Hello and welcome back to the Queerest podcast, Telling the
fiercest Stories. This is Queer Talker, and I'm
Ben Cicchetti. This week I sit down with
England's first openly gay MP and the world's first openly gay
cabinet minister. My first Lord on queer talker,
Lord Christopher Smith. I remember writing a very boring
speech on the train and as I'm walked up to take my place on
the platform, I just thought this is the place to do it.
I can remember having to sit through the most dreadful,
offensive, horrible speeches from some of the supporters of
Section 28I dialled this number, it was a South African number.
And picking up the phone at the other end was Nelson Mandela.
And that, I think, was the moment when I thought perhaps a
career in public life has been worth it after all.
Chris, we will start with our queer panic rapid fire
questions. And so you just respond with the
first thing that comes to your mind, which is what is your
favourite queer movie? Oh, call me by your name.
Brilliant choice. Timothy Chalamet.
Fantastic. How about ATV show?
Queer TV show you recommend to everyone?
It's a sin. Excellent choice.
How about AI can see a lot of books behind you.
So what about a queer book you recommend to everyone having on
this show? Armistead Mopin.
It would have to be I I grew up with all of his tales of San
Francisco and they are a pure delight.
Amazing. OK, I love that choice.
Who's your ultimate queer? Icon.
It would probably have to be in McKellen, but the world is full
of ultimate queer icons. But that would probably be the
one that I would choose. Yeah, an incredible, incredible
individual, incredible trendsetter and trailblazer for
a lot of us. Who is one person you would like
to hear on this podcast? Oh, I'm tempted to say Ian
McKellen, I, I think you also ought to ask Wahid Ali to come
on first openly gay member of the House of Lords.
He preceded me by a long way in the House of Lords.
He has also, of course, not just been a successful businessman,
but he's had to tussle with being a Muslim and queer and
that's something you could explore with him.
Definitely. I love that we we discuss
intersectionality a lot on this podcast, so I think that'd be an
incredibly interesting conversation.
Is there a moment in your political career that you are
most proud of? It would probably be the moment
that I achieved my long held ambition to make all the
national museums and galleries free for everyone.
It took me 4 years to achieve. It actually happened about two
months after I had stopped being Secretary of State.
But the Science Museum invited me back to come and cut a ribbon
and throw open the doors, and we had a lovely little ceremony.
And about half an hour later, I was wandering around in the
foyer of the museum, and this young man carrying his little
daughter on his shoulders, was making a beeline towards me.
And as he came up to me, he turned his face to his daughter
and he said, I want you to say thank you to this man.
It's because of him we're able to be here today.
And that, I think, was the moment when I thought perhaps a
career in public life has been worth it after all.
That is amazing. What an incredible, incredible
legacy that so many of us have now been able to enjoy because
of you. And still in place, of course,
remarkably. Long made Long made?
What is one word you would use to describe your childhood?
Calm. I grew up in a very loving home.
My mother was a teacher, my father was a civil servant.
They looked after me really well.
They did not initially respond terribly well to me coming out
publicly, but term within two years they were inviting my
boyfriend to my then boyfriend to come and stay so they they
came round to it after a while. Yeah, that's amazing.
Well, well, we've warmed up a little bit Aqua Panic questions.
So we'll get a bit deeper because you said calm.
And I have this theory that to understand an LGBTQ plus person
as an adult, you do first need to understand them as a young
person. So what should I know about you
as a child or a teenager to understand the Chris that sits
in front of me? Today the one thing I would say
is it took me a very long time to realise that I was gay.
So it was probably into my 20s when the realisation dawned.
But through the whole of my teenage years I grew up in
Scotland and I loved roaming the Scottish hills and the Scottish
countryside and living in Edinburgh was a complete
delight. But I it took me time to realise
that I was gay. Yeah, I mean Edinburgh, it looks
phenomenal. I've never been and it's on my
list of go to places that I need to go to.
I want to go and enjoy Christmas there, I feel.
Like it'd be incredibly fast. It should be very high up on
your list of go to places. Yeah, wonderful.
City, I'll make it happen for sure.
So if you think about that experience, then do you remember
the first LGBTQ plus person you became aware of, either in real
life or just through the news and media?
When I was a student at Cambridge I was very closeted
but there was 1 figure who was really open about themselves and
camp would be the obvious word that would come to mind.
But I was sort of aware of him, but I didn't really know him.
It was then, subsequently, in my 20s, that I began to get to know
and fall in love with gay people.
And I began to lead a very open life at that, at that stage.
Yeah, that's incredible. I often think it's interesting
to understand. Do you remember so many of us
can have a memory of that first time we felt the queerness
within us, whether it's because we we saw something or we got
exposed to something that made us kind of feel something
inside. Do you remember that first
feeling you got that you may be queer?
Yes, and it was when I saw really attractive men and and
and thought this is how I want to express myself in into the
future. And that was probably when I was
still a student. Yeah.
Well, you also then went on to have an incredible career and
politics as we talked about. What was your journey into
politics and was it always kind of your aspiration as you went
through school and university or did it did something along your
journey kind of spark that path for you?
But remember, I grew up in the 1960s and this was a time of
real hope and optimism and we all thought we could change the
world and that politics and democratic decision making was
the way to do it. And, um, I, um, I, I went into
politics because I wanted to change the world and, uh, I
thought that politics was the way to do it.
Um, and so from the time I left university onwards, I, I went to
work for housing associations and housing cooperatives
building houses for people around London and the southeast.
But I I, I wanted to get involved in politics and I was
first of all elected to be a counsellor in Islington Borough
Council, where I lived. And then I became the candidate
eventually for Islington South and Finsbury as a parliamentary
seat. Yeah, and obviously famously in
1984 you stood on a stage at a rally in rugby and you came out
publicly as gay. That moment made you Britains
first openly gay male MP. What gave you the courage to do
that? Right.
It was a different time. So what gave you the courage in
that moment, knowing the climate of the time?
It was a horrible time and the IT was the time of the pretty
police in Earl's Court entrapping people and
prosecuting them. It was the time of the Customs
and Excise raid on gays the Word Bookshop.
It was the time of the fire bombing of Capital Gays offices
in London. And it was not an easy time.
And you have to remember also that when I was first elected
the year before in 1983, I had a majority of 363 votes.
So it was a wafer thin majority and nonetheless I knew that at
some point I wanted to say something about myself.
I had seen a colleague who wasn't out, who was gay, who was
being hounded by the press, and he had people rummaging through
his dustbins. He had people sitting in cars
outside his block of flats all night long recording who was
going in and out. And I, I didn't want to have to
go through the same sort of thing.
Yeah. And I just decided that the way
to stop the the intrusion was to tell the story yourself.
And by telling the story yourself, you remove all the
title tattle from it. And so it eventually proved for
me and the the moment that I did it, because I'd been thinking
for about a year, at some point I have to say something, but the
only question was when would be the right moment.
And the City of Rugby had taken the decision.
It had just changed political control and it had taken the
decision to remove sexual orientation from the list of
things that they would not discriminate against in their
employment policy. So effectively they were saying
we do not want LGBT people coming to work for Rugby Council
and there was a big rally in March called for a Saturday
lunchtime in the middle of rugby.
And because I had said supportive things about lesbian
and gay rights, they, the organisers, invited me to go up
and speak. And I can remember the meeting
had already started when I arrived.
I had gone up on the train and I remember writing a very boring
speech on the train and I walked into the hall.
There were about 1000 people there.
The meeting had already started and as I'm walked up to take my
place on the platform, I just thought this is the place to do
it because the issue here is all about how anyone, no matter what
their sexual orientation happens to be, can do an equally good
job as anyone else working for Rugby Council.
Yeah. And I just thought actually
exactly the same applies to MPs. Yeah.
And so it was a spur of the moment decision.
It was about 10 minutes before I was due to stand up.
It was 10 of the scariest minutes of my life.
My knees were literally knocking together and I stood up and I
began my speech by saying my name is Chris Smith, I'm the
Labour MP for Islington South in Simsbury and I'm gay.
At at which point the entire audience got to their feet and
gave me a standing ovation. It is the only time I've ever
had a standing ovation 20 seconds into a speech, but I
have to say I have never regretted that moment for a
single instant ever since. What was the feeling as you
stepped off stage? There must have been a Was there
a feeling of a sense of relief, a weight off your shoulders?
Was there an anxiety of what have I just done?
Like kind of what was the feeling as you walked off that
there? There was certainly a what have
I just done? Because no one had ever done
this before. And I, I remember for the
following week there, there was quite a lot of coverage in the
papers the following day. But for the following week, I
got letters from people all around the country.
Now this was way before the days of social media.
So people wrote letters and some of the letters said,
congratulations, good on you. Well done.
But I think the letters which meant the most were the ones
that said thank you. What you've said has made things
easier for me. And if I was able, by what I
said, to make things just a little bit easier for people,
especially young people up and down the country, it was worth
it. Yeah, I mean it's amazing and
it's it's what people need, right.
I often say you can't be what you can't see.
And I think people need to be able to see people being
successful and open and authentic in order to know they
can also do so. What was the reaction in
Parliament from both colleagues and public when you kind of had
to go back, I'm assuming relatively quickly afterwards to
to Parliament? This was on a Saturday in on the
Monday I walked into the House of Commons.
Everyone knew, and there were some people who should have
known better who scuttled past me in the corridor, averting
their eyes. But the vast majority of
colleagues were really supportive and warm and and
helpful about it. And especially Neil Kinnock was
the leader of the Labour Party at the time.
He was really supportive. And my favourite moment was on
the Monday afternoon. I was standing in the queue in
the members tea room to get a cup of tea.
There were MPs sitting around all over the place and Edwina
Curry, who was a very ferociously feisty Conservative
MP, previous health minister, came barging in to the tea room.
She came marching up to me and in a very loud voice she said,
Chris, I hear you've come out well done and turned on her heel
and marched out. And I, I loved her forever
afterwards because of that. That's amazing.
That's incredible. I think what's interesting
though, if we think about that time period is just a few years
later, Section 28 would be introduced.
And Section 28 comes up a lot on queer talkers that quite a few
members of our previous guests have grown up through Section
28, went to school through Section 28.
You were one of the only openly gay voices in Parliament when
Section 28 was introduced. I was the only OK, can you take
us? Back to that moment then and how
it felt both personally and professionally, and then I would
love to get your perspective on what, if any, you think the
lasting damage of that legislation has been on LGBTQ
plus people in Britain. Well, of course, it was a clause
that was added to a local government bill, initially
proposed by a group of Tory backbenchers but then endorsed
by the Thatcher government, and it labelled any LGBT person and
any LGBT relationship as second class.
And it was a deeply offensive bit of legislation.
We, of course, eventually were able to repeal it in the early
2000s, but while it was on the statute book, no prosecution was
ever brought under it. But it nonetheless had a
chilling effect. And it meant that, for example,
a teacher in a school, if a kid came up to them and said, I am
really worried, I think I may be gay.
Of course, what a teacher ought to be able to do in such
circumstances is to sit the kid down and say this is perfectly
all right. It's perfectly normal.
There are lots of people like you and we will love you and
support you, whatever you happen to be.
But no teacher under Section 28 was able to do that.
They had to say, oh, I'm afraid I can't talk about that.
And that chilling effect on the ability to guide and nurture
children, that was really detrimental.
And when it was, when the legislation was going through
Parliament, there were a number of us fighting very hard against
it. I can remember having to sit
through the most dreadful, offensive, horrible speeches
from some of the supporters of Section 28.
It it they, they were all about how gay people were a threat to
children and it, it was all about perversion and so on.
I really horrible offensive stuff that people were coming
out with. But I remember there was 1
moment of of real hope in all of this.
And it was when there was a particularly Neanderthal Tory on
his feet, man called Nicholas Winterton making a speech about
Section 28. And I stood up to intervene on
him and made a point. And as I sat down, he looked
across the chamber at me and he began his response by saying the
House has learned to listen to the honourable gentleman
pointing at me with respect when he talks about these matters.
But he then went on to disagree with me.
But the fact that he felt he had to put in that little bit about
respect showed me that we had made a tiny little step of
progress because he was no longer able to talk in windy
generalisations about gay people because they're sitting in front
of him was one of the people he was talking about.
Yeah, it must have been incredibly hard, or maybe it
wasn't because you are such a professional.
But it must be very hard to remain professional in those
moments when people are stood up saying such horrible things
about you and your community. How did you kind of come up, you
know, protect that part of you from what you were having to
listen to? You to a certain extent, you
have to let it wash over you and you, you just have to know that
it's wrong and it's evil and it's offensive.
But to just sit through it and then stand up and try and make a
coherent argument against what they've been saying?
Yeah. Quite difficult.
I think I I would struggle. Obviously EU KS first openly gay
MP, but then in 1997 you joined Tony Blair's cabinet and became
the world's first openly gay cabinet member.
What did that moment mean to you?
Well, the rather wonderful thing that happened when I was
appointed to the cabinet was no one noticed that I was the first
openly gay cabinet minister in the world.
And that really did show me that we had made progress because it
was no longer something really remarkable.
It was just taken in its stride by the media and all the
political commentators. And that, of course, is how it
ought to be. The there were two other gay but
not openly gay members of the cabinet in that first Blair
administration, and one of them did come out to a great to do in
the press. One of them never did come out
and but nonetheless, everyone knew that he was gay.
But it it was, it was a remarkable first, and
particularly remarkable because it didn't raise an awful lot of
comment. Yeah, that is interesting.
And as, as you say, that almost should be the way it is, that it
shouldn't be groundbreaking. It was groundbreaking and it was
incredible. What was that period of your
life like then whilst kind of serving under Tony Blair and in
his his government? Well the what we were able to do
of course was bring in a whole raft of change for LGBT related
legislation. The first thing we did was to
equalise the age of consent and then we got rid of Section 28
and then we had equal access to goods and services.
And then we were able to reform the way in which the diplomatic
service and the Armed Services operated.
And then we were able to bring in civil partnerships and that
whole raft of legislation. I remember Tony Blair's office
was really nervous at the outset.
Oh, what are our working class pension of voters going to think
about a Labour government that does this?
And we eventually managed to persuade them that if the ER, if
two young men brought a case to the European Court of Human
Rights and if the European Court found against the UK, then the
government would legislate. And that is precisely what
happened to very brave young men assisted by Stonewall, went to
the European Court, took the government to court, won the
case and then Blair was able to say we have to do this.
And he not only brought in equalisation legislation in the
House of Commons, but then when the House of Lords threw it out,
he invoked the Parliament Act to force it through the House of
Lords in the subsequent year. And of course, when the
legislation actually came into force, the roof didn't fall in
and the working class pensioner voters weren't the slightest bit
concerned about what was happening and everyone sort of
thought this is rather a good thing.
And after that it was easy to persuade his office to allow us
to do everything else that we wanted to do.
Yeah, it's an incredibly, I mean, obviously he went on to
get elected a couple more times after that.
So it's an incredibly important message actually, I think
because I think we sometimes feel like we have to pander to a
certain vocal minority. Then actually I think what
you'll find and what I hope is that the vast majority of people
just want people to be able to live their lives with equality.
So I think seeing that and knowing it didn't, you know, as
you said, the roof didn't fall in, you know, the hell didn't
freeze over. Life continued and you know, the
government continued to be successful.
Absolutely. And in some ways I think
ordinary people were way ahead of the politicians on this.
And one of the reasons it became easy to bring in all the
legislative change that we did was that it wasn't so much that
public figures like politicians and actors had come out.
It was that ordinary people in their family, amongst their
friends, in their neighbourhood, in their workplace had come out
to their friends and had said, yes, I'm one of those.
And everyone had begun to realise that these were
perfectly normal, decent, ordinary people.
And that changed public attitudes enormously.
Yeah. But I think what you need is
people like yourself who are a voice in that room, right.
And often what I talk about is the importance of diversity from
a business perspective and a leadership level.
From a business perspective, you could argue there's no higher
leadership team in the UK anyway than the Cabinet.
Why is it so important, therefore, that we have
diversity of people and background in our cabinets?
Because the Cabinet must reflect the spectrum of people within
the nation as a whole. And the, uh, one of the, uh,
real arguments for diversity, which is under enormous threat
in, especially in the United States at the moment, umm, it's
also a bit under threat here because there are many companies
and organisations that are taking their lead from the Trump
assault on, uh, uh, DEI in the US.
Umm, the one of the main purposes of promoting diversity
is to say if we want all the available talents in our
organisations, in our companies, in our country, we need to
appreciate and celebrate difference.
And there will be many people who don't look like you, who
don't behave like you, who are different.
And we need to welcome those people because they will have a
a lot to offer that you don't. Yeah, I think it's such an
important message, especially right now.
As you say, we are seeing things being stripped back in the
United States and unfortunately that often kind of does have a
knock on effect here in the UK and it's definitely something
we're seeing from a business perspective.
You continued to break new ground and pioneer and be a
vocal member of the community, and in 2005 you revealed that
you were HIV positive. What made you decide to share
that publicly, and what impact do you think that openness had
on the community and on society as a whole?
Well, I was first diagnosed with HIV many years before, in 1988.
And for many years I thought, actually, this is nobody's
business. I told a few friends, I told my
then partner of course, but I didn't say anything publicly
because it wasn't affecting my ability to do my job at all.
And then in 2003, a journalist from The Sunday Times phoned me
up and said I want to talk about your health.
And I knew immediately what it was that they were wanting to to
do. And so I said, well, if you want
to do that, then I want to speak with your editor.
And within 20 minutes the editor of The Sunday Times, who was
John Witherow at the time, had phoned me up and I said to him,
you do realise of course that revealing someone's personal
health details without their permission is in flagrant breach
of the editorial code of conduct.
And I don't want you to say anything at the moment.
What I will say, I said to him is at some point I will want to
say something about this and when I do, I will do it with The
Sunday Times. And he in a remarkable moment of
ethical journalism, he didn't publish anything at that point.
And when two years later, Nelson Mandela had made a speech at his
son's funeral, his son had died of AIDS.
And the he made this rather wonderful speech saying we must
stop hiding this. We must come out and talk about
it. We must make it public.
We must address the stigma that comes with HIV and an HIV
diagnosis. And I just thought, well,
perhaps I ought to say something now.
And so I phoned up The Sunday Times and I said I want now to
go public. And they literally cleared the
front page and made a big splash of it.
And I then did a whole series of interviews through this Sunday
and I was making two points. The first was what I hope I've
been able to demonstrate is that it is possible to live with HIV
and make a perfectly worthwhile contribution to society and work
whilst you are HIV positive. And secondly, I said in a
perverse kind of way, I've been lucky because I've had HIV in a
country with a National Health Service with medical expertise,
with answers to the the virus. And we mustn't forget that there
are thousands of people around the world who aren't in that
lucky position and we need to think about and help to support
them as well. And I have to say the coverage,
with the exception of one article in the Daily Mail on the
Monday, with that one exception, the coverage was remarkably
constructive and positive. And the finest moment was on the
Monday morning, I walked into my office in the House of Commons
and there was a little note on my desk saying please ring Mr
Mandela and a telephone number. And so I dialled this number.
It was a South African number. And picking up the phone at the
other end was Nelson Mandela, who said I just wanted to say
thank you for saying what you have and it makes a real
difference. And that moment almost made the
whole thing worth it. Yeah, that's incredible.
What an amazing, amazing individual to have spoke to, an
amazing, amazing thing for you to do.
I think to your to your first point, is that continual work to
remove the stigma and we still see it today.
Most recently on I Kiss the Boy on the BBC, one of the
contestants, Adam came spoke about his HIV positive status
and just kind of the importance of removing so much the stigma
that still exists because so many of us grew up through the
80s and the 90s where there was this impression of HIV in a
certain light. Now we need to help do all the
work to kind of remove that and recognise that people can, as
you said, live healthy, happy, productive lives.
And that's just so incredibly important.
And of course, for a long time, anyone with HIV was fighting 2
diseases, was fighting the virus itself and everything that it
was doing inside you, but also fighting the stigma that came
with it. And that was eased a little bit,
but not wholly, and we still have to fight the stigma and the
prejudice that comes with it. Yeah, completely agree.
Right at the start of this conversation, you mentioned your
time at the University of Cambridge, and in July you were
elected Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.
Can you talk to me about what that role entails and kind of, I
guess, what you hope to achieve in that work?
Well, the, the, the, the, the, all the real work is done by the
vice chancellor. The chancellor sort of floats
over the top and but the duties are largely ceremonial.
But you have a duty and an opportunity to be a voice and an
advocate for the university and for higher education more
generally. And of course higher education,
especially across the other side of the Atlantic, is under real
threat at the moment. Academic freedom is at real risk
and freedom of speech, which is what a university has to be all
about. What we're seeing across the
Atlantic is everyone talking about freedom of speech, but
what they mean is only one particular kind of freedom of
speech, and anyone who disagrees with that is it is rubbished and
introduced. And we need to protect academic
freedom, we need to protect debate and discussion and the
search for evidence and truth. And the chancellor of the
University of Cambridge can raise a voice for doing that.
You are the Queen, you're not the Prime Minister, so you don't
actually make decisions about what the university can and
can't do. But you can set the tone and the
culture and the atmosphere of the place.
And that's something I very much hope to be able to do.
Yeah, and it's so important, right.
To your point that if we think about what we've just been
discussing, being a voice can be so incredibly important and can
really help shape, as you say, even if the you can't make the
change yourself, helping shape perceptions and shape opinions
is incredibly important and. Rather remarkably, amongst the
10 candidates for the chancellorship there were three
openly gay candidates. One, of course, was John Brown,
who has a troubled history in BP and but one was Sandy Toxvig,
who ran a very feisty and open campaign and I'm delighted to
say that she came third and virtually all of her votes
transferred to me in the in the final stage of the of the vote.
That's amazing. We talked a lot about kind of
the political climate throughout your career, and I've suggested
that the current political climate as it relates to the
trans community feels reminiscent of the climate in
the 80s and 90s for the gay community.
As someone that was clearly just at the forefront of change
during that time, do you feel that's a fair comparison?
I think it's entirely fair. And I really do despair of the
way in which, uh, the position of trans people has been
weaponized and labelled, um, on both sides of the argument.
And I, I really want to knock everyone's heads together and
say, for heaven's sake, we are talking about individual human
beings here. And very often these are human
beings who are going through real challenge and former and
difficulty. And our job is to support them
and help them. It's not to label them and turn
them into a political battleground.
And I just hope that over the course of the next few years, we
can get to a position of real equality and support for trans
people. I have to say the EHRC is not
helping at the moment, but we we need to get better at
understanding what someone who is transitioning or has
transitioned really needs in terms of support and facilities.
Yeah, I completely agree. And I think, you know, so many
people, much like we talked about through the 1890s, people
just wanted to want to live their lives and they want to
thrive and they want to be able to live their authentic self.
And that's not a threat to anyone else.
And in fact, it's actually those individuals that are actually a
more threat than anyone else. So we do all need to come
together. We do need to protect them.
We started this conversation talking about you as a young
person, so young. Chris, if you could give your
younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?
And would it be different if I said, what advice would you give
to a young LGBTQ plus person today?
It would be exactly the same advice and it would be don't be
scared, be self confident about who you are and what you are and
go out and express that amongst your friends in the world
outside I. I've had the privilege for the
last 10 years of being head of a college at Cambridge.
And I have gone out of my way to try and make sure that we
welcome and embrace the any student who is LGBTQ plus who is
worried about who or what they might be.
And making sure that it's a welcoming environment and it's a
supportive environment is something I very consciously
tried to do. And many of our young students
have said to me, thank you because it has provided me with
a really safe environment and it's given me the courage to be
who I am. And I hope that not just in the
little bubble of the Cambridge College, but more broadly in
society as a whole, we can get to that stage.
Yeah, I love that. Don't be scared and be brave.
It's such an important message. Chris, thank you so much for
being on the podcast. But on this podcast, we often
talk about those people who have laid the groundwork and fought
the fights for people like me to not only live but thrive as our
authentic selves. And you are one of the reasons
that today we have an openly gay leader of a major political
party, Zach Polanski. So from many of us in the
community, thank you so much for everything you did.
And continue to do for the RGBTQ bus community.
Well, thank you. You are much too kind in what
you say. But if I've made a tiny little
contribution at some point over the past 40 years, then it's
been worth doing.