It’s Pride in London this weekend, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to go this year – but that doesn’t stop me being an active ally and supporting everyone from the LGBTQ community.
I’m aware I’ve been lucky to work in supportive clinics that have no obvious issues with LGBTQ staff, but talking to everyone at Pride made me see this isn’t always the case – and, in my view, this needs to change. Besides marching, you can sign up as an LGBTQ-friendly clinic for EMS.
British Veterinary LGBT+ (BVLGBT+) started at London Pride in 2016, and the celebration of marching includes doing it for those who can’t, or are no longer with us. For me, this is the reason I march.
Why I march
I march for my friend Alan.
Alan was a patient care assistant at a hospital I worked in. He won’t ever appear in official statistics – he was gone long before BVLGBT+ got started, yet his effect on me will never diminish.
We worked in the same team, and shared early mornings, late evenings, weekends and night shifts. I loved Alan. He never knew this. We were great friends, but he never knew I thought the world of him, his plans and his ideas, which mirrored mine.
We spent nights doing celebrity impressions and perfecting our Bob and Olive routine in homage to some favourite twilight hours clients. There is a certain dark humour to night shifts, and ours was rather too in sync sometimes.
Safety in numbers
One fateful night shift, Alan and I were covering the hospital together, and, at around 3am, the oxygen alarm went off. At this time the piped oxygen supply was stored in a cage just outside the secure back gates of the hospital. As it was dark, raining and 3am – and we weren’t in the most salubrious part of north London – we decided to go and change the oxygen together; safety in numbers and so on.
The gates were opened by a button from the inside, but once outside, we would need to scan our security passes to get back in.
No problem at all. Except after we had changed the oxygen cylinder and secured the cage, the gates had closed and our passes wouldn’t work. Not mine and not Alan’s.
About this time I realised I had drunk three large coffees and might need to go for a wee.
Maintaining dignity
The gates were about 6ft high and not designed to be climbed, but in the drizzly rain Alan was my hero – nobly climbing to the top of the gates before disaster struck.
By this point I was running up and down the path to make sure I didn’t have a serious accident, and trying not to laugh too hard at Alan’s commentary as he scaled the wrought iron gates. As he reached the top he sat down to one of our regular night time skits and it all fell apart.
It was our habit to pretend we were on the TV show Pet Rescue with Wendy Turner Webster as our host. As it was a daytime show, they clearly assumed no one could keep track of the complex storylines, so Wendy had regular update segments that always started with the words “earlier in the programme”.
Yes, as I struggled to maintain my dignity, Alan was channelling our televisual hero sitting at the top of a 6ft gate in the dark saying: “Earlier in the programme we saw Alan and Jane locked out of the hospital – let’s go back to see how they are.”
Well, that’s what I can print, but there were darker comments based on what might happen if we had got trapped inside and the patients had been starved of oxygen or other such mortuary humour.
Losing it
Things would have been fine with Alan deliberately stalling his climb down to see how long I could maintain my continence for. Then the real disaster happened – Alan’s shoe fell off and he refused to climb down until I had bent over and picked up the shoe.
Now, if there’s one thing you don’t want to have to do with a very full bladder is bend over, but I was under a very animated Wendy Turner Webster’s stern instructions that, without the return of the shoe, she could not move past this “earlier in the programme” segment to get to “we’ll find out at the end of the show”.
Well, I managed great control, the shoe was duly returned to Wendy, and he dropped to the floor and pressed the button to open the gates. I did an excellent Usain Bolt impression and my dignity was saved.
Lost
It wasn’t long after this Alan decided he wasn’t staying to find out about what happened at the end of the show – he was making his own ending.
He felt isolated and lonely, and didn’t want to go to “the scene”, as he called it, to find a partner. Perhaps if I had understood more about how lonely he felt, and that he felt there wasn’t a place for him, I could have done more to help. We had such similar dreams and plans, and there was only one difference between us.
That night might be almost 15 years ago now, but I think of him often and still get angry that he’s not here to laugh at something we’d both find funny. I have been back to the practice we worked in and there’s a plaque on the wall for him.
But that’s not enough, is it? I don’t want any more plaques. I don’t want any more funerals. I don’t want any more sadness because people find living their life honestly is so lonely. So, for Alan and everyone like him, I march.
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