Much like Andrew Adonis, after decades in the closet I finally came out as gay – and it changed everything

Only in my 60s did a combination of sexual frustration and determination to be open about the true 'me' lead me to come out. It devastated and ended my marriage, causing huge hurt to my wife

Andrew’s interview in The i last week, recounting the pressures he had experienced to conceal his true sexuality, resonated powerfully with me

I had heard on the grapevine that Andrew Adonis had come out as gay. He and I were colleagues at the same time, working for Tony Blair in 10 Downing Street in the early 2000s. We were both deeply closeted at the time. Andrew’s interview in The i last week, recounting the pressures he had experienced to conceal his true sexuality, resonated powerfully with me.

I had my first same-sex experience, with a school friend, at the age of 10. The year was 1957 and the next time I had sex with another male was some 50 years later. I was a product of my Roman Catholic upbringing, the law and societal attitudes at the time. Sexual activity between men was a crime in England, punishable by imprisonment and hard labour. It was drilled into me that what I had done must never ever happen again.

So, growing into my teens, and at university, I knew I was more attracted to other boys, not to girls. But I didn’t dare to admit it to myself, let alone “come out” to anyone. No one came out as gay. Some led their lives in secret, others were “outed” – and paid a price.

When parliament debated – and eventually agreed – the partial decriminalisation of same-sex activity in 1967, none of the MPs who were later known to be gay declared their sexuality. Instead, they took the line that homosexuals were unfortunate misfits who should not be punished for an affliction they had not chosen.

From university, I joined Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service. The Foreign Office, shaken by the Cambridge-spy scandals of the early 60s, and worried by Soviet cold-war blackmail, would not grant security clearance to anyone who was avowedly homosexual. Had I, I was asked by a retired police detective during my security-vetting interview, ever had any homosexual experience? “Yes”, I said, “with another boy when I was 10”. Laughter. “Did I have any homosexual tendencies?” I gulped. And lied: “No”, I replied. I passed the test, but at the price of telling myself that I would have to fight my impulses and take the secret of my sexuality to the grave.

The Diplomatic Service frowned on single men who were not married. One of my ambassadorial bosses even advised me, when I was about 27, that it was time I married in order to further my career. I did marry. It was not a cynical act. I met and married a wonderful girl. I was convinced marriage would “cure” me. I repressed my true sexuality, burying myself in work. I was hard wired to be gay, but my sense of self-esteem, family pressures, love, loyalty, religious faith and career prospects all pushed me into a heterosexual mould.

Only when I stopped full-time work at around 60 did a combination of sexual frustration and determination to be open about the true “me” lead me to come out. It devastated and ended my marriage, causing huge hurt to my wife. But the burden of years of concealment had been lifted.

People congratulated me on my “courage”. But it was those who had come out earlier in life who were the brave ones. I had cowered in the closet. I was determined to make up lost ground. Initially, I was only out to family and friends. Then the BBC World Service invited me to take part in a radio programme on LGBT+ issues that had a large audience in Nigeria, where it is a grave offence, both legally and socially, to be gay.

“Why me?”, I asked the producer. “Because,” he replied, “you are a pillar of the establishment and a ‘Sir’. Few people in Nigeria will think it possible to be those things and gay as well”. And so, I outed myself to the world.

Talk to many gay men of my generation and you will hear similar stories, that of the man who is now my husband, among them: he would have been sacked from his post as a senior consultant at a children’s hospital had it been known he was gay. We were constrained to lives against our nature because society required it and refused to accept us for who we are. We have to make sure those precious and hard-won rights are not reversed.

Stephen Wall is a former British Ambassador to the EU and the chair of Kaleidoscope Trust