Words Will Stroude
R ecalling his schooldays in the 1980s, Andrew Moffat says: “There was no question of being gay: you could not be gay. I remember a child saying, ‘All gay people should be lined up against the wall and shot’, and the whole class clapping. But this isn’t unique. Every gay person I’ve talked to had a tough time at school.”
Three decades on, and 47-year-old Andrew, now the assistant-head teacher of Parkield Community School in Birmingham and happily married to his partner David, is on a mission to ensure new generations of LGBTQ children don’t grow up facing the bullying, hostility and shame he was forced to endure. “I don’t want any child to go through that, those years of self-hatred,” he explains. “And how do you stop it? By teaching children that there are different people, different families, and that that is fantastic.”