Why caring Keith is a listening ear for troubled farmers

But that’s exactly what Canon Keith Ineson experienced after he set up his award-winning ‘Gay Farmer Helpline’ - the only service of it’s kind in the UK to support men in isolated rural communities struggling with their sexuality.

In fact, the Cheshire born man, who now lives in Dromara with his husband, says that there have been a “fair few” farmers who have expressed similar sentiments since he set up the helpline.

It’s a sobering thought, but Keith says that the sad reality is that farming is a profession which already has a high suicide and depression rate due to a number of factors.

That’s why the work he does to reach out to those farmers, who are feeling isolated both physically and emotionally, is so vitally important.

The 68-year-old, who grew up in a farming family and realised he himself was gay at the age of 12, but kept it a secret until he was 50, set up Gayfarmer.co.uk for gay farmers suffering mental health issues and feeling lonely or isolated, after founding Cheshire’s Agricultural Chaplaincy Team in 2000, which had initially brought him into contact with many gay farmers who were feeling this way.

And having felt forced to keep his sexuality concealed for most of his life, Keith knew exactly how so many of those farmers felt, and could empathise with what they were going through.

“I come from a Salvation Army family and my parents were very ecumenical,” Keith recalls.

“However, for their time, they were very forward thinking. For example when my father was running the Sunday School, he used to insist on the Catholics being involved as well.

“So it was very much a liberal type of family in one sense, although my father was quite homophobic as well, and so I kept my sexuality well under wraps until I was about 50.”

Unsurprisingly, the weight of such a burden affected Keith’s mental health greatly, and when he was just 14, his worried father arranged for him to see his GP, after displaying all the signs of the onset of depression.

But even sitting in front of his doctor, Keith couldn’t open up and tell him what was really ‘wrong’.

“I was quiet all the time, I didn’t want to go anywhere - it was very difficult,” he says of that period of his young life.

“I got on like a house on fire with my father, we were always very close, but there was always this worry at the back of my mind because I knew he was anti-gay.

“If I had mentioned it to him, would he have said, ‘well, this is my lad, everything is alright’, or would he have just turned against me completely? I had no way of telling.

“And of course in a sense - and I don’t know this because my father is dead now, and I never will know - but perhaps he had realised that there was something different about me.

“And of course it was still illegal back then, so it might even be that he was protecting me. I’ll never know now.”

Keith coped by throwing himself into his farming work, and of course, looking back, he believes now that it was all part of his journey to faith, and has gifted him with that empathy for other gay men - one in four of which, it has been disturbingly revealed, will try to take their own lives at some point.

“Because I had suffered from depression, I understood what farmers were feeling like. I knew what it was like for people to say to you, ‘well, you can take a day off at Christmas,’ and you want to say well no, the cows will still need to be milked.

“I also understood how difficult it was to be gay in the farming community.”

Indeed, it’s well documented that some farmers struggle with their mental health, and Keith believes there is a variety of reasons for this.

“First of all, it’s a very macho industry, and secondly - it can be lonely. If you live in the middle of Belfast or Manchester, you have access to gay areas. If you live up in the mountains of Mourne, you don’t.

“You can’t go away for the weekend at all because you’ve got stock to look after, so if you go out and about you’ve got to be back early to do the milking. You can’t leave until you’ve done the feeding in the morning.

“It’s a very restrictive life. And of course everybody knows everybody else in the farming community, and the chances are if you go to the doctor with worries about your sexuality, your mother knows the receptionist.

“It’s a very close knit community and folk are just worried about other people finding out.

“One in four gay men will attempt suicide at some time in their lives, plus the farming community already has a high suicide rate, you’ve got the two together, and it really is a recipe for disaster.”

Keith set up the helpline after heading up the Salvation Army’s Agricultural Chaplaincy, which he founded in his native Cheshire.

“About 10 years into the chaplaincy I realised I was working with some gay farmers,” he says.

“And I thought how you never heard much about gay farmers, they mustn’t exist. But of course they exist - as much as they do in any other occupation.

“So I put the feelers out and checked out how many farmers there were likely to be in Cheshire. I worked on the basis that more than half were likely to be male.

“I used government statistics to calculate that about seven per cent of men are gay, and we ended up with 300 gay farmers or farm workers in Cheshire, and of course I didn’t know any of them, which just shows how secretive it all is.”

The helpline was launched via a mobile phone number and a single advert in the Farmers Guardian.

Much to Keith’s surprise, the first calls started to come immediately.

“I had expected it to take a few years before it would take off,” he admits.

“I can still remember that very first caller. There was nothing really exceptional about him apart from the fact that he was very lonely and he thought that he was the only gay farmer in the world.”

Keith says that farmers will phone in with all sorts of problems they want to talk about.

“You get some that I call practical, for example men who want to know where gay ‘areas’ are; then I had one caller who rang up after being with a man for the first time in his life.

“He had had unprotected sex and thought he was going to die of AIDS. I was able to point him in the direction of his local sexual health clinic to get tested.

“He rang me back and said they had all been wonderful, they hadn’t batted an eyelid, they were efficient - and I’m clear.

“Then you get others who are just lonely. I remember one guy who called, he was from the Scottish highlands and a member of a very fundamental church. He was a real mess.

“You also get men who have a partner but are already married. I had one man whose partner had died of cancer but of course he couldn’t mourn for him, because nobody knew that he existed.

“The average caller will be in his 50s, married with children, having been almost forced to do so because of pressure to keep the farm in the family.

“Then they get to their 50s and they think - what have I gone and done? I might have another 30 years ahead of me.

“And in the majority of cases, they are thinking, ‘I don’t want to hurt her, she’s not a bad woman, I just shouldn’t have married her.’

“And again the mental health issues that go hand in hand with that are enormous.”

Keith’s stories are spine-tinglingly sombre and desperately sad, and all he wants to do is raise awareness of his helpline, and let farmers know there is a listening ear for them to turn to.

And his message to Ulster farmers who may be in need of that ear is a simple one: “For Heaven’s sake talk to somebody.”