Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I'd like to talk to you about what happens to who we are
when we start to win.
I'm going to use the example of gay liberation,
but I want to make a bigger point.
What happens to how we identify
when, as in our case,
you go from being illegal to being in the closet, to being married?
And why does that matter in today's politics?
Now, Brighton has always been a fabulous home for gay people.
Brighton is a city that's half made up of people who ran away
and half made up of the people who took us in.
And the history of being gay has always been, for hundreds of years,
the history of running away.
And we ran away,
we ran away to the seaside and the seasonal employment
and the hundreds of soldiers that were billeted here during the Napoleonic wars.
(Laughter)
And we ran away to the fashionable permissiveness of the Prince Regent,
and together with other people, we created a city of difference.
We made Brighton into a stick of rock,
but a stick of rock that didn't say the same thing all the way through.
But we were illegal.
It was only in 1835,
which is five years after the Prince Regent died,
that the last person in England was hanged for sodomy.
And our -
But life carried on,
you know?
Gay life flourished in Brighton.
On the surface, so suburban,
but underneath, at dark,
life veered dangerously and unpredictably
between sex and love and violence and prison and arrests.
And our gay identity was forged
as we internalized that criminality and that rejection by society.
Our solidarity was born not out of something positive,
but out of oppression by a cruel world.
It's not easy to feel too proud about who you are
when you're forced to live your lives in the shadows.
And then, 1967 happened.
I know it was only partial decriminalization,
but suddenly, we weren't illegal.
We could be visible,
and visibility is pretty much all gay people have got, politically.
It is the big difference between being gay and being black,
as if you're black, you don't have to tell your mother.
(Laughter)
And so we started to campaign,
we started to argue for what we wanted.
And the thing about solidarity movements in their early days
is that they're well-served by solidarity.
Our differences are submerged
under the shared experience of the insult to our liberty.
We know exactly who we are and what we want.
So when the twelve of us started Stonewall in the late '80s,
we were really clear about what we were campaigning for.
We wanted equality, pure and simple.
We just wanted to be treated equally, under the law, with everybody else.
And as we fought these battles, something strange started to happen.
We started to win,
not only first in the court of public opinion -
I can't remember how many times
we lost the vote on the age of consent in Parliament,
but I coined at the time this rather Maoist-sounding phrase,
which was, "Every defeat is a victory."
Because every time we lost, nonetheless,
ordinary members of the public were won round
to the simple justice of our cause.
And then we started to win legally.
So the age of consent was equalized at 16.
So then, we did gain the ability to foster and adopt children.
And then, the military ban,
the ban on lesbians and gays serving in the armed forces, was lifted.
And that gave rise to some fantastic arguments.
I remember once being in a television studio
with a very senior military man,
who said to me, "We can't possibility have homosexual soldiers in the army
because the other soldiers will be forced to share the showers with them,
and that will make them feel nervous and anxious."
And I remember saying to him at the time,
"Look, if what makes you feel nervous and anxious
is another guy thinking you've got a really cute butt,
I'm not sure the army is the job for you."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
So we started to win,
and as we won these legal battles,
then there were more gay pop stars and politicians and journalists
and the occasional business person and sportsperson.
But as we won, something happened to our coherence as a group.
That coherence started to be accompanied by a diversity amongst us,
and that diversity was born of our new freedom.
And that diversity enabled us not just to be gay
but to pursue our individual ambitions and aspirations.
So, who had we become?
Our world had fundamentally changed.
Homophobia wasn't over,
but while prejudice was still an everyday event,
it was no longer an all-day event.
So how had we changed?
Identity in the context of changing freedoms is a very complicated thing.
What that freedom does is it means
that even though when something hits you in the face,
metaphorically or literally,
you're still just a pouf.
For the rest of your life, you're Simon, who's also gay.
And here's the thing: being gay is not very interesting.
(Laughter)
It just is!
Growing up gay is interesting
because that's the question about what contribution it makes
to the many-faceted person that you have become.
So identity in growing freedom is complicated.
I have a friend who is a judge,
and she is black,
and she sits on the family bench.
Because she sits on the family bench,
in court she's God because she can take your kids away.
But walking home,
she's just a black woman on the streets of South London.
She and I have talked about this a lot:
what does being black mean
at all those different parts of the day and of her life.
Being black is always absolutely essential to who she is,
but so is being a judge, a barrister,
and so is being Margot.
Now, my husband is Nigerian.
And you know, I still love saying the word "husband." It's gorgeous.
My husband is Nigerian,
and I'm, you know, British.
And so, he's African and I'm European, so he's black and I'm white.
And he's religious, and I'm not religious at all.
In fact, he's a Muslim, and I am definitely not a Muslim.
And we're 26 years apart, and whenever I tell people that,
they always say the same thing.
They say, "How do you deal with the age gap?"
(Laughter)
But those are just our headlines.
As anybody who's in a relationship or been in a relationship knows,
the real journey is not just understanding the headlines,
but it's understanding each other
as two different, separate, individual human beings.
It's exploring our differences that bring us together,
and it's sharing our values that keep us together.
And my fear at the moment
is that when we overfocus on identity politics,
it drives us into a political dead end.
Because people are using their identity to form their politics,
but then, dangerously, they're using their identity to defend those views
and invalidate any challenge to those views from anybody else.
We're living in what I call the "as a" phase of politics:
"as a gay man," "as a black woman," "as a person with disabilities" -
"As a middle-class wanker."
(Laughter)
(Clapping coming from the audience)
Don't clap too much, please.
(Laughter)
It's my sister.
(Laughter)
Or it's my husband, I think.
(Laughter)
"As a" is used to make people's politics,
but it's then used to repel any challenge.
When Donald Trump banned trans people from serving in the armed forces,
it wasn't about trans people.
He was playing to his base.
He was just using trans people
as the latest political punchbag.
But too many people took the bait,
and in defending trans rights, they diverted the argument.
The point of the campaign wasn't to argue about the ins and outs and ups and downs
and whether-or-not-bes of trans people serving in the army.
The issue at stake was that the president of the United States,
the commander-in-chief,
was banning a group of citizens from one of the fundamentals of citizenship,
which is the opportunity to volunteer to serve in defense of your country.
I saw a guy protesting it, and he had a placard,
and on the placard, it said, "Pro trans rights, anti-war."
And I thought, "How egotistical!"
"This isn't about what you think about war."
That's getting in the way, that's stopping us mounting a campaign,
a huge alliance of people around the idea of citizenship,
and fighting Donald Trump's attack on the very idea of citizenship itself.
If we're going to find a way of creating utopia,
we have to find a way like we did with Stonewall.
We won because we made alliances.
We won because we convinced people,
our mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters
and uncles and aunts and cousins and colleagues and friends and neighbors.
We convinced people of a vision
of a country in which all of us, them and us, could be equal,
a country which was not just a gay country,
not still a straight country,
but a country in which equality flourished for all of us.
The historic imperative of politics at the moment
is for us to reach across boundaries
so we can unite around a principle which the vast majority of us agree on.
It is not to strengthen the sectional interests of the tribes,
but to build alliances between them in the greater good.
And it's complicated. Identity is complicated.
When people say to me - Sorry, correction -
When white people say to me,
"Oh, I don't see race; I just treat everybody equally,"
I say to them,
"If you don't see race, you're really missing out on something."
But if you only see race, you're also missing out on something.
And that's true whether you're talking about race,
or sexual orientation, or gender,
or any of the other big identity groups.
In my life, I'm Simon,
I'm gay,
I'm a citizen,
and those things overlap and intersect.
And if we're going to build a utopia,
we need to seek to understand each other's lives
and each other's experiences and each other's differences
in order to collaborate to build a society that we all can live in.
If the personal really is the political,
then we need to see difference, value difference,
understand difference and embrace difference,
of individuals and of groups,
in order to build a world that's fit for all of us.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)