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Today’s banner:
Girl on the bridge,
The Mound, Sutherland,
by Islay McLeod
Counting homosexuals can be a tricky business. There has always been a whole body of homosexual folk who just want to be allowed to get on with minding their allotment or going to their pottery class without being counted by some meddling do-gooder with a clipboard.
There are those who remember the days when, after a gay murder, the police liked nothing more than counting up the names of folk in the victim’s address book so that they could then charge them with sexual offences which had nothing to do with the murder. But now in a world where, thanks to the Equality Act of 2010, we are staggering towards some kind of legal equality, things have changed and organisations that provide services to the whole world have decided that they need to know if they are providing them to homosexual folk as well as everyone else. It would give some kind of clue as to whether legal equality is more than skin deep.
The Scottish Household Survey has, in this vein, started counting homosexuals – or, as they put it, they have introduced a new question: ‘designed to provide accurate statistics to underpin the equality monitoring responsibilities of public sector organisations and to assess the disadvantage or relative discrimination experienced by the lesbian, gay and bisexual population’.
It’s the kind of question that must really get up the back of that whole cohort of folk who, with straight face, assure the world that there are no homosexuals in their neck of the woods. ‘Oh, no, no’ in Aberlemno. The percentage of the population that has been identified by the survey as lesbian, gay or bisexual amounts to 0.9%.
The monitoring of sexuality among workforces in England by Stonewall has shown that, over the years, the number of respondents who are willing to identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual increases as they realise there are no negative consequences to coming out. For example, the first time Nottinghamshire County Council carried out an anonymous survey as part of its equality programme, 33% of its employees said they were willing to come out at work but a year later that had gone up to 37%; complementarily, the number who chose to stay in the closet declined. The fact that people were willing to come out suggested that they felt more comfortable about being honest about their sexuality in their workplace; far-sighted employers realise that a contented workforce is more likely to be a productive workforce.
The Household Survey’s question will, hopefully, encourage other employers and providers to follow suit. The results will help provide a clearer picture of both the needs of the LGBT community and the prejudice experienced by them more than anything that we have at the moment. Much as I support the current campaigns for same-sex marriage equality, the old gay liberationist within me despairs at the way that some of these campaigners talk as though the highest achievement of queer folk will be when all couples have the right to a bungalow in Monifieth. (Filmgoers will remember the scene in ‘The Hours’ when the Virginia Woolf character, asked if she would prefer life in Richmond or dying, says that she will opt for dying; I feel a bit like that about Monifieth.) Because whatever happens within the cocoon of the bungalow, there will be occasions when the double-barrelled couple will have to step out of doors. My concern is about the quality of citizenship that they will be able to enjoy when they do so.
If an employer is found to have a substantial number of LGBT employees but they are all on the lowest paygrade, that gives him and the relevant trade unions an opportunity to examine their training and promotion policies. Then there are the questions that arise when the cocoon of matrimony bursts. If one of the couple becomes incapacitated by ill health, will service providers know how to offer support? Or if one of the couple should decide to escape from the cocoon and fly off butterfly-like to pastures new, will the mortgage providers be able to re-negotiate new mortgages and post-mortgage settlements? The numbers do not solve the problem of prejudice but they help organisations prepare for any eventuality and offer the best service possible to all their clients and employees, regardless of any individual prejudices held by staff members.
Most monitoring surveys offer people the right to tick a rather-not-say box when it comes to sexual orientation. It’s right and proper that such a box is there but we’ll have gone a long way towards meaningful equality when that box is discontinued due to lack of use.
Bob Cant is the editor of Footsteps and Witnesses: Lesbian and gay lifestories from Scotland.
