It’s a real pleasure to follow Hannah Blythyn and to speak in this first opportunity that this Assembly has to celebrate LGBT history in Wales. I, once, at a Pride event in Cardiff, claimed that the Welsh had actually invented homosexuality. I prayed in aid, Emlyn Williams’s 1937 play, ‘He was Born Gay’, and indeed Ivor Novello’s musical—his last musical—’Gay’s the Word’ in 1950. Of course, they were both members of the LGBT community. In fact, Emlyn Williams wrote a very brave autobiography, a way ahead of its time, actually presenting, I think, for his time, the searing conflict for somebody who was from a mining village from north Wales in trying to reconcile the different elements in his identity—the mosaic of his identity.

In some ways, actually having a word for being who we are was the first step—the naming of things. There was power, actually, in that word: ‘gay and lesbian’, ‘LGBT’. That was the first step. But, actually knowing our history is the next necessary stage because, in some ways, we in Wales have experienced this in a different dimension: as Welsh gay and lesbian people, we have been written out of our own history—out of Welsh history. We are invisible in large tracts of time. Centuries go by. You will find the word ‘hoyw’ in the poetry of the middle ages, but of course, it’s not with its modern reference. You have to go right back, actually, to the founding period—or the founding myths—and actually some of the sneers that were thrown at us, supposedly because of their own homophobia. Actually, we are told that homosexuality was the national sin. Gildas tells us that Maelgwn Gwynedd was guilty of it. It’s repeated, of course, in Geoffrey of Monmouth and in Gerald of Wales. In fact, in reference to the Celts, you can go back as far as Aristotle. It was used as an imperial smear, and I wonder whether that, actually, has cast a shadow in terms of our relationship with our LGBT community. Ironically, of course, as we are hearing about the Synod at the moment, even John Peckham, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his series of letters to Llywelyn ein Llyw Olaf, one of the insults that he throws at Llywelyn is this repeated idea of the Welsh being homosexual. It is there, right at the beginning of our history, this smear. Ironically, of course, Edward II, the Prince of Wales that was held up in 1284, his lover is one of the icons that is outside here. They were captured together, of course, fleeing from Neath abbey to Llantrisant. Hugh Despenser the Younger was executed immediately; Edward II later. Martyrs—not the first and not the last in the history of the LGBT community worldwide, and neither here in Wales. Invisible, then, for large swathes of our time.

You get, then, to the twentieth century, and some of our writers, as I referred to: Prosser Rhys winning the crown in 1924 with a poem about his own grappling with his sexual identity. The Dictionary of Welsh Biography records it thus:

In 1924, at the national eisteddfod held at Pontypool, he won the crown for his poem ‘Atgof ‘, a poem which was unusual in its form and its content and which caused a stir at the time.’

Classic Welsh understatement. [Laughter.] It’s the poets and the writers of Wales that have to tell those untold invisible stories: the Dave Llewellyns, the Mihangel Morgans, the Dafydd James, the Sarah Waters, the Peter Gills, Roger Williams, Paul Burston, Jan Morris and others. They have to tell the stories that were unwritten. We know that we were there. If you go back to the sixth century, among the penitentiaries that are offered is, again, one for the sin of sodomy. From the sixteenth century on, we know that people in Wales were convicted wrongly for being none other than who they were. So, we have always been here. We are part of this nation. We are part of its history. And, we are part of its future too.