It was only when strangers started hugging him in the street that Dan Harry fully appreciated what his appearance on the UK’s first all-gay dating show had meant.
“People would get really emotional, saying: ‘Thank you for what you’ve done for this community,’ and I don’t necessarily see it like that. I just went on holiday and kissed some boys,” says the 27-year-old who grew up in Coatbridge, North Lanarkshire, and now lives in London.
“But when you hear from people who have never seen themselves on TV before, never heard their stories told, you realise it’s not just another dating show.”
The BBC reality show I Kissed a Boy, which was filmed in Italy and screened over the summer, followed a familiar format of matchmaking contestants in sunny climes but earned particular praise for its sex positivity, (relative) diversity of body type and the occasional sharp social observation around the poolside.
Harry is now lending his voice to calls for concerted action to tackle hate crime, as he warns that morale in the UK’s LGBTQ+ community – particularly after the recent Conservative conference – has “never felt lower”.
He has teamed up with the charity Stonewall to challenge the UK government to improve strategy and data collection around hate crime, after Home Office figures revealed last week that hate crimes against transgender people had risen to a record high in the past year. Although the same report found that homophobic hate crime had fallen by 6% over the same period, the LGBTQ+ anti-abuse charity Galop suggested the figures reflected a lack of trust in the criminal justice process.
Just over a year ago, Harry was surrounded by a group of three young men on a platform at King’s Cross tube station in London who called him homophobic slurs and threatened to push him in front of a train. He recalls escaping by running to the other end of the platform as a tube arrived but the gang continued to search the carriages for him. None of his fellow passengers intervened or offered support.
He chose not to report the incident – “I just wanted to put it behind me” – something he now regrets. “Hopefully I can encourage other people to speak about their own experiences because ultimately we want to paint the most accurate picture we can of hate crime in the UK.”
Harry is quick to differentiate experiences within the LGBTQ+ community. “As a cisgender, white man I get through life more or less fine. But there are members of the community who are more vulnerable than myself, such as people of colour, or the trans community. Those are the ones where I imagine it’s hard to walk down the street right now and not feel like they are a target – because targets have been put on their backs by political leaders and by certain parts of the media.”
Harry is especially vexed after the prime minister’s remarks in his closing speech to the Tory party conference that the country “shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be”.
Harry said: “All it takes is for someone like [Rishi] Sunak to say that and it emboldens Joe and Jean in Derby to think they can have these beliefs really strongly and vocally. It does provoke violence and aggression towards trans people who represent such a small percentage of the population.”
Harry is also a volunteer for a crucial HIV vaccine trial run by leading specialists at the St Stephen’s Centre at the Chelsea and Westminster hospital in London. He is one of five volunteers receiving an experimental dose three times over the course of 13 months, undergoing regular tests to determine whether they are producing antibodies.
“I feel a lot of gratitude towards the generations of my community who have come before me. There are so many rights that I wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for them sometimes literally fighting in the streets for them and also I acknowledge that they were most affected by HIV.”
While scientific advances mean that a diagnosis of HIV is no longer a death sentence but can be a manageable chronic condition, Harry also points out that this does not apply uniformly around the world: “Your average gay guy living in London can easily pick up PrEP [the medicine used to reduce the risk of infection, available at sexual health clinics in the UK], but it’s not like that across the developing world.”
