A personal view on LGBTQ+ History Month

Through most of my life I haven’t been particularly interested in history. I find the dates of battles quite difficult to remember, and the history that I was taught in school was mainly sanitised, whitewashed, and presented as a series of facts, rather than the personal stories that stick in my mind and grab my attention. 

Recently, I have become more interested in my own family history, which is apparently a sign of advancing age, and slowly becoming a part of history yourself. I have had my genetic analysis done (which threw up some surprises) and became fascinated with the way it spotlighted how my family fitted into the history of Iceland. Iceland was settled not only by Vikings, but by women from Ireland who were abducted from their homes, raped and enslaved. Through the middle ages and until the last century it was desperately poor, with high infant mortality, and it turns out most of my ancestors were essentially slaves on farms in the south west of Iceland.

There is, however, little or no evidence of anyone being gay.

In fact, there is little or no history of gay people in world history, with the exception of convictions, evidence of sex workers and a few musicians/composers/writers. Otherwise we have been deleted from history where we were present, but in most cases we hid our homosexuality well and never featured at all.

The way doctors have dealt with LGBTQ+ issues over time doesn’t really cover us in glory. Treating homosexuality as a disease, subjecting gay people to torturous “therapies”, discrimination against our patients and colleagues. I was at medical school in the 1990’s, and there was only one out student in the whole medical school. I really hope he never heard the comments that were made behind his back, and I stand up and applaud his bravery.

I think my homosexuality played a part in my choice of specialty too. When I was at medical school my impression of anaesthetists was of calm, cool, competent and welcoming people. They were less judgemental, and doctors training in anaesthesia were less reliant on a single referee than specialties such as surgery. In fact I think it would have been very difficult to progress in a career in surgery then as an out gay man. Even now, many of the gay surgeons I know are very quiet about their sexuality and home life.

I say “even now” – surely times are different? I really do think they are. It’s much less of an issue, and the fact that institutions like my own participate in national events like gay pride, and indeed LGBTQ+ history month shows how far we’ve come. Role models are important, and if we see it’s ok to celebrate the way we are and remember the people that campaigned to get us there, it gives us permission to be who we are. I am the first out gay Vice-President of our College, and first elected council member (my colleague Andrew Hartle was the first co-opted onto Council as the president of the Association of Anaesthetists). If you’d told me in 1998 when I came out that this is how it turned out I simply wouldn’t have believed you.

Does this mean we can sit back and relax? Quite the opposite. We must never take our human rights for granted, as people in Russia and various other countries who have rolled back their human rights can attest. There is also still a lot of discrimination woven into our practices, and particularly against trans people. We must make our patient pathways welcoming towards those who identify as LGBTQ+. We don’t have to stop talking about women in labour, but we do need to ensure that the services we provide cater for other identities and they feel well cared-for and included in our hospitals.  

When I was training, if an exam question mentioned someone gay, they invariably had HIV infection. It would be great if our educational material had us suffering from “normal” illnesses like the metabolic syndrome that my husband has. We need to be included in mainstream history, and become the role models for our future family members who may get their DNA analysis done and start looking into their family history.

Dr Helgi Johannsson
Vice President
Royal College of Anaesthetists