Stephen Wall
Stephen Wall (Selwyn, 1965), in his own words:
“As a shy introvert, coming from a strict Roman Catholic school, I tried to kid myself that my attraction to one of my (subsequently lifelong) friends at Selwyn College in the late 1960s was just because I had not met the right girl. From Cambridge, I went into the Foreign Office (FCO) and lied when asked in my security vetting whether I had any homosexual tendencies. Until I was 20, it was a crime to be queer, and it remained a bar to employment in the Foreign Office until the early 1990s.
“I was sent by John Major (for whom I had worked in No 10) to be the UK’s ambassador to the EU from 1995-2000. After I finally came out in 2009, I discussed with John Major how politically difficult it would have been to post an openly gay man to that job at that time.
I worked for seven years with the Kaleidoscope Trust, supporting LGBT activists in Commonwealth countries where it is still a crime to be gay, and I was happily married, until his death three years ago, to Ted Sumner, a former leading paediatric anaesthetist and intensivist at Great Ormond Street hospital. He, too, had been forced to conceal his sexuality throughout his career for fear of dismissal. Ted used to say that being gay was a superior form of existence. He was the doctor, so how could I disagree with the diagnosis?”
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The photo shows Stephen with LGBT+ Olympian Tom Daly.