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Phillip Schofield, right, and his This Morning co-host Holly Willoughby.
Coming out on air: Phillip Schofield, right, with his This Morning co-host Holly Willoughby. Photograph: S Meddle/ITV/Rex/Shutterstock
Coming out on air: Phillip Schofield, right, with his This Morning co-host Holly Willoughby. Photograph: S Meddle/ITV/Rex/Shutterstock

Phillip Schofield gay? Presidential contender gay? And who cares?

This article is more than 4 years old

Coming out won’t dim Phillip Schofield’s starry TV career. And look at Pete Buttigieg’s Iowa caucus results

Phillip Schofield left his niche as a children’s TV presenter and became a national star in 1992. He’d secured the part of a Technicolor-coated Joseph in a London Palladium revival of the Lloyd Webber musical.

If Schofield resolved at that time, either consciously or subconsciously, to suppress any emerging sense of being homosexual it’s unsurprising. Jason Donovan, his predecessor in the production, was in the middle of suing the Face magazine for libel for what Donovan’s barrister described as the “poisonous slur” of suggesting his client might be gay.

The young Schofield might have taken heart, however, for Britain was already changing. In 1995, Michael Barrymore, one of ITV’s most bankable stars, came out too (some time before a swimming pool tragedy changed his life story). Some speculated that his career would not survive.

Then, and things have not changed hugely since, many senior executives from both the BBC and commercial television lived in posh London squares and loved in posh London triangles. But most imagined that the wider viewing public did not share their own modern approach to personal morality.

Millions of people doggedly proved them wrong. Year after year, Barrymore continued to win a catalogue of prizes at the National Television awards. The prizes were not voted for by TV glitterati, who were oddly no longer Barrymore’s “friends”, but by TV audiences.

Nowadays, daytime viewers of This Morning, Schofield’s billet for almost two decades, are evidently much wiser than TV executives once took them to be. And more open-minded.

Same-sex relationships, transgender happinesses and intimate infections are among the award-winning programme’s staples. The show recently featured a mid-morning health segment entitled “Should you give up toilet rolls?”. After the benefits of bidets and the dangers of “faecal particles, especially in hairy men” had been highlighted, the greatest concern expressed by viewers who contacted the show live was not one of bad taste but – in the spirit of the times – whether wet wipes might not be biodegradable.

So, happily, two million This Morning viewers will barely have blinked at Schofield coming out on air last Friday. Just as millions don’t blink any more at the idea of Ian McKellen, Clare Balding or Miriam Margolyes being lesbian or gay. Fifteen years after every Briton was obliged to start acknowledging that someone they knew somewhere had entered a civil partnership, – whether a lollypop lady in Luton, a plumber in Portsmouth or a company sergeant major from Catterick – there has been a recognition that countless ordinary folk are quietly living in same-sex relationships in this country, notwithstanding the prejudice that some still face.

The sociological plates have shifted in Iowa too. If you were an American searching for someone to introduce to your parents as new husband material, Pete Buttigieg, 38, might have come from central casting. He’s handsome, intelligent, hard working, devoutly religious, has an impish sense of humour, a puckish nose and, in 2014, was willing to step down from his mayoral duties in middle America to serve in Afghanistan with the US navy reserve.

Pete Buttigieg speaks during a Democratic presidential primary debate on 7 February 2020. Photograph: Elise Amendola/AP

The only inconvenient truth about “Mayor Pete” and his presidential ambitions is that while he enjoys an apparently happy and monogamous marriage (something not entirely commonplace among leaders of the Anglo-Saxon world) his spouse is male too.

Until now, that had appeared to disqualify him from success, not least in the minds of some Democrats who might otherwise have thought of endorsing someone from a minority and immigrant background. Unpicking the data from Iowa, once it was eventually available, the starkest thing about Buttigieg’s victory – slim but epochal – over Bernie Sanders was that he cleaned up in rural areas, inhabited by precisely the sort of folk who, Democrat or not, are said not to be prepared to vote for someone gay.

Some Democrats may now be reflecting that if you propose to run Sanders on a 20th-century socialist ticket you’re not sure he can sell, then you might as well run Buttigieg on a 21st-century ticket that would almost certainly galvanise millions of middle-of-the-road young Americans – as in Britain, much less twitchy about sex than their grandparents – into engaging in politics.

That sort of tide helped Barack Obama secure the presidency in 2008. In 2015 and 2018, it saw thousands of young Irish people return from abroad to vote in same-sex marriage and abortion referendums that they thought – rightly – would help signally change their home nation.

Just as most Americans have in recent years reconciled themselves to Rock Hudson being gay and Ellen DeGeneres being lesbian, they have also – courtesy of the supreme court in 2015 – been undergoing exactly the same sort of quiet political education that civil partnership provided in Britain. Policewomen in Pennsylvania, schoolteachers in South Dakota and veterans in Vermont have all publicly married same-sex partners. Neither the sky nor the stock market has fallen in. The frontier in the battle for equality has moved.

If we do this autumn witness a presidential debate between Buttigieg and Donald Trump and the latter hints at their personal differences, a temptation he would surely find almost impossible to resist, Buttigieg could retort that when called on by his country he went to Afghanistan; Trump dodged the draft. While this president might never have taken himself to a frontline voluntarily, the frontline in an important culture war may now, courtesy of Mayor Pete’s rising star, be coming to him.

Ben Summerskill was chief executive of Stonewall from 2003-2014

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