‘I went from marching for homosexual rights outdoors Parliament to altering legislation as MP’

A Shadow Cabinet minister has spoken about how his fight against anti-gay laws paved the way to him being interested in politics.

Steve Reed said he came out when there was a lot of “fear” around being gay. The Croydon East MP, 60, said the AIDs crisis and anti-gay legislation under Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government didn’t make it “necessarily easy”.

“As I was growing older, I realised that I was gay and that’s something you have to come to terms with,” Mr Reed told the Mirror’s Party Games YouTube show. “It wasn’t necessarily easy doing that back then. It was a time of AIDS as well. So there was a lot of fear around it.

“But you had the Thatcher government, the Conservative government, passing legislation. Section 28 was the name of the particular piece of legislation. It attacked gay people’s relationships as being pretend. I always felt: ‘Why have we got a government that wants to stop you loving who you want to love?’”

Mr Reed said he took part in protest marches outside Parliament calling on the Government to row back on Section 28, which was finally repealed in England and Wales in 2003.

“When I was elected to Parliament, which was at the very end of November 2012, just a couple of weeks later, we had the vote on equal marriage. I was in Parliament to vote through equal marriage and now I have a ring on my finger and I’m married. So that journey, going from protesting for freedom to being in Parliament to vote for freedom, just said to me politics can make a difference.”

In the video, Mr Reed also discussed his passion for cooking, including how he once took a week off work to master how to make the perfect roast potato. Party Games is a new show launched by the Mirror where an MP sits down to discuss their childhood, why they became a politician and the day-to-day life of being an MP over a familiar board game.

The new episode of Party Games is available on the Mirror’s YouTube channel now.