John Barrowman, The Making of Me (2008)
I’m going to try and explain why this really shook me, and I’ll probably fail, but here goes: John’s very secure in his sexuality. He’s known he was gay since he was eight, and he grew up in a loving, supportive family. Yet he still fears that if he’d stayed in a country where homosexuality was illegal for most of the first part of his life, that he wouldn’t have survived.
And that’s why equal rights are so important.
What you said, that’s absolutely heartbreaking.
And I want to hug him even more than usual.
That’s the most… terrible thing. Considering that I was born in Scotland a while obviously after him this makes me feel incredibly sick that something like this happened. No one should still fear what could have happened when they were younger and just the fact of homosexuality being illegal is just… I just don’t understand! How could it be considered a weakness. Poor John considering how comfortable he is you would never have quite realised what could have happened when he was small 🙁 I agree though this is why equal rights are so important.
I think that’s one of the things that makes Ireland’s vote for marriage equality just over a week ago such a big deal. Homosexuality was a criminal offence here until 1993 when David Norris took the country to the European Court of Human Rights to force the law to be changed. Reading articles and posts in the run up to the referendum, you could see a very sharp divide between people who were old enough to have been aware of their own sexuality before the mid 1990s and people who were not. Being alive and aware that who you were was deemed immoral, illegal, disgusting has obviously had an enormous negative impact on people.
Hell, I was born in 1983 and no one in my year at school was out to more than a handful of friends by the time we graduated high school, but my brother was born in 1987 and a boy in his class came out to the whole class while they were having a discussion about personal growth in second year, when he would have been 13 or 14. Even those four years made a difference.
Reblogging again for those excellent points. I think the younger generations on here forget how different a world we live in-I was born in 84 in Wales and I recognise the world I the above comment, and go back another generation and it was even worse. Things have changed a great deal and relatively quickly. It’s also about as JB notes different countries experiences which he saw first hand.
I was born in 1979 in America and graduated high school in 1997 and there was nobody out in my high school. There were some suspects, and the ones that came out later I wasn’t really surprised, looking back. One of my strongest memories is the choir teacher brought a friend of hers to talk to the band and choir kids. He’d been a choreographer and at the time he talked to us was HIV positive and I’m pretty sure that was the first time any of us knowingly talked to anyone who was gay (well, other then the ones in the closet), let alone anyone who had HIV. And there was still a lot of fear mongering about AIDS in the late 80s and early 90s.