Ivan Massow

Ivan Massow

Ivan Massow (born 11 September 1967 in Brighton as Ivan Field) is a British entrepreneur and gay rights advocate, best known for founding one of the UK's first financial services companies explicitly targeting gay clients.

Early life

Born Ivan Field in Brighton in 1967, Massow had an unsettled childhood, moving through multiple families before being adopted by John Massow in his pre-teens. Dyslexic, he left school at 16 with few qualifications, later obtaining a BTEC in art and design.

Gay Money: a pioneering business

Massow launched Ivan Massow Associates in the early 1990s to serve a community that mainstream financial institutions were systematically refusing to help. At the time, most residential mortgages in the UK required linked life assurance – but insurers, alarmed by the AIDS crisis, were routinely declining gay men as too great a risk, or loading premiums to unaffordable levels. The effect was to lock gay men out of home ownership altogether.

Massow built a business around this gap. He developed detailed knowledge of what insurers were and were not legally entitled to ask, and how to structure applications in a way that met underwriters' requirements. Clients who had been turned away by high street lenders could, through his firm, secure both life assurance and the mortgages that depended on it. The tagline – "Gay Money, Straight Advice" – captured the proposition exactly.

The business grew rapidly through the 1990s. By 1997 Ivan Massow Associates had expanded beyond London; Massow was voted Man of the Year by the Pink Paper in 1996 and the firm had become the leading independent financial adviser serving the LGBT community in the UK.

Institute of Contemporary Arts

In 1999 Massow became chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. In January 2002 he contributed an article to the New Statesman describing much contemporary conceptual art as "pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat." The ICA board unanimously requested his resignation the following month.

Politics

Massow joined the Young Conservatives as a teenager. He was a member of the Conservative Party for much of his adult life and in his early career shared a flat with Michael Gove and Nicholas Boles. In 2000 he briefly left the Conservatives to join the Labour Party, stating that he hoped the move would draw attention to the Conservative-backed Section 28 and press for its repeal, before returning to the party.

In 2016 he sought the Conservative nomination for Mayor of London but was unsuccessful. Following the Brexit referendum, he joined the Liberal Democrats later that year.

Personal life

In 1996 his boyfriend Jamie died by suicide. Massow subsequently struggled with alcoholism, achieving sobriety in 2008. In 2010 he suffered a serious aneurysm requiring emergency surgery. He lives in Hoxton, London.

Massow is an enthusiastic horseman and fox hunter, and has served as Master of the Southdown and Eridge Hunt.

Advertisement

Ivan Massow Associates advertisement from 1994, when the firm opened its Edinburgh office. "Gay Money, Straight Advice." Photo and advert by Jonathan Harbourne.

External links

• Personal website