My chat with Mike Buonaiuto about LGBT issues

This week, I had a chat with Mike Buonaiuto. I work with Mike at Shape History, a social change company. He started Shape History just over a year ago. Since I first met Mike, I’ve come to realise that he has an incredible amount of passion and drive to create social good. One of the issues that Mike is determined to change, is the way in which LGBT people are seen across the world. I remember having a chat on my first or second week at Shape History with Mike at a pub (where all good conversations take place). We somehow got onto the topic of being gay, but in particular, language, categorisation and stigma. The conversation that we had was too good to keep to ourselves (well, what Mike had to say anyway). Mike’s enthusiasm of LGBT issues, coupled with his own personal experiences, combined with me sucking up to him, I thought that this week, it was a good idea to expand our little chat in the pub.

 I wanted to start by asking you about your own experience with being gay and the story of when you first ‘came out’?

The interesting thing about coming out is that you never stop coming out. When you start talking about your first time coming out, it’s obviously the most important because it’s most likely to be the people you care most about. Telling your loved ones is far more likely to be more momentous than telling the shop assistant when you’re buying flowers and they say “hey, nice bunch of flowers for your girlfriend”. You then have to question whether you want to actually come out again. It’s a pivotal moment and I think that given my personality, I take every moment to do it because it forces people to question their outlooks on gender and sexuality; the norms and what is acceptable and what isn’t.

I came out to my parents when I was 19. My dad was from a very strict Italian background, my mum, British. What was fascinating was that my dad was far more accepting of it at first than my mum was. This wasn’t because either of them had a problem with it but because my mum and I have such a close relationship and she felt very hurt that there was a ‘secret’, as it were, that I had kept from her when she thought that I could tell her absolutely anything. In essence, that was it.