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Coming Out

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19 August 2014

By Lauren H

After coming out gay in a whole school assembly in 2010, David Weston, a former teacher at Watford Grammar, received a heart-warming message from a student four years later.

Speaking to B**P, David revealed why he decided to do the assembly, saying, “I had 4 years of being really ill. My mum had died from lung cancer and I was diagnosed with a really rare liver condition. I was going downhill and had to get a transplant at the beginning of 2009. As I was recovering from that I saw the film Milk – one of the things said in the film was that everyone needs to come out because the more people know someone gay the less fearful they will be. It really inspired me and I thought that I’d been given a second chance at life with an amazing gift from someone of donating an organ. I spoke to the head teacher and he was hugely supportive. I said that if people asked me I would be honest and do some assemblies on homophobic language and the gay legislation.”

 

4 years after coming out, a former pupil messaged David on LinkedIn after finding his profile:

hi david

 

After receiving the message, he posted it online via Twitter, later stating, “I wrote back then thought I would put a clip of it on as a lot of teachers follow me and I thought they’d like to see a nice message and then it took off”. To David’s surprise, the tweet has so far had over 4,500 retweets and almost 6,000 favourites, showing just how amazing people saw this to be.

 

Continuing, David says, “Now that I’ve been able to think about it a bit, it’s made me realise that there are a lot of teachers out there who are still in the closet and the more I think about it I think we actually need to help teachers to come out in schools. I’m pondering what’s next now, and how we can help teachers come out.” In addition to this forward thinking, he already has his own charity, founded by teachers, in the hope to improve children’s lives through great teaching. This can be found at http://tdtrust.org/.

 

 

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