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So no pressure there, then it's like, Andy, I too would like to to say happy night after the night before.

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It's not often that in LGBT History Month, we actually get to participate in history being made.

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I'll be completely honest with you,

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when the whole issue of equal marriage was first mooted a couple of years back as a serious, ongoing campaign for No.

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I wasn't entirely sure that I wanted to be married.

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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,

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we avoided all the history boned up in that world.

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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.

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It seemed to me that we were avoiding by having civil partnership.

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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,

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the more I came round to understanding the importance of it. I don't know how closely you followed the debate last night,

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but certainly one of the most moving things I thought was David Lammy talking from the

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perspective of a black man about how it is impossible to have separate but equal development.

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And I was listening to that.

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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.

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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.

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But ultimately, that we would be able to get married to seemed a then c an idea.

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But this now feels like one of the last pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

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A complicated jigsaw puzzle. And one of those annoying ones that doesn't have a picture on the box.

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So you're continually fumbling around trying to figure out which bit goes where.

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But I very much feel that we're close to completing a picture of that jigsaw,

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a picture where we will be regarded in this society as full and equal members as good as anyone else.

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And surely, I think that's what we all aimed for, what we all hoped for.

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And in my case, something I never quite believed could happen.

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One of the things I enjoy most in the course of every year is to go to the Stonewall Equality dinner.

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It's in the Dorchester, in the ballroom at the Dorchester,

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and the ballroom at the Dorchester is full of queers guys looking wonderful in their tuxedos,

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some of them in the kilts, women in beautiful gowns and dresses, and some of them in beautiful tuxedos as well.

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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,

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just being ourselves and celebrating that we have come this far and so far I think has been this has been for me anyway,

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a time of great excitement and great joy.

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But it wasn't always thus.

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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.

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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.

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There were no lesbians visible, certainly there were no lesbian novels,

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there were no lesbians in movies about lesbians on the soap for new lesbian tennis stars.

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I know you'll find that hard to believe.

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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.

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We had heard that there were people who were different would have these things called Les's, but nobody ever actually met one.

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Sometimes you met somebody whose cousin's cousin had a friend who was one.

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But you never actually met one as such. No.

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We knew there were proofs because you saw them on the television from time to time.

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Larry Grayson, John Inman when posted about them. But there were no lesbians.

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Absolutely none. So I grew up really not understanding why I felt different.

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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.

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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.

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But I was very lucky. Well, when I was six years old, my parents moved house to live opposite the Central Library.

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And that became my home from home, that became my haven. That became the place where I discovered the world.

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And from that base, I suppose I I learnt that there was a wider world.

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What I really learnt was that people actually wrote those books didn't just appear by magic.

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And it was a job that you got paid money for.

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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.

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And so from a very early age, I formulated the notion I would like to be a writer.

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And I thought, that's what made me different. I thought, that's what set me apart.

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I think for teenage girls, for adolescent girls,

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sometimes it's very difficult in a world where there are no visible lesbians to identify your sexuality,

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because I think for most adolescent girls, the heart of your emotional life is your female friendships.

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You have your best pal, you have your other close pal. And that's the one of whom you share your emotional reality.

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You might go out with lots on a Saturday night, but it's not real until you talk about it on Monday morning.

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Girls have very passionate and very emotional friendships in their teens.

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And if you don't have another box to put that in, you just think you're like everybody else and you just do.

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It's one of those things you don't really talk about. You don't like periods.

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You have these strong emotional attachments, but it's just like everybody else.

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And so I grew up really feeling different, but not understanding where that difference lay.

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There were no templates for any other kind of life. Why would I think differently?

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I did discover towards the end of my my my school career a book called The Well of Loneliness.

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Now I read this book because at that stage of my life, I was reading everything crossed my path.

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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.

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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.

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I had lots of friends, but I always felt, as I said, I felt different.

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I felt separate. And I thought this was somehow the thing that you needed to do to be a writer.

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You had to have that detachment that that separation. So I was OK with thoughts.

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And I came to Oxford and I did what everybody else does Oxford.

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I got drunk and I went to tutorials and danced the night away and I had boyfriends.

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And again, I felt that my life was was kind of like that Peggy Lee song, you know?

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All it is, you know, I went out with boys, I even slept with them.

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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.

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And I was in my my second year at Oxford when I read a book called Sexual Politics by Kate Millett.

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This is a work of essentially of literary criticism.

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But for someone who was in the middle of an English course at a time when the English course was very

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much a traditional course rooted in Anglo-Saxon middle English and were modern English literature,

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it ended in 1945. This book was a revelation to me.

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It was the first book of feminist criticism I had ever seen, and I devoured this.

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It was. It was as if I was walking through a desert and suddenly I had found an oasis.

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I devoured this book over the course of the weekend and I was on fire.

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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,

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but it was very proper, very polite, very quiet, very calm, a good Christian, a good woman and a good shooter.

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Very, very traditional.

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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.

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I talked about what I'd learnt about the explosion inside my head,

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about how excited I was about how this had revolutionised the way I thought about English literature.

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And on Eliot sat quietly, nodding through all this tirade, which I eventually stopped for breath and she said, Oh yes, dear Kate.

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Oh dear Kate, what do you mean, dear Kate? And she says I supervised her PhD thesis that became sexual politics.

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I was just so completely gobsmacked that even in this one revelatory thing, Oxford had got there ahead of me.

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But the thing about discovering Kate Miller's and discovering feminist criticism

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that this led me into the arms of the feminists at the time in the early 1970s,

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being led into the arms of the feminists inevitably meant being led into the arms of the lesbians.

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But I still wasn't sure about the lesbians. I just wasn't sure about this at all.

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It just seemed something that was just thought a little step too far, that little step beyond the world that I really understood.

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Apart from the fact that they were lesbians, they were very, very different from me.

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They were very different from my experience of the world.

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They were English for a start and they were middle class,

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and they talked about relationships in terms of timely of politics and not about emotions, really.

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And I found that a bit strange. I find I find a bit hard to get my head round.

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And so I kind of hung back and I carried on reading and I carried on trying to to

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do my coursework and trying to make the first steps towards becoming a writer.

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And eventually, what happened to me was what happens to all of us in fullness of time.

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I fell head over heels in love with someone who fell head over heels in love with me. And that was about them.

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I'm a lesbian, though that's fine. When I was 19, I was in my final year Hilda's.

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And that was not an easy path to tread at that particular point for all sorts of reasons,

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but it was for me an absolute revelation that changed my life.

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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,

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that meant that it opened up the door to being possibly the kind of writer I could be.

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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.

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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,

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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.

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When I left Oxford, I went off to work in that natural home for a radical lesbian feminist tabloid journalism.

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I got my first job working for Middle Group Trading Scheme down in Devon, where they had a group of weekly newspapers.

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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.

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You know, I was desperately looking for other lesbians at this point. You know, I was 20.

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I was like, You know, I was I was up for it, you know, and I eventually found it.

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There was a supposedly a gay pub. I went along to this gay pub one Wednesday night, which was the gay night,

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and I was the only woman in the place and the guys were really nice and really friendly, but they were women.

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It wasn't.

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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.

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But in the sticks, it wasn't. It wasn't a simple and straightforward process.

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So I suppose I was putting a lot of a lot of my energies into attempting to write under, I suppose,

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because I had just finished my degree in Oxford, I decided I was going to write literary fiction.

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I was going to be a great English novelist, never mind that was Scottish.

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I was talking about the English novelist. And I thought that I should do it to, you know, the secrets of the universe.

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You know, nobody can tell you anything when you're 20.

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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.

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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.

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And I finish this book is about the only thing I can say in its favour.

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I actually finished it and I started sending it off to publishers in London.

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It was. It was, of course, a lesbian novel because that was something I was going to make.

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The great literary lesbian novel couldn't wait for the waters to come along, you know, to get stuck in there.

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So I sent this off to many publishers,

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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.

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And eventually it comes back with, you know, polite letter explaining the reasons why it doesn't fit the list right now.

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And this wasn't what happened to me. My book used to come back by the time the post.

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I think I sent it to just about every publishing house in London.

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I think by the end I was getting letters from people I hadn't actually sent it to.

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We've heard about this book, please don't send it to us, but I was undaunted.

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I was undaunted, you know, I was I was determined I was,

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but by this time starting to to write my my second grade English novel that was a lesbian novel as well.

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You know, if you can cast your mind back to 1975, that wasn't a lot of lesbian novels being published full stop,

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and those that were being published were being tended to be published by small feminist publishing houses,

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one by two women in North London, and didn't even occur to me to send it to them.

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But but I did.

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I did show it to a friend of mine who's an actor, and she she looked at this,

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and to this day, she wouldn't admit whether she was diplomatic or telling me the truth.

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But she said, I don't know much about novels, but I think this would make a good play.

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So I thought Patsy's just cross all the descriptions, leaving the speaker a bit since the play.

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And so essentially what I did, I went through. I left the dialogue. I crossed to all the descriptions.

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I wrote a few extra scenes to cover the bits.

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I've crossed out and it was a play and I trotted off to the local theatre company down in Plymouth, where I was.

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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

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theatre company because the director of the local theatre was the ex-boyfriend of my best friend,

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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.

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And he said, This is marvellous. I love this song.

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I want to do a season of new plays in the studio theatre and this is perfect.

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So by the age of twenty three, completely accidentally, I was a professionally performed playwright with a lesbian play.

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I was little commissioned to adapt this play for BBC radio, and you wouldn't believe the trouble that caused it ended up.

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It was originally commissioned by Radio three. Radio three got cold feet because it was a lesbian play.

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Then Radio four expressed an interest, and they eventually decided not to do it because it was about lesbians,

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and it eventually ended up bizarrely being broadcast on Radio Scotland.

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Not, you would imagine, the natural home of a lesbian play in 1983.

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I think it was, but I think it was just because the guy who produced the play was on staff

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at Radio Scotland and the short of a play one week and he stuck it in there.

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I, of course, thought this was the start of a brilliant career as a playwright that any minute now Hollywood would

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be knocking at the door that I was going to be the new Harold Pinter or the new Tom Stoppard,

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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.

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I kept trying to write plays, and they were terrible. Truly, truly terrible plays.

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Most of them wasn't even lesbian plays, but I couldn't get another one performed anywhere.

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And eventually I reached the point where the agent I had acquired when my first

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play was professionally performed sent me a letter that begun Dear Val McDermid.

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Now, you know, that's not going to be a good letter, don't you? And it wasn't a good letter.

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It was the one that went. We are. We are cutting back on our list and you are cut back.

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And so this was was for me was was really the lowest point of my my writing career.

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I was, however, at this time gainfully employed as a tabloid hack.

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I had gone into tabloid journalism with a very strong political idealism.

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I grew up, as I said, in the working class background in Scotland,

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and I felt very strongly that working class people had a right to media that were intelligent, uninformative as well as entertaining.

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And I believed that that's what the role of tabloid journalism should be, and that's why I went into tabloid journalism.

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I started, as I said, a trainee journalist in Devon on weekly papers.

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Then I moved to the Daily Record in Glasgow, which was the paper I had grown up reading in my parents house,

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which was in those days a pretty decent newspaper still actually reported the news.

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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.

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When I went to the people, it was a it was a powerful tabloid newspaper. We did a lot of investigative journalism.

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We did a lot of human interest stories.

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And it was only really in the mid-1980s that we started the irreversible slide into the gutter where it became.

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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,

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that when you were out doing a story you'd get questions from the news desk for underwear.

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Was she wearing or someone's just died?

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I mean, it was it was on that level.

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Believe me and I was sort of like living these, these two lives in parallel, if you like I was living this life of,

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I want to be a proper writer on this life as a tabloid journalism, but I was very successful.

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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.

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It's much nicer outside London, go into the countryside, you get to meet people.

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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.

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I had never been in the closet in that sense.

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When I went into tabloid journalism, I didn't walk in with a T-shirt emblazoned with I am a lesbian.

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But equally, if people asked me the question, I didn't deny it.

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I was determined not to live half a life.

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I've seen the lives of people I've grown up with, where they were in denial,

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sometimes to themselves, but always to the people around them about their true selves.

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And it seemed to me that what they were living was half a life. I was not prepared to do that.

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It always seemed to me that the price of doing that was much higher than the price of doing something else.

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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.

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There are strong connexions there and I still know people that I went to school

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with who I know are gay and who are in the closet still all these years later.

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I count amongst them someone who was a very close friend of my teens who.

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Even stayed in the closet when her teenage daughter came out to me.

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And I was the person who guided her teenage daughter through being a lesbian in a small town in

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Scotland in the 1980s because her mother was too frightened to come out even to her own daughter.

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I just don't understand that mindset.

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I just don't understand. The need to be like that in the 21st century.

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It's such an impoverishing way of life. And it makes me so sad, and it makes me.

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It makes me glad that I chose the route that I chose, because although it's been difficult at times,

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there were times booking as the only lesbian tabloid journalist in the country who was out.

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I knew of at least two others, but they were very far in the closet. I mean, they were practically anonymous.

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And you know what? I'm what I'm not. I'm not claiming any great bravery for myself.

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What I'm actually claiming for myself, I think, is there's a greater sense of fear,

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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.

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I didn't want to live like that. I couldn't live like that.

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And so I went forward as it were taking the knocks.

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But but at least being, you know, willing to try.

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I was very involved in the trade union of journalists.

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I was involved with Union Equality Council, but I was also involved as a negotiator for my chapel.

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The journalist that I worked with, I represented,

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and that also taught me a lot about the whole lot of negotiating your way through the complicated shoals of difficult illness.

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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.

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And it seemed to me that I had gone wrong was not understanding what I was doing.

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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.

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I devoured it alongside everything else that I was reading.

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And also, at this time, I had started reading a lot of lesbian fiction.

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This was the time when writers like Barbara Wilson and Mary Wings and Catherine Forest were writing those early lesbian crime fiction.

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And I started to think that this might be a possible thing that I could do.

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But the book that finally catapulted me to get off my backside and do it wasn't one of the lesbian writers.

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It was actually Sara Paretsky cineplexes first novel indemnity only, which I found an electrifying read.

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I loved it because at the heart of this book, there was a female protagonist who had a brain and a sense of humour.

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I loved the fact that they had an urban setting that seemed to me to be much more realistic and

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much more in tune with the world they inhabited than the world of the English detective novel,

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and that Agatha Christie and and even Ruth Rendell had presented.

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That was not my world. You know, the villages I grew up in that not have retired cardinals of the Indian Army.

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And so I love this all of the setting. But what I also loved about it was that these books had politics as well.

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They had personal politics and they had a wider social politics.

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And that appealed to me because I suddenly understood that by writing fiction, writing engaging,

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entertaining fiction that would draw an audience to my books, I could actually explore the things in the world that mattered to me.

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I could explore issues of gender that could explore issues of social politics.

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I could get to grips with all the things that made me rant and rage in the morning when

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I listen to the radio and that I wouldn't be doing this in a sort of didactic way.

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I would be doing it as part of the fabric of what I was writing.

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And that's what paretsky taught me.

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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.

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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.

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You make it inextricable with what you're writing about the story that you're telling.

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And so I sat down to write my first attempt a crime novel.

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The book that came out of it was a book called Report for Murder, which was published in 1987.

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And this book was the first British crime novel with an openly lesbian protagonist.

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Now, when I sat down to write the book, that really wasn't what was in my mind.

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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.

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I ended up writing a lesbian crime novel because that was the way she came out,

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and it never occurred to me that Lindsay Gordon would be anything other than a lesbian.

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That was the character in my head, and that was the way she came out on the page. And the.

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For me, growing up without any role models, I felt very passionately that I did not want the next generation of young women

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coming after me to be growing up in a desert barren of any kind of lesbian temple,

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any kind of life that was an alternate to the heterosexual, normative lives on offer.

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And so it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that I should write a lesbian central character.

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If you've read the Lindsay Gordon books, you will know that she's never physically described.

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I never tell people what Lindsay looks like, and there's a very strong reason for that.

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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.

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Imagine on a good day or a bad day, depending on what she was doing at the time.

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But that was them.

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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.

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I wanted I wanted Lindsay to be somebody that could be every woman that she could speak to,

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the women out there who up to that point hadn't had somebody speaking to them in fiction.

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But more than that, I wanted to tell a good story because I did understand that if you don't tell the good story,

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then everything else is pointless because nobody's going to read past Page three.

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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.

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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.

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That was the story I really wanted to tell, but I wasn't very sophisticated as a not as a narrator.

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I didn't really know much about how you weave stories together.

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And I couldn't figure out how to get to the third book with it right in the first two.

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Now, as it turns out, that was probably quite a good idea because back in those days,

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the advances you got from feminist publishing houses were miniscule.

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So it's probably as well that I had three books and then to sell instead of just the one.

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But I wrote this book very much with this the some.

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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.

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I know what the possibilities are. I know what the prospects are. I know what the working day is like for a journalist.

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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.

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The downside of that, I suppose, is that this makes people tend to assume that Lindsay Gordon is me.

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She's not in terms of her personality. She's very different from me.

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But I did use the superficial facts of my life in constructing the character because I didn't know any better.

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I didn't know any different.

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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.

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Writers had the opportunity to grow and develop these days, if you've not got a success by your third novel, your history.

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If I was judged on the sales of my first three novel, I wouldn't have a career today.

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But luckily in those days you could take your time to get a bit better and take your time to build an audience.

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Report for murder was published to a resounding silence.

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I have to say, you know, you always think when your first novels published that suddenly everything's going to change,

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know you're going to walk out the front door of what is going on. There she is the novelist.

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But one report from what came out came out as a paperback original and back in 1987.

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You can cast your mind back that for newspapers only reviewed hot books.

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So the book didn't get reviewed at all and published by a small publishing house, there was no no marketing budget behind it.

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So report for murders it was published a resounding silence that astonishes me to this.

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Did anybody actually manage to buy it? But it did sell in reasonable numbers and sufficient that they wanted some more of Lindsay.

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Thank goodness.

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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

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bookshops and UK publishers were desperate and booksellers too were desperate for something that was home-grown that had the same kind of feel.

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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.

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So I've always known I was going to write something different after those first three books.

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The question was what was it going to be by that time?

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I wanted to develop my skills as a writer.

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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.

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And so I had to think about what was going to come next.

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And I ended up writing a series of books with a character called Kate Brannigan, who is a private eye based in Manchester.

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And she's straight, and there had good reasons for that. The first reason is that I wanted to push myself as a writer.

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I wanted to see if I could write further away from myself in a character like Lindsay.

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I wanted to stretch myself and stretch my imagination to try and create something that was beyond my own experience.

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I also, I'll be honest about it. I wanted to find a mainstream publisher. I wanted to make a living as a writer.

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I no longer wanted to be a tabloid journalist.

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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.

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The third reason is the subversive reason I know the way that crime readers read because I'm a crime reader myself,

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and I know that when you find a new writer that you like, you go and buy everything they've written, don't you?

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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.

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And it worked. You know, every time I keep running, a novel came out. The Lindsay Gordon sales spiked as well.

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And the other thing that I was able to do with the Kate Brannigan novel.

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I gave her a best friend who's a lesbian all through my books, whatever the central character,

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whatever the subject I've written about, there have always been gay and lesbian characters as part of the landscape.

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And that, for me has been one of the most important things about being a writer of my generation.

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And in my position is the ability to portray gay and lesbian lives as being part of the landscape.

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Part of the world, part of the community were not weirdos and a strange little corner.

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All of our own doing laundry and a particularly lesbian way, or going round a supermarket in a particularly gay way.

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Most of our lives are just like everybody else as we put the bins out.

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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.

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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.

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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,

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in a way we'd all like to live lives with. It doesn't matter who you sleep with.

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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,

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the way you live in relation to your family, your friends, to the wider community that you inhabit.

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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.

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My my wife, I call him my wife, although she is my civil partner, but I'm not always civil.

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I have to say I was. She was.

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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?

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Said, What do you mean? She said, Well, you know, there were all those people, you know, who were like, getting their relationship blessed.

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She's American, by the way.

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Are all those people getting their relationships blessed before we could like have any kind of formal commitment, she said.

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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.

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Is this the last thing or are we going to have to do some more? So I think that's the last thing.

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I can't think of anything else unless you want to divorce me.

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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

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that are still a remarkable number of countries where it's a capital offence

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to be open about what we have been able to take for granted in my lifetime.

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We have seen remarkable changes in this country. We have seen for men going from being criminals to being able to marry each other.

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We have seen changes in the social fabric we have.

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It's no longer acceptable to insult us in the streets.

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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.

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But we have lives where, you know, it's an awful lot better than it used to be.

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And I think that know we've got this far.

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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.

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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.

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And I think that what I would like to do is in the coming years is to focus some

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of my energies on trying to make things better for people in places where,

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frankly, it's [INAUDIBLE] because we've come a long way.

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And you know, we can celebrate,

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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.

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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.

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I live with a woman that I love. We have a son.

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We have a dog. Really? I feel very blessed.

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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.

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I am a director of Raith Rovers Football Club,

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and one of the things that we're working with is campaign against homophobia in sport in general and football in particular.

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And. Although we've come a long, long way, the still battles to be fought on in the moment of celebration,

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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.

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I just want to leave that little thought with you to changes all up.

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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.

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I suppose you'd have to call it an LGBTQ Annie.

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This is the point we're going to be assisted by the pro vice chancellor here, but.