When Hillary Clinton was appointed Consul Minister of Wales gay with foreign leader

In a different direction, a conversation took place between Hillary Clinton and the Welsh government minister, Jeremy Miles.

The former US Secretary of State was sitting next to Miles at a party at Swansea University when their conversation began. The Welsh official thanked her for mentioning gay rights during her speech, before telling her she was the Welsh government’s first openly gay minister.

Denying Miles the position of consul, Hillary Clinton

Then Hillary Clinton asked him if he had a partner and seemed ready to introduce her friends to him.

“I asked if I had a partner — I was newly single at the time — and she very kindly offered to introduce me to some of her friends. Among them — I won’t name him — a world leader. I didn’t say yes, I thought that would be a step forward,” Miles revealed.

The Welsh Minister for Education and the Language, speaking on BBC Radio’s Wellcast, said he faced a lack of positive gay role models and that his family “didn’t talk about that period at all”.

“I knew I was different, and I wasn’t sure exactly how, but I knew I was different. And obviously, once I became a teenager, I had a much stronger sense of being gay, but you didn’t see that anywhere, and they never talked about it at school.

My family never talked about it. And when I came out much later, it was very painful,” she recalls.

Miles later revealed that “there was a long time I would give anything to not feel that way. I used to go to bed and pray I wasn’t gay.”

“That has changed now, obviously, thank God. But these things leave their mark. And I think if I look back on my youth, I think it probably affected my confidence and my sense of what I could achieve.”

Miles’ involvement in politics began at the age of 16, when he joined the Labor Party, before studying law at New College, Oxford.

Now as Minister for Education, Miles said his ordeals as a teenager led him to believe: “to create a comprehensive school and university”.

“You have to be able to see yourself, your feelings, and your place in the world somehow reflected in the life of the school,” Miles said.

He said the Welsh government was currently looking into “guidance to support schools, to support trans youth and the school community at large”, which he hoped would be published before the end of the year.