Speak its name

SOPHIE WARD INTRODUCES A NEW BOOK OF PORTRAITS CELEBRATING LGBT PEOPLE, OUR ALLIES AND OUR ICONS

How does it feel to be part of monumental change in your lifetime? To be part of history not because you were swept up in events, a force majeure, or a bit part in someone else’s war, but because you effected change through your own agency and determination? All of you reading this article will have been part of that movement. All of you are part of that history. You stood against the tide of public opinion and calmed the waters for your own and coming generations with new laws that you fought for and civil rights that you claimed. You did it through the grandest of gestures and toughest of fights and you did it with the smallest and most personal of your choices. You did it with love.

The last 50 years, and the past few in particular, have seen momentous change in British law and attitudes towards LGBT people. We still have so far to go (when lesbian couples waltz around on Strictly Come Dancing and you don’t have to think about how safe you are in public before you touch your girlfriend’s shoulder) but we have many new freedoms, and chief among those is the legal recognition of our right to exist, form families, marry, divorce and be at the hospital bedside of our loved ones.

Gay men are no longer criminalised merely by the fact of their existence (since the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1967) or subjected to demeaning, legally-mandated medical and psychiatric procedures in order to correct them (the imposition of which led to Alan Turing’s suicide in 1954).