Blog
We really didn’t need to talk about Kevin
30/10/2017
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.
Historic sexual offences: A long night’s journey into day
08/11/2017
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Why marriage is still a thrill one year on
31/05/2018
‘I’m still strangely excited about being married.’ Not my words, but those of one of my oldest friends who married his long-term partner just a few weeks ago. Theirs, he said, was not a wedding. Just a signing on the dotted line before they whisked each other away for a few days. When my husband […]
Growing up gay — what we must learn from the tragic death of Jamel Myles
29/08/2018
How old were you when you first knew you were straight? If you are straight, I wonder if anyone has ever asked you that question. You may be the exception that proves the rule but I’d hazard a guess they haven’t. Because that’s not how it works. But as the tragic death of Jamel Myles […]
The love that dared to speak its name
14/02/2019
When I was 12, our English teacher, Mrs Greenwood, asked us to write an extended composition. Our task was to tell a story in three parts — to go wherever our imagination took us and take her, the reader, with us. While other boys wrote tales of adventure and ambition — on the playing field and elsewhere — I wrote about […]