How do we survive a plague? Together

13/03/2020

For those of us who found ourselves at the heart of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, COVID-19 incites old emotions which have never been far from the surface in the intervening decades. In myriad ways, the world of 2020 is one we couldn’t have imagined back then — not least the digital connectivity we […]
Tough times and golden moments — the story of Pyllon Endeavour Two

27/01/2020

I wasn’t there at the beginning and it’s hard to know where to start. Perhaps the best place is the bare facts about Pyllon Endeavour’s challenge, Out of the Wild, completed earlier today. Nine runners, between them, have run the entire length of the Scottish National Trail — Cape Wrath to Kirk Yetholm. That’s 102 […]
Scotland has decided it wants a different future — and we need to get there together

13/12/2019

In the dead of election night, I polled my Twitter followers about whether my next move should be tea, coffee or gin. The result was overwhelmingly gin. A bottle, not a glass, one suggested. Intravenously, said another. But I chose tea. A strong mug of Scottish Blend. I was reminded of election night, 1987. In […]
Lest we forget: Communities make the difference

28/11/2019

Another day of AIDS awareness and mourning is upon us. It’s the 32nd since the 1 December was designated World AIDS day in 1988. This year’s theme — both timeless and timely — is ‘Communities make the difference.’ Earlier this year I republished a letter to my late partner, Lawrence, who died of AIDS in […]
One day in East Berlin

09/11/2019

I never went to East Berlin. Not really. By the time I first set foot there on a freezing, grey morning in December 1989, it was too late. I was 28. The Berlin Wall, built six months after I was born, had fallen just weeks earlier. Those exultant scenes of hammers and chisels being taken […]
Coming Out — an act of repetition — because the personal is still political

11/10/2019

TS Eliot died in 1965, four years before the birth of the modern gay liberation movement. What he might have made of being quoted on National Coming Out Day, goodness knows. And yet his words, from the final stanza of part three of East Coker, came to me this morning — as they often do. […]
Suicide — it isn’t always good to talk, but talk we must

09/09/2019

Sixteen years ago, just a few years shy of middle age, I came to Edinburgh to make a new life. Summer was just beginning but it was a cold coming. An inauspicious arrival. All bets were off. I came to begin a new chapter in the very place where, scarcely six months earlier, I had […]
Finding a way to belonging — on Constitution Street

06/09/2019

Yesterday evening I took part in a protest. It wasn’t on the streets or outside a building. There were no placards, no hecklers. There was no lobbying, no them and us. It was a book launch. In a library. I’ve taken part in a protest in a library once before. Nearly 40 years ago, my […]