I was very active in gay politics by the time I started my Masters Degree in Social Work in 1982. It was almost inevitable, therefore, that I should start to rattle the School of Social Work’s cage when it came to putting LGBT issues on the academic agenda.

To say that the School didn’t see sexuality as being relevant to social work would be an understatement. The only specific reference to it in the course material was, in fact, quite hostile – the key psychiatry text book declaring lesbianism to be a psychiatric disorder.

Whilst this particularly hostile line was never actively taught, the fact that the psychiatry book remained a key text was indicative of the lack of interest and concern around the issue. It was also another measure of our invisibility: there was no need for consideration of gay issues because the likelihood of coming across a real live homosexual (or at least one who was going to make an issue out of it) was bound to be pretty slim.

This lack of interest was underscored when I was finally granted permission to run a study day on ‘Sexuality and Social Work’. Every student attended. None of the staff did.

For the first few months it seemed as if I was the only gay student on the course. By all accounts there were no homosexuals in the year above me or the year that followed. (Not that the atmosphere was conducive to coming out – as I was to learn during my first practice placement. Being open about one’s sexuality was seen as simply asking for trouble.)

Thankfully, one of my fellow students did come out as a lesbian some months into the course. In reality, she only came out to support me, having been in a long-term relationship long before she started the course. And she picked her timing perfectly.

One of our sociology lecturers had decided to pander to my whims by making ‘homosexual identity’ the topic of one of our weekly seminars. As usual, this meant reading an impenetrable academic text on the subject beforehand.

I was not the only one who failed to fathom the sociological jargon that was, apparently, explaining my condition; the majority of my fellow students were equally mystified. In consequence the seminar began with the exchange of blank looks.

Then Linda piped up:

“I don’t understand any of this but, as a lesbian, what I’d really like to discuss is ‘what makes people heterosexual’!”.

There would have been fewer shock waves if someone had thrown a live hand grenade into the room! With a single sentence, Linda had turned the microscope around: the subjects had suddenly become the inquisitors – and the new course of our inquiry was making our fellow students most uncomfortable.

The next few minutes were some of the most educational – and enjoyable – I ever had on that course.

The very fact that the heterosexual students had to explain their ‘condition’ was, in itself, an education for us all. It instantly undercut the notion that there was something intrinsically ‘correct’ about it.  Suddenly they had to explain their sexuality; look for causes; find words to rationalise it.

And, of course, it gave them a taste of what we have to endure all the time: whenever there’s talk about the ’cause’ of something it’s invariably implied that there’s a problem with it. Even here in academia – where fact and logic are meant to prevail – the bias was perpetuated by the constant scrutiny of homosexuality and never heterosexuality.

In all fairness, the students gave it their best shot – even though they’d clearly never been put in a position where they’d had to think about it before. Interestingly, none of the students explained their sexuality in terms of desire or attraction.

For the male students, the key ‘guideline’ for being straight was simply ‘not being gay’. There wasn’t really any consensus on what ‘being gay’ meant in practice: it certainly didn’t seem to come down to having sex with other men. Indeed, one student even alluded to a ‘friendship’ with another man some years earlier. The exact nature of the friendship was never made clear but, nonetheless, it was a remarkably brave and very touching note of honesty. It was also  interesting to hear a straight man acknowledging that sexuality wasn’t necessarily a clear cut issue.

None of the female students seemed to have been subject to such strong anti-gay injunctions and, perhaps as a result of that, generally seemed more relaxed about the whole issue.

One notable exception was an older Asian student who explained, somewhat apologetically, “I didn’t have a choice. My culture made me this way!”

It seemed to me that what she was talking about was the more proscriptive definition of gender roles in Asian culture at that time. It wasn’t about desire or attraction; for Asian women there was a still a strong emphasis on being a good wife and mother.

But it was also the only time in my life when I’ve ever heard anyone be so apologetic for being straight!

By the end of the seminar I think we’d all learned a lot. For my part, the level of honesty and disclosure on the part of the students made it particularly special.

The lecturer didn’t contribute.