Support for those with HIV

Peter Shapcott founded The Eddie Surman Trust after his partner Eddie following the suicide of his partner after he was diagnosed positive.

Positiveline has saved many lives over the years and that was the aim of the trust. I am also able to tell someone who is feeling suicidal, from my own experiences, that your loved ones will never be the same again.

Polari Facts on the FBI

The bureau had questionable dealings with homosexuality in the 1950s and ’60s. There were certainly a great many probes.

There were rumours that Hoover and associate FBI director Clyde Tolson were lovers. Hoover ordered a crack-down that was nothing less than vicious. The subject rather unhinged him.

On the theme of changing the guard.

Simon Savidge questions how progressive the West really is.

I have rights, I can have a civil partnership, can adopt children, and I can hold my same-sex partner’s hand in public … Well, I can in London, but take me back to the Derbyshire Dales and it’s quite a different story.

Maurice, the book that helped me to understand my sexuality

How the book, following on from the film, changed the life of William Summers.

Maurice is not a great film. It is not even as great a book as Forster’s others. Yet at the age of sixteen I found it to be revolutionary.

Committed Christian who worked in a registry office sues!

Lillian Ladele, former registry office employee in the borough of Islington, and – gasp, horror – Mother of Child Outside Wedlock, claims she believes civil partnerships are wrong because she follows what the bible teaches. Apparently.

The portrayal of Ladele as an innocent victim who simply followed the rule of the Bible is a narrative device that is, in the end, irrelevant. The Daily Mail gets lost in it, failing to make any real analysis of the story to hand, but the issue is simple: a registrar is employed in a secular institution to enact the law of the land.

Clementine relives the 1960s

Clementine the Living Fashion Doll on fashions of the 1960s and the ‘Gore Bob’ … is that really what she means?

Why are you wearing such outrageous ogle riah fakes and such a dolly caxton?

Brian Robinson joined the Belfast Gay Liberation Society in 1975 and been a gay activist ever since.

The Senior Programmer at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and founder member of The House of Homosexual Culture, writes about how film can reveal a hidden gay past.

I think we need to reinvent the urgency and excitement of Gay Liberation to ensure that succeeding generations are exposed to their own heritage. Our national cultural institutions have paid no more than lip service to queer cultural achievement.