So no pressure there, then it's like, Andy, I too would like to to say happy night after the night before.
It's not often that in LGBT History Month, we actually get to participate in history being made.
I'll be completely honest with you,
when the whole issue of equal marriage was first mooted a couple of years back as a serious, ongoing campaign for No.
I wasn't entirely sure that I wanted to be married.
I had been very happy when the whole civil partnership thing came in because it seemed to me that by giving us something that wasn't called marriage,
we avoided all the history boned up in that world.
The patriarchal history, the sense of marriage as ownership of women, all of those, all of the baggage that came with marriage, if you like.
It seemed to me that we were avoiding by having civil partnership.
But the more I listened to the arguments and the more I understood what people were asking for and why people were asking for this,
the more I came round to understanding the importance of it. I don't know how closely you followed the debate last night,
but certainly one of the most moving things I thought was David Lammy talking from the
perspective of a black man about how it is impossible to have separate but equal development.
And I was listening to that.
I was thinking how extraordinarily far we have come in the 40 years since I first came to St Hilda's and how unbelievable that would have seemed.
Back in 1972, when I came here as an undergraduate, the notion that we would have all the kinds of legislation enacted that we've had in recent years.
But ultimately, that we would be able to get married to seemed a then c an idea.
But this now feels like one of the last pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.
A complicated jigsaw puzzle. And one of those annoying ones that doesn't have a picture on the box.
So you're continually fumbling around trying to figure out which bit goes where.
But I very much feel that we're close to completing a picture of that jigsaw,
a picture where we will be regarded in this society as full and equal members as good as anyone else.
And surely, I think that's what we all aimed for, what we all hoped for.
And in my case, something I never quite believed could happen.
One of the things I enjoy most in the course of every year is to go to the Stonewall Equality dinner.
It's in the Dorchester, in the ballroom at the Dorchester,
and the ballroom at the Dorchester is full of queers guys looking wonderful in their tuxedos,
some of them in the kilts, women in beautiful gowns and dresses, and some of them in beautiful tuxedos as well.
But what I love is that here we are. We have taken over the bastion at the heart of the establishment of what a body part playing for heaven's sake,
just being ourselves and celebrating that we have come this far and so far I think has been this has been for me anyway,
a time of great excitement and great joy.
But it wasn't always thus.
I grew up in Scotland, as you can probably tell, I was born in 1955, so I did most of my growing up in the 1960s and the early seventies.
And when I grew up, there were no lesbians. No no one wasn't a single lesbian in Scotland as far as I was aware.
There were no lesbians visible, certainly there were no lesbian novels,
there were no lesbians in movies about lesbians on the soap for new lesbian tennis stars.
I know you'll find that hard to believe.
You know, I would sit there and watch, you know, Pam Shriver and Betty Storv and think they look a bit different, but I don't know quite what it is.
We had heard that there were people who were different would have these things called Les's, but nobody ever actually met one.
Sometimes you met somebody whose cousin's cousin had a friend who was one.
But you never actually met one as such. No.
We knew there were proofs because you saw them on the television from time to time.
Larry Grayson, John Inman when posted about them. But there were no lesbians.
Absolutely none. So I grew up really not understanding why I felt different.
I thought I felt different because I wanted to be a writer. And that was an ambition that Ted had formed me at the very early age.
I grew up in a very working class background. There was not much money and there was money for books, which were a luxury that we couldn't afford.
But I was very lucky. Well, when I was six years old, my parents moved house to live opposite the Central Library.
And that became my home from home, that became my haven. That became the place where I discovered the world.
And from that base, I suppose I I learnt that there was a wider world.
What I really learnt was that people actually wrote those books didn't just appear by magic.
And it was a job that you got paid money for.
It wasn't something that people did out of the goodness of their heart rate books so that people could read them and enjoy them.
And so from a very early age, I formulated the notion I would like to be a writer.
And I thought, that's what made me different. I thought, that's what set me apart.
I think for teenage girls, for adolescent girls,
sometimes it's very difficult in a world where there are no visible lesbians to identify your sexuality,
because I think for most adolescent girls, the heart of your emotional life is your female friendships.
You have your best pal, you have your other close pal. And that's the one of whom you share your emotional reality.
You might go out with lots on a Saturday night, but it's not real until you talk about it on Monday morning.
Girls have very passionate and very emotional friendships in their teens.
And if you don't have another box to put that in, you just think you're like everybody else and you just do.
It's one of those things you don't really talk about. You don't like periods.
You have these strong emotional attachments, but it's just like everybody else.
And so I grew up really feeling different, but not understanding where that difference lay.
There were no templates for any other kind of life. Why would I think differently?
I did discover towards the end of my my my school career a book called The Well of Loneliness.
Now I read this book because at that stage of my life, I was reading everything crossed my path.
And I thought, Well, I don't want to be a men's suits. I don't want to be called Stephen, and I don't want to kill myself.
Obviously, I can't be a lesbian. And as I say, I think that at the heart of my my teenage years, there was a loneliness.
I had lots of friends, but I always felt, as I said, I felt different.
I felt separate. And I thought this was somehow the thing that you needed to do to be a writer.
You had to have that detachment that that separation. So I was OK with thoughts.
And I came to Oxford and I did what everybody else does Oxford.
I got drunk and I went to tutorials and danced the night away and I had boyfriends.
And again, I felt that my life was was kind of like that Peggy Lee song, you know?
All it is, you know, I went out with boys, I even slept with them.
And all was at the heart of it was like, You know what? All the fuss was about. I mean, really, that's not what all the fuss was about.
And I was in my my second year at Oxford when I read a book called Sexual Politics by Kate Millett.
This is a work of essentially of literary criticism.
But for someone who was in the middle of an English course at a time when the English course was very
much a traditional course rooted in Anglo-Saxon middle English and were modern English literature,
it ended in 1945. This book was a revelation to me.
It was the first book of feminist criticism I had ever seen, and I devoured this.
It was. It was as if I was walking through a desert and suddenly I had found an oasis.
I devoured this book over the course of the weekend and I was on fire.
I was so excited I had discovered feminism. And I remember going to my tutorial with an Eliot who was at all, if any of you remember John Eliot,
but it was very proper, very polite, very quiet, very calm, a good Christian, a good woman and a good shooter.
Very, very traditional.
And I burst into my tutorial absolutely full of myself, and I just ranted for 10 minutes about the glories of sexual politics by Kate Millett.
I talked about what I'd learnt about the explosion inside my head,
about how excited I was about how this had revolutionised the way I thought about English literature.
And on Eliot sat quietly, nodding through all this tirade, which I eventually stopped for breath and she said, Oh yes, dear Kate.
Oh dear Kate, what do you mean, dear Kate? And she says I supervised her PhD thesis that became sexual politics.
I was just so completely gobsmacked that even in this one revelatory thing, Oxford had got there ahead of me.
But the thing about discovering Kate Miller's and discovering feminist criticism
that this led me into the arms of the feminists at the time in the early 1970s,
being led into the arms of the feminists inevitably meant being led into the arms of the lesbians.
But I still wasn't sure about the lesbians. I just wasn't sure about this at all.
It just seemed something that was just thought a little step too far, that little step beyond the world that I really understood.
Apart from the fact that they were lesbians, they were very, very different from me.
They were very different from my experience of the world.
They were English for a start and they were middle class,
and they talked about relationships in terms of timely of politics and not about emotions, really.
And I found that a bit strange. I find I find a bit hard to get my head round.
And so I kind of hung back and I carried on reading and I carried on trying to to
do my coursework and trying to make the first steps towards becoming a writer.
And eventually, what happened to me was what happens to all of us in fullness of time.
I fell head over heels in love with someone who fell head over heels in love with me. And that was about them.
I'm a lesbian, though that's fine. When I was 19, I was in my final year Hilda's.
And that was not an easy path to tread at that particular point for all sorts of reasons,
but it was for me an absolute revelation that changed my life.
There was no turning back from that point. For the first time, really, I think in my life I knew who I was, and for me,
that meant that it opened up the door to being possibly the kind of writer I could be.
Informed, I suppose, my whole idea of the world, and I don't care if it was going to be difficult, I didn't really.
I was young and stupid, you know, I didn't care how difficult it was going to be because I was, I was, you know,
I was going to be heroic and idealistic and all of those things, I just knew that I was who I was, and I could not live in denial of that.
When I left Oxford, I went off to work in that natural home for a radical lesbian feminist tabloid journalism.
I got my first job working for Middle Group Trading Scheme down in Devon, where they had a group of weekly newspapers.
And I have to say that in terms of being a feminist, never mind, the lesbian in Plymouth was a bit the last place on the planet to be.
You know, I was desperately looking for other lesbians at this point. You know, I was 20.
I was like, You know, I was I was up for it, you know, and I eventually found it.
There was a supposedly a gay pub. I went along to this gay pub one Wednesday night, which was the gay night,
and I was the only woman in the place and the guys were really nice and really friendly, but they were women.
It wasn't.
It wasn't a time where I think it was very easy to meet other women unless you happened to be in London, where I think it was a wee bit easier.
But in the sticks, it wasn't. It wasn't a simple and straightforward process.
So I suppose I was putting a lot of a lot of my energies into attempting to write under, I suppose,
because I had just finished my degree in Oxford, I decided I was going to write literary fiction.
I was going to be a great English novelist, never mind that was Scottish.
I was talking about the English novelist. And I thought that I should do it to, you know, the secrets of the universe.
You know, nobody can tell you anything when you're 20.
So I wrote this this great novel about life was full of all the big emotions of love, hate and jealousy and betrayal and rage and despair and punting.
And believe me, if you've ever gone past that Hilda's in those days before the dredge the bottom, you'd know how desperate that could be.
And I finish this book is about the only thing I can say in its favour.
I actually finished it and I started sending it off to publishers in London.
It was. It was, of course, a lesbian novel because that was something I was going to make.
The great literary lesbian novel couldn't wait for the waters to come along, you know, to get stuck in there.
So I sent this off to many publishers,
and people will often tell you about the first experiences of trying to get published and send books off to publishers and wait for weeks and weeks.
And eventually it comes back with, you know, polite letter explaining the reasons why it doesn't fit the list right now.
And this wasn't what happened to me. My book used to come back by the time the post.
I think I sent it to just about every publishing house in London.
I think by the end I was getting letters from people I hadn't actually sent it to.
We've heard about this book, please don't send it to us, but I was undaunted.
I was undaunted, you know, I was I was determined I was,
but by this time starting to to write my my second grade English novel that was a lesbian novel as well.
You know, if you can cast your mind back to 1975, that wasn't a lot of lesbian novels being published full stop,
and those that were being published were being tended to be published by small feminist publishing houses,
one by two women in North London, and didn't even occur to me to send it to them.
But but I did.
I did show it to a friend of mine who's an actor, and she she looked at this,
and to this day, she wouldn't admit whether she was diplomatic or telling me the truth.
But she said, I don't know much about novels, but I think this would make a good play.
So I thought Patsy's just cross all the descriptions, leaving the speaker a bit since the play.
And so essentially what I did, I went through. I left the dialogue. I crossed to all the descriptions.
I wrote a few extra scenes to cover the bits.
I've crossed out and it was a play and I trotted off to the local theatre company down in Plymouth, where I was.
I was working at the remote, but I was working next to by then took this off to the local theatre and I had an in with the local
theatre company because the director of the local theatre was the ex-boyfriend of my best friend,
Oxford sister. So obviously you have to you have to use the Old Pals Act, you know, so at least I got I got them to look at it.
And he said, This is marvellous. I love this song.
I want to do a season of new plays in the studio theatre and this is perfect.
So by the age of twenty three, completely accidentally, I was a professionally performed playwright with a lesbian play.
I was little commissioned to adapt this play for BBC radio, and you wouldn't believe the trouble that caused it ended up.
It was originally commissioned by Radio three. Radio three got cold feet because it was a lesbian play.
Then Radio four expressed an interest, and they eventually decided not to do it because it was about lesbians,
and it eventually ended up bizarrely being broadcast on Radio Scotland.
Not, you would imagine, the natural home of a lesbian play in 1983.
I think it was, but I think it was just because the guy who produced the play was on staff
at Radio Scotland and the short of a play one week and he stuck it in there.
I, of course, thought this was the start of a brilliant career as a playwright that any minute now Hollywood would
be knocking at the door that I was going to be the new Harold Pinter or the new Tom Stoppard,
but it didn't work out quite like that. I think the problem for me really was that I didn't know what I'd done right, so I couldn't replicate it.
I kept trying to write plays, and they were terrible. Truly, truly terrible plays.
Most of them wasn't even lesbian plays, but I couldn't get another one performed anywhere.
And eventually I reached the point where the agent I had acquired when my first
play was professionally performed sent me a letter that begun Dear Val McDermid.
Now, you know, that's not going to be a good letter, don't you? And it wasn't a good letter.
It was the one that went. We are. We are cutting back on our list and you are cut back.
And so this was was for me was was really the lowest point of my my writing career.
I was, however, at this time gainfully employed as a tabloid hack.
I had gone into tabloid journalism with a very strong political idealism.
I grew up, as I said, in the working class background in Scotland,
and I felt very strongly that working class people had a right to media that were intelligent, uninformative as well as entertaining.
And I believed that that's what the role of tabloid journalism should be, and that's why I went into tabloid journalism.
I started, as I said, a trainee journalist in Devon on weekly papers.
Then I moved to the Daily Record in Glasgow, which was the paper I had grown up reading in my parents house,
which was in those days a pretty decent newspaper still actually reported the news.
Oddly enough, if you read tabloids these days, you'll know that it's quite a reality, and I later went on to work in Manchester for the people again.
When I went to the people, it was a it was a powerful tabloid newspaper. We did a lot of investigative journalism.
We did a lot of human interest stories.
And it was only really in the mid-1980s that we started the irreversible slide into the gutter where it became.
A tabloid rag like the rest of them, that was only interested in the sex lives of soap stars and photographs of people in their underwear,
that when you were out doing a story you'd get questions from the news desk for underwear.
Was she wearing or someone's just died?
I mean, it was it was on that level.
Believe me and I was sort of like living these, these two lives in parallel, if you like I was living this life of,
I want to be a proper writer on this life as a tabloid journalism, but I was very successful.
I was continually being approached, topped up to come to London. I always said, No, I want to go to London, I would want to go there.
It's much nicer outside London, go into the countryside, you get to meet people.
It's nice. But also I think what I had by that stage I had done was I'd carved a niche, I suppose, of some kind of respect amongst my colleagues.
I had never been in the closet in that sense.
When I went into tabloid journalism, I didn't walk in with a T-shirt emblazoned with I am a lesbian.
But equally, if people asked me the question, I didn't deny it.
I was determined not to live half a life.
I've seen the lives of people I've grown up with, where they were in denial,
sometimes to themselves, but always to the people around them about their true selves.
And it seemed to me that what they were living was half a life. I was not prepared to do that.
It always seemed to me that the price of doing that was much higher than the price of doing something else.
And, you know, I will say that I I still go back a lot to the time, but I grew up, I have strong roots.
There are strong connexions there and I still know people that I went to school
with who I know are gay and who are in the closet still all these years later.
I count amongst them someone who was a very close friend of my teens who.
Even stayed in the closet when her teenage daughter came out to me.
And I was the person who guided her teenage daughter through being a lesbian in a small town in
Scotland in the 1980s because her mother was too frightened to come out even to her own daughter.
I just don't understand that mindset.
I just don't understand. The need to be like that in the 21st century.
It's such an impoverishing way of life. And it makes me so sad, and it makes me.
It makes me glad that I chose the route that I chose, because although it's been difficult at times,
there were times booking as the only lesbian tabloid journalist in the country who was out.
I knew of at least two others, but they were very far in the closet. I mean, they were practically anonymous.
And you know what? I'm what I'm not. I'm not claiming any great bravery for myself.
What I'm actually claiming for myself, I think, is there's a greater sense of fear,
the fear of what it would do not to be honest about my life, the fear of what it would do to me to continually live a lie.
I didn't want to live like that. I couldn't live like that.
And so I went forward as it were taking the knocks.
But but at least being, you know, willing to try.
I was very involved in the trade union of journalists.
I was involved with Union Equality Council, but I was also involved as a negotiator for my chapel.
The journalist that I worked with, I represented,
and that also taught me a lot about the whole lot of negotiating your way through the complicated shoals of difficult illness.
So once I had realised I wasn't going to be a playwright, I had to figure out what kind of writer I was going to be.
And it seemed to me that I had gone wrong was not understanding what I was doing.
So it seemed to me, therefore, that I ought to try and do something that I did understand. And I had always read a lot of crime fiction.
I devoured it alongside everything else that I was reading.
And also, at this time, I had started reading a lot of lesbian fiction.
This was the time when writers like Barbara Wilson and Mary Wings and Catherine Forest were writing those early lesbian crime fiction.
And I started to think that this might be a possible thing that I could do.
But the book that finally catapulted me to get off my backside and do it wasn't one of the lesbian writers.
It was actually Sara Paretsky cineplexes first novel indemnity only, which I found an electrifying read.
I loved it because at the heart of this book, there was a female protagonist who had a brain and a sense of humour.
I loved the fact that they had an urban setting that seemed to me to be much more realistic and
much more in tune with the world they inhabited than the world of the English detective novel,
and that Agatha Christie and and even Ruth Rendell had presented.
That was not my world. You know, the villages I grew up in that not have retired cardinals of the Indian Army.
And so I love this all of the setting. But what I also loved about it was that these books had politics as well.
They had personal politics and they had a wider social politics.
And that appealed to me because I suddenly understood that by writing fiction, writing engaging,
entertaining fiction that would draw an audience to my books, I could actually explore the things in the world that mattered to me.
I could explore issues of gender that could explore issues of social politics.
I could get to grips with all the things that made me rant and rage in the morning when
I listen to the radio and that I wouldn't be doing this in a sort of didactic way.
I would be doing it as part of the fabric of what I was writing.
And that's what paretsky taught me.
I think more than anything was you can weave the stuff that you really passionately cared about into what you write without going, by the way.
And another thing. And by the way, here's another thing to think about you weave into the story, weave into the lives of your characters.
You make it inextricable with what you're writing about the story that you're telling.
And so I sat down to write my first attempt a crime novel.
The book that came out of it was a book called Report for Murder, which was published in 1987.
And this book was the first British crime novel with an openly lesbian protagonist.
Now, when I sat down to write the book, that really wasn't what was in my mind.
I wasn't thinking, Oh, I'm going to break the ground, I'm going to be the first one to write the lesbian crime novel in the U.K.
I ended up writing a lesbian crime novel because that was the way she came out,
and it never occurred to me that Lindsay Gordon would be anything other than a lesbian.
That was the character in my head, and that was the way she came out on the page. And the.
For me, growing up without any role models, I felt very passionately that I did not want the next generation of young women
coming after me to be growing up in a desert barren of any kind of lesbian temple,
any kind of life that was an alternate to the heterosexual, normative lives on offer.
And so it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that I should write a lesbian central character.
If you've read the Lindsay Gordon books, you will know that she's never physically described.
I never tell people what Lindsay looks like, and there's a very strong reason for that.
I wanted people who read the books to make their own Lindsay. I wanted them to be able to read Lindsay and imagine themselves in her shoes.
Imagine on a good day or a bad day, depending on what she was doing at the time.
But that was them.
They could be that person, or if they didn't want to be that person, they could be going out with that person or staying in with that person.
I wanted I wanted Lindsay to be somebody that could be every woman that she could speak to,
the women out there who up to that point hadn't had somebody speaking to them in fiction.
But more than that, I wanted to tell a good story because I did understand that if you don't tell the good story,
then everything else is pointless because nobody's going to read past Page three.
So at the heart of what I was trying to do was was to tell a story that that spoke to people when I wrote Report for Murder.
Again, it was almost as accidental as my first play because the book I really wanted to write was the third book in the series.
That was the story I really wanted to tell, but I wasn't very sophisticated as a not as a narrator.
I didn't really know much about how you weave stories together.
And I couldn't figure out how to get to the third book with it right in the first two.
Now, as it turns out, that was probably quite a good idea because back in those days,
the advances you got from feminist publishing houses were miniscule.
So it's probably as well that I had three books and then to sell instead of just the one.
But I wrote this book very much with this the some.
It's the thought of I know how a crime novel works, and if I make Lindsay Gordon a journalist, I know what journalists do.
I know what the possibilities are. I know what the prospects are. I know what the working day is like for a journalist.
And if I make a Scottish and lesbian on left wing and feminist, and that's that's a bit of a doddle, we'll explore all those things are.
The downside of that, I suppose, is that this makes people tend to assume that Lindsay Gordon is me.
She's not in terms of her personality. She's very different from me.
But I did use the superficial facts of my life in constructing the character because I didn't know any better.
I didn't know any different.
I didn't have many, many things in my toolbox, one of many skills at my command back in the day when I started writing for Lindsay Gordon books.
Writers had the opportunity to grow and develop these days, if you've not got a success by your third novel, your history.
If I was judged on the sales of my first three novel, I wouldn't have a career today.
But luckily in those days you could take your time to get a bit better and take your time to build an audience.
Report for murder was published to a resounding silence.
I have to say, you know, you always think when your first novels published that suddenly everything's going to change,
know you're going to walk out the front door of what is going on. There she is the novelist.
But one report from what came out came out as a paperback original and back in 1987.
You can cast your mind back that for newspapers only reviewed hot books.
So the book didn't get reviewed at all and published by a small publishing house, there was no no marketing budget behind it.
So report for murders it was published a resounding silence that astonishes me to this.
Did anybody actually manage to buy it? But it did sell in reasonable numbers and sufficient that they wanted some more of Lindsay.
Thank goodness.
And I put that mostly down to the success of Sarah Paretsky and Sue Grafton and Barbara Wilson and Mary Wings because they had done well in
bookshops and UK publishers were desperate and booksellers too were desperate for something that was home-grown that had the same kind of feel.
So I wrote the second Lindsay Gordon and the third one, and I had then achieved what I set out to achieve, which was my my trilogy.
So I've always known I was going to write something different after those first three books.
The question was what was it going to be by that time?
I wanted to develop my skills as a writer.
I wanted to write different kinds of things. I didn't want to be confined to just writing one kind of book for the rest of my career.
And so I had to think about what was going to come next.
And I ended up writing a series of books with a character called Kate Brannigan, who is a private eye based in Manchester.
And she's straight, and there had good reasons for that. The first reason is that I wanted to push myself as a writer.
I wanted to see if I could write further away from myself in a character like Lindsay.
I wanted to stretch myself and stretch my imagination to try and create something that was beyond my own experience.
I also, I'll be honest about it. I wanted to find a mainstream publisher. I wanted to make a living as a writer.
I no longer wanted to be a tabloid journalist.
By that stage, I wanted out of the business, and so it was necessary for me to find a way to support myself, and I wanted to do that writing fiction.
The third reason is the subversive reason I know the way that crime readers read because I'm a crime reader myself,
and I know that when you find a new writer that you like, you go and buy everything they've written, don't you?
Yeah. So I thought this is a really cunning plan to get all those people who would never buy a lesbian novel to go and buy the Lindsay Gordon books.
And it worked. You know, every time I keep running, a novel came out. The Lindsay Gordon sales spiked as well.
And the other thing that I was able to do with the Kate Brannigan novel.
I gave her a best friend who's a lesbian all through my books, whatever the central character,
whatever the subject I've written about, there have always been gay and lesbian characters as part of the landscape.
And that, for me has been one of the most important things about being a writer of my generation.
And in my position is the ability to portray gay and lesbian lives as being part of the landscape.
Part of the world, part of the community were not weirdos and a strange little corner.
All of our own doing laundry and a particularly lesbian way, or going round a supermarket in a particularly gay way.
Most of our lives are just like everybody else as we put the bins out.
You know, we bring the carton of the dog. These are our lives, and they are lives that fit in the rich tapestry of the society that we inhabit.
I'm not a separatist. I've never been. I don't want to live in a ghetto because it makes it too easy for them to come and find us.
And so I've never written in the ghetto and I've always tried to write lives that seem to me to be the lives that and in an ideal world,
in a way we'd all like to live lives with. It doesn't matter who you sleep with.
At the end of the day, what matters is your humanity the way you live as a human being, the way you live in terms of your integrity,
the way you live in relation to your family, your friends, to the wider community that you inhabit.
And, you know, we're all celebrating this week, and rightly so, because we are we have got to is an amazing place and it's an exciting place.
My my wife, I call him my wife, although she is my civil partner, but I'm not always civil.
I have to say I was. She was.
She was talking to me just before I came out here tonight and she said, You know, honey, she said, Is this the last thing?
Said, What do you mean? She said, Well, you know, there were all those people, you know, who were like, getting their relationship blessed.
She's American, by the way.
Are all those people getting their relationships blessed before we could like have any kind of formal commitment, she said.
And then they had to go and like, have a civil partnership, and now they're going to have to have the civil partnership converted to a marriage.
Is this the last thing or are we going to have to do some more? So I think that's the last thing.
I can't think of anything else unless you want to divorce me.
But I think what we also have to remember in this time of celebration is that in many places in the world where being gay is no cause for celebration
that are still a remarkable number of countries where it's a capital offence
to be open about what we have been able to take for granted in my lifetime.
We have seen remarkable changes in this country. We have seen for men going from being criminals to being able to marry each other.
We have seen changes in the social fabric we have.
It's no longer acceptable to insult us in the streets.
We have lives that although they're not always perfect, and if you live outside one of the big cities, the so often very difficult.
But we have lives where, you know, it's an awful lot better than it used to be.
And I think that know we've got this far.
I would like to think that we can turn some of our campaigning energies into places where it's not as easy for other people as it is for us.
And some of those places are practically on our doorstep. Some of them are places where, you know, we're going to be playing football shortly.
And I think that what I would like to do is in the coming years is to focus some
of my energies on trying to make things better for people in places where,
frankly, it's [INAUDIBLE] because we've come a long way.
And you know, we can celebrate,
but we need to share that celebration so that other people can can be who they are without being afraid that it's going to cost them the lives.
I feel I have had a very, very fortunate life. I do the one thing in the world I ever wanted to do, and they pay me money for it.
I live with a woman that I love. We have a son.
We have a dog. Really? I feel very blessed.
I feel very content. We're not complacent. And I would like to to spread that and share that one of the things that I am involved with is football.
I am a director of Raith Rovers Football Club,
and one of the things that we're working with is campaign against homophobia in sport in general and football in particular.
And. Although we've come a long, long way, the still battles to be fought on in the moment of celebration,
I would like to think a little bit about the ways that we can maybe help to support other people when they're fighting their battles.
I just want to leave that little thought with you to changes all up.
So I have I have talked about you, I think probably for quite long enough, and I'm told that the intent is that there should be.
I suppose you'd have to call it an LGBTQ Annie.
This is the point we're going to be assisted by the pro vice chancellor here, but.