UK’s secret LGBT island community that wasn’t known about for decades As a teacher, a councillor and even a local mayor, Robin Ford was a public figure on an island where ‘everyone knows everyone’.
The social stigma against homosexuality across the 147 square mile island led Robin to years of repression, ‘denial and reversal’, including seven years married to women in the late 1960s and ’70s.
Robin, now 82, remembers the sense of realisation and shame when he first came across the word ‘homosexual’ in 1955 on the island.
What everyone did not know was his crucial role as the gatekeeper for an ‘underground’ community and his ‘great unmentionable’ secret that he was gay.
I felt very pleased, but I found it all very difficult to live with after that first exhilaration,’ Robin said.
