the pit for two weeks then came home and begged his parents to let him find another job.
So he became a bus driver and then went on to be a minor civil servant at the Royal Ordnance factory. But we still lived in the pit village.
I guess that's where I got my understanding of mining communities and the sense of community itself.
Ours wasn't a political family: quite the opposite. It was ‘keep your head down' – a very traditional family with very traditional gender roles. So there were no politics in the family and no political awareness, beyond the fact that we lived in a mining village and so, when there was a strike and our neighbours were out on strike, my mum would go shopping and buy an extra packet of sausages or whatever to give to our neighbours to help them out.
But the message I grew up with was ‘don't go down the pit. If you don't study, you will end up down the pit.' When I left school, it was a question of getting any job other than as a miner, so I became a civil servant, then a student psychiatric nurse and then in 1976 I went to Leicester Polytechnic as a mature student, studying English, history and politics.
I was born in Balham, south London in 1959. I moved to Tooting when I was eight. I had one half-sister who was nine years older than me. Dad was a milkman and Mum was an auxiliary nurse in a psychiatric hospital. My mother came from Ireland and my dad was born in Scotland but grew up in Newcastle.
We lived in a privately owned three-storey terraced slum. We all shared one room: there was a little kitchen area in the room and my dad put in a little partition wall to segment off a bit of the rest for my sister but I shared a bed with Mum and Dad. The toilet was down on the next floor and shared with the whole house.
There was no bathroom: we had a bath once a week on a Sunday night in a tin bath, which was hung up at the top of the stairs. I would get first dibs and my parents and my sister would go in after that. I grew up thinking that was absolutely normal; I thought everyone lived like this.
My family was tribally Daily Mirror-reading Labour. But if you pushed them on it – and I did when I was a teenager – they couldn't explain why.
I went to a Catholic primary school and then on to a Catholic grammar school four miles away from where I lived. All my friends went
to the local comprehensive and I had to wear this poncey light-blue blazer with yellow trim. But I was never bullied: it helped that I was tall.
I was about thirteen when I began to suspect I was gay. I wasn't comfortable with this and I threw myself into religion for a couple of years. I was an altar boy at school and went on a couple of religious retreats. But it was sublimation really. I was uncomfortable about my sexuality and, at the same time, I developed sort of romantic-fantasy attachments with women: it was just like falling in love without ever telling them.
I went to Middlesex Polytechnic to do a philosophy, psychology and sociology degree. Within the first term, I realised that I was going to end up being a teacher or a social worker and I didn't want to be either. So I left and got a job at the Young Vic theatre, where I met some of the most fantastic, outrageous people. There I was one of only three people – out of a staff of forty – who claimed to be straight.
I was born in 1955 in North Wales and brought up first in Holyhead and then in Bethesda, a former slate-quarrying village where my mother's family came from. My father's father was a miner from South Wales and my other grandfather had been a quarryman. My father was a fireman and a trade unionist: he was a branch officer in the Fire Brigades Union (FBU). My mother was a teacher. They split up when I was five. I'm the middle of three brothers: all three of us are gay. When I was a teenager, we moved to Sevenoaks in Kent. My mother's father had died when she was very young so she was brought up by her mother, who was the youngest of seven children. All her sisters went into service but she was one of the first generation to go to University College North Wales, which had been funded largely by a voluntary levy that the quarrymen organized. She became a librarian.
When I was about nine, it began to dawn on me that I might be gay. My brothers and I all came out in chronological order, and my mother and grandmother, who with lived with us, were pretty accepting.
We weren't a particularly political family but my elder brother got involved in left-wing politics and I joined the Workers Revolutionary Party when I was fifteen. But two years later I'd grown up a bit and so I
joined the Labour Party instead. Then in 1978 I went to Leeds University, as a mature student, to study sociology.
I was born in 1962 in Rugby but grew up in Coalville in Leicestershire. I have one younger brother. At that time Coalville was still a mining town but it was also really a sort of exburb of Leicester. My dad was a pharmacist and had a little shop on a council estate. My parents were both from a working-class background so I was sort of lower middle class.
It wasn't really a political family. My father was a Conservative but he was a liberal Tory. I don't know about my mum. We didn't really do politics at home but I got interested from around the age of twelve. I can distinctly remember the 1974 election because Harold Wilson came to the Miners Welfare in Coalville and I slapped him on the back.
I knew I was gay at the age of sixteen and I came out to everybody then. I came out to my parents when we were on holiday and they kind of went a bit mad. The worst thing was that, when I came out at school – the local comprehensive – nobody said anything to me; there was, like, no effect at all. But years later I discovered that my brother had been bullied because of me, and that nobody had told me about it. To this day, my mother and my brother blame me for coming out.
I did go to a college – Huddersfield Polytechnic – to do economics but I wasn't really interested and, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, I moved to London.
I was born in Nottingham in 1961. I don't have a father and I haven't spoken to my mother in twenty years. My mother was the black sheep of her family. She came from a military family who had real military minds. In the 1970s she came down to London to go on demonstrations and marches demanding equal pay for women. And she was one of those who were responsible for getting the law changed to get equal pay for women. But I wasn't a political person growing up. I felt politics didn't belong to me. It wasn't my world.
I first knew I was gay when I had sex in a haystack with my cousin's friend: I must have been about seven or eight. And from then on I knew I was gay and it wasn't an issue for me. My mother is a lesbian – though she didn't know that I was. When I was still very young, I managed to get into a gay nightclub in Nottingham. My mother came round the corner in the nightclub and I saw her: she didn't see me and I spent the rest of the night trying to dodge her. I'm not a lesbian because she is. It just happened that way. I did eventually tell her I was a lesbian and it turned out to be a problem. Not for the fact of my being gay but because she said I was copying her.
I qualified as a nurse in 1981 and came down to London and got a job in the National Hospital for Neurosurgery and Neurology. In those days you had to wear linen frocks and starched linen aprons and, as you got more senior, your starched hats got bigger. My family – such as it was – disowned me when I went to London because their attitude was that I was going there to take drugs.
I was born in 1956 in Clerkenwell in central London. I'm from a working-class background. My dad was a driver for the Evening Standard – he used to deliver the papers – and my mum was a housewife. They were both really hardworking. I think they'd both had a really tough time in the war – my dad was on the frontline in Africa, Italy and Greece, and Mum lived through the fire and bombs of the Blitz. It was tough on them but their attitude to life was that you should work to live, not live to work. Both my parents worked really hard to make us happy,
though there wasn't a lot of money.
It was a very traditional working-class, cockney family. We lived in a council flat. I had two sisters, both quite a bit older than me. I was a bit of a runt, off sick from school a lot, but it was a very happy childhood. Both my parents were staunch old-guard Labour, both very much into trade unionism. My dad always used to say that, if you're working class and vote Tory, you're mad.
Education wasn't particularly important in my family, especially because we were all girls. My oldest sister was very bright and she went to grammar school. For a working-class girl at that time, going to
grammar school was extraordinary. My dad used to say to us, ‘You're a girl. You're going to get married. Don't worry about an education.'
I left school at sixteen. After working in a bank and then at a publisher, I got a job in the subs department at the New Statesman magazine. Later I joined Camden Council. I was so lucky: at that time it was a socialist council and it had money.
I was born in Buckinghamshire in 1960. My family was very ‘home counties': Conservative, Tory-voting. It was a very nuclear family – I had one sister. But Mum and Dad split up in 1967, which was very unusual for ordinary people then and that had a huge effect on me. Emotionally, obviously, but also it created in me a sense of not belonging and of being different from that early stage in my life.
My town, High Wycombe, was incredibly Conservative but it was a divided population – socially and racially. It was two societies: Asian people who worked in factories lived on one side of town and all the white people lived on the other.
But this was also a time of huge social and political ferment and I was seeing things on the television that were telling me there was an alternative to the life I was living.
There were people protesting on the streets; students and feminists protesting – a whole world of ideas in which people were protesting at the way the world was. So I started kind of protesting against the way my family was and at the way I was being coerced and corralled into traditional gender roles and expectations.
I was first attracted to girls when I was fifteen. I was magnetised by a girl at my school and had a sexual dream about her. That really scared me. I was scared that I was a monster, abnormal, a freak: I was unspeakable.
I grew up listening to my transistor radio: cultural programmes, drama programmes on Radio 3 and Radio 4. When I went to university to read English, I never really went back home again.