Robert Hampton

Oslo really gets excited about Pride. The Pride Parade, traditionally held on the last Saturday in June, is preceded by a week of festivities. Even the trams are adorned with rainbow flags for the occasion.

I’ve been rather sceptical about Pride recently. Just before I left, Liverpool Pride had announced a dramatic scaling back of its 2015 event. This was portrayed in the media as a disaster; personally I’ll be happy if this year sees a return to a more community-based event, rather than charging £11 to experience terrible music and overpriced beer.

Yes, I’m a grumpy sod, which meant that Oslo Pride was going to have to be quite special to shake me out of my funk. Could the Norwegians do something that Liverpool couldn’t?

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Twin brothers Austin and Aaron Rhodes phoned their dad with some news (spoiler alert: they’re both gay).

There’s a lot of cynical comment over their decision to film this moment and put it on YouTube. I, for one, am glad they did, as it highlights the immense difficulty that gay in coming out to their loved ones. I doubt there’s a gay person alive who doesn’t remember a moment like this. The tears. The anxiety. The sentence started but not finished: “I am…”

It shouldn’t be that hard. If we want to make life easier for LGBT youth, let’s start here. Educate parents. Educate teens. Stop making gay kids feel like they have some strange “otherness” to them that people won’t accept.

Ronny & I is an entertaining LBGT short film and a nice take on the well-worn “coming out story” genre. It’s shot in the style of handheld mobile phone footage so it’s a bit shaky and disjointed, but once you get past that it’s a fun watch. Well worth 20 minutes of your time.

One extra thought from me (with a minor spoiler) below…

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Gay rights and gay issues have always interested me, and you’ll find reference to them throughout my blog, right back to the earliest days. Nowadays, the reasons are obvious. However, for the first seven years of the blog’s life, I was hamstrung by the fact that I was out to almost no-one.

I thought I was being quite clever, carefully wording my posts in such a way that I could demonstrate I was a champion of gay rights without actually coming out and saying that I was gay myself. However, when I was finally brave enough to start coming out to people, a response I got more than once was, “I know, I read your blog.”

Waiting until the age of 27 to come out is not ideal, and it’s something I regret bitterly (especially as a lot of my friends and family already knew, or at least suspected). There are many reasons that I left it so late, but discussion of those reasons is something more appropriate for a revealing therapy session, rather than the blog. So, on with the flashback!

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