For years, Angela Eagle was the only out lesbian in parliament. The MP for Wallasey, she was a pensions minister during the Brown government and is now the only LGBT person in the shadow cabinet.
PinkNews.co.uk caught up with her to ask about the future of LGBT equality, feminism and her makeover.
After accusing David Cameron of “patronising” her in the Commons by telling her to “calm down, dear”, Eagle is no fan of the prime minister’s sense of humour.
She isn’t impressed by his joke at the recent LGBT reception about gay actor Sir Ian McKellen being a “queen” and says: “Doesn’t he realise that if you refer to yourself as a queen and you’re gay, it’s totally different than if a heterosexual person calls you a queen?
“Everyone else has got to have a sense of humour about his rather odd jokes. I think it betrays a bit more than he might want to be known about his approach to these things.”
She says he did not apologise for the Michael Winner-inspired ‘calm down’ remark, which earned her support from female colleagues in Labour, but ridicule from others.
For years, she was the only out lesbian in parliament. Now, Conservative MP Margot James and MSP Ruth Davidson are also out.
On whether lesbians are represented well enough, Eagle says this is a problem for women in general.
“It’s about women’s visibility as well as lesbians’ visibility. In politics and as you get to the more powerful end of life, politics, corporate life, there are fewer and fewer women and I think that also translates into gay life as well.
“And so I’m not sure that it’s about lesbians or gay men, it’s actually about gender and the way women find it hard to be in positions of influence or power across the whole of our society.”
Fittingly, she backs her colleague Harriet Harman’s calls to ensure that a woman is always the leader or deputy leader of the Labour Party.
She bristles at the term “positive discrimination”, calling it “pejorative”.
Instead, she says: “I think the issue is about level playing fields and I think, in a lot of power structures, you get to the situation where there’s a un-level playing field and you’ve got to do something to put that right.
“It’s not always deliberate, I’m not saying it’s always men spending their time excluding women, but what happens is that structures tend to replicate themselves, [something that is] particularly true in the Houses of Parliament. And sometimes you have to disrupt that to create openings for equality and more equal access.”
Eagle’s twin Maria is also a Labour MP, formerly a minister, and the pair’s lives have followed remarkably similar paths.
Indeed, to some newspapers and commentators, the only discernible difference between the two is their sexuality.
But Eagle says that as a teenager, she focused on other aspects of her personality.
She says: “I’ve spent my whole life being interested in equality issues and it started off with women’s issues, before I really knew i was gay … Well I probably knew when I was a teenager but I didn’t do a lot about it. I think I wanted to spend time establishing other forms of my identity and being, you know, getting a proper education, sorting my views out on things, so I sort of let it lie a bit until I was a bit older.
“I mean, I think it’s fantastic that young teenagers now can be open about their sexual orientation but when I was growing up in the seventies and eighties, it wasn’t exactly a very nice atmosphere, there was a lot of homophobia around.”
Does she ever suffer homophobia now? “Largely not.”
I ask what rights she feels LGBT people have yet to gain.
