Dame Kelly Holmes has spoken out how scared she was to come out as gay, carrying a 'fear of jail' for years.
Serving from 1988 to 1997, the two-time Olympic gold medal winner recalled how her room was ‘ransacked’ and she was ‘interrogated’ over the possibility of being gay, as prior to 2000, the armed forces had a ban in place against homosexuality, before the archaic law was changed.– explained that the fear she had of going to jail continued to impact her when she continued keeping her true identity hidden from the public.
‘I was scared that if I ever came out and admitted being gay while I served, that I could still go to jail. That was how my head had created this wall and barrier.’As fellow Loose Women presenter Janet Street-Porter shook her head in disbelief, Dame Kelly outlined how people’s relatives who served in the army might still be affected by similar worries.
‘People that have served have lived with this in their DNA for so long. I want people to now come out, because I’m finally free of that. It took a lot of years.’Dame Kelly is promoting a campaign calling for military personnel who were affected by the ban between 1967 to 2000 to come forward with their stories, stressing that it would be for an independent review and ‘no one will know who you are’, with the review being independent from the military, the Ministry of Defence and the government.
Dame Kelly outlined how they’ve discovered people who were impacted by the ban who are homeless, were sexually abused, blackmailed, verbally abuse, had their pensions scrapped and haven’t had a job since, losing ‘every part of who they are as a person’.
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