The Scottish Minorities Group was founded in 1969 … I went along out of curiosity one Monday and I really was most impressed by the standard of discussion. And so I just became a regular. There was a Monday discussion night and Saturday they had it for a social.

Now, in those days, of course, there were no organised social events for gay people. And this thing on Saturday night just escalated. It became known as the Cobweb. And so many people were turning up to a small space - you're lucky if it was any bigger than this room - and started to dance, that we had to form a committee and limit numbers, having people signing in. And there was this huge queue outside each Saturday. It really was quite extraordinary. So that was my first organised involvement. I also was getting more and more involved in the Monday discussions, the serious part of it.

… we needed premises for meetings, for small social occasions, for the befriending service. And this involved moving. So this was a major step.

We settled on premises on Broughton Street - a hairdresser's with rooms at the back. 60 Broughton Street consisted of the ground floor flat and also two rooms at the back in the basement. And the rooms at the back were occupied by two tenants … We were supposed to get it without the tenants, but somehow or other we didn't. Anyway, eventually all the legal things went through …

I was given the keys by the lawyer, and I went down and walked into 60 Broughton Street and there was the hairdresser still happily carrying on with his clients. So that was the start of the saga of 60 Broughton Street …

I had never actually been to a meeting of gay women as such. … And I was terrified. And, of course, I had all these preconceptions in my mind. And I've thought since, if someone who was gay who had had a long relationship had these preconceptions, how much worse is it, you know, that really straight people have these preconceptions? I mean, one is brainwashed. … I was in my early 40s I think, and terribly naive still. And I went in and there were three much younger women in miniskirts and one transvestite man in pearls and twinset. It was a great culture shock … I think we met once a week. We didn't do anything else otherwise. But more and more people were coming over from Edinburgh and the east of Scotland. So it was decided to set up a branch in Edinburgh. And that is how the Edinburgh women's SMG set themselves up. Now I should stress I was not the founder …

I felt actually, to be perfectly honest, that part of the job of the lesbians in SMG - and my God it was boring, it was ghastly, you know - was to educate the men about the different issues that concerned women. I mean, we did have a lot of the feminists in Edinburgh at the time … who said, 'You should not be working with men,' as they burst in in their duffle coats. But I felt that we did need to work with men: a) for the purely practical reason that they had a higher profile and the access to the dosh; and b) because it was necessary to educate them about the different concerns of women.

We were asked to send speakers to things like the Samaritans' conferences and Fife Social Work and so on. And as I was the only woman on the committee most of the time, I usually got pulled on to do this with Cecil or one of the others … And we got called out once, I remember, to a miner in Midlothian who was transvestite. He didn't want his wife to know. So we worked with him, counselled him for a while. And then I got a call on my own from him, so I said, 'No, I'm not going out there on my own.'

Quite shortly after I got on to the Befriending team - it must have been 1975/76 - I saw a need for a women's group and nobody else was around and willing to do it. So I started a women's group downstairs at 60 Broughton Street. It was open to any women, any age group and I met a wealth of lovely women … women, let's say, who really influence matters in the town today that I'm still pally with and who come around the house here quite a bit.

Sigrid [Neilson] and I did it together for a while but Sigrid quite quickly dropped out of it because she had so many commitments …

It was quite a mixed, let's say, mentality of women that were coming and a lot of times people were just coming to find a partner. I mean, you'd see them one day at the group and the next day you'd see them walking round MFI together. A lot of women that got into couples then are still in couples today but have moved out of town. But there was a big turnover in couples as well. …

There was another conference. It was called Human Rights Conference or something and it was a gay thing. It was in Teviot I think and I fell out very badly with Ian Dunn at that time when he described the 'red herring of feminism' and so we went away and formed a little caucus, as one did then, and set up a magazine called Red Herring and thought we were terribly witty, you know. It actually had feminist knitting patterns. It was really very funny …

It was an extremely powerful influence on gay people in Edinburgh, just having the event here. It didn't get very much publicity at the time; the major media ignored it to begin with, and we had 2,000 people from all over the world here! So we decided we were going to do something that they couldn't ignore. This was all taking place at the Edinburgh University Teviot Place Union. There was a big banner that had been draped along the front of the speaker's area and this was taken down and we marched down the Bridges, first of all to the Scotsman offices. And then we marched on to the BBC in Queen Street. We forced the BBC Scotland guy, John Gray, to come out and talk to us … So this was actually, in a way, a Pride march 21 years before the first Pride march. In its way it was the first gay march.

I was the official photographer for Gay News for this event - and I was running down the far side of the Bridges to make sure I got a good vantage point. I remember a policewoman talking into her radio saying 'Do you know anything about a march?' It took people completely by surprise and it caused quite a bit of consternation. I do know of people from Edinburgh who were on the march who were seen by friends from buses and things and they effectively came out this way. It was quite fun. You just got caught up in the whole euphoria of the event.

The axis of gay activism, I suppose, was Ian Dunn's flat along with the Gay Centre which was two doors further down the street … Apart from having Ian's name on the door his flat also had Gay Scotland on a brass plaque, and I thought 'Erm, I hadn't quite anticipated that.' And, again, great soul searching and, I dunno, I just plunged in and decided to cross that bridge when I came to it: if my parents came to visit - should we put sticky tape over the sign or …?

Ian had his finger in lots of different pies: political activism, left wing politics and other stuff that must have gone on in that basement; I'm not too sure what; the SHRG Committee.

But it was only later on, a few years later, that the magazine became quite successful. There was nothing else quite like it … There would have been Gay Times in London, but this was very local for Scotland.

We got more advertising in, more people involved, and it moved from its first office which was, if you can imagine it, underneath Ian's bed in his bedroom, which had a big, wooden platform, king-size bed and underneath was a little office with an Anglepoise lamp and a big desk and an electric typewriter … That was where Gay Scotland magazine started.

I think when it started it was very crude - there were awful cartoons on the cover: on the second edition it had the Loch Ness Monster - it was really pretty crude. And it was very much in the early days a kind of political rag, but we wanted something that was a firebrand, I suppose …

It was around that time - the early '80s - that we started to hear news reports and things on the telly about this strange disease that was afflicting people with the letter 'H' at the beginning of a word that would describe them; there were haemophiliacs, heroin addicts, people from Haiti, and homosexuals. I think many gay people felt immediately victimised by this disease because nobody could put a reason for this but quite clearly a lot of people in San Francisco and New York, which had huge gay communities, were being struck down by it. These gay men were dying of strange diseases that were finally [defined] as having an immune defence system root and viral. I think those of us based on Switchboard decided, well, we can either play victims here or we can decide whatever we know about it, we need to know more; we need to be well-informed and we need to react to it.

And the first ever office for an information service about this disease was the office of our old people's home in Midlothian [a care home jointly owned and operated by John Ramage and Edward McGough]. And that's where Scottish AIDS Monitor, the first organisation set up to deal with monitoring this disease and to disseminate information among those communities that appeared to be vulnerable, began …

I like to think that in Scotland particularly, the reason that we never had the epidemic the way that it was advertised that we were going to have it was because the gay community in Scotland actually took the bull by the horns and did something. Part of that was because we had links already through Switchboard with the Department of Urology and Sexually Transmitted Diseases at the Infirmary. We had friends who were clinicians on that team and who'd worked with us anyway, so, if you like, there was a kind of infrastructure there to grab on to, to share information, to monitor the situation and to start to make people aware of it.

Subsequent to that, of course, there was the plan to build the first ever AIDS Hospice and Edward [McGough] particularly was very involved with Derek Ogg and a couple of other people and the then Lord Provost of Edinburgh what is now Waverley Care started with the Trust that came out of Scottish AIDS Monitor to build the hospice.

In fact, I invented the name for the hospice, Milestone, over a very boozy lunch in the Doric restaurant with Edward and Derek because we were determined that we were going to make this happen. So my contribution was just to make up the name … But Edward and Derek really, really put in one hell of a lot of work.

1981 was the first discovery of the disease and they usually say when New York sneezes, five minute later Edinburgh, Scotland, Britain catches a cold … I think a lot of people, because they were in denial, decided that it was a conspiracy against gay people.

There were people who thought it was too difficult to face the reality of it. There was a great deal of fear and a great deal of, I would say, depression: I think people thought, 'Why us?' People were justifiably depressed that things they enjoyed doing could be hurting them, could be dangerous.

I remember we did a benefit concert, sort of late night show to raise money for Scottish AIDS Monitor as part of the Festival and we got various comedians and performers who were working on the Festival to come that night and make a contribution, do an act; one of them was Julian Clary who at that time was known as 'The Joan Collins Fan Club and Fanny the Wonder Dog.' I was the host, the MC. I introduced all the acts and tried to be funny and informative about the work of Scottish AIDS Monitor, trying to make jokes about AIDS for the first time, thinking 'I'm on a hiding to nothing here' but we managed somehow.

There was a clique of rather well known Edinburgh gay queens in the audience and Julian Clary went down a bomb. I don't know if you ever saw his act with Fanny the Wonder Dog. It was brilliant. But the act that followed Julian Clary died a death. He wasn't very good, with the result that this clique of queens in the audience started shouting. When he finished his act and I had to go on again, they started shouting 'We want Fanny, we want Fanny', meaning they wanted Julian Clary and the dog.

Well I just waited until it died a bit, this chant of 'We want Fanny, we want Fanny' and then I named the loudest of these guys because I knew him and said, 'That's not what I've heard' and that shut them up, the rest of the audience fell about laughing and started clapping. That's all I remember of that night really. I just remember thinking, 'I'm standing here on this stage and there are people booing; what do I do?' Anyway we raised a lot of money and that was the point of the thing.

It was a hairy scary time: fear, denial, paranoia. People thinking 'What if the person I'm with has got this, what if I've got it, what if . …

When it became clearer that heterosexual people were equally vulnerable to this disease, when that sunk in, gay people felt less victimised and more willing to get on with managing their lives with this disease around us …

I work with very young people at universities, students - and one of the things I often say to them is, 'Do you know, when I was your age, I had two great fears about exploring my sexuality: one was, if it was with a woman, she could become pregnant and if it was with a man, I might get found out … You have an extra problem, it can kill you; we didn't have that.

I'm very aware of that being a huge difference between being young when I was young and being young now …

There were bigots who saw HIV/AIDS as punishment from God … In fact, when we were looking for a building for the hospice, one of the problems we encountered [in some areas, notably Torphichen in West Lothian] was that there were local people, including churches, who didn't want that … in their neighbourhood, because that meant that there would be perverts and junkies flocking into their previously spick and span community.

But I have to say that very clever work with the community at Firhill meant that we had the opposite response when Milestone was being built … The community embraced it in a very, very supportive way … Partly because of the Lord Provost: she was just marvellous, Eleanor [McLaughlin]. She was a fantastic woman, very energetic and a woman that ordinary people just identified with and trusted and she did a great deal of campaigning work. She was quite ferocious about it as well and that work really paid off …

We had used it as a place where different groups could meet. … We used to give people big pots of tea and things while they were having a big meeting, sitting round a table for three hours. [We were] making absolutely no money whatsoever, but it was interesting …

We just wanted it to be an alternative to what the scene was like at the time in Edinburgh, because it was very much the Laughing Duck which obviously revolved around alcohol, there was Key West around the corner from that which revolved around alcohol and there was Fire Island, the night club which again was alcohol-fuelled.

There was no place that was really open during the day where people could just go and sit and meet other people and we also weren't licensed so no beer or wine or any spirits whatsoever, it was all just tea and coffee, we had this old cappuccino machine. It was good.

And it was really weird: just when we set that up that was when the Tory government was introducing the Clause 28 stuff … We were running a café in the Lesbian and Gay Centre. Gay Scotland was being published downstairs, Scottish Homosexual Rights Groups met in the building as well, in the committee room, and we were all just in the same building at the same time and we were able to all get together and decide how we were going to fight this ridiculous piece of legislation. …

We managed to organise a couple of rallies and a march in Edinburgh; we took coaches down to London for mass demonstrations down there, there was a big demonstration in Manchester that we took people to as well.

I'm not saying that if the Blue Moon hadn't been there it wouldn't have happened anyway, it was just that we were just right there in the centre of things and we were able to manage to pull all these different groups together that maybe - like women-only groups, the Scottish Homosexual Rights Group and other groups of people that maybe would never have spoken to each other at that time.

Shortly after I moved to Edinburgh Section 28 came along and attempts at getting that through Parliament. And we very, very quickly in Edinburgh set up a group to combat Section 28, which was sort of named in response to the organisation that then ran the Lesbian and Gay Centre, which was SHRG, Scottish Homosexual Rights Group. And we set ourselves up as Scottish Homosexual Action Group, with the acronym of SHAG, which caused a bit of amusement when we went to the Council for funding and things like that. You know, the kind of thing that you think is a laugh at the time, but the Council doesn't get it. And we had … I think it was the first demonstration in the UK against Section 28. Very small-scale initially. But the group was very active.

One of the main things we did was actually run Lark in the Park in the Ross Bandstand in Princes Street Gardens. And the kind of scale of it was really unprecedented. And the fact that it was right there, right in the middle of the city, a chance for lesbian and gay people and their friends and whatever to get together very openly. And the event was five hours of music mostly and comedy, but with quite a strong political agenda. And it was just great. It was really, really wonderful. And it felt very defiant and it attracted a lot of people. We ran that two years, I think. And the second year was just after Section 28 had been made law. And it was the first event that had been - a public event - that happened after that. And we had Council backing. So that was a very interesting time.

It was an interesting group in that, it was made up of a lot of lesbian feminists who had never worked with men or hadn't for many years. And gay men who weren't really used to working with very stroppy, strong women. And you know, we did remarkably well under the circumstances.

I hated London. So I gave up on it and came back to Edinburgh. [In 1984] we organised a group, which at first met monthly, and quite a few people started to come along. And we didn't really quite have the critical mass of people to make the group work. So what we decided to do was organise a bisexual conference. I'd been to one that the London Bisexual Group had organised. Maybe two. And decided we could do the next national conference in Edinburgh and that that might make things happen. And it did. It was a great success.

About 60 people were there - about half were from Edinburgh - and from that sprang a weekly group. We met on Thursdays. The Edinburgh Bisexual Group continued to meet for sixteen years. So it was probably the most successful group, or one of the most successful LGBT groups, there's been in Edinburgh. And it only finished in February 2000, when it finally folded.

We met, for most of that time in the Lesbian and Gay - later renamed Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual - Centre in Broughton Street, downstairs in the meeting room, which was at the front of the building at the time. The format of the group was informal. We didn't ever have a committee. We did 16 years without any elected formal committee-type structure. And so the ethos of the group was very much that it belonged to everybody who came along. And at the very beginning, when it started off on its weekly meetings, it really, really did …

We had a membership list which we carried around and different people took it home on different evenings and brought it back the next week. And we did posters every week advertising the next week's meeting because it was the eighties, everybody was on the dole, we had loads of time. So we'd do posters and we put them round 30 or 40 venues in Edinburgh every week advertising the meeting. It was an incredibly active group. There'd usually be a topic of discussion on the sorts of topics groups always have: coming out and that kind of thing; a lot of quite political ones, the politics of bisexuality. Sometimes we'd have a speaker. We'd have new members coming every week. After the group we always went on for some sort of social event. The bit I remember most was going to the Northumberland Bar, as was, on Northumberland Street every Thursday night and just carrying on socialising there.

We did a newsletter. I think it was bi-monthly actually, listing all the meetings that were coming up. Early on I'm not sure if it had a name, but later it was called the Ubiquitous, which stands for Uppity Bisexual Queers United In Their Outrageous Unconventional Sexuality. Outlandish? I can't remember what exactly. It circulated mostly within Edinburgh, to people who came to the group. We did cull the mailing list every so often, but the Ubiquitous went to all the people on the database, and the database did reach several hundred."The [early] newsletters looked different every time and had different types of content every time. It was really interesting. And the posters were done by somebody different every week. And some people were really arty and some people weren't. We copied them at SCRAM, the Scottish Campaign for Resisting Atomic Menace, just above Lavender Menace [Edinburgh's first gay and lesbian bookshop]... they had a photocopier. And we could change the ink so it would photocopy in blue or whatever colour paper. So our posters were different every week. Very active, those early few years. Until people started getting jobs and having too much to do.

There was a preponderance of people in their twenties and thirties. But our youngest member was 16 and our oldest was in his 70s, so it really did span all age groups. And it spanned all kinds of people as well. ... I always felt that I was meeting people I would never have met in any other context.

It went through ups and downs. There were years where it would sort of reach two or three people coming to a meeting and new people would come and they'd think, 'Oh, there's hardly anybody here,' and then they'd never come back again. But, mostly there was a sort of core of people who were interested in making it continue… And people would come and rally round and make things happen. We had training for facilitators so that people would feel drawn in. And social events … For a long time all the women in the group went to the Turkish Baths at Portobello for a couple of years, every Sunday morning. And, you know, that was absolutely lovely.

And for another period we all met at The Northumberland for Sunday lunch. Other times there were bike rides and walks and picnics in Warriston Cemetery.

We organised I don't know how many conferences. Four or five national conferences … UK-wide. Every two years we would end up hosting a conference. The very first one we held was at … I think it was at the Pleasance. That's certainly where the lesbian and gay socialist one was held. I think the bisexual one was there as well. We held one at Tollcross Community Centre and there was one at the Methodist Central Hall. And we were always very keen, like from the start, on access … We had signers for deaf people. And we always made sure we had wheelchair access …

Oh, we had workshops on every kind of topic under the sun. You know, from coming out, to academic studies on bisexuality, safer sex and a whole range of things. But we had sort of ongoing debates about various things. For example, whether transsexual people - particularly the controversy was about male to female transsexual people - whether they could use women-only space. And we said, yes, they could … but there was always some controversy about that. An interesting ongoing debate.

There was a little period when S and I were into making banners. The first one we made just said … What did it say? Lesbian and Gay Equality, or something along those lines. Something very basic. On this marvellous, heavy blue satin with a gold fringe. We'd been going to a march in Glasgow and the night before the march we went back to the flat and on the doorstep of the flat downstairs we found this material and we thought fantastic, we can make a banner, we'll make it in the morning, in time for the march. And, actually, we spent days making it and missed the march completely. But it was a really lovely banner. It was very heavy, but very beautiful. And then we kind of got the bug and we made the Pinko Commie Queers one. And we made one for Scottish Homosexual Rights Group, as was. And we made the Gay Scotland one that had a triangle with a big GS like the logo of Gay Scotland. And an Edinburgh Bisexual Group one, of course. I can't remember what else … But we had great fun with the sewing machine and a lot of colourful material.

Act-Up was quite active in '90 and '91. In fact it organised the first really successful demonstration that I went on, which was outside the Scottish Office in St Andrew's House. And it was to protest against the way that HIV money was split up around the health regions. In those days HIV money was divided amongst the health regions in proportion to the population of the regions. And we said it should be divided taking into account the number of people with HIV in each region. And so we organised this demo.

It was the first demo I had been on that was properly organised. We notified the press and everything. We lay down on the road in front of the buses and stuff like that … And we got MPs to come along. Gavin Strang came along. And at least one other MP … I think it was Ron Brown actually who was then the MP for Leith. And Gavin Strang was asked by the press, by the TV people, 'Don't you think it's terrible these people are blocking the traffic and stuff?

And he said, 'Well, you have to understand why it is that people feel so strongly about this …' He said he supported what we were saying. Because remember, they were in opposition then.

And in fact shortly after they did change the way that the money was split up. Which was good. I'm not saying that that was caused by the demonstration, but when that kind of thing happens it definitely gives a boost to the people who are doing the campaigning.

The Sex Offenders Bill was published by the Tory government in late '96, and I got a copy of it and read it, and realised it was highly discriminatory for Scotland, but not for England and Wales, and that turned out to be because Stonewall and Outrage had done work on it for England and Wales, and completely ignored Scotland … So we decided that we needed to campaign about it.

It was mostly, I think, Helen [Chambers], Derek Ogg and myself that were heavily involved around Christmas '96 in starting a campaign to get this Bill changed. Because it would have been a disaster. It would have meant that men who are fined £50 for cottaging or shagging on Calton Hill would have wound up on the Sex Offenders Register in Scotland, but not on a similar thing in England.

We decided we needed a name, so we called ourselves the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Equality Network. And that was based on the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network in Ireland, which had been very successful in getting the law changed in Ireland in the early '90s. This was the end of '96. And we did loads of work on it in early '97, talking to civil servants, getting MPs to put amendments into the legislation and so on. And, eventually, the Scottish Office backed down - Michael Forsyth was Scottish Secretary at the time - and eventually they said, yes, okay, we will change it. So that was good. That Act was passed just before the general election in 1997.

So we thought, shall we just wind up this thing? ... No, what we'll do is have a conference, a national conference, about what needs to be done for LGB equality and we'll have it the day before Pride Edinburgh '97, the second Pride. We had it on the Friday in Edinburgh City Chambers, and that was the first Equality For All conference, probably because Equality For All was the slogan for Pride that year … Something like 120 people came, and we've still got the reports of it, identified all sorts of issues, and more to the point it said we want the Equality Network to carry on. So that was the start …

March 99 was when the Bank of Scotland thing happened. The Bank of Scotland announced that they were going to do this deal with Pat Robertson. Previous to that we'd had some successes: we'd changed the Sex Offenders Act, we'd changed the Scotland Act, and we had an influence on the consultative steering group report. The Bank of Scotland thing was completely different. And we had a meeting to discuss whether or not we wanted to do anything about it. And we decided we did. That it would be good for LGBT equality to make publicly the links between his sexism and his racism and his homophobia. We never thought that the bank would actually be forced to back down, but for various reasons it was.

A lot of people were saying, 'Well, you'll never make something like that happen in Edinburgh.' It's interesting because a bunch of people in Glasgow that had started getting going said, '[it] shouldn't be in Edinburgh, you need to be in Glasgow, we've got the numbers of people to host it.' The next year, when we insisted that it was going to move from city to city, there was masses of opposition: they said it needed to stay in Edinburgh. So it was a constant battle to have a vision and to actually follow through on that vision rather than be swayed into the self-interest of different groups. And, essentially, right up to June 17th, we really didn't know, if anyone was going to turn up at all. We knew by April/May that we had convinced enough people, that there were going to be people there … But everybody was completely in the dark as to whether anyone, any significant numbers of people, were going to turn up. It was quite possible that we would have lots of stall holders, lots of stewards and no actual people.

Well, it was very clearly intended to be a community empowerment thing and to hark back to protest as well. In 1995 obviously Section 28 was still around, but a whole bunch of oppressive legislation was still on the books and, socially, we were behind where we are now and there was still a long way to go.

But, anyway, it was really important for us that the Pride thing wasn't just a festival: it was a march, the act of protest, and then the celebration afterwards that we had done the march. That was the bottom line and so it was never queers-only but it needed to be focussed around us, not something that somebody walking past laughed at. It certainly wasn't trying to put people off walking past and joining in, it was meant to be an attractive thing: people come along and find out what's going on, maybe see some of the stalls, pick up some leaflets and stuff.

But, really, it was focussed on the community because, the danger with advertising broadly when you're at that sort of stage of an organisation, if somebody is appearing, a mainstream popular act, it tilts the festival against what you're trying to do. And we did hear after that the atmosphere was really surprising and incredibly empowering for a lot of people because it was the first time - and Lark in the Park had happened, and that was really the first big gathering thing up here - but Pride was 1995, it was the first time people had really felt that coming together, that in-your-face march and I think it really worked for a lot of people.

On the day itself none of the main people involved, apart from Tim Hopkins, who was stewarding the march, got anywhere apart from the festival site. We were running around trying to do all the last minute disaster-limiting problems, fill in the gaps, so we never saw the gathering for the first march.

There are two things on that day that really stick in my memory. We all had radios, but the ones on the march were too far away to communicate with the ones at the festival. The link points were Tim, as the Chief Steward of the march, and me, as the festival coordinator. And we did it by phone, so we literally didn't know even at the time that the march was starting (because he was running around like a blue-arsed fly and not able to phone) how many people were coming, whether there was anybody there.

And then I remember getting a phone call, probably about 20 minutes before they were due to arrive on the site, and it was Tim's voice in a real cacophony of whistles and shouts and so on and he just said, 'I've just asked the policeman next to me for an estimate of the number and he says it's 3,000.

The tingle is going down my spine again now when I think about it. That was so far away from our expectations. We thought 500. We thought if we could get 1,000 we would be as happy as Larry. But, if the police estimate 3,000, you actually are talking about 5,000 or 10,000. So at that point I put the phone down and got the radio out for the festival people and there was a lump in my throat when I said, "I hope you are all ready because in 15 minutes 3,000 people are going to arrive here' and there was a stunned silence for a minute and then 'whoops' went all the way round the different tents. So it was really a moment of truth.

I think the other [outstanding memory from the day] actually came afterwards. There was this chap who lived on the corner of Barony Street, a second floor flat, and he was dying of AIDS that summer. And his last wish was to take part in the first Pride. He wasn't able to do that because he was too ill, but what he wanted to do at least was to see it. And we found out a few days afterwards that about 12 o'clock, when it was all just setting off, he was able to stand at his window and see the march head off - and he died about half an hour after that. It was such a big thing for so many people.

Towards the end of 2002 we started to put out feelers to see if people were interested in getting together a trans men support group. People were, so that's where Trans Men Scotland started really, from that point, and we started meeting in our living room until December of 2002. We had 13 guys come to the first meeting and that's where we started. There were guys like ourselves who had already transitioned and other people who were still coming out or in transition and a lot of quite younger guys. When we started to transition, I think most people who were in that big first wave, were in their 30s to early 40s but even just a few years later, it seemed that it was people in their 20s and late teens were the people who were coming out, so the age was growing younger. Also then in 2003 the LGBT Centre [for Health and Wellbeing] had got awarded funding, and quite early on we went and met Tony Stevenson there, and wanted to talk to them about what they were going to do around trans work. They had got T in the name - we asked what did that mean to them. We made those connections quite early on, and by then the group had been meeting for quite a while and we wanted to get it out of our living rooms. We started meeting there, and that's provided us with a good space for the group to be able to flourish.

We meet every month and do discussions and the group has grown from there. There are probably about 30 guys or so that are in touch with us from all over Scotland, so there's quite a significant community and people are coming out all the time.