King Charles has made his first appearance at an event that has a connection to the LGBT communities.
On Monday the monarch attended the United Kingdoms first memorial to LGBT service personnel where he laid a wreath of remembrance and spoke to veterans.
Among those attending were veterans whose careers had been cut short when it had been discovered that they were same sex attracted at a time when homosexuality was banned from the armed forces.
King Charles attendance at an LGBT related event comes three years into his reign. By comparison his mother Queen Elizabeth II went decades before she even said the words gay or lesbian.
During her 2003 opening of parliament the Queen said the words “same sex couples” for the first time when she announced the government’s plan to introduce civil unions. It would be more than a decade before she was publicly heard saying other words related to the LGBTIQA+ communities.
It was not until 2014 that the Queen publicly said the words “gay” or “lesbian”. As London’s Gay and Lesbian Switchboard celebrated their 40th anniversary, the Queen made history by acknowledging their existence. Sixty-two years after she took up her role.
While Australia allowed gay people to serve opening in the military in the early 1990s under the Keating government, Britain did not remove its ban until early 2000. In 2023 UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak delivered a historic apology for those affected by the former policy.
The new memorial is titled An Open Letter, and it looks like a crumpled bronze letter. The letter inscribed on the sculpture is made up of quotes from people who were affected by the ban on gay people serving.
