Our LGBT+ friends in Scotland need more from us than simply tolerance

I’ve been working with a theatre, helping market a “super-queer” play. It’s pretty out there. The lead character Calvin has a lot of outdoor sex with multiple partners, much of which is graphically depicted.

It comes as gay rights are under attack, or at risk of outright deletion across Europe, and members of the LGBT+ community are feeling pressure here in Scotland.

And it’s got me reconsidering my own self-declared tolerance to the queer community.

In time of strife, is tolerance enough? One of the few ways in which I’d thought the world had got better in my lifetime was in our general chilling-oot with regards to the LGBT+ community.

But I realised through watching Wilf, the play by Fifer James Ley, that actually I had no idea what being gay actually involved, or what stresses it brings to bear.

This is no accident, the writer explains. “Queer people being expected to act like straight people in public still permeates as an ideology,” James told me.

“The negotiation with conservative people has been like ‘yes you (queer people) can have more space, as long as you are hetronormative, or homonormative.”

The upshot, James explained, is that you get loads of really conservative gay guys acting in that restricted way.

I was tane aback. We’d made such progress, I thought. Nae men or boys had been openly gay at Carnoustie High School when I was there. There were a couple of lesbians.

We threw around homophobic slurs and called each other “gay” as an insult.

There must’ve been homosexual folk among us, and it must have been hellish for them to listen to. Nae danger were they getting accepted in that small-minded society.

James, now in his 40s, says he experienced a similar environment growing up in Fife.

“It was not OK to be gay then”, he said.

“In fact I came from Elie, which the other villages already saw as soft. You were called ‘gay’ if you were from Elie. So I was sort of ‘double gay’ because I was both gay, and from Elie.”

By the time I was at the end of my 20s, things seemed to have shifted.

LG people were widely visible and part of life. B people were increasingly understood. T and + people not quite so much just yet, but we still seemed to be moving in the right direction.

Four of the leaders at Holyrood were queer for a while; even the Tory was a lesbian wi a bairn!

But through James I am understanding that while progress has been made, there remains more space to be opened up.

And what progress there has been remains reversible.

I’ve been gied a real fleg recently by our European sisters and brothers ramping up hostility to gay folk.

Hungary has banned homosexual couples from adopting. Denying the many poor bairns in need of a safe, loving home because you don’t like queers is a double dunt of selfish cruelty.

They’ve recently gone further, banning trans people from legally changing their gender, and banning young people learning about gayness.

This is bad enough, in a small, distant European country. But it is part of a trend.

My former home of the Georgian Republic has seen attempts to organise a Pride rally brutally and violently repressed.

Italy has voted to deny homosexuals the right to defence against hate crime under law. Italy. One of the cradles of EU values, refusing to protect its homosexual citizens.

There is a toxic tide flowing and Scotland hasnae been immune. The trans community have been pressured.

Trans folk are often seen as the weakest link in the LGBT chain, and folk will target them to try and separate the other links.

They’re trying to weaken solidarity within the movement and allyship outwith it. Don’t let them do it.

I saw hope through the eyes of LGBT teens. I was at the Traverse Theatre last night, watching that “super queer” show. Wilf would be illegal in Hungary. It would be protested against in Georgia. I suspect it might not thrive in Italy. But here, in Scotland, I saw LGBT Youth Scotland, a charity that supports young queer people, bring a dozen or so teenagers along to a performance.

They were excited beforehand, they socialised and seemed to feel comfortable.

I saw some of them looking out of the corner of their eyes at the drag queens and hyper-camp patrons in the theatre bar pre-show.

Potential role models on stage and around them in the bar. Surely this is a good, healthy place to be.

But as we are learning from Europe, these recent gains are not set in stone.

There is a toxic tide against difference heading our way.

It’s come for the trans community first, and will work its way down the LGBT rainbow if we’re not careful.

Speaking as a member of the humdrum heterosexual male community, let’s make sure the rainbow flag flies alongside the Saltire.

Our allyship needs to go beyond unthinking “tolerance” to the positive, proactive creation of spaces for LGBT+ people to express themselves.

There is a toxic tide flowing and Scotland hasnae been immune

PRIDE: Great progress has been made regarding attitudes towards the LGBT+ community – but these gains are not guaranteed.