When my tweet about 'gay genes' went viral, I realised we're looking at LGBT+ history all wrong

On Friday morning I posted a tweet which included a picture of a faded yellow cutting I took from a national newspaper in 1993.

The trigger for my post was waking up to the news – across newspapers, TV and radio – that scientists had concluded that there is no single “gay gene”. The result, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science, used data from the UK Biobank and 23andMe.

I’m definitely not a scientist, but I have always been personally uncomfortable with research into the genetics of sexuality. I know some feel it helps dispel the myth that sexuality is a choice. However, I don’t think it will change the way people treat me and there is always a risk in how it might be used, as evidenced by the story I tweeted.

I was 20 when the dog-eared article I posted ran and I’d come out as gay just four months earlier. I was still feeling vulnerable and hadn’t told my parents or brothers.

The clipping was headlined “Abortion hope after ‘gay genes’ findings” and included the chilling line: "It could soon be possible to predict whether a baby will be gay and give the mother the option of an abortion".

I remember how much the article repulsed me and how angry I felt. Angry about why we were doing this sort of research and at how it had been covered by the paper.

My post went viral, with thousands of people sharing and liking my tweet and literally hundreds saying they couldn’t believe a newspaper still printed stuff like this in 1993. People were clearly flabbergasted and horrified that it had been written in their lifetime.

However, many felt it was an isolated story by a particular conservative paper. Something that didn’t really reflect life in the early 1990s. Not only is that shortsighted, it’s a dangerous rewriting of LGBTQ+ history.

I know that homophobia was still rife in 1993, and it was blatant within our mainstream media. It wasn’t always as vile as the abortion story, but you didn’t need to spend long flicking through a day’s papers to find articles mocking gay people, challenging our right to equality and blaming us for many of the ills of society. In 1994, an MP publicly referred to homosexual activity as “neither natural or normal”.

Let’s remember, in 1993 the age of consent for men who slept with men was 21 (for opposite-sex sexual activity it was 16). It was illegal for a 20-year-old man to have sex with his 20-year-old boyfriend. These types of laws legitimised homophobia and discrimination by othering LGBT+ people and implying our relationships were different. In 1994, it was lowered to 18, but it took another six years until it became equal at 16.

Section 28 was also on the statute book (and stayed there until 2003) – stopping teachers from discussing same-sex relationships with their students. It was illegal for gay men to serve openly in the army until 2000. Civil partnerships didn’t arrive until 2005 and same-sex marriage until 2014.

Things have moved on significantly since the “gay gene” article was published. However, I think we need to be careful not to paint an overly rosy picture of society’s attitude towards LGBT+ people. Even more worryingly, there are clear signs of the equality we’ve spent so long fighting for being undermined.

Just this summer, Home Office data showed the reports of anti-LGBT+ hate crimes have more than doubled in five years. In July, the British Social Attitudes survey showed that acceptance of same-sex relations fell for the first time in 30 years.

It is still unusual to see same-sex couples holding hands or showing affection to each other in public – especially outside of big cities. We’ve seen violent homophobic attacks on our streets and protests against LGBT+ equality lessons outside a school in Birmingham. And outside of our borders, it is still illegal to be gay in 70 countries and punishable by death in eight.

The large majority of us aren’t homophobic. But let’s not whitewash LGBT+ history. Awful things were happening not that long ago and forgetting it was in recent times could stop us from regressing, and that matters much more than what scientists think of our genes.