#13 Queer Ways of Knowing | with Felicity Long

What does it mean to be known and seen as queer, by others and ourselves? Felicity Long shares some insights, from rural Lancashire to the Dreaming Spires. Felicity works in the University’s Graduate Admissions and Recruitment team on access programmes to support graduate students from underrepresented and disadvantaged groups to apply to Oxford, and to thrive once here. 

Felicity spoke at Evensong in Wadham's Chapel at the end of Queerweek.

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Transcript

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Reverend Baun, Wadham College. Thank you very much for having me. It's a great privilege indeed to be with you. At the culmination of Queer Week. If a queer person comes out in the woods and there's no one there to hear them, did they really come out? I've been pondering these words for much of my adult life, though the one constant in my life has been sensing an attraction to women. I've known that since the age of seven. Though I would not admit it even to myself until well into my twenties. I have spent most of my adult life that's the past 20 years, to be precise, single. I was in a civil partnership for a short time, but I now regard that as the blip, the real deviance from who I really am. And while I'll never say never. I couldn't be more content with my life as it is currently. However, this means I have no partner to allude to, no pronouns to refer to, to out myself. So what does queerness mean for me? I think this is actually a perspective that many queer people can share. That tree falling in the woods with no one to hear a queer person in a long term heterosexual partnership, for example. And these days, of course, even simply saying I'm married does not necessarily indicate a person's sexual orientation or their spouse’s gender. So how do we share that we're queer? And why is it important that people know that? That's a question that many straight people ask me. Why does everyone have to know you're gay? It's just not a big deal these days. Well, it is a big deal to me. And I think many of us here. I spent a long time denying who I was, as have many queer people. And that is damaging in a host of ways. For me, ensuring I present as queer is also, dare I say it, a form of public service. The first flickering of a light bulb that edged me towards acceptance of myself was meeting an openly gay woman in my first proper job. Who knows who else I may be encouraging to be themselves simply by being myself. But now let's go back in time. A little less than 20 years to my own journey towards queerness. Now I've tried it - this story doesn't really make sense outside Oxford, so I'm very glad to be able to share it with you this evening because it takes place in the Rad Cam. So as I've said, it is somehow exactly 20 years this term since I arrived here as a fresher at Exeter College Michaelmas term 2003. It doesn't seem a long time ago to me, but it was in some ways a very different world. Section 28 had been introduced in 1989, the year I started primary school, and it was not repealed until November 2003. Shortly after I had started university, I often reflect that my compulsory education was bookended by this overtly homophobic piece of legislation. The time of my childhood, the 1990s, was also markedly different to today in many ways. I grew up in a small town in Lancashire, living with my mum, dad and younger brother and sister. I worshiped at St Michael's church. I went to St Michael's school and I even lived on St Michael's Road Church and faith was part of my everyday life in church and outside it. For example, my mum and I used to go out collecting for the Children's Society, the Church of England's children's charity. We would go from door to door giving out and then collecting little blue boxes with yellow writing on them. I can remember it very distinctly in our hallway. We kept it for loose change and then would collect all of them in and take them back to church the following Sunday we were, by any measure, a very churchy family, and I didn't know anyone I would describe as queer growing up. I don't necessarily attribute that to the circumstances of my upbringing. There simply weren't queer people living openly as there are now. Indeed, the only out lesbian in British public society was Sandi Toksvig. She was already a well-known TV personality and was an ambassador for Save the Children, another children's charity. She was unceremoniously dropped from hosting their 75th anniversary celebrations in the Royal Albert Hall in 1994 after she came out as gay. And that wasn't even the children's charity associated with the church. Even so, they couldn't get rid of her fast enough. I was nine years old when this happened, and the fury around Sandi coming out and then being very publicly rejected set I think the first link in my young mind between being gay and being unacceptable, even being ambassador for a children's charity could not apparently redeem you from your sins. I knew in my heart of hearts that she and I were the same, that I was gay. But the future didn't look bright. No surprise then that I kept that secret buried, not admitting it even to myself. It was clearly, it seemed to me, something that would never be accepted. Now, let's travel forwards in time a little bit to how I knew I was queer. My coming out story, which, as I have indicated, originated somewhat improbably in the Rad Cam. I had embarked upon a second reading of Mrs. Dalloway that seminal text. I'd read it as a sixth former and reread it, and one paragraph really struck home in a way I could no longer ignore rather than taking it at face value. Like the good student I was, I decided to consult some secondary texts on the matter. So off I went to the Rad Cam and I was doing some further research by reading Hermione Lee's excellent biography on Virginia Woolf. How else could I then resign myself and resolve this issue than by writing an essay? That's how I’d learned to work through things. So I went back home, wrote an essay, argued it this way, argued it that way, and came to the conclusion, I must be a lesbian. I would not utter those words to anyone for a while, but I had at least written them down. So queer for me then and now meant existing outside of the mainstream. Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. We are who we are. And the sooner you stop railing against it and stop caring about what society thinks, the sooner and more joyfully you can get on with living your life. But still, even then, living life joyfully on our own terms, we sometimes come across barriers that remind us that we remain very much outside what has been designated acceptable. In my home parish church, St Michael's there is a paving stone that everyone has to walk over at the entrance. It bears the words that we heard the choir sing so beautifully just now in the Psalm. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth forevermore. I've loved those words since I was a child, but still, the church seems to preserve people differently. And this, for me, is still very painful. Still, there’s hope. Even the Pope recently hinted that the door might maybe, perhaps be slightly ajar for Catholic priests to one day bless same sex unions. And I'm standing before you now in this place of God, talking to you as part of an act of worship about my lived experience as a queer Christian woman. This would have been unthinkable to me as a fresher 20 years ago, and it may not have happened, I think, even in Wadham. But please do correct me on that if I'm wrong after the service. Wadham was the first constituent institution of the university to raise the rainbow flag during Queer Week. But that wasn't until 2011. That's not a long time ago in the scheme of things. And a lot has changed for the better in those past 12 years, and we must hope that a lot will change for the better in the 12 years to come and beyond, especially for trans folk. Today, of course, being the final day of Transgender Awareness Week. I close now with a quote from someone who died 183 years ago, but who has been a source of inspiration to many people, queer and non queer alike. Anne Lister brought to life so memorably in the recent BBC TV series Gentleman Jack. If you've not had the pleasure and if not, I'd definitely recommend her She was a 19th century Yorkshire land-owner and her prolific diaries recently discovered and decoded revealed the two pillars of her life, her Christian faith and her love of women. She didn't conform for anyone, and her unwavering sense of self makes her a source of comfort to me and to many when I doubt myself. Her diary entry from 11th of November 1816 notes a conversation with a friend about whether two women loving each other is wrong in the eyes of God.“I dexterously parried all these points,” writes Anne“I urged in my own defense the strength of natural feeling and instinct for so I might call it as I had always had the same turn from infancy.” Words to live by, Anne. May God grant all of us the strength to be true to ourselves. In the words of Saint Paul,“for everything God created is good and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.” Amen