LOVE is LOVE? It's different for everyone

As a gay parent, Lotte Jeffs is simply encouraging her five-year-old daughter to follow her heart

My five-year-old daughter is adamant that she is going to marry her best friend Sophie when she’s older. They’ve got it all planned out. Sophie will carry the baby in her tummy because my daughter Olive doesn’t want the operation (she knows she was born via a Caesarean). But Olive will be the one to look after the baby at home while Sophie goes out to work. Because work, she believes, is boring.

My first instinct when she told me this was to panic – what if Sophie has had the same conversation with her parents and it looks like my wife Jenny and I are pushing some kind of queer life onto our daughter and her friends? It’s remarkable that however content and proud I am as a lifelong member of the LGBTQ community (yep, the ‘L’ pretty much stands for Lotte), there are often instances like this where deep-rooted gay shame rears its head.

I’m in my 40s and grew up in the era of Section 28 when schools were prohibited from even mentioning that queer people exist, let alone might have relationships or families. If it wasn’t for my best friend Will coming out as gay when he was 14, and inviting me along to an LGBT youth club, I wouldn't have had any reference points for my own burgeoning sexuality.

Thankfully, although I grew up with liberal, curious parents in the centre of London, I wasn't naive enough to think this was the norm. The way celebrities were outed against their will in the press, coupled with the lack of representation across the media, meant that being openly queer in the 1990s felt subversive and dangerous in a way it really isn't.