Transcript
I think so, I think with my parents it’s quite hard to tell. I actually came out in the exhibition in the project.
I was making a photo album inspired by the ones that we’d seen at The Keep in the archive, where this person had documented their lives in a way that people used to with photo albums and it made me kind of sad that we don’t do that anymore. So I decided that when I was doing it, it was my first year at university, so that was quite an important time of my life and I wanted to document things that were happening.
As part of the project, we went to Pride so I had loads of photos from Pride and I wasn’t planning on doing it, but I wrote a little note to my parents saying, ‘by the way, I like everybody’. So that was a bit scary, because it was in pen and I couldn’t take it back.
Then I almost didn’t invite them to come and see it, because they didn’t know anything about the project. It was ‘No. I’ve been trying to come out to them for ten years now. It’s written down somewhere, they can come and see it’.
When they came to see it, because it was in the middle of the book, in my head I thought ‘I’ll go look around at the other work and just leave them to it.’ When it actually came to it, I was just stood there, counting down the pages until it was getting there. So they were looking at the pictures and my Mum read it and she made sure my Dad had seen it, because he didn’t have his glasses, so we weren’t sure if he had seen it, but he had.
They just sort of nodded and kept going, didn’t really mention it that much, which was probably a good thing, because I was crying, I was like ‘er that’s enough’ and in the car afterwards All We Need Is Love came on and my mum said ‘Well this is very appropriate’ and that’s all that’s been mentioned about it since.
And you haven’t been feeling like you wanted to say anything more?
No, but then we weren’t really discussing relationships or anything before either. I don’t think it’s that they’re not accepting, its just that we don’t really talk about that kind of thing.
I think they’d be fine with it if I came to them and started talking to them about it. I think they’re just not entirely sure what to do with the information now. There’s been one other time where it came up, when I showed my mum the postcards and she did the thing that quite a lot of people seem to do when you come out to them and they’re like ‘Oh that’s great, I know this person that’s gay and this person’. ‘Thanks. I don’t know everybody’, but I think that’s just how they are, so I’m quite happy. It went as well as it could do I think.