University Provost reflects on changing attitudes to sexuality on campus over thirty years
As LGBT+ history month draws to a close, University Provost Professor Mark Peel has spoken about his personal experience of the changing attitudes towards sexuality on university campuses in a piece for the Times Higher Education, which is reposted on the University Leadership Team Blog.
This year marks 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England and Wales and universities across the country have been reflecting on the achievements for equality in that time. In his writing, Professor Peel reflects upon his own experience working in Australian Higher Education in the 1980s, keeping his sexual orientation to himself, and seeing such a great change over the years that he now regards his sexual identity as an asset in his work.
He also discusses the University's own programme of wide-ranging events for staff, students and the general public for LGBT+ month this year, and his feelings that these events could well have been deemed illegal or distasteful in the not-too-distant past.