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
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
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
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
‘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
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
‘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 […]
Why Trump’s state of mind is the wrong target
I’m not going to read Fire and Fury. I have a stack of books I want to get stuck into. Some non-fiction, some fiction and a bit of poetry too. Some will make me laugh, others will make me cry and all of them will, I hope, make me think. I’m sure Fire and Fury […]
Death doesn’t become us, so don’t wait
Returning from a few days away this week, I learnt of the death of an old friend from my trade union days. The revelation came via the dead hand of Facebook. A timely reminder that for all its faux intimacy, social media is brutally impersonal. It connects us for sure, but in ways we have […]
How stigma killed us too
It was just another Saturday afternoon in Stoke Newington, around the middle of January 1993. Lawrence had sent me to Safeway for the last few things we needed for dinner. I’d left him preparing mussels we’d bought earlier that day at Steve Hatt’s fish market on Essex Road in Islington. We were expecting guests. I […]