Journalist and campaigner Benjamin Cohen tells his LGBT story: It gets better

Benjamin Cohen (born 14 August 1982) is a journalist based in London. He campaigns on gay and disabled rights and is the publisher of Pink News. In May 2012, Cohen founded the Out4Marriage campaign for marriage equality in the United Kingdom. Benjamin is also on the Keshet UK board.

‘My personal aspirations of the future are to get married, hopefully to my partner and to have children.’

‘I don’t want to have a different life, a hedonistic life, I don’t want to have what people used to perceive as a gay life, so for me what I aspire to is to be in a stable monogamous relationship, having children, eventually having grandchildren. And that’s important to me because part of that reason is because of Judaism, the structures and rituals that made up my childhood, and it’s something I want to do with my child some day. Obviously it’s not something I can see myself doing particularly soon. Obviously it’s much harder for a male couple to have children that a heterosexual couples or a female couple particularly if you want to have your own children. You have to go through a surrogacy process. It’s complicated and it’s complicated for me because aside from being LGBT I’m also disabled as I have multiple sclerosis and  it makes it harder to adopt children because of that. I want to have a normal life, that my aspiration and I think more and more people who are LGBT especially younger people are seeing that. Being LGBT doesn’t mean being different; it means being the same as everyone else and why having equal marriage is important…opening up into that institution means our relationships can be considered in the same context as heterosexual relationships and maybe that means I can be accused of being hetero-normative, but I’m probably just normal-normative and want to have a normal life for myself in the future.’

Read the full transcript: Transcript Benjamin Cohen