My first job was as a cashier in a South Manchester car park, a Saturday post I held between the ages of 14 and 19, the exact ages I was working out how being gay might pan out for me. I worked alongside the Corps of Commissionaires, a rum, witty bunch of pensioner ex-servicemen who’d shine their shoes to perfection in order to chase down local scallies trying to hotwire a tasty, second-hand Volkswagen Polo. They were great, dependable men, many widowers, committed smokers with a plentiful reserve of dirty jokes.
The boss’s best friend was local snooker-playing legend Alex “Hurricane” Higgins, whose arrival was mostly augured by swerving his bronze Jag into a specially-reserved spot as if at Brands Hatch, usually half-cut by midday. It was categorically not a gay job.
Does such a thing exist? Perusing some of the more niche results of the 2023 census, published yesterday, which for the first time has broken down the jobs most populated by a gay, lesbian and bisexual workforce, it would seem so. Predictable patterns emerge.
The gayest job, by some margin, is airline cabin crew, with as many as one in seven gay employees. Gleaned from my many years of plane travel, not to mention a disastrous job interview open day I attended at Heathrow for prospective BA stewards in my twenties, at which I turned up in a state at which the Hurricane himself might have blushed, the only shock was that the percentage was so small.
As a recent graduate determined to avoid the social hostility toward homosexuality prevalent in the mid-Nineties, the options looked far from limitless
As a slightly lost, recent graduate determined not to work anywhere that might reflect the social hostility toward homosexuality prevalent in the mid-Nineties, the options looked far from limitless. We didn’t talk about safe spaces back then. We just felt around in the dark to see where we fitted, a clumsy life jigsaw puzzle that sometimes turned out for the best, often not. Among the vast panoply of British employment, only hairdresser and firewoman looked like the failsafe options.
Next in gay job popularity 2023 is a familiar list of service industry positions, some but not all of which I’ve filled. Coffee shop assistants, theme park staff, entertainment presenters. All roughly 10 per cent gay. So pretty gay, and breakable down to my own sub-categories. Performative gays: London dungeons. Reserved gays: Starbucks. Not finding my brief tenure as an operative on a tarot card hotline on the list almost came as a relief. I’m not entirely sure that job is legal any more. Yet every man in the office was gay.
At the opposite end of this scintillatingly queer new employment data scale sit farmers, roofers and plumbers, most of which number below one per cent of openly gay employees, dashing most fantasies conjured by the sexy, Ken Loach-ish mid-2010s cinematic gay farming yarn, God’s Own Country, starring Josh O’Connor.
No huge surprise, though my partner and I did meet a delightful elderly gay couple, with an openly roving eye for the pool-attendants at a great all-inclusive in Madeira, who turned both our heads by telling us they ran a Shropshire farm. On Googling them, it turned out their homestead had been featured in extensive picture spreads with Homes & Gardens, rather dashing the stories of their rugged young trysts, of which there were many, when homosexuality itself was illegal.
Mostly, the census reminded me of some of the restrictions you put on yourself as a gay person, without even thinking about them, when making big life choices like where will I live? What will I do for a living? And will I be any good at it? In response to the lowly level of gay farmers on the census, it was good to hear a response from the head of the National Farmers Union of England and Wales, Minette Batters, mentioning inclusivity initiatives set up to correct the issue. That felt sweet and modern. Rural gayness shouldn’t be an anomaly.
I have yet to find the stats on gay chief executives, though given how much each one tends to become a diversity cause celebre, I suspect I may have been searching in vain for the sprinkling of names we already know.
For writers and authors, the percentage turned out to be a progressive eight per cent, a nice nod that perhaps I’d made one of my better, or less terrible, choices back when they didn’t seem quite so plentiful. As I pondered my time at the car park, a job I still mostly dwell on through rose-tinted recollections, I recalled it being the last place of work I hadn’t told any of my workmates I was gay. Possibly a pointer as to the necessity of this new slant to the Census. Nobody wants to be the odd one out. We all deserve work that works for us.
