A gay member of the British Royal Family is sharing some insider details about the inner workings of the group.
Last year, we shared with you the joyous news of Lord Ivar Mountbatten getting married to his longtime boyfriend James Coyle. This marked the first gay marriage in the Royal Family. And now, Mountbatten is opening up about life as a married man and as a cousin to the main branch of the royal family.
While talking to the British magazine Tatler, Lord Ivar Mountbatten shared that he honestly doesn’t know how his third cousin Queen Elizabeth II and her family feel about his wedding and same-sex marriage.
“They don’t really talk about it,” he said. “I mean, the royals, they don’t communicate very well.”
That said, Lord Ivar says his mother, Janet, has been fully supportive of him and his relationship.
“The older generation of my family have seen and done it all before,” she said. “My aunt Nada was a lesbian. You’ve got to try everything once, that’s what my mother always said.”
Honestly, its not too surprising that Mountbatten hasn’t intimately talked to his cousins about his relationship. Not all family members, and cousins specifically, have to be or are close. And with the universal pressure of being a member of the British Royal Family, that fact means double.
But, we do know that some members of the main branch family are supportive of LGBTQ people. In 2018, Prince Harry and Dutchess Meghan Markle spoke to delegates at the Commonwealth Youth Forum in England about expressing their support of LGBTQ people.
Australian Jacob Thomas, who won a Queen’s Young Leaders award for helping to reduce the suicide rate within the LBGTQ community in Australia, told reporters later that, “Miss Markle said, and these were her exact words, ‘This is a basic human rights issue, not one about sexuality.’”
“Prince Harry said that what was so amazing was that 10 or so years ago, we wouldn’t have been having this conversation and how incredible it was that we now were,” Jacob added.
The couple also had a pro-LGBTQ bishop provide over their wedding.
Prince William also recently expressed that he’d be “obviously absolutely fine” if his kids came out as gay.
“Do you know what, I’ve been giving that some thought recently because a couple of other parents said that to me as well,” said the prince in response to being asked about potential gay children. “I think, you really don’t start thinking about that until you are a parent, and I think – obviously absolutely fine by me.”
The prince then went on to comment on how his main concern as a parent is the well-being and happiness of his kids.
“The one thing I’d be worried about is how they, particularly the roles my children fill, is how that is going to be interpreted and seen,” he commented. “So Catherine and I have been doing a lot of talking about it to make sure they were prepared. I think communication is so important with everything, in order to help understand it you’ve got to talk a lot about stuff and make sure how to support each other and how to go through the process.”
But, William is also concerned for how the media and the public would treat his hypothetical gay children.
“It worries me not because of them being gay, it worries me as to how everyone else will react and perceive it and then the pressure is then on them,” said the prince.
So while Lord Mountbatten may not be sure how his cousins feel about his wedding, it appears they should be perfectly fine with it.
Strictly speaking he is related to the royal family but he is not a member proper of the royal family. That would include the queen, her husband, their children, grandchildren and great grand children, her sister’s children, and the immediate relatives of the previous monarch which would be the queen’s first cousins. The spouses of any of the royal family would also be considered the Royal Family. Outside of the first degree of kinship make you a member of the family, but you are not a royal.