UK’s secret LGBT island community that wasn’t known about for decades

As a teacher, a councillor and even a local mayor, Robin Ford was a public figure on an island where ‘everyone knows everyone’.

What everyone did not know was his crucial role as the gatekeeper for an ‘underground’ community and his ‘great unmentionable’ secret that he was gay.

Robin’s story is one among dozens of ‘hidden LGBT past lives’ on the Isle of Wight that were uncovered after decades of ‘omission and misrepresentation.’

Robin, now 82, remembers the sense of realisation and shame when he first came across the word ‘homosexual’ in 1955 on the island.

‘I had not heard of it before. I felt very pleased, but I found it all very difficult to live with after that first exhilaration,’ Robin said.

‘Being gay was the great unmentionable.’

The social stigma against homosexuality across the 147 square mile island led Robin to years of repression, ‘denial and reversal’, including seven years married to women in the late 1960s and ’70s.

‘Throughout my early life, I made horrible attempts to pretend I was straight. There was this terrible sense of shame.’

He added: ‘The liberal position was that you were ill. You were a sick man’

When his sexual orientation was known, the ‘overt homophobia’ taught him that he could not be gay in public life.

He was called ‘filthy’ by a GP in 1963 and was promptly kicked out of the surgery.

Later, as a teacher in the 1980s, ‘Mr Ford is gay’ was scratched over his school desks.

Robin was first elected to the local borough council in 1972 and was forced to keep his sexuality in the shadows for the following 15 years in public office, including one year as mayor of the borough which encompassed the island’s capital Newport.

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‘There was no LGBT life then, I was too exposed,’ he explained

‘I was in a public position. There came this almost feral fear that I had to live celibate.’

However, as the AIDS crisis in the 1980s saw public homophobia skyrocket, Robin became a key member of the island ‘underground’ and secretive meeting scene.

The Isle of Wight Gay Social Club was advertised in the footnotes of the Gay Times and County Press in the late 1970s and 1980s with a single phone number – Robin’s phone number.

He said: ‘I had so many people ringing up. It was all just one telephone contact advertised in Gay Times.’

The group would meet at his house and, later, other social venues on the island. Robin even met his long-term partner, James, through the group in 1987.

The ‘hidden’ LGBT social group provided a lifeline to Joanne Brady when she encountered homophobia after arriving on the island from Ireland at the age of 18 in 1984.

Joanne and her then partner, Sue, were working in a factory on the island when a group of gay female employees were confronted by their boss.

‘We were taken into the office, six of us. We were told we were disgusting and our lifestyle was disgusting,’ Joanne said.

‘If we wanted to hang onto our jobs, we needed to sort it out.’

This type of homophobia was present throughout the Isle of Wight, and forced Joanne to socialise with other LGBT islanders in the shadows.

She said: ‘There was a night club in Newport called Blitz. They used to do a gay night, but you were too scared to go because people would know you were gay.

‘You didn’t go because there would be people outside waiting [for you].

‘There was the LGBT ‘Social Group’, advertised in the County Press. We would go to different houses, but you would not tell anyone.

‘It was all “hush hush” and word of mouth, because it was frowned upon.

‘When it got bigger, we would hire a hotel and have a disco.’

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The group even organised trips from the Isle of Wight, which is two to five miles off the coast of Hampshire, to cities like Blackpool and Brighton, so that its members could experience what it was like to be out of the closet.

‘It was a big thing for us. We could just go and be out in public, because we couldn’t do it here,’ said Joanne.

Robin and Joanne are among those whose stories and experiences have been recorded as part of a National Lottery Heritage Fund project, Out on an Island.

The National Lottery Heritage Fund, which has invested over £12million in LGBT projects in the UK since 1994, has been nominated for Grassroots or Charity Organisation of the Year in Metro’s Pride Awards.

With help from this funding, Out on an Island began in 2019 to research 100 years of LGBT history on the Isle of Wight and address ‘the omission and the misrepresentation of LGBT past lives’.

Caroline Diamond, Project Manager, told Metro: ‘We wanted to stop the assumptions people had that gay people just existed in Brighton, London and Manchester. There are LGBT people in rural communities as well.

‘LGBT people’s lives were very, very hidden.

‘They’ve been through all of these harrowing things they didn’t deserve to go through that just because they were gay.’

The Isle of Wight held its very first pride event in 2017, and won a competition to hold the second ever UK Pride in 2018, which was described as an ‘incredible achievement’ for the island at the time.

The island is now home to numerous support groups and organisations for gay, bisexual and transgender for its 140,000 residents.

Progress on LGBT acceptance and celebration has come as a welcome development for many of those interviewed by Out on an Island, although concerns about homophobic attitudes still remain.

Robin Ford said: ‘It is something I can hardly believe, it is wonderful. I know that all the problems have not gone away, there is still queer bashing.’

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