Indyref 2: Can we learn to disagree well?
‘Here we go, here we go, here we go’, is a refrain often heard on football terraces. But for many of us who lived through the tumultuous years of the 1984-5 miner’s strike it will be remembered as the chant on picket lines. It was a time of deep division and the scars are still […]
Why does LGBT history month matter?
Why does LGBT history month matter? One simple answer is that stories drive change. Whether it’s within families, friendship circles, in the community or wider society, we know that sharing stories educates. It challenges misconceptions and creates empathy.
Gordon Aikman taught us about death as well as life
I didn’t know Gordon Aikman. But the news of his death this morning was terribly sad nonetheless. His beautiful New Year message on Twitter, ‘Oh hi 2017, I didn’t expect to see you’, was a shaft of light and hope in the bleak midwinter.
Transformational change: It’s the people, stupid
The practice of hoarding is a bone of contention in our house. I try not to do it but my partner is a self-confessed hoarder. However in my case there some exceptions, the most obvious of which is books. The other, which takes up rather less space, is a variety of old papers including my […]
A love by any other name
This is how it was. In the early 1980s, a whole generation of gay men who had scarcely known the ability to live and love openly was besieged by an epidemic. Because it turned sex into something dangerous, it was an epidemic which for more than a decade scarred love and relationships. It framed our […]
Can we transcend identity liberalism?
I wrote recently about the challenge to identity liberalism in the wake of a tumultuous political year. The post was a response to arguments from the American writer Sohrab Ahmari that identity liberals need to be less tribal, and the American academic Mark Lilla that we need a post-identity liberalism which concentrates on broadening its […]
Identity liberalism in the dock
‘Recently I forgot I was gay because I was too busy doing something else.’ The words of Colm Toibin, the Irish novelist resonated for me because reading them 35 years after I had first come out I realised that I was lucky enough to forget that I was gay most days. Something which had been […]
A cautionary tale for progessives
In May 1998 at the age of 37, I was elected to Tower Hamlets Council. Although I’d been involved in the Labour Party since I’d joined as a 19-year-old student I had lived in the borough for just two and half years, having moved into my small terraced house in Bethnal Green at the end […]
Finding hope and fighting back
Twenty-seven years ago today the Berlin Wall fell. It was the defining political moment of my lifetime. Until today. Unlike today it was a moment, to coin a phrase Barak Obama would use later, of audacious hope. The other 9/11 in 2001 came pretty close as a defining moment but it was surely the worst […]
The truth about gross indecency
In 1978 I had sex with a man for the first time. I was 17 and the encounter took place in a public toilet. Not something to shout about perhaps. But it’s a moment I was reminded of by John Nicolson’s Bill to pardon gay and bisexual men historically convicted of sexual offences that are […]