One in 10 of 16 to 24-year-olds are gay or bisexual — and it’s no biggie. So does this mean that taboos about same-sex relationships are on the way out? Alice Thomson reports.
“I wake up some days and I’m like, ‘Okay, today I’m gay.’ Other days it’s, ‘Right, I’m straight. Where are the girls at?’ It’s a roller coaster sometimes. I mostly set my dating apps to boys and girls, or sometimes I’ll just set it to boys.” At 21, Luke Hallows is part of the new queer generation, openly experimenting with his sexuality.
Luke, who works for a security company in Manchester, says that boys “are more chill. You’ll send a message to a girl and they’ll overthink it 500 times and ask their friends.” He’s had long-term relationships with both sexes. “You can be attracted to both, but your feelings are completely polar opposite.”
He wasn’t “out” at school. “I got picked on a lot for being camp and flamboyant. I hoped it was a phase. I came out on social media platforms and made a TikTok video — it was a song that went something like, ‘I like girls, I like guys.’ I was absolutely blown away by the reaction. I got nothing but love.” He did a “glow-up” video of before and after. “It got 1.6 million views.”
Most of his friends, he says, are a bit queer, meaning that they’re still exploring their sexuality and can’t be categorised. “We can all relate to each other.”
Nyama Keyworth, 22, is studying philosophy at the University of Sheffield. “I would probably say I’m queer as opposed to bisexual. I don’t want to rule anyone out,” she says. “There is also a bit of a thing about putting bisexual on a dating app and then it being fetishised by straight men. I had one serious relationship with a guy for two years when I was in school, so I guessed I was straight. But when I was at uni, I set my dating apps to ‘everybody’. Now I’ve had a girlfriend for nine months.”
A quarter of Nyama’s friends say they are queer. “In my experience and those of my friends, we’ve not really felt a need to come out per se. It’s more, ‘Oh, now I’m getting with this person.’ I think my family were a bit surprised. But they were very accepting. And they are aware that it is different in this generation.”
Nyama grew up in Oxford. “My little brother’s still at the school where I went. By the sounds of it, there’s a lot more ‘outness’ than when I was there.”
One in 10 members of Gen Z now identify as gay or bisexual, double the rate of five years ago, according to the UK’s Office for National Statistics’ latest population survey. Almost 9 per cent of young women between 16 and 24 identify as bisexual, while 2 per cent say they are lesbians; 4.1 per cent of young men identify as bisexual with 3.8 per cent saying they are gay. Born between 1998 and 2006, this cohort was at primary school when legislation introducing same-sex marriage was passed. By contrast, in their grandparents’ generation, only 0.7 per cent of 65-year-olds and over say they are gay or bisexual. A recent poll by Ipsos for campaign group Stonewall suggests a quarter of 16-25-year-olds identify as LGBTQ+ compared with fewer than 10 per cent of baby boomers.
Is this enormous societal shift a cause for celebration or concern? Or should we all just chill, as Nyama suggests. The comments under the Times news story reporting these findings were divided: some of our readers have embraced the changing attitudes; others sounded wistful; many appeared alarmed about this new “fashion”, worried that teenagers are trying to conform to pressure to be “cool” or feel the need to shock and hoping they will grow out of it.
According to new data from the British Social Attitudes Survey, opinions about same-sex relationships have become increasingly positive since the ‘80s, levelling out in the past eight years with two-thirds of people agreeing that “same-sex relationships are not wrong at all”.
Surely this new tolerance feels like progress. When I interviewed Douglas Stuart, the 47-year-old prize-winning author of the novel Shuggie Bain, last year, he explained that as a gay teenager in Scotland in the ‘80s, he was kicked and beaten so badly by fellow pupils as he walked home that his neighbour thought she was rescuing a “squealing dog”.
Actor Stephen Fry once told me he thought he would have to leave the country because of his anxiety as a young person in Norfolk in the ‘60s after reading about the life of Oscar Wilde and realising he was gay. “I started to gasp and pant, feeling simultaneously triumphant and terribly, terribly worried,” he said. “I realised that my life was absolutely cursed if I wanted to stay in Britain.”
Wilde himself was prosecuted for gross indecency with men and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. At Queer Britain, the national LGBTQ+ museum, which last year exhibited the door to Wilde’s prison cell, the director, Joseph Galliano-Doig, says he senses that a stigma has been removed rather than a generation has changed their sexuality. “No one experiments with their sexuality unless they are drawn to it. I’d be surprised if anyone genuinely heterosexual ended up in a long-term same-sex relationship. For centuries we have been covert about it; Gen Z have shown you can be overt. But it still matters what area you grow up in and how supportive your family, school and workplace are.”
With increased visibility there has also been a backlash. UK Home Office statistics from 2022 show hate crimes against people based on sexual orientation have doubled in four years. “But that doesn’t mean you should hide,” Galliano-Doig says. “When people can’t be themselves, it narrows their minds as well as those of their persecutors. The question shouldn’t be why are you experimenting, but why does it bother anyone? We should live in a world where our differences mean everything and nothing at all.”
Heartstopper, Netflix’s quaint coming-of-age rom-com about an openly gay male sixth former at an English comprehensive who falls in love with the school’s most popular rugby player, has a cult following among the older LGBTQ+ community as well as the young. The Communards pop star turned vicar, the Rev Richard Coles, says he cried when he saw it. “A queer happily ever after seemed beyond the realms of possibility when I was young,” he explains. He left his vicarage after the Archbishop of Canterbury refused to sanction gay marriages in church. “It’s shaming and degrading for the church to be so excluding. My sexual orientation is a given. It’s like hair colour.” He is still angry that he couldn’t officially marry his partner, David Oldham, before the latter died in 2019. “I just wanted our relationship to be like everyone else’s — accepted, upheld and respected.”
So, how do Gen Z feel? Are they still fighting the battles of their elders or are they relaxed now? Amélia Lecapitaine, 24, is a teaching assistant in Reading. She grew up in Hong Kong, where there was no open gay community. “I thought, every girl feels that way about other girls, so it’s fine, I’ll just focus on my boyfriend. I repressed it, because my family’s quite homophobic, but there were always signs,” she says. Amélia moved to Manchester as a student. “My mum is becoming more accepting, though at one point she told me, ‘Oh, sexuality is a choice.’ But I found people who understand me and queer social media helped. Britain is super-open. I’ve realised that I do like men too. People are too obsessed with categories. It just depends on the person.”
Dylan Wagner, 21, is a bisexual former junior British kickboxer from Hertfordshire who has just graduated from University College London. “Most millennials downwards are accepting of it,” he says. “But if you come out, it depends which area you are in. I’m quite lucky; I’m not worried about someone beating me up, but I’m from around London, which is as diverse as it can be. Pretty much every gay I know has had some form of trauma, whether it is getting abused or groomed or attacked. If they’re wearing crop tops or see-through stuff, they can go through a lot worse things, especially late at night or on the street. One of my gay friends got beaten up by a group of guys on the way home, but he’s still in [the club] Heaven dancing every Friday.”
Dylan realised he might be gay aged 16. “I was folding laundry and I was like, ‘Do I like guys? Maybe.’ Then I carried on with my life. I didn’t think about it again. I come from a very complicated immigrant family. My mum is Russian-Ukrainian, my dad is South African-Israeli. Now they’re fine; they accept it out of respect. But any time I mention a girl they start jumping with joy. I used to have both [girls and boys dating app filters] on. But now I find myself either looking exclusively at guys or exclusively at girls. I find it easier to focus on one at a time. Girlfriends tend to be loyal; with guys it’s fast-paced. Guys will be sending, ‘Hey, what you doing?’ Girls are a bit too nervous to make the first move.”
It’s still simpler to be straight, according to Milo Samuels, a 22-year-old farmer who was brought up in Devon and met his boyfriend on the dating site Muddy Matches. “If you hold another man’s hand on the street, people often either go, ‘Oh, you’re so brave,’ or call you a faggot. Both are exhausting. The last time I cuddled a man on the beach, someone threw stones at us. It’s easier to date the opposite gender in almost every way. The vast majority in this world are still heterosexual.” But the farming community is surprisingly open, he suggests.
Other remaining pockets of prejudice are also changing, says Milo, who wanted to be a professional footballer at school. The teenage footballer Jake Daniels, who came out last year, was the first gay male professional player to do so since Justin Fashanu in 1990, who was described as a “bloody poof” by his manager and later killed himself. Now the England captain Harry Kane tweets Daniels, “Massive credit to you and the way your friends, family and captain have supported you.”
Gen Z may be more open and questioning about their sexuality, but they are far tougher than the Boomer generation about boundaries and consent. “Footballers can be gay now, but they can’t be dicks. There shouldn’t be any power imbalance just because you are male or famous. Everything now is by mutual agreement,” Milo stresses. Nor are they likely to date anyone much younger or older than themselves. “That’s just creepy,” every Gen Zer I chatted to insisted.
The slightly older millennials are unfazed by their younger peers’ experimentation. Annie Lord, the 28-year-old dating queen who has a candid cult column in Vogue, told me this summer that she is more worried about sexually transmitted diseases than sexuality. She thinks the pressures to perform and be perfect are greater in this more judgmental online age, and young women often feel they can’t be thought of as “vanilla and boring” when in a relationship with a straight young man who may have been desensitised by porn.
She didn’t feel pressured about her sexuality. When she was growing up in Yorkshire, she says, her parents were immensely kind and supportive about her dating life, as she suspects are most Gen X parents. “But we don’t think in boxes as much. I definitely grew up snogging my girlfriends a bit, but then it was men. When I was very young, gay was still an insult. Now it’s not an issue; everyone does whatever. Our generation is less obsessed with all these definitions than yours.”
Soma Sara, 24, who set up the Everyone’s Invited movement to try to end the culture of sexual harassment among her peers, sees this as one of the more positive shifts among a young generation struggling with 21st-century pressures. “Young people are often more open and accepting. I think growing up online has encouraged more openness, allowing people to be who they are.”
The majority of UK secondary schools, from Eton to Exeter and Edinburgh, have LGBTQ+ societies, 20 years after the repealing of Section 28, which banned local authorities and schools from “promoting homosexuality” in any form. They are usually run by pupils. Drag queen Lawrence Chaney was so bullied for being a “weird outsider kid who is fat and walks funny” at his Glasgow school two decades ago that he told me his teacher suggested he eat alone in the art room for safety. He returned last year to address his old school’s LGBTQ+ society and eat lunch with them.
“The lexicon of abusive homosexual language in the playground and staff room is dying out,” one history teacher at a mixed London secondary school explains. “But I am rather amazed by how many are now in same-sex relationships. I suspect for some 14-year-old girls, kissing a girlfriend is just a phase. A decade ago it would have been called a crush but, by 18, they know who they are.”
Some in older generations are still worried about “the complications” of being in a same-sex relationship, but none I talked to would go on the record. Lola, 19, studying medicine, spells it out. “I suspect my grandparents worry about what happens in the bedroom.” Her grandparents, she thinks, also fret that as a lesbian Lola may never have a “conventional” family life, but Lola says most of her girlfriends are ambivalent about having children anyway and are more put off by whether they can afford a home and childcare.
Paul Morgan-Bentley is the head of investigations at The Times and author of the book The Equal Parent. He has a son with his husband. “What’s the downside? Some seem to be frightened that the younger generation won’t settle down or have a family,” he says. “But gay people can try to have families now if that’s what they want, and studies show that outcomes are excellent for children born through surrogacy and in families with same-sex parents. I couldn’t feel more traditional, yet I still have to come out regularly wherever my husband and I go.”
He thinks he would have found it easier and “prevented a lot of heartache” as a teenager if he could have felt free to experiment openly with his sexuality. “You shouldn’t feel forced into being anything. It’s more important to discover consensual, loving, kind relationships of any sort.”
Where once TV series and films only reflected on the agonies of being gay and almost never mentioned bisexuality, contemporary classics such as Modern Family, Call Me by Your Name and Sex Education can’t get enough of the queer storyline.
With British Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s pronouncement that anti-gay discrimination is not a qualification for LGBTQ+ asylum seekers, it feels like politics may be entering a less liberal, more intolerant phase, but several members of the shadow cabinet are openly gay. Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, came out at Cambridge University. “The morning after I told a couple of friends, I woke up and just felt this huge weight off my shoulders,” he told me. “I felt genuinely liberated.”
Historian Nino Strachey, who was head of research for the National Trust, has written extensively on the Bloomsbury set in her books Rooms of their Own and Young Bloomsbury. A century ago, the Stracheys, Bells, Sackville-Wests, Virginia Woolf, Dora Carrington and Duncan Grant were already pushing at sexual boundaries, flouting conventions, challenging their seniors, breaking taboos and celebrating sexual equality and freedom.
In the 1920s, it was easier for the rich to experiment with their sexuality in their literary and artistic groups. There were raucous parties and gossip-filled country weekends. “They didn’t have to label themselves,” Strachey points out, but even the wealthy couldn’t be openly flamboyant everywhere. “The early 20th century was still riven by homophobia and biphobia. Homosexuality wasn’t decriminalised until 1967. In the ‘70s, the era of free love was still only for a few.”
Gen Z’s new movement feels more classless and far-reaching. Max, 19, a trainee solicitor from Cardiff, is pleased that the word “queer” has been reclaimed by his peers. “You shouldn’t have to label yourself for others. If you come out as the only gay in the village, it’s hard to go back in again. It shouldn’t be about some big reveal but what makes you happy and fulfilled,” he suggests.
“Look at the celebrities in older generations, like the presenter Phillip Schofield, who now seem to be struggling with their sexuality. They possibly didn’t have as much chance to try stuff out and are still embarrassed and confused in their fifties and sixties. We’re just more relaxed. Don’t pity or patronise the queer generation. They may have it right.”
Written by: Alice Thomson
© The Times of London
