A week before I interview Ben Summerskill at the Stonewall offices, I hear him give an impassioned speech in support of marriage equality at the annual Stonewall fundraising dinner. Afterwards, the poet Jackie Kay described it as one of the best speeches on human rights she had ever heard.
Summerskill is modest when I mention it, but proud of the gains made in the nine years he's been chief executive of Stonewall. It's a period in which there have been many advancements in the fight for full equality for LGBT people in the UK. What does he think are the key changes? "I think the legal protections in employment, in terms of the practical impact on people's lives, were probably more important than people realised at the time. People couldn't be bullied out of their jobs any more, or summarily sacked, as was often the case. And I think the other significant change was securing civil partnerships, with all the rights and entitlements of marriage."
Clearly, this is still a hot topic as many lesbians and gay men regard marriage as an equality issue and civil partnerships as part of a two-tier system with one law for them and another for heterosexuals. "Securing the term "marriage" is the final part of the jigsaw," agrees Summerskill. "The issue around marriage for some lesbian and gay people is largely symbolic. Others feel strongly that they should be allowed to describe the formal framework of their relationship and the context in which their children may be growing up, in exactly the same way as heterosexuals. In terms of the religious issue, Stonewall's draft bill makes it clear that religious denominations should have the right to celebrate gay marriages just as they celebrate gay civil partnerships. It's actually an issue of religious freedom."
Equally high on the agenda is homophobic bullying at school. "We need to address homophobia in schools," says Summerskill. "And the way some schools have started to address this would have been unthinkable 10 years ago or even five years ago. The fact that we now have our 'Different Families' materials in almost 5,000 primary schools is pretty remarkable. But more work needs to be done." Looking beyond the UK, Summerskill believes passionately that: "having secured a pretty clement legislative framework in this country, we do now have an obligation to try and see that replicated around the world. It's often too easy to forget how oppressive a legislative regime that criminalises you as a matter of fact is to all lesbian, gay and bisexual people."
With this in mind, Stonewall are developing a workplace guide in partnership with Google, whereby 'discrimination or harassment on the grounds of sexual orientation while working overseas' will be the responsibility of the employer, whether based here or abroad. This will be followed up at the European Diversity Conference on Thursday 20 September.
"We're delighted to be working with Google," says Summerskill. "It's an opportunity to see how employers working around the world can provide leverage in the countries they're working in to promote equality. And from that point of view, it's great that Google are involved. They have a huge international reach and they've been very proactive and assertive about the issue. They're gone beyond just saying, "we'll support lesbian and gay staff if they happen to be working in this environment" to saying, "we think the environment should change". That's a significant step forward, and one we should all applaud."
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