Oral History Interview - Sebastian Sandys
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19/10/2017
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2018.56
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Audio recording of an oral history with Sebastian Sandys (born 1962, Dulwich).
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Transcript of Interview with Sebastian Sandys
Q. My name's Rebecca Odell I am interviewing Sebastian for Hackney Museum. The date is the 2nd of August 2017. Can you start by telling me your full name, where you were born and when you were born?
SS. My full name is Sebastian Sandys and I was born on the 31st of May 1962 in Dulwich Hospital [00:23].
Q. Can you tell me a little bit about your childhood?
SS. Yes, I was conceived in Ireland. My mother was a young Protestant woman who had left Ireland to come to London to nurse and had gone back to Ireland to nurse her mother, I think during illness. She renewed her friendship with somebody called Thomas O'Malley who was a local Catholic farmhand and in documentation they went about together for the summer. She returned to London not knowing that she was pregnant, and I appeared, and the circumstance is such that she was Protestant and he was Catholic. I was put up for adoption through the [Thomas] Coram Foundation in London. I was adopted by my parents when I was six months old and went to live in Norfolk.
My father worked for Kellogg’s and was transferred from Cheshire to Old Trafford, Manchester. I was maybe seven or eight by the time we got to Cheshire and had an idyllic middle-class affluent childhood, sang in the church choir and the church youth group, was a sixer in the cubs and a pillar of respectful church life. Rose to the dizzy heights of head chorister and managed to keep that up until I was all of 17 when I discovered that perhaps young gay and 17, affluent South Cheshire was not the place to be and I ran away to London. I didn’t run away, I came to London to work at Harrods where things were somewhat different.
Q. You moved to London when you were 17. Whereabouts did you end up in London?
SS. I lived in a Seamen’s Hostel in Aldgate in Dock Street which was pretty grim. I don't think my parents would not have consented had it not been for the redoubtable Miss English who ran the place with a rod of iron. My mother was much reassured that no harm would come to me as long as Miss English was in charge. I lived there to begin with and then I moved to a hostel at Stepney that was managed by The Scout Association and again that was fine. Got my first gay flat share about two years in I suppose, 18 months, something like that, over in Notting Hill.
Q. Moving from rural Cheshire to London what was your kind of first impressions of living in London? [03:23]
SS. Just fantastic really. It took me three months, maybe four months to actually find a gay club or a gay pub. I knew they existed, but I had absolutely no idea. Sort of wandered around streets and then I ended up sharing a room in The Scout Association place with another gay man who had been here a bit longer than me and he knew where the clubs were. I was off, that was it and had a fantastic time.
Q. In your opinion, was that how the social scene worked - you needed somebody who knew where they were?
SS. Yes, well, 17 is very young to be exploring that. There was a clearly openly gay element to Harrods, but I wasn’t confident enough to sort of get involved with that, but yeah. I'm fairly extrovert on some levels and so once you make that one contact that makes up.
Q. You mentioned this sort of scene at Harrods was that coincidence you ended up there, was that part of the reason you found yourself working there? [04:53]
SS. No, it was coincidence, well, if you believe in coincidence. I went to work at Harrods not Chelsea Football Club, but that’s what you did. I suppose subliminally that you’ve watched Are You Being Served in your teen years and so that might not be a positive role model, but at least it’s a role model. Yes, it was very particular, I mean it really wasn’t that John Inman was an inaccurate stereotype, but yes, it was a particular way of being…
Q. I think it's interesting you mentioned seeing Are you Being Served as a teenager. Going back to growing up in rural Cheshire to what extent do you think you're aware of LGBTQI class people growing up? [05:51]
SS. Well, there weren’t any. There were lots of gay men when you went cottaging, but we certainly haven't heard of LGBTQI+. When I was about 13, the Sunday Times Magazine used to do a feature at the back called The Day in the Life Of, and it was usually famous people and it was a vehicle for interviewing people, and they’d talk about their day. One Sunday they did The Day in the Life Of ‘a homosexual’. He wasn't in photographs, it was in silhouette and it was a ground-breaking thing, ‘a homosexual’ was giving an interview to the Sunday Times. Somewhere tucked away in that interview he talked about meeting gay men in public toilets. [exclaims] “That’s where you go!”. So, off I trotted to the cottages behind Safeways and began my career as it were, and it was all down to the Sunday Times telling me where it happened. That carried on pretty much for the four years until it was time to come to London.
Q. In addition to Are You Being Served did you see any people that you would interpret as being gay or lesbian on TV growing up? [07:11]
SS. One of the things that I have since discovered is unusual about me is that I never had the coming out experience. I just assumed that everybody was gay and that everybody at school that we all talked about girlfriends and girls because that's what you did. But I was absolutely under the impression that everybody fancied Martin Bestler [07:39] from the football team and it wasn't just me. Really surprisingly late, I must have been, I can't remember exactly, but I must have been 13, 14, maybe even a bit older before it suddenly dawned on me that actually when the other boys talked about girls, they meant it. That became really quite a shock. I was very lucky, I knew I didn't talk about it openly, but it wasn't through a sense of shame. There were things that you just wouldn't talk about. There’s nothing inherently wrong in picking your nose, but you don't pick your nose in front of your parents or your parent’s friends, it was the same with that.
The only time I remember being conscious that some people had a problem with it was when the Jeremy Thorpe trial was on and our great aunt Catherine had come to stay. She was a lady with very firm views on every topic under the sun. I can't remember exactly what she said, but when the gay elements of that trial came out, I remember hearing her and her views led me to believe it would not be a good idea for me to discuss my sexuality with my great aunt Catherine. I didn't learn secrecy but I learned discretion. That seemed to be fine, it worked. It meant that I left home sooner than most people do, as I say 17 was young. But it really wasn't running away. I didn't pack a bag in the middle of the night and go, it was done properly. It was as much to do with hating school as it was to do with anything else.
Q. What did you particularly hate about school?
SS. I went to a very traditional old-fashioned grammar school. They still had and they still do have grammar schools in Cheshire. The form of teaching didn't work for me. I was not picking up stuff, I was always behind, that's mostly because I'm idle. But they didn't find a way to engage me really, and at the end of the lower sixth, my headmaster’s comment at the bottom said ‘he is wasting his own time as well as ours’, which was a perfectly accurate assessment. I spoke to my parents and said I didn't want to go back. They agreed provided that I got a job that had prospects, it was to begin a career. If I got the job that they agreed to. In those days it was banking or retail, if you didn't have A levels. [inaudible] major mistakes in life, I decided to opt out of banking, decided that wouldn’t be fun. Just wrote to everybody and Harrods were the one that replied. I have since discovered that there was a huge gay subculture at school.
I suspect some of the relationships between the masters and the boys were not entirely healthy. I don't think they were abusive in one sense, we're talking about sixth form we're not talking about 11-year olds, but there was certainly, I've discovered since particularly around the amateur dramatic society and all the rest of it. Clearly the gay pupils were getting together and finding each other, but because I had been identified as slightly effeminate and was called gay, I was not going to be allowed into that circle because it was secret. But you knew it was there. But because of the cottaging thing I was meeting people anyway, so I was meeting people, so I didn't need that at school.
Q. Did you have much contact with your parents when you were in London?
SS. Oh, yes, yes. It certainly wasn't a separation, and I remember speaking a lot on the phone. Harrods did a router where you worked Monday to Friday one week, and Tuesday to Saturday the next, so every other weekend was three days. It was expected and I didn't mind, it was expected that I would go home for the long weekends. Yeah, I maintained that relationship.
Q. You ended up age about 19 you went to Notting Hill and had the flat share?
SS. Yeah.
Q. Was there any particular reason you were around the Notting Hill area? [13:23]
SS. I can't remember where I saw the advert, I think it must have been, goodness knows what it would have been Gay News or Vulkan Magazine or something, one of those magazines I’ve seen the small ad. Or it might have been the Gay Switchboard -- Gay Switchboard had a very good accommodation service, it might have been that, I can't remember. Two much older guys, well, they seem to me to be ancient so probably 30. They took me under their wing, they were really nice and supportive and encouraging. I must have been in tough old world I thought, I was terribly pretty thought I knew everything.
Q. You’ve been in East London and you gone over to West London. [14:20]
SS. Yeah.
Q. Like, did you feel much of a difference between the areas?
SS. Not really because I was working during the week and on those three-day weekends I was going back to Cheshire, so I wasn’t really exploring. I wouldn’t really have been aware of the neighbourhood. I remember the Hayfield pub in Stepney, so I explored that a bit. But I didn't feel that I was rooted in the community there.
Q. You mentioned these two old gentleman who took you under their wing. In general, did you find the gay or wider like gay, lesbian community quite excepting and welcoming?
SS. Yeah, I was very pretty. I was very fond of sex, I was white I was middle-class, the list of people who are going to have a problem with that was very short. I learned flirtation like water off a duck’s back, it came to me very easily. Yeah, I never experienced the sort of isolation that some people did.
Q. Based on what you say, you kind of imply maybe some other people wouldn't receive such a welcome?
SS. Yeah, I've read misery memoirs. I know people who've had an unhappy childhood. I've spoken to friends and other people particularly, although we were in Cheshire, it was quite affluent, it was middle-class. I've spoken to people who've come from other backgrounds and they’ve clearly had a different experience to mine. English middle-class people are very good at not seeing what they don’t want to see, they’ve got it down to a fine art [16:42].
Q. You mentioned the scene a little bit, but was there any particular places you liked to go on a night out?
SS. Absolutely, there was -- yeah, Bang night club on Tottenham Court Road. It was what GAY was before, Jeremy Joseph got hold of it. Bang on a Thursday night and a Saturday night, Heaven on a Friday night. The Champion in Notting Hill. I'm very fond of saying and I don't know whether it's true, but there was a time where I'd been to every gay venue. You knew where all the gay venues where, and you'd been to them because there were 10 maybe. New ones opened and you'd go to them. it was a big thing. When Bolts in Harringay opened, a new big glamorous club you knew that, and you went. I remember moving on now, starting to be conscious that there were gay pubs that I haven't been to. That was a strange experience.
Q. Were there just too many? [18:18]
SS. Yeah, it's just too many. Yeah, yeah. But certainly, yeah, I’d go to Bang on a Thursday night, pick somebody up go home with them. Then I’d have to get up and get back home and get changed and go to work the next morning. I remember somebody caught me once doing that, coming into the hostel, and I made up some excuse ‘oh I left my wallet’ and I've clearly not already left, dressed to get my wallet. Yeah, it was a good time.
Q. That's the hostel in Docklands?
SS. Yes, well, in Stepney.
Q. Stepney.
SS. Yeah.
Q. Was it hard bringing people back?
SS. Yes, I didn’t do that, it was a shared room, I didn’t, yeah.
Q. Were there any places like as far East as like Hackney and Stock Newington, Shoreditch?
SS. Yes, of course there was Benjy’s at Mile End where I danced with my head between Diana Dors’s tits and I'm not making that up. Benjy's was on the corner of Mile End. I don't know if it's still there, so if you think that where Mile End tube station is, the big crossroads, it's on the corner opposite the park. And for many years it was owned by, I think it might have even been the Krays, but it was owned by that lot, certainly Ronnie Knight had some involvement. They had a gay club which was gay on Sunday, because they wanted somewhere where their women folk could go where they wouldn't get hassled and which was how Barbara Windsor would be there. Then one-night Diana Dors was there, and I did dance with her and I did put my head between her tits (and very high tits they were too I can tell you!) That was great, that was Sunday night, Benjy’s at Sunday night. You can date it quite accurately because we would drink vodka and Russchian. Russchian was this ghastly mix so that Schweppes brought out to drink with vodka, so vile it wasn’t on the market for very long, so we can date when we were and go back to Schweppes ask them when they were selling it. That was the night I met Gary Redding [20:54].
I was there drinking vodka and Russchian and then a boy of such extraordinary beauty walked in, walked past. One of the ones you think, well, just really nice to have a look at, but don't even think about going there. So off I went. Then about 15 minutes later, very tall, very camp, Eddie he was called, and he came up and I thought hmmm, here we go, what does he want. He said, “excuse me, my friend fancies you, will you buy him a drink?” “Which is your friend”, and he pointed to this beautiful creature. That relationship lasted the best part of a year, I went home with him that evening to his house in Canning Town. Gary earned his living by running up curtains for people and doing Boy George impressions in working men's clubs. He lived with his mom and his dad and his grandma.
In the morning I was woken to his grandmother shouting up the stairs, bear in mind, I would be 19 and Gary was a bit younger than me, say 17, 18. I was woken by his grandma the shouting up the stairs, “Gow, Gow, is it one cup of tea or two?” [laughs] Yeah, and Gary was my boyfriend for the whole year, I think. Yes, that was Benjy’s and in the back of Benjy’s was The Backstreet which was the leather club. It was a decade or more before I ever went in there, it was known it was there, but that was for the grownups. We didn't do that, we were too busy dancing to The Weather Girls or that kind of thing.
Q. Was there a lot of like straight and gay mixing at clubs?
SS. Not really, a lot of young gay men would bring their straight female friends for support, so there would be some of that. But you certainly didn't get the hen night feature that you do now, and certainly you wouldn't get straight men coming. There would be a companionship, the sort of the stereotypical straight girls having their gay best friend thing, so some of that would go on. Lots of giggling and talking about people, and I got the talent together and know all that, so that would go on. But certainly no visible gay women, I mean that didn't happen or it certainly weren't visible to me, but then I might not have been looking properly.
Q. They were offered different venues?[24:20]
SS. Yes, I imagine so. Lesbians were not a feature of our lives at all really.
Q. Why were places like Benjy's and other clubs so important?
SS. It got you sex, but it also, it’s easy to interpret after the fact, but what I was doing was forming my identity and forming my networks and forming my community and being a part of something and being validated and having my experience and my sense of personality and sense of self validated. This was pre-HIV, so I got the last two years before the epidemic.
Q. Are you happy to talk a little bit about the impact? [25:40]
SS. Yeah, I’ve always been religious and sung in the choir and I was very comfortable with that. Had no issue at all with going to church in the morning on a Sunday and going to Benjy’s in the evening, there was no contradiction in that for me at all. I ended up feeling I wanted to be ordained and that facilitated going back to Cheshire to finish A levels, that I failed to do earlier. I went through that process and ended up not being ordained, but I did join a religious order became a Franciscan Novice for a bit and that was 1982. I left London in 1981 and so I was safely tucked away up in Cheshire doing my A levels and then joined the Franciscans and didn't come out till 1984. Who knows, it's pointless speculating, but in every likelihood would be that had I continued the life I was leading in London in 1981 through to 1984, a lot of the people who were living that life with me became infected.
So when I came out of the Franciscans in 1984 and came back to London, it was well underway, it was happening. The condom message was unavoidable, it was established and we understood the roots of infection and we understood the need for safe sex. It didn't take long, I came back to London, I ran away with the bursar from the monastery -- no this is much later, it’s much later.
Q. Don’t worry too much about going in chronological order.
SS. Then I got involved in the early responses. I worked for Cara and The Lighthouse [The London Lighthouse] so it wasn't that those very early years because, stuff like The Lighthouse was already underway and the Mildmay and those places. It was an extraordinary time really. Again, you live through moments and eras and events like that and it's very easy to talk about them in retrospect, and we put our own understanding now onto what we were doing then. We did do great stuff. The response of the community was extraordinary, but it didn't feel extraordinary at the time, it was just if your friends are dying, you do stuff. If you feel that governmental response and health service response and society's response was unjust then you fought it, so that happened, outrage was born. Here we come to The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and a neat little segue there. Because the sisters really were founded here as a response to HIV, one of the Sisters from San Francisco had come over and met people here and talked about the work they were doing and what they were doing, so it began over here.
I think I am correct in saying that the Sisters were the first people to produce a safer sex leaflet in the UK, certainly we were giving out condoms before it became fashionable. But certainly, yeah, Sisters were giving out condoms and a safer sex message because we'd been in touch with people from San Francisco and New York who were that little bit ahead of us and had had the experience. We didn't exactly mirror their response because there are cultural differences, but yeah huge, huge, completely altered the course of my life that I ended up working for various organisations doing consultancy work. Then set up a house in Bethnal Green for people living with the virus and lived there for a bit. That all lasted until I got entirely burnt out, knackered, so yeah quite a long time. [31:24]
Q. Now we talked before about the Sisters and you know that I know a little bit about them. But are you happy to sort of describe a bit about the work of the sisters and how you went about things?
SS. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are an international order of gay, male nuns who were founded in San Francisco in 1970 something, check date. The quote was that the original Sister- I can't remember it exactly, it's probably worth looking up -he was clearly under the influence of something or other and said to two of his friends what I really want to do is go down the high street with a gun and shoot everybody. So they dressed up walking down the high street dressed as nuns, shooting everybody. I mean they didn’t shoot anybody, and it wasn't real guns. They dressed up as nuns and it was a very effective form of protest because it was eye catching, it challenged every sense of what was right and proper, gay men with beards in those habits.
I think 1979 is correct, because again they had started just before, so they were in place when the epidemic first hit, and we’re very well placed to respond to it because they were rooted in that community. We started it here, doing safe sex awareness stuff and also we would conduct weddings. We would do wedding services for people, this was long before gay marriage was even a twinkle in anybody's eye. We provided a partly just entertainment factor, but also people recognised that we were doing stuff and we got under the skin, particularly of the church. They didn't like us when we protested outside Westminster Cathedral. Some people thought we were frivolous.
Peter Tatchell denies vehemently that he ever thought we were frivolous, but he did. The Sisters were not welcome at Outrage demonstrations because we were far too silly. But it was effective, and it also provided a really strong network, my best friend now is the person who brought me 30 years later, I mean people formed friendships for life. I also had some fantastically vicious petty rants. Schisms would always occur two weeks before Pride, you'd always get three different lots of Sisters on the Pride march who weren’t talking to each other. I mean it really is The People’s Front of Judea, I mean we were living that stuff. All kinds of rivalries and jealousies and insecurities would come to the fore and manifest themselves in letters to The Pink Paper.
The Sisters are, I mean there is still - there is a house up in Dunedin there are I think there is a kernel of a house still going in Manchester. I tried when I was in Brighton, but it didn't work, I don’t think Brighton needs the Sisters really, I think it's sort of quite sorted. I still put my habit on and manifest occasionally. About 18 months ago, Michael Mason the former Editor of Capital Gay died and had the forethought many years ago to buy plot in Highgate Cemetery. I put on my habit for that and went along to that funeral and totted up to Highgate Cemetery in four inch heels, such is my devotion to Michael. In theory, we are all still Sisters and in theory I put my habit on for Michael, but we’re not that close-knit group that we were. But we're all friends on Facebook, so yeah.
Q. Do mind me asking you how you got involved personally? [36:34]
SS. I thought you might ask, and I've been trying to remember. I met Allister who was Sister Bridget Over Troubled Waters. He introduced me to Alan Beck, he was teaching radio drama at Canterbury, and I can't remember how we met. I know I put my habit on for the first time in the Champion Pub in Notting Hill, but I honestly can't remember how we first met.
Q. You mentioned you protested outside Westminster Cathedral, what sort of things do you particularly remember that you think was so effective?
SS. Certainly the response to HIV and certainly the response to homophobic institutions and organisations of which the church is clearly the obvious one. The visibility, I think it would exist now, but not in the same way. We were more shocking. A surprising number, and not the obvious people, would take offense at it. There were certainly a feminist response that was not entirely supportive of a bunch of gay men dressing up as women. But we were very clear we were not dressing up as nuns, we were nuns, we were an order of nuns we weren't pretending to be something else. But yes, some of our sisterly comrades in the struggle we're not at all comfortable with us, C’est la vie.
Q. I'm just interested that you grew up with the church as part of your life, as you mentioned, and want to be ordained. Do you think that had any relationship with your attraction to the Sisters?
SS. Given that about 70% of the Sisters has had some sort of involvement with the church. It was not surprising that the need for liturgy, that need for community, that need for iconography, all the needs that the church were meeting, they don't go away because in turns out the churches were a bunch of homophobic hypocrites. Those needs are still there, and so yes, the sisters were meeting some of those needs for people and very effectively in some cases.
Q. Do you mind me asking whether you feel like your religious background or identity was a conflict?
SS. I had imagined from quite an early age that I would be ordained. In the sense that anybody has a vocation and my vocation was to be ordained. But I didn't need to go very far down the road before I realised the extent of the hypocrisy and double standard and bare face lying that gay men in the church were required to do, and we're quite happy to do. That was not for me. I found the levels of hypocrisy just staggering. The double standards just enormously damaging. One summer I was on holiday in Ibiza and I read Michelangelo Signorile’s book, I think it was called Outing about the politics of outing people, and I thought right, yes, good plan.
I came back and in a debate at Durham University outed three Church of England bishops which caused something of a stir, yes. That fairly pulled the rug under any potential relationship I might have with the church going on. But people found that very difficult and the reporting of it, rather than the actual..., alienated a good number of my friends who thought I might do it to them and were frightened. The three bishops I’d named were all people I'd known personally, they were all gay men and they have all been people who have used their position as bishops in inappropriate ways around sexuality.
Q. As they introduced homophobic policy in the church?
SS. Homophobic policies and also use their position in order to gain sexual advantage with younger men. That level of hypocrisy, that determination to defend the closet. I remember 30 years ago thinking if every gay priest in the Church of England got up on the same Sunday and said I am gay, the issue would last a week and it would go away. But here we are, they’re still -- there’s another report just come out. They're still talking about it, they are deranged. It is extraordinary the way it has so dominated the businesses of the church really and leads to abuse scandals and all the rest of it. That's the consequence of it, I mean, these things last decades. Only last month former Archbishop George Carey was finally relieved of any official posts for his parts in covering up abuse and in the speech I made in Durham. I referred to the scandal of George Carey asking people to pray for the victims. Asking to people -- he didn’t ask people to pray for the victims, he asked people to pray for the bishop in these troubling times for him. Just extraordinary, it was extraordinary then and just the response and the determination to protect the closet and to protect the institution over and above the victims of abuse.
Q. In addition to The Sisters are there any other ways you feel like you're involved with activism?
SS. Yes. The Sisters were one part of my response during the HIV crisis epidemic. But then as time went on, we had Section 28, we had the age of consent. It felt like that whole period was one long protest march really a bit. “What is this week?” It’s HIV, oh now it’s Trident. It's cruise missiles. Because that was the other thing, I was very involved with CND and the anti-nuclear movement, so that was a big part of my life as well. Then when Section 28 came in, I think that we suddenly discovered that the rights and the freedoms that we've been slowly gaining, they can be undone, and they still can. I keep telling people they're not written in stone and they can be taken away at any time. We need to be constantly vigilant and challenge what seem to be minor infringements of, I don't even want to call them freedoms. The discriminating legislation has been removed.
There is now in the United Kingdom, no legislation that discriminates on the grounds of sexuality, but it could be put back tomorrow. If we look at what's happening with PrEP now, I saw something just this week about customs in Ireland seizing PrEP, and I can't remember the quote, but one customs officers said it encourages poor behaviour, and that's still happening. It's still costing people's lives. People's lives still being ruined by other people’s fear of what it is that we are, and envy, because homophobia is rooted in envy, because we are more fabulous than everybody else and we do have nicer lives and I can see why people get upset.
Q. Are you happy just to sort of say in your own words, the significance of PrEP and what it has meant for people that won't know the term?
SS. PrEP is a small dose of an antiretroviral drug, which is used to treat people with HIV and taken in small doses it is demonstrably effective in preventing infection. At one level, you would think it is inconceivable that its distribution would not be - we have a drug that prevents HIV transmission, but it's not being licensed. Why is it not being licensed? Well, if you want to know, you only need to go back to the 1960s and read the arguments against the pill and why we mustn't have the pill because that would just encourage all of these women to have sex. The same arguments are now being trotted out now against PrEP and there dressed up as costs, there dressed up as effectiveness, but it's just plain old fashioned, straightforward homophobia. They don't like us fucking each other and that's what it is.
Psychologically the importance of it just cannot be overstated, particularly for gay men of my age who, as I said earlier, I had two years of an active sex life before safer sex came in. I don't know whether it was better or worse to have never known the other stuff and then to be constrained. I don't know who dreamt up the term ‘safe sex’ it’s dreadful, especially sex it’s not supposed to be safe, it’s meant to be risky that's the point. But for people who are a little bit younger than me, have never known sex without fear, without stigma, without discrimination that comes with HIV. I was diagnosed with HIV much, much later, but I had my first condomless sex with somebody on PrEP last year and it was the most liberating, wonderful experience. For the first time in 30 years the decisions about what we did, who was going to do what, what we were going to do was completely unrelated to either of our HIV status. It doesn't sound much when you speak it, but when that happened it was extraordinary. And it is that the fear of that power and that force is being released that's the root of it is all about, oh, back to us being fabulous again.
Q. You are.
SS. Yeah, indeed we are.
Q. So in your mind is PrEP quite a big milestone?[51:20]
SS. Well it’s the biggest thing since Section 28. It's the biggest attack on gay men and our freedom since Section 28 without a doubt. It is rooted in fear, misunderstanding and that right, discrimination and revenge. It’s part of the whole Brexit, Trump that we have won the culture wars and the right are fighting back and they're fighting back very effectively, and they are eroding our freedoms, they are eroding our identities, and that's not happening by accident [52:03].
Q. We are going to make things positive again for a minute. So what are the main positive changes? You said they're at risk, but I bet you have seen them come in, for example, the removal of Section 28.
SS. Section 28 was totemic. Really there's a wonderful photograph of me and the Tower Hamlets’ lesbian and gay campaign group presenting gay novels to the Librarian at Bancroft Road in Tower Hamlets because she was determined to be the first librarian prosecuted. That was how we went in, gave her six gay novels to put on her shelf and got it in the paper and stood there. So I had to write to the East London Advertiser, and I wrote as Edna B Welthorpe, Mrs, which was the name that Joe Orton used to write to the Radio Times complaining about displays. So, I wrote as Edna B Welthorpe, complaining about these shocking books and they published my letter. So then Sebastian wrote the following week, and then I wrote back, and this went on for about six weeks until I got rumbled by the editor and he wasn't amused at all. But what Section 28 did was create a climate of fear, these are the tools of oppression, they create a climate of fear, and nobody was ever prosecuted under Section 28, but it just created a space in which sensible discussions in school should not be had [53:39].
The age of consent. The big task, there were two wings to the task, there’s the legislative change, which you must do, you must get right, and you must review and repeal discriminatory laws and there must be equality before the law, but that's just the first stage. And we got there, and I was working for Stonewall all through part of that process. And I remember when we got to the point that there was no discriminatory legislation on the statute, but that's the bedrock on which you then build societal change. I used to have a second-hand book shop on Roman Road and I was sitting there one afternoon, and I saw two guys walking back from college, 16, 17, and they were walking on Roman Road holding hands. They were clearly a couple. I didn't rush out and say “we fought the revolution for you”. I mean sometimes I look at some things and I think we fought the revolution for that. Some manifestations of our culture are not as desirable as others, but then there has been a sea change.
Off course there is still a homophobic bullying. There's still discrimination, but there is a difference now that if you are 15, 16, now, you won't have to look us hard and you won't have to search us hard for positive role models. Even if you are in your immediate family situation or in your immediate school situation, things are difficult. It's easier to imagine how it can be different now because the positive is out there, and yes, we all have our own situations that we need to resolve and get right. But it would be quite difficult if you were 15 now to believe that you were the only gay person in the world. You'd have to work quite hard on convincing yourself that now, and that's a good thing.
Q. Do you think that the 15-year olds or the 20-year olds, do you think they're aware of the struggle, the revolution as you put it? [57:07]
SS. I hope not.
Q. Really?
SS. We’re never good at acknowledging the people on whose shoulders we stand. The Gay Liberation Movement has never properly paid its debt to the Women's Movement, the Trans Movement has never properly paid its debt to the Gay Liberation. We don't do it, we just have to bite our tongue and it's nice occasionally to have it acknowledged and to have it recognised, but I want people to live their lives now. I don't want everybody constantly looking over the shoulder.
I do get cross particularly around the HIV stuff. I've been in meetings where I've been told to shut up about what it was like back in the day, and yeah, people don’t get away with that. But no, I mean we need people to understand the history, we need people to read it, we need people to know that it happened. And it's not about age actually, in terms of coming out, it doesn't matter whether you come out whether you're 15 or you're 50. Your journey begins at that point and it's nothing to do with how old you are. But yeah, I want people to create their own lives and there will always be new battles to be fought. We don't need to be constantly looking back at the old ones.
Q. Going back very early on when we were chatting, you kind of said that you didn't really feel like you came out, is that a fair sort of statement?
SS. Yeah. So Tom Robinson who recorded Glad To Be Gay, which was a notable popular music song of its time. He famously said if you want to come out to people, all you have to do is stop telling lies. You don't need to need to skip down to breakfast one morning and shout, “I’m gay” and the top of your voice. You just have to stop lying, particularly in relation to your family. That mothers do not ask questions that they don't already know the answer too, or that they're ready to hear. So if your mum wants to know where you were last night and she's had an idea, if she thinks you were out with some gay couple, or your boyfriend, she will not ask you where you were, even at some conscious level. So if she asks you, don't lie, and I think my perception is that he's correct. The people who are close to us will only ask questions if they're ready to hear the answer.
I did formally come out to my parents when I ran away from the monastery as it needed some sorts of explanation, and I told my sister years before. So I talked about going home for the weekends when I was 17 working in Harrods and I came back one weekend, I'd been there about six months, and I saw my grandmother who lived nearby, who I was very close to, and she'd asked me if I’d got girlfriend in London. I said no. She just said, “well, have you got a boyfriend then?” Because the only explanation to her, of why her gorgeous 17-year-old grandson hadn't got a girlfriend was because he had a boyfriend. My grandmother's generation, it was only that my parents' generation, the 1950s lot, they were the ones that had the problem with it.
Yeah, so I can't remember a situation where I have ever pretended not to be gay. I've frequently been in situations where that's not the issue, and that's what I strive for. I very rarely these days would describe myself as gay, and if we get on to the question of the abject failure of identity politics, we'll be here all day. But it's not that I don’t want today’s 15, 16- and 17-year olds to be calling themselves gay. I just want them to be who they are, but those forms of political identity are important when we are being oppressed, they are the product of oppression. I would much rather we didn't find ourselves constrained by kind of identities and labels. All these poor gay men that have never been able to sleep with a woman because of the stigma and shame that it would bring them, and we need to address that.
Q. What do you think you would like to see change in the future or in society?
SS. I'd like to see the overthrow of global capitalism. I'd like to see a return to an agrarian economy. I’d like to see the state seize all personal wealth and assets from everybody and we all pay everything in common and hoping to achieve that by next summer. We talked about PrEP that's an obvious one. That globally, there are still seven countries where the death penalty exists, there's still 95 countries where it's illegal, and I would like to see much more awareness within our affluent western communities about the situation in other communities and that was the thing that the Women's Movement got. Strange enough, the left movement, the workers trade union movement got internationalism, and we just never really have, and we do not know enough, we do not seek out enough information. We do not express solidarity enough with what's been happening to gay men in Chechnya, this year, it's happening now. It's not something that's in the past or – Chechnya is not far away.
You can be there in the time it takes you to get to Inverness and this is happening. I've been spending time in Turkey. Where interestingly, Turkey is one of the few members states in the United Nations where homosexuality has never been illegal, but just because it's not illegal does not mean people are not being persecuted. There is still a sense that being gay is different, that being gay is other, that being gay is somehow a thing, and I would like it just, it not to be a thing. Not there yet.
Q. I guess us interviewing you.
SS. No, no, no, that's fine, that's fine.
Q. Yeah.
SS. But yeah, I’ve used the G word more today than probably have in the last 10 years
Q. Yeah.
SS. Right.
Q. Finally, is there anything you'd like to add? It's your interview.
SS. One of the things that I’ve always found supportive and interesting and just personally helpful is - I can't remember what we used to call it intersectionality, but I think that's gone quite out of fashion we call it something else now I don't remember - I was very lucky, at a quite early age, in my early 20s I became friends with women from the 1970s, Women's Movement, significant figures in that movement. And I cut my political teeth listening to them and their stories. I mean [inaudible], but it's the human condition. This is where my politics now comes into it. We don't recognise the factors in common that different forms of discrimination and oppression and mistreatment have and now I’m being an old hippy-dippy and global. It's sharing that common human experience and it's recognising oppression and the abuse of wealth and power and how that happens. It happens to all manner of people. And we need to call it out for what it is. And if that means we have to riot and burn down Bond Street, so be it.
Q. All right. Thank you very much.
Q. My name's Rebecca Odell I am interviewing Sebastian for Hackney Museum. The date is the 2nd of August 2017. Can you start by telling me your full name, where you were born and when you were born?
SS. My full name is Sebastian Sandys and I was born on the 31st of May 1962 in Dulwich Hospital [00:23].
Q. Can you tell me a little bit about your childhood?
SS. Yes, I was conceived in Ireland. My mother was a young Protestant woman who had left Ireland to come to London to nurse and had gone back to Ireland to nurse her mother, I think during illness. She renewed her friendship with somebody called Thomas O'Malley who was a local Catholic farmhand and in documentation they went about together for the summer. She returned to London not knowing that she was pregnant, and I appeared, and the circumstance is such that she was Protestant and he was Catholic. I was put up for adoption through the [Thomas] Coram Foundation in London. I was adopted by my parents when I was six months old and went to live in Norfolk.
My father worked for Kellogg’s and was transferred from Cheshire to Old Trafford, Manchester. I was maybe seven or eight by the time we got to Cheshire and had an idyllic middle-class affluent childhood, sang in the church choir and the church youth group, was a sixer in the cubs and a pillar of respectful church life. Rose to the dizzy heights of head chorister and managed to keep that up until I was all of 17 when I discovered that perhaps young gay and 17, affluent South Cheshire was not the place to be and I ran away to London. I didn’t run away, I came to London to work at Harrods where things were somewhat different.
Q. You moved to London when you were 17. Whereabouts did you end up in London?
SS. I lived in a Seamen’s Hostel in Aldgate in Dock Street which was pretty grim. I don't think my parents would not have consented had it not been for the redoubtable Miss English who ran the place with a rod of iron. My mother was much reassured that no harm would come to me as long as Miss English was in charge. I lived there to begin with and then I moved to a hostel at Stepney that was managed by The Scout Association and again that was fine. Got my first gay flat share about two years in I suppose, 18 months, something like that, over in Notting Hill.
Q. Moving from rural Cheshire to London what was your kind of first impressions of living in London? [03:23]
SS. Just fantastic really. It took me three months, maybe four months to actually find a gay club or a gay pub. I knew they existed, but I had absolutely no idea. Sort of wandered around streets and then I ended up sharing a room in The Scout Association place with another gay man who had been here a bit longer than me and he knew where the clubs were. I was off, that was it and had a fantastic time.
Q. In your opinion, was that how the social scene worked - you needed somebody who knew where they were?
SS. Yes, well, 17 is very young to be exploring that. There was a clearly openly gay element to Harrods, but I wasn’t confident enough to sort of get involved with that, but yeah. I'm fairly extrovert on some levels and so once you make that one contact that makes up.
Q. You mentioned this sort of scene at Harrods was that coincidence you ended up there, was that part of the reason you found yourself working there? [04:53]
SS. No, it was coincidence, well, if you believe in coincidence. I went to work at Harrods not Chelsea Football Club, but that’s what you did. I suppose subliminally that you’ve watched Are You Being Served in your teen years and so that might not be a positive role model, but at least it’s a role model. Yes, it was very particular, I mean it really wasn’t that John Inman was an inaccurate stereotype, but yes, it was a particular way of being…
Q. I think it's interesting you mentioned seeing Are you Being Served as a teenager. Going back to growing up in rural Cheshire to what extent do you think you're aware of LGBTQI class people growing up? [05:51]
SS. Well, there weren’t any. There were lots of gay men when you went cottaging, but we certainly haven't heard of LGBTQI+. When I was about 13, the Sunday Times Magazine used to do a feature at the back called The Day in the Life Of, and it was usually famous people and it was a vehicle for interviewing people, and they’d talk about their day. One Sunday they did The Day in the Life Of ‘a homosexual’. He wasn't in photographs, it was in silhouette and it was a ground-breaking thing, ‘a homosexual’ was giving an interview to the Sunday Times. Somewhere tucked away in that interview he talked about meeting gay men in public toilets. [exclaims] “That’s where you go!”. So, off I trotted to the cottages behind Safeways and began my career as it were, and it was all down to the Sunday Times telling me where it happened. That carried on pretty much for the four years until it was time to come to London.
Q. In addition to Are You Being Served did you see any people that you would interpret as being gay or lesbian on TV growing up? [07:11]
SS. One of the things that I have since discovered is unusual about me is that I never had the coming out experience. I just assumed that everybody was gay and that everybody at school that we all talked about girlfriends and girls because that's what you did. But I was absolutely under the impression that everybody fancied Martin Bestler [07:39] from the football team and it wasn't just me. Really surprisingly late, I must have been, I can't remember exactly, but I must have been 13, 14, maybe even a bit older before it suddenly dawned on me that actually when the other boys talked about girls, they meant it. That became really quite a shock. I was very lucky, I knew I didn't talk about it openly, but it wasn't through a sense of shame. There were things that you just wouldn't talk about. There’s nothing inherently wrong in picking your nose, but you don't pick your nose in front of your parents or your parent’s friends, it was the same with that.
The only time I remember being conscious that some people had a problem with it was when the Jeremy Thorpe trial was on and our great aunt Catherine had come to stay. She was a lady with very firm views on every topic under the sun. I can't remember exactly what she said, but when the gay elements of that trial came out, I remember hearing her and her views led me to believe it would not be a good idea for me to discuss my sexuality with my great aunt Catherine. I didn't learn secrecy but I learned discretion. That seemed to be fine, it worked. It meant that I left home sooner than most people do, as I say 17 was young. But it really wasn't running away. I didn't pack a bag in the middle of the night and go, it was done properly. It was as much to do with hating school as it was to do with anything else.
Q. What did you particularly hate about school?
SS. I went to a very traditional old-fashioned grammar school. They still had and they still do have grammar schools in Cheshire. The form of teaching didn't work for me. I was not picking up stuff, I was always behind, that's mostly because I'm idle. But they didn't find a way to engage me really, and at the end of the lower sixth, my headmaster’s comment at the bottom said ‘he is wasting his own time as well as ours’, which was a perfectly accurate assessment. I spoke to my parents and said I didn't want to go back. They agreed provided that I got a job that had prospects, it was to begin a career. If I got the job that they agreed to. In those days it was banking or retail, if you didn't have A levels. [inaudible] major mistakes in life, I decided to opt out of banking, decided that wouldn’t be fun. Just wrote to everybody and Harrods were the one that replied. I have since discovered that there was a huge gay subculture at school.
I suspect some of the relationships between the masters and the boys were not entirely healthy. I don't think they were abusive in one sense, we're talking about sixth form we're not talking about 11-year olds, but there was certainly, I've discovered since particularly around the amateur dramatic society and all the rest of it. Clearly the gay pupils were getting together and finding each other, but because I had been identified as slightly effeminate and was called gay, I was not going to be allowed into that circle because it was secret. But you knew it was there. But because of the cottaging thing I was meeting people anyway, so I was meeting people, so I didn't need that at school.
Q. Did you have much contact with your parents when you were in London?
SS. Oh, yes, yes. It certainly wasn't a separation, and I remember speaking a lot on the phone. Harrods did a router where you worked Monday to Friday one week, and Tuesday to Saturday the next, so every other weekend was three days. It was expected and I didn't mind, it was expected that I would go home for the long weekends. Yeah, I maintained that relationship.
Q. You ended up age about 19 you went to Notting Hill and had the flat share?
SS. Yeah.
Q. Was there any particular reason you were around the Notting Hill area? [13:23]
SS. I can't remember where I saw the advert, I think it must have been, goodness knows what it would have been Gay News or Vulkan Magazine or something, one of those magazines I’ve seen the small ad. Or it might have been the Gay Switchboard -- Gay Switchboard had a very good accommodation service, it might have been that, I can't remember. Two much older guys, well, they seem to me to be ancient so probably 30. They took me under their wing, they were really nice and supportive and encouraging. I must have been in tough old world I thought, I was terribly pretty thought I knew everything.
Q. You’ve been in East London and you gone over to West London. [14:20]
SS. Yeah.
Q. Like, did you feel much of a difference between the areas?
SS. Not really because I was working during the week and on those three-day weekends I was going back to Cheshire, so I wasn’t really exploring. I wouldn’t really have been aware of the neighbourhood. I remember the Hayfield pub in Stepney, so I explored that a bit. But I didn't feel that I was rooted in the community there.
Q. You mentioned these two old gentleman who took you under their wing. In general, did you find the gay or wider like gay, lesbian community quite excepting and welcoming?
SS. Yeah, I was very pretty. I was very fond of sex, I was white I was middle-class, the list of people who are going to have a problem with that was very short. I learned flirtation like water off a duck’s back, it came to me very easily. Yeah, I never experienced the sort of isolation that some people did.
Q. Based on what you say, you kind of imply maybe some other people wouldn't receive such a welcome?
SS. Yeah, I've read misery memoirs. I know people who've had an unhappy childhood. I've spoken to friends and other people particularly, although we were in Cheshire, it was quite affluent, it was middle-class. I've spoken to people who've come from other backgrounds and they’ve clearly had a different experience to mine. English middle-class people are very good at not seeing what they don’t want to see, they’ve got it down to a fine art [16:42].
Q. You mentioned the scene a little bit, but was there any particular places you liked to go on a night out?
SS. Absolutely, there was -- yeah, Bang night club on Tottenham Court Road. It was what GAY was before, Jeremy Joseph got hold of it. Bang on a Thursday night and a Saturday night, Heaven on a Friday night. The Champion in Notting Hill. I'm very fond of saying and I don't know whether it's true, but there was a time where I'd been to every gay venue. You knew where all the gay venues where, and you'd been to them because there were 10 maybe. New ones opened and you'd go to them. it was a big thing. When Bolts in Harringay opened, a new big glamorous club you knew that, and you went. I remember moving on now, starting to be conscious that there were gay pubs that I haven't been to. That was a strange experience.
Q. Were there just too many? [18:18]
SS. Yeah, it's just too many. Yeah, yeah. But certainly, yeah, I’d go to Bang on a Thursday night, pick somebody up go home with them. Then I’d have to get up and get back home and get changed and go to work the next morning. I remember somebody caught me once doing that, coming into the hostel, and I made up some excuse ‘oh I left my wallet’ and I've clearly not already left, dressed to get my wallet. Yeah, it was a good time.
Q. That's the hostel in Docklands?
SS. Yes, well, in Stepney.
Q. Stepney.
SS. Yeah.
Q. Was it hard bringing people back?
SS. Yes, I didn’t do that, it was a shared room, I didn’t, yeah.
Q. Were there any places like as far East as like Hackney and Stock Newington, Shoreditch?
SS. Yes, of course there was Benjy’s at Mile End where I danced with my head between Diana Dors’s tits and I'm not making that up. Benjy's was on the corner of Mile End. I don't know if it's still there, so if you think that where Mile End tube station is, the big crossroads, it's on the corner opposite the park. And for many years it was owned by, I think it might have even been the Krays, but it was owned by that lot, certainly Ronnie Knight had some involvement. They had a gay club which was gay on Sunday, because they wanted somewhere where their women folk could go where they wouldn't get hassled and which was how Barbara Windsor would be there. Then one-night Diana Dors was there, and I did dance with her and I did put my head between her tits (and very high tits they were too I can tell you!) That was great, that was Sunday night, Benjy’s at Sunday night. You can date it quite accurately because we would drink vodka and Russchian. Russchian was this ghastly mix so that Schweppes brought out to drink with vodka, so vile it wasn’t on the market for very long, so we can date when we were and go back to Schweppes ask them when they were selling it. That was the night I met Gary Redding [20:54].
I was there drinking vodka and Russchian and then a boy of such extraordinary beauty walked in, walked past. One of the ones you think, well, just really nice to have a look at, but don't even think about going there. So off I went. Then about 15 minutes later, very tall, very camp, Eddie he was called, and he came up and I thought hmmm, here we go, what does he want. He said, “excuse me, my friend fancies you, will you buy him a drink?” “Which is your friend”, and he pointed to this beautiful creature. That relationship lasted the best part of a year, I went home with him that evening to his house in Canning Town. Gary earned his living by running up curtains for people and doing Boy George impressions in working men's clubs. He lived with his mom and his dad and his grandma.
In the morning I was woken to his grandmother shouting up the stairs, bear in mind, I would be 19 and Gary was a bit younger than me, say 17, 18. I was woken by his grandma the shouting up the stairs, “Gow, Gow, is it one cup of tea or two?” [laughs] Yeah, and Gary was my boyfriend for the whole year, I think. Yes, that was Benjy’s and in the back of Benjy’s was The Backstreet which was the leather club. It was a decade or more before I ever went in there, it was known it was there, but that was for the grownups. We didn't do that, we were too busy dancing to The Weather Girls or that kind of thing.
Q. Was there a lot of like straight and gay mixing at clubs?
SS. Not really, a lot of young gay men would bring their straight female friends for support, so there would be some of that. But you certainly didn't get the hen night feature that you do now, and certainly you wouldn't get straight men coming. There would be a companionship, the sort of the stereotypical straight girls having their gay best friend thing, so some of that would go on. Lots of giggling and talking about people, and I got the talent together and know all that, so that would go on. But certainly no visible gay women, I mean that didn't happen or it certainly weren't visible to me, but then I might not have been looking properly.
Q. They were offered different venues?[24:20]
SS. Yes, I imagine so. Lesbians were not a feature of our lives at all really.
Q. Why were places like Benjy's and other clubs so important?
SS. It got you sex, but it also, it’s easy to interpret after the fact, but what I was doing was forming my identity and forming my networks and forming my community and being a part of something and being validated and having my experience and my sense of personality and sense of self validated. This was pre-HIV, so I got the last two years before the epidemic.
Q. Are you happy to talk a little bit about the impact? [25:40]
SS. Yeah, I’ve always been religious and sung in the choir and I was very comfortable with that. Had no issue at all with going to church in the morning on a Sunday and going to Benjy’s in the evening, there was no contradiction in that for me at all. I ended up feeling I wanted to be ordained and that facilitated going back to Cheshire to finish A levels, that I failed to do earlier. I went through that process and ended up not being ordained, but I did join a religious order became a Franciscan Novice for a bit and that was 1982. I left London in 1981 and so I was safely tucked away up in Cheshire doing my A levels and then joined the Franciscans and didn't come out till 1984. Who knows, it's pointless speculating, but in every likelihood would be that had I continued the life I was leading in London in 1981 through to 1984, a lot of the people who were living that life with me became infected.
So when I came out of the Franciscans in 1984 and came back to London, it was well underway, it was happening. The condom message was unavoidable, it was established and we understood the roots of infection and we understood the need for safe sex. It didn't take long, I came back to London, I ran away with the bursar from the monastery -- no this is much later, it’s much later.
Q. Don’t worry too much about going in chronological order.
SS. Then I got involved in the early responses. I worked for Cara and The Lighthouse [The London Lighthouse] so it wasn't that those very early years because, stuff like The Lighthouse was already underway and the Mildmay and those places. It was an extraordinary time really. Again, you live through moments and eras and events like that and it's very easy to talk about them in retrospect, and we put our own understanding now onto what we were doing then. We did do great stuff. The response of the community was extraordinary, but it didn't feel extraordinary at the time, it was just if your friends are dying, you do stuff. If you feel that governmental response and health service response and society's response was unjust then you fought it, so that happened, outrage was born. Here we come to The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and a neat little segue there. Because the sisters really were founded here as a response to HIV, one of the Sisters from San Francisco had come over and met people here and talked about the work they were doing and what they were doing, so it began over here.
I think I am correct in saying that the Sisters were the first people to produce a safer sex leaflet in the UK, certainly we were giving out condoms before it became fashionable. But certainly, yeah, Sisters were giving out condoms and a safer sex message because we'd been in touch with people from San Francisco and New York who were that little bit ahead of us and had had the experience. We didn't exactly mirror their response because there are cultural differences, but yeah huge, huge, completely altered the course of my life that I ended up working for various organisations doing consultancy work. Then set up a house in Bethnal Green for people living with the virus and lived there for a bit. That all lasted until I got entirely burnt out, knackered, so yeah quite a long time. [31:24]
Q. Now we talked before about the Sisters and you know that I know a little bit about them. But are you happy to sort of describe a bit about the work of the sisters and how you went about things?
SS. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are an international order of gay, male nuns who were founded in San Francisco in 1970 something, check date. The quote was that the original Sister- I can't remember it exactly, it's probably worth looking up -he was clearly under the influence of something or other and said to two of his friends what I really want to do is go down the high street with a gun and shoot everybody. So they dressed up walking down the high street dressed as nuns, shooting everybody. I mean they didn’t shoot anybody, and it wasn't real guns. They dressed up as nuns and it was a very effective form of protest because it was eye catching, it challenged every sense of what was right and proper, gay men with beards in those habits.
I think 1979 is correct, because again they had started just before, so they were in place when the epidemic first hit, and we’re very well placed to respond to it because they were rooted in that community. We started it here, doing safe sex awareness stuff and also we would conduct weddings. We would do wedding services for people, this was long before gay marriage was even a twinkle in anybody's eye. We provided a partly just entertainment factor, but also people recognised that we were doing stuff and we got under the skin, particularly of the church. They didn't like us when we protested outside Westminster Cathedral. Some people thought we were frivolous.
Peter Tatchell denies vehemently that he ever thought we were frivolous, but he did. The Sisters were not welcome at Outrage demonstrations because we were far too silly. But it was effective, and it also provided a really strong network, my best friend now is the person who brought me 30 years later, I mean people formed friendships for life. I also had some fantastically vicious petty rants. Schisms would always occur two weeks before Pride, you'd always get three different lots of Sisters on the Pride march who weren’t talking to each other. I mean it really is The People’s Front of Judea, I mean we were living that stuff. All kinds of rivalries and jealousies and insecurities would come to the fore and manifest themselves in letters to The Pink Paper.
The Sisters are, I mean there is still - there is a house up in Dunedin there are I think there is a kernel of a house still going in Manchester. I tried when I was in Brighton, but it didn't work, I don’t think Brighton needs the Sisters really, I think it's sort of quite sorted. I still put my habit on and manifest occasionally. About 18 months ago, Michael Mason the former Editor of Capital Gay died and had the forethought many years ago to buy plot in Highgate Cemetery. I put on my habit for that and went along to that funeral and totted up to Highgate Cemetery in four inch heels, such is my devotion to Michael. In theory, we are all still Sisters and in theory I put my habit on for Michael, but we’re not that close-knit group that we were. But we're all friends on Facebook, so yeah.
Q. Do mind me asking you how you got involved personally? [36:34]
SS. I thought you might ask, and I've been trying to remember. I met Allister who was Sister Bridget Over Troubled Waters. He introduced me to Alan Beck, he was teaching radio drama at Canterbury, and I can't remember how we met. I know I put my habit on for the first time in the Champion Pub in Notting Hill, but I honestly can't remember how we first met.
Q. You mentioned you protested outside Westminster Cathedral, what sort of things do you particularly remember that you think was so effective?
SS. Certainly the response to HIV and certainly the response to homophobic institutions and organisations of which the church is clearly the obvious one. The visibility, I think it would exist now, but not in the same way. We were more shocking. A surprising number, and not the obvious people, would take offense at it. There were certainly a feminist response that was not entirely supportive of a bunch of gay men dressing up as women. But we were very clear we were not dressing up as nuns, we were nuns, we were an order of nuns we weren't pretending to be something else. But yes, some of our sisterly comrades in the struggle we're not at all comfortable with us, C’est la vie.
Q. I'm just interested that you grew up with the church as part of your life, as you mentioned, and want to be ordained. Do you think that had any relationship with your attraction to the Sisters?
SS. Given that about 70% of the Sisters has had some sort of involvement with the church. It was not surprising that the need for liturgy, that need for community, that need for iconography, all the needs that the church were meeting, they don't go away because in turns out the churches were a bunch of homophobic hypocrites. Those needs are still there, and so yes, the sisters were meeting some of those needs for people and very effectively in some cases.
Q. Do you mind me asking whether you feel like your religious background or identity was a conflict?
SS. I had imagined from quite an early age that I would be ordained. In the sense that anybody has a vocation and my vocation was to be ordained. But I didn't need to go very far down the road before I realised the extent of the hypocrisy and double standard and bare face lying that gay men in the church were required to do, and we're quite happy to do. That was not for me. I found the levels of hypocrisy just staggering. The double standards just enormously damaging. One summer I was on holiday in Ibiza and I read Michelangelo Signorile’s book, I think it was called Outing about the politics of outing people, and I thought right, yes, good plan.
I came back and in a debate at Durham University outed three Church of England bishops which caused something of a stir, yes. That fairly pulled the rug under any potential relationship I might have with the church going on. But people found that very difficult and the reporting of it, rather than the actual..., alienated a good number of my friends who thought I might do it to them and were frightened. The three bishops I’d named were all people I'd known personally, they were all gay men and they have all been people who have used their position as bishops in inappropriate ways around sexuality.
Q. As they introduced homophobic policy in the church?
SS. Homophobic policies and also use their position in order to gain sexual advantage with younger men. That level of hypocrisy, that determination to defend the closet. I remember 30 years ago thinking if every gay priest in the Church of England got up on the same Sunday and said I am gay, the issue would last a week and it would go away. But here we are, they’re still -- there’s another report just come out. They're still talking about it, they are deranged. It is extraordinary the way it has so dominated the businesses of the church really and leads to abuse scandals and all the rest of it. That's the consequence of it, I mean, these things last decades. Only last month former Archbishop George Carey was finally relieved of any official posts for his parts in covering up abuse and in the speech I made in Durham. I referred to the scandal of George Carey asking people to pray for the victims. Asking to people -- he didn’t ask people to pray for the victims, he asked people to pray for the bishop in these troubling times for him. Just extraordinary, it was extraordinary then and just the response and the determination to protect the closet and to protect the institution over and above the victims of abuse.
Q. In addition to The Sisters are there any other ways you feel like you're involved with activism?
SS. Yes. The Sisters were one part of my response during the HIV crisis epidemic. But then as time went on, we had Section 28, we had the age of consent. It felt like that whole period was one long protest march really a bit. “What is this week?” It’s HIV, oh now it’s Trident. It's cruise missiles. Because that was the other thing, I was very involved with CND and the anti-nuclear movement, so that was a big part of my life as well. Then when Section 28 came in, I think that we suddenly discovered that the rights and the freedoms that we've been slowly gaining, they can be undone, and they still can. I keep telling people they're not written in stone and they can be taken away at any time. We need to be constantly vigilant and challenge what seem to be minor infringements of, I don't even want to call them freedoms. The discriminating legislation has been removed.
There is now in the United Kingdom, no legislation that discriminates on the grounds of sexuality, but it could be put back tomorrow. If we look at what's happening with PrEP now, I saw something just this week about customs in Ireland seizing PrEP, and I can't remember the quote, but one customs officers said it encourages poor behaviour, and that's still happening. It's still costing people's lives. People's lives still being ruined by other people’s fear of what it is that we are, and envy, because homophobia is rooted in envy, because we are more fabulous than everybody else and we do have nicer lives and I can see why people get upset.
Q. Are you happy just to sort of say in your own words, the significance of PrEP and what it has meant for people that won't know the term?
SS. PrEP is a small dose of an antiretroviral drug, which is used to treat people with HIV and taken in small doses it is demonstrably effective in preventing infection. At one level, you would think it is inconceivable that its distribution would not be - we have a drug that prevents HIV transmission, but it's not being licensed. Why is it not being licensed? Well, if you want to know, you only need to go back to the 1960s and read the arguments against the pill and why we mustn't have the pill because that would just encourage all of these women to have sex. The same arguments are now being trotted out now against PrEP and there dressed up as costs, there dressed up as effectiveness, but it's just plain old fashioned, straightforward homophobia. They don't like us fucking each other and that's what it is.
Psychologically the importance of it just cannot be overstated, particularly for gay men of my age who, as I said earlier, I had two years of an active sex life before safer sex came in. I don't know whether it was better or worse to have never known the other stuff and then to be constrained. I don't know who dreamt up the term ‘safe sex’ it’s dreadful, especially sex it’s not supposed to be safe, it’s meant to be risky that's the point. But for people who are a little bit younger than me, have never known sex without fear, without stigma, without discrimination that comes with HIV. I was diagnosed with HIV much, much later, but I had my first condomless sex with somebody on PrEP last year and it was the most liberating, wonderful experience. For the first time in 30 years the decisions about what we did, who was going to do what, what we were going to do was completely unrelated to either of our HIV status. It doesn't sound much when you speak it, but when that happened it was extraordinary. And it is that the fear of that power and that force is being released that's the root of it is all about, oh, back to us being fabulous again.
Q. You are.
SS. Yeah, indeed we are.
Q. So in your mind is PrEP quite a big milestone?[51:20]
SS. Well it’s the biggest thing since Section 28. It's the biggest attack on gay men and our freedom since Section 28 without a doubt. It is rooted in fear, misunderstanding and that right, discrimination and revenge. It’s part of the whole Brexit, Trump that we have won the culture wars and the right are fighting back and they're fighting back very effectively, and they are eroding our freedoms, they are eroding our identities, and that's not happening by accident [52:03].
Q. We are going to make things positive again for a minute. So what are the main positive changes? You said they're at risk, but I bet you have seen them come in, for example, the removal of Section 28.
SS. Section 28 was totemic. Really there's a wonderful photograph of me and the Tower Hamlets’ lesbian and gay campaign group presenting gay novels to the Librarian at Bancroft Road in Tower Hamlets because she was determined to be the first librarian prosecuted. That was how we went in, gave her six gay novels to put on her shelf and got it in the paper and stood there. So I had to write to the East London Advertiser, and I wrote as Edna B Welthorpe, Mrs, which was the name that Joe Orton used to write to the Radio Times complaining about displays. So, I wrote as Edna B Welthorpe, complaining about these shocking books and they published my letter. So then Sebastian wrote the following week, and then I wrote back, and this went on for about six weeks until I got rumbled by the editor and he wasn't amused at all. But what Section 28 did was create a climate of fear, these are the tools of oppression, they create a climate of fear, and nobody was ever prosecuted under Section 28, but it just created a space in which sensible discussions in school should not be had [53:39].
The age of consent. The big task, there were two wings to the task, there’s the legislative change, which you must do, you must get right, and you must review and repeal discriminatory laws and there must be equality before the law, but that's just the first stage. And we got there, and I was working for Stonewall all through part of that process. And I remember when we got to the point that there was no discriminatory legislation on the statute, but that's the bedrock on which you then build societal change. I used to have a second-hand book shop on Roman Road and I was sitting there one afternoon, and I saw two guys walking back from college, 16, 17, and they were walking on Roman Road holding hands. They were clearly a couple. I didn't rush out and say “we fought the revolution for you”. I mean sometimes I look at some things and I think we fought the revolution for that. Some manifestations of our culture are not as desirable as others, but then there has been a sea change.
Off course there is still a homophobic bullying. There's still discrimination, but there is a difference now that if you are 15, 16, now, you won't have to look us hard and you won't have to search us hard for positive role models. Even if you are in your immediate family situation or in your immediate school situation, things are difficult. It's easier to imagine how it can be different now because the positive is out there, and yes, we all have our own situations that we need to resolve and get right. But it would be quite difficult if you were 15 now to believe that you were the only gay person in the world. You'd have to work quite hard on convincing yourself that now, and that's a good thing.
Q. Do you think that the 15-year olds or the 20-year olds, do you think they're aware of the struggle, the revolution as you put it? [57:07]
SS. I hope not.
Q. Really?
SS. We’re never good at acknowledging the people on whose shoulders we stand. The Gay Liberation Movement has never properly paid its debt to the Women's Movement, the Trans Movement has never properly paid its debt to the Gay Liberation. We don't do it, we just have to bite our tongue and it's nice occasionally to have it acknowledged and to have it recognised, but I want people to live their lives now. I don't want everybody constantly looking over the shoulder.
I do get cross particularly around the HIV stuff. I've been in meetings where I've been told to shut up about what it was like back in the day, and yeah, people don’t get away with that. But no, I mean we need people to understand the history, we need people to read it, we need people to know that it happened. And it's not about age actually, in terms of coming out, it doesn't matter whether you come out whether you're 15 or you're 50. Your journey begins at that point and it's nothing to do with how old you are. But yeah, I want people to create their own lives and there will always be new battles to be fought. We don't need to be constantly looking back at the old ones.
Q. Going back very early on when we were chatting, you kind of said that you didn't really feel like you came out, is that a fair sort of statement?
SS. Yeah. So Tom Robinson who recorded Glad To Be Gay, which was a notable popular music song of its time. He famously said if you want to come out to people, all you have to do is stop telling lies. You don't need to need to skip down to breakfast one morning and shout, “I’m gay” and the top of your voice. You just have to stop lying, particularly in relation to your family. That mothers do not ask questions that they don't already know the answer too, or that they're ready to hear. So if your mum wants to know where you were last night and she's had an idea, if she thinks you were out with some gay couple, or your boyfriend, she will not ask you where you were, even at some conscious level. So if she asks you, don't lie, and I think my perception is that he's correct. The people who are close to us will only ask questions if they're ready to hear the answer.
I did formally come out to my parents when I ran away from the monastery as it needed some sorts of explanation, and I told my sister years before. So I talked about going home for the weekends when I was 17 working in Harrods and I came back one weekend, I'd been there about six months, and I saw my grandmother who lived nearby, who I was very close to, and she'd asked me if I’d got girlfriend in London. I said no. She just said, “well, have you got a boyfriend then?” Because the only explanation to her, of why her gorgeous 17-year-old grandson hadn't got a girlfriend was because he had a boyfriend. My grandmother's generation, it was only that my parents' generation, the 1950s lot, they were the ones that had the problem with it.
Yeah, so I can't remember a situation where I have ever pretended not to be gay. I've frequently been in situations where that's not the issue, and that's what I strive for. I very rarely these days would describe myself as gay, and if we get on to the question of the abject failure of identity politics, we'll be here all day. But it's not that I don’t want today’s 15, 16- and 17-year olds to be calling themselves gay. I just want them to be who they are, but those forms of political identity are important when we are being oppressed, they are the product of oppression. I would much rather we didn't find ourselves constrained by kind of identities and labels. All these poor gay men that have never been able to sleep with a woman because of the stigma and shame that it would bring them, and we need to address that.
Q. What do you think you would like to see change in the future or in society?
SS. I'd like to see the overthrow of global capitalism. I'd like to see a return to an agrarian economy. I’d like to see the state seize all personal wealth and assets from everybody and we all pay everything in common and hoping to achieve that by next summer. We talked about PrEP that's an obvious one. That globally, there are still seven countries where the death penalty exists, there's still 95 countries where it's illegal, and I would like to see much more awareness within our affluent western communities about the situation in other communities and that was the thing that the Women's Movement got. Strange enough, the left movement, the workers trade union movement got internationalism, and we just never really have, and we do not know enough, we do not seek out enough information. We do not express solidarity enough with what's been happening to gay men in Chechnya, this year, it's happening now. It's not something that's in the past or – Chechnya is not far away.
You can be there in the time it takes you to get to Inverness and this is happening. I've been spending time in Turkey. Where interestingly, Turkey is one of the few members states in the United Nations where homosexuality has never been illegal, but just because it's not illegal does not mean people are not being persecuted. There is still a sense that being gay is different, that being gay is other, that being gay is somehow a thing, and I would like it just, it not to be a thing. Not there yet.
Q. I guess us interviewing you.
SS. No, no, no, that's fine, that's fine.
Q. Yeah.
SS. But yeah, I’ve used the G word more today than probably have in the last 10 years
Q. Yeah.
SS. Right.
Q. Finally, is there anything you'd like to add? It's your interview.
SS. One of the things that I’ve always found supportive and interesting and just personally helpful is - I can't remember what we used to call it intersectionality, but I think that's gone quite out of fashion we call it something else now I don't remember - I was very lucky, at a quite early age, in my early 20s I became friends with women from the 1970s, Women's Movement, significant figures in that movement. And I cut my political teeth listening to them and their stories. I mean [inaudible], but it's the human condition. This is where my politics now comes into it. We don't recognise the factors in common that different forms of discrimination and oppression and mistreatment have and now I’m being an old hippy-dippy and global. It's sharing that common human experience and it's recognising oppression and the abuse of wealth and power and how that happens. It happens to all manner of people. And we need to call it out for what it is. And if that means we have to riot and burn down Bond Street, so be it.
Q. All right. Thank you very much.