Coming out to their families
1974
Barbara said “Feminism provided a
smoke screen for coming out, while I made it clear to my family that my
politics had changed and I was into Women’s Liberation and goodness
knows what else, going through their minds with the associations with
bra burners and men haters meant I didn’t have to actually say I was
having a relationship with a woman. In my early twenties I came out to
my mother but not to my father, initially my mother was shocked and
blamed herself, she was in her late seventies, and felt she’d done
something wrong, which she thought was to do with Barbara being born
out of wedlock in 1954 in Germany; she was in a children’s home for
three years as her parents couldn’t live together until they came back
to this country and got married. My mother was intent that my father
shouldn’t know, in spite of the fact that I’d lived in a series of
houses with women, but the crunch came when Bridget and I bought our
first house together in the early eighties. My father had met Bridget
and got on well with her, until the penny dropped that it was a sexual
relationship and he refused to deal with it, he would never visit, and
never did until his dying day, he thought it he did he’d be condoning
it. Whereas my mother eventually got over the guilt and visited
regularly, and got on well with everyone and enjoyed coming up to
Birmingham and meeting gay male friends as well.” However Bridget said
“She didn’t totally overcome her prejudice, she decided not to invite
some of her friends to Barbara’s birthday because Tom was going to be
there and he was a stereotypical gay man with body piercings etc. It
was going too far, letting other people know”. They recall other
people’s experiences coming out as quite mixed, “One would be quite
frightened about coming out in different circumstances, and sometimes
the most worried ones turned out to be the best, and vice versa, it was
terribly difficult to judge.”
Contributed by: Barbara Carter, 53, Bridget Malin, 62