Blog - Chris Creegan

Ending new HIV transmission in the UK by 2030 is within our grasp — we must not fail

01/12/2024

It’s World AIDS Day again. For those of us who lived, loved and lost through the 1980s and 1990s, it is an opportunity to recall the lives of those who didn’t make it through that hell. It matters that we remember the dead. The past is not a foreign country. It is a place we inhabit still. […]

How I became an assisted dying advocate — and why Westminster Parliamentarians must stand up for choice at the end of life

29/11/2024

On balance the choice of an assisted death is probably not one I would make for myself. That may sound like a curious way for an advocate of assisted dying to start an article at such a moment. Contradictory even. But at its heart this is a debate about choice. And whatever choice I might […]

A letter to my sister, Rachael, at 60

27/10/2024

On human forms, your presence, first and always open smile; I cannot reach the memory or ease the space, of in between the cliffs and sky: the silence. From Untitled by David Annwn* It has taken me 16 years to write this letter. But you would have been 60 today and I could not let the moment […]

‘You and me together, fighting for our love’ – how Bronski Beat’s The Age of Consent defined an era and why it endures 40 years on

18/10/2024

On Monday the BBC’s flagship arts programme, Front Row, marked the 40th anniversary of the release of The Age of Consent, Bronski Beat’s debut album, on 15th October 1984. Presenter Samira Ahmed talked to Laurie Belgrave, founder and director of the south London queer bar and performance collective, The Chateau, and novelist, Matt Cain, formerly editor of Attitude. How far […]

A journey through grief

10/07/2024

In 1937, even though banned by the Nazis from producing her work, the artist Käthe Kollwitz secretly made one of her last major pieces. Just 40cm high, it is a sculpture of the draped figure of a mother, sharing a silhouette while cradling her grown son. Twenty-three years after her son Peter’s death, at the […]

Sixty-three down: memories of birthdays past — and the long road to Dundee

20/03/2024

Today is my 63rd birthday. Age comes increasingly quickly it seems. As far as I can recall, most of my pervious sixty-two birthdays have been spent in one of four places: surburban Cheshire where I grew up, Lancaster where I studied as an undergraduate, London where I spent my formative adult years, and Edinburgh, the […]

Equal marriage: the time for debate is over — in 2024 we must kick-start progress to shore up hard won rights

31/12/2023

When (if ever) is it reasonable to argue that the debate is over? As 2022 ended, this was a question with which I had long grappled. And for me, as a gay man, it is a question which has always been personal and political. As the rallying cry sounded out back in the day, the […]

On the death of a remarkable woman – in memory of Marie Buckley

22/12/2023

Scarcely anyone reading this will have heard of Marie Buckley who has died aged 86. Yet she was, by any measure, a remarkable woman. And although I had not seen her for many years, she was also one of the most significant people in my life. Marie was my late partner, Lawrence’s mum. If you […]