Category: sexuality

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Yesterday was a good day in Scotland. It was the kind of day that reminds us why politics matters. And we seem to have had precious few of those lately.

So Kevin Spacey is gay. It’s one of those rumours that has circulated for years. A bit like the one about, Olympic hurdler, Colin Jackson. And we learned recently that Colin is gay too. But there the similarities come to a juddering halt.

Back in the 1980s, I used to spend a lot of time with a journalist. My friend Tim, who sadly died more than 20 years ago, was a local hack. He was a sub and he loved to collect improbable headlines.

Against the Law, shown on BBC1 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England and Wales, left me momentarily lost for words. That doesn’t happen too often. But as is more usually the case it is by getting some words down on a page that I can best make […]

The publication of the 34th British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey report today chronicles another chapter in the remarkable liberalisation of attitudes to homosexuality during the last 25 years. In this very modern morality tale we are increasingly choosing liberalism over conservatism and the pace at which we are doing so shows no sign of abating. […]