A Handsome Bromance: Four Gay Stories

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My first time hitchhiking was in winter last year when some friends and I decided to go an adventure whilst tripping on acid. The day started off typically at a hostel; everyone had the day off, we were smoking a lot and wanted to get our trip on. We walked by the Bow River (Canada) towards the Hoodoos.

It can be a very intimidating environment for refugees, as they often want to be helpful and get their story across. They don’t want to make a fuss by saying they don’t understand the interpreter they’ve been given. We’ve had refugees come to us after their interview and say they didn’t really understand but they didn’t want to upset the interviewer so they carry on and hope for the best.’ Jayne Ozanne has continuously campaigned to bring an end to so-called ‘conversion therapy’ through leading protests, raising awareness by discussing her own experiences of the harmful practice and challenging those in power whenever possible. She now chairs the Ban Conversion Therapy Coalition and, just last year, resigned as an adviser to the government because of the “hostile environment” it has been creating for LGBTQ+ people. Jayne, who is a gay evangelical Christian, has been a pioneer in working with religious organisations to eliminate discrimination based on sexuality and gender, something she founded the Ozanne Foundation in 2017 to help achieve. In March of this year, she helped bring more than 150 senior religious leaders, academics and lay leaders from all over the world together to agree on measures that will help protect queer people from discrimination they may face in their religious communities. Bi Pride UK The Last of Us, a big-budget HBO adaptation of the post-apocalyptic video game, is hailed for an episode centred on two gay characters, Frank and Bill, as they deal with a terminal illness suffered by Frank and the unfolding wider breakdown of society that forms the plot of the main series. The instalment was widely described as one of the best episodes of television ever broadcast and commentators welcomed its representation of gay relationships.However, there are flaws in using interviews as the foundations for someone’s asylum case. While there are interpreters on hand to help translate questions for people who don’t have a solid grasp of English, Reiss argues it can be difficult for someone to express intangible feelings adequately to an interviewer.

I’ve had partners just shut that down and say its not their thing (I’d never try to be pushy about this kind of thing) and others who’d be up for dabbling. With my wife, as we have been together for 10 years, it has been something that is “there” for ages. In that regard, the Home Office have their cake and eat it,’ he explains. ‘If you don’t “look” gay, interviewers may say: “Well, you don’t present as a gay man so what’s the risk? We don’t accept you are gay as claimed.” Your second interview can occur six to 12 months after you first claim asylum, due to delays in the process,’ he explains. ‘This interview runs for hundreds of questions and forms the core of what is that person’s asylum claim. Cave recalls that neither the top brass nor fellow soldiers showed any concern about gay enlistees. People were trying to turn the hippo around so that it could walk away, but it was so heavy that they were having a hard time. I don’t know what happened to the hippo…but it definitely made my hitchhiking experience so much more interesting.” Gay Hitchhiker: Celebrating Pride

The one who just couldn’t wait…

LGBTQ+ activist and author, Charlie Craggs rose to prominence with her campaign, Nail Transphobia. Travelling around the UK with her pop up nail salon and squad of trans nail techs, the campaign offers the public free manicures for the chance to sit down and have a chat with a trans person in a bid to break misconceptions and make allies. The 2013 campaign was a huge success and cemented Charlie as one of today’s most influential trans voices. She has since gone on to write award-nominated book, To My Trans Sisters, a collection of letters by successful trans women and campaign for the inclusion of a trans flag emoji in Unicode, a cause subsequently actioned in 2020. More recently Charlie also became only the second ever trans companion in the history of Doctor Who, landing one of the leading roles in the spin-off podcast Doctor Who: Redacted. Today, Charlie uses her platform to highlight the struggles facing the young trans community and put them on the national agenda, with a recent example of this being her BBC Three documentary Transitioning Teens. Travis Alabanza You may feel a desire to punish your friend. It's natural when we have been injured to want to lash out. But I think the best course is to spend some time with him and try to reach a new understanding that contains a further frankness. What has gone between you requires you, in fact, to find a further frankness. The casual arrangements you have made in the past are no longer enough to encompass what you now know. I was with men, women, men and women at the same time, with cross-dressers, and have cross dressed myself. Meanwhile, Joel believes having people from the LGBTQ+ community interviewing gay asylum seekers would make the process much less damaging for claimants.

Over the past 50 years we’ve come a long way. Pride is now a massive annual event attended by millions of people across the globe. In the UK we’ve fought for and won many rights – from same-sex marriage, equal age of consent, the Gender Recognition Act, and the right to adopt, through to repealing the homophobic Section 28 that probited the teaching of LGBTQ+ experiences in schools in the 90s. We still have some very big battles left to win, but there’s no denying that our community as a whole feels the strongest it has ever been. BBC launches Gay Britannia, a season of programming marking the 50th anniversary of The Sexual Offences Act 1967, which partially decriminalised male gay sex. 2020 His behavior also gave me new insight into the falling-out he had with a mutual friend several years ago, while we vacationed in the same resort town. They had been sharing a bed, and I noted that our other friend had begun to sleep on the sofa, too. They had an angry fight one night on that trip and they've never spoken to each other again. It has been crazy since coming out," Daniels said. "I didn't think it would blow up as much as it did. The reception I've had, the people I've met, it's been a crazy experience. In 2022, Shakespeare’s Globe announced I,Joan as part of its schedule. Written by Charlie Josephine and starring Isobel Thom, the play retelling the life of Joan of Arc – the 15th century female saint and French military leader – received praise from left-leaning theatre critics whilst being heralded as the poster for “woke culture” by more conservative titles.

1996

No one has celebrated queerness in its many difference forms on British television quite like Russell T Davies. The screenwriter and television executive has placed LGBTQ+ representation at the forefront of his work throughout his career, bringing queer characters and narratives to a mainstream audience. His most notable works include: Queer as Folk, a 1999 drama that chronicled the lives of three gay men in Manchester’s gay village; Cucumber, a GLAAD-nominated mini-series focusing on middle-aged gay men; and It’s A Sin, a five-part series depicting the lives of gay men who lived during the HIV/AIDS crisis in the UK. The latter, which received universal critical acclaim, made history as the most binge-watched show on All4 and was also responsible for creating an upsurge in HIV testing. For his trailblazing work surrounding LGBTQ+ visibility on television, Russell was recognised with the 2020 GAY TIMES Honour for Outstanding Impact. Lady Phyll Sam’s asylum claim was denied by a judge, as he hadn’t had a partner for 10 years (Picture: Supplied)