Blog - Chris Creegan

What’s left? Nowness and the next phase

13/04/2018

More than forty years ago our car pulled into the drive at home after a holiday in north Wales. We couldn't have been away for more than a couple of weeks but it seemed an age since we’d been there. Time lasted longer in childhood. It was an ending of sorts, of the holidays, of […]

Why feminism benefits us all

08/03/2018

Is there something in the air about men? Perhaps a counter-intuitive question to ask on International Women’s Day. Then again, perhaps not. In a sense what better day for a bit of male self-reflection. And just to make it clear I’m not about to call for International Men’s Day (November 19th), though I’d wager my […]

One day in Manchester – and that clause

19/02/2018

It’s half a lifetime ago but I can conjure it up in a moment. On February 20th, 1988, more than twenty thousand of us marched through the streets of Manchester against Clause 28. The largest national demonstration its streets had seen for a decade turned the city pink on a dull day. And yet perhaps […]

Thanks, Mr Littlejohn, for keeping me straight

16/02/2018

I’ll say one thing for Richard Littlejohn. His timing is impeccable. I was at Lancaster University last night, delivering a lecture for LGBT History Month. It’s just shy of 36 years since I organised a programme of events for the student union entitled, Gay Rights in Everyday Life. The lecture was a look back to […]

Champions for equality: custodians of a cause

08/02/2018

Stephen would call me at home in Hackney from a telephone box deep in west Wales in the mid-1980s. He had been given my number by London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard for whom I’d agreed to be a referral point on employment issues. Stephen worked in an abattoir. His colleagues had discovered he was gay […]

Be here now: reflections from Provincetown

05/02/2018

‘The season’s over now’, said the flight attendant as we were about to board the Silver Line to Seaport Boulevard on our arrival in Boston in late September last year. ‘But if you want to party you should definitely try the Tea Dance at the Boatslip Beach Club’. We were heading to Provincetown, on Cape […]

After the Presidents Club dinner

25/01/2018

Weinstein was a watershed moment. But in the here today, gone tomorrow cycle of today’s media it can all too easily feel like yesterday’s news. Yet anyone who thought that its revelations and those which emerged afterwards would somehow seamlessly pave the way for change has surely had the mother of all wake-up calls from […]

The trouble with banter

13/01/2018

‘Silly banter between old mates’, explained John Humphrys about the rather less than edifying exchange it was revealed he’d had with Jon Sopel about equal pay. Just a bit of harmless fun then. And it was between friends. Well, how lovely. Who could possibly begrudge a couple of old pals having a bit of a […]