I look at the gay scene and I can't believe it any more - hundreds of guys going around. When you compare 20 guys in one corner of Paddy's bar, it's completely mind boggling… It's wonderful. Obviously, 90% of the people who are out enjoying themselves today would have been living miserable, secret lives if the law hadn't changed.

One thing in all the years I've lived here that has never ceased to amaze me: there are thousands of lesbians in Edinburgh, thousands and thousands. There absolutely are. But mostly they are all in little groups, unknown to each other.

I acquired quite a lot of knowledge, intellectual knowledge, but very, very little social contact because all the gay people, I met in the '50s were gay men and, of course, they were of this very, very camp generation. You know, something quite, quite different from the male gay identity nowadays. I did actually meet two gay women, but they were having a terrible time in Edinburgh. They were on their way to Singapore….

At the end of the '50s, I went down to London. It was quite obvious that I wasn't going to meet anybody or find any culture, gay culture for women anyway, in Edinburgh. Edinburgh in the late '50s was another universe from what Edinburgh is now. So I went down to London and … I had some very strange adventures on my own. I found out where the Gateways was, but just as I was about to enter, a man shouted out across the road, 'That's right, dear. First on the left.' And I was so terrified, I just turned back.…

I would almost say that it was better, it was better being gay then in a kind of way. Partly because it was illegal. There was that bit of a thing about it being illegal. And because it was more concentrated. You didn't have to jump about to too many different places to find people. They were either in one bar or along the road in the other bar, and that was it … But it's wide open now, almost too wide open, because it's spread out so far. But, in saying that, there's less fear of standing up and saying 'I am gay', which there was then.

People would meet at the Kenilworth. Glances would be exchanged across the crowded bar and, almost by unwritten agreement, you would meet. In those days 'drinking up time' was 10 o'clock. Late licenses? Ha, no chance … The Church of Scotland ran the town … So at 10 o'clock you left the Kenilworth, wallked into Castle Street turned right and walked up the road to a coffee bar. It was called Crawfords. It was actually a baker's shop but at the back of it was this coffee bar which stayed open late - until 11! Exciting! Sophisticated! And that was where the gay community met - in Crawfords. And over our cups of coffee more glances would be exchanged and, if it was suitably dark, you might both go for a walk round the corner lanes in Rose Street or Thistle Street and 'things would happen'. If one of you was lucky enough to have a car you would go for a drive, usually up Calton Hill or other discreet places. The surrounding area around Inverleith Park was quite popular … In fact, it was so popular at one point, when you walked along, you couldn't tell if it was the wind moving the bushes or if it was couples …

… One particular character who I will call Sticky … Sticky had 'agricultural premises', shall we say, outside Edinburgh … and every Friday night in Crawfords, after the Kenilworth had shut, Sticky would appear, having parked the horse-box in George Street. A big horse-box in George Street, which, it's fair to say, wasn't exactly subtle. And Sticky would appear with a collection of young men and invite carefully selected and trusted friends to go back to his premises near Newbridge for what I can only describe as an orgy. And his orgies were legendary.

You have to remember this was a) pre-AIDS, so anything went; b) we were all young and dumb and full of testosterone and a few other things. Everybody who went to his premises knew what happened at those premises, so there was never any dubiety about 'oh, they got me drunk and forced me.' ... On a number of occasions the party started about midnight on the Friday night and finished at 8am on the Monday morning …

There was never any nonsense or any trouble in the cafés at all at any time. The gay crowd, there's never really trouble. But in Castle Street one night, the manager came to the door and stood at the door and, as we were going out, to each and every one of us, he said 'Thank you for your custom, but don't come back.' For no reason other than the fact that we were gay.

10 o'clock for young people is just when the evening is starting, not when it's finishing, so consequently there was a very rich party life that went on after the pub. Everybody on a Friday or a Saturday night went back to somebody's flat; and there were great parties. Great crowds of people would go back to an individual's place or you just moved from place to place and that in itself meant that you got to know people far better than you ever did in a pub. You don't really get to know people till you go to their houses and see how they live.

Even at the time, when the positive reforms of the licensing law came in, I knew that it was going to change things for the worse in some respects. One of the things we lost, as a result of the later pub opening, was the party tradition. Parties just petered out, really.

Pete Davis became very interested in plants and then he wanted to become an academic but before that of course the Second World War broke out and Peter became employed by the intelligence services and worked in Alexandria. I'm not quite sure what he did, anyway he used to go round Alexandria in the war … presumably seducing German officers and finding out what was going on, and he got to know some amazing people like Henry Miller and other luminaries who were living like gods at the time. He used to go collecting plants in Upper Egypt. He gave wonderful lectures; he was very popular and he was great fun. He used to have the most wonderful parties; he had a little house in St Bernard's Road and because he was quite well-connected to the arts community, he had wonderful things in it like Cocteau drawings and all that sort of stuff, marvellous antiques and he used to get all sorts of people to these parties; from duchesses to taxi drivers or some amazing seamen he would pick up in the bars in Leith the night before. He was a fascinating man and he had some extraordinary friends too, not all of whom were gay, obviously. You couldn't say openly you were gay but they all did frightfully well …

I'd been out on holiday that summer in San Francisco … I went to discos there and I just looked round and thought, 'Why don't we have these sorts of things in Scotland?' 'Why don't we have them in Edinburgh?' I'd never even seen them in London, let alone anywhere else in Britain. So, I felt we should have something more like this and I decided to make it happen ….

There had been the discos in the Cobweb which I had been to for years, and then we moved around various halls. It was all very, very, primitive compared to these big commercial discos in America. So, I was by now a member of the Edinburgh Committee of the SMG and I volunteered to be the Social Convener …

On November 19th 1974, I think it was, we had our first disco in Nicky Tam's. We did it on two floors: we had the disco on one floor and we had the food and stuff on the other; you always had to provide food, it was part of the licensing condition. We started off doing these discos every other month … and then they became monthly. And then eventually it became too big; too many people wanted to go: people queued up the street.

We moved to Stockbridge, to what was Tiffany's in those days, it later became Cinderella Rockerfellas. This was in St Stephen's Street; the building's now demolished and replaced with flats. It was owned by Mecca and we used to go there on a Monday or a Tuesday night, which was a quiet night for them … but actually, we were told by the manager that these had the biggest bar takings and people were better behaved. The police, of course, keep an eye on these sorts of things. They said they never had any trouble when we were there. …

It was, I suppose, many more men than women but it was everybody who could get in … We had up to 700 people at these discos and in the end we were doing them fortnightly … In 1976 Eric Morley who ran Mecca, came up with his directors to spy out the land for doing a Miss World in Tiffany's in Edinburgh. They were up on a Tuesday night when we were having one of our discos and they were horrified that their family business with tits and bums and all that bit was being subverted by poofs! And so he issued instructions that it cease. I still have the correspondence.

I was working in the Lesbian and Gay Centre on Broughton Street. At the time there was a café above the office called Stonewall. It was owned by this collective group of people - really, really pleasant people; I still run into them occasionally. It was certainly a lot of people for one little business to be supporting. I think they ran it for about 18 months and then decided to jack it in and the whole centre sort of died because there weren't people coming in any more. There were offices and so on but there wasn't a place where people could go and meet.

When I was a student I had worked in kitchens and bars and things like that over the holiday periods and there were two other people who were working on Gay Scotland as well who had done similar sorts of stuff. And we just sort of said, 'Why don't we open a café?' So there's me and a woman called Siobhan and another woman called Catriona and we thought, 'Yes, we'll give it a shot, just for a laugh, just for something to do.' So we bought the stuff from the people who had been running Stonewall, painted the walls a wee bit, didn't really change it round that much and off we went and that was the start of the Blue Moon café.

The café was a place where people could meet, and I'd put people in touch with other people. So you might call me more of a facilitator at that point rather than a real on-the-street , jumping up and down, waving a placard. I just didn't have time to do that any more but at least I was still able to provide a focus for people and an information place really, just things like having a noticeboard so that people could say, 'We're meeting'.

You either had the people who were into the political side of gay life or the people that belonged to the scene side of gay life and they just wouldn't mix at all. The political people used to think that the people who went to the gay bars and got drunk or whatever were just airheads and not worth bothering about, and all the people on the scene just thought that all the political people were boring. And they just never mixed. So was a way of getting people to talk to other people that maybe they would never have talked to in the past.

The Blue Moon at that time was really small. We only had eight tables in it, could seat 27 people. As it started getting busier and busier, obviously people used to come in and just hang around all afternoon, reading newspapers, if they had nothing to do or were just having a day off. You would get other people coming in and they would want to sit at a table and have a meal or have a coffee and you would say 'Well, we don't have any tables but you could sit there; there's a seat there' and by just putting people on to tables, people start having conversations and it could be a young woman sat next to an old man and they would end up striking up a conversation and that's what I really, really liked about the Blue Moon.

Some people didn't like it: 'We'd rather wait and have a table on our own'. 'Well, you can do but if somebody else comes in after you, I'm going to sit them down at your table anyway. We don't have enough space to let people have a table to themselves.

People got used to that idea and you saw friendships spring up where you would probably never think that they would do. I thought that was absolutely superb. I used to love that.

… Well what actually happened was, when we were in the old Blue Moon, my manager at the time was called Maggie, and we used to go to the gay clubs in Edinburgh, but then we started going to the Scottish rave scene at the time, like early '90s, all the Acid House stuff, and we just thought 'Never heard anything like that before but it's absolutely superb!

But they weren't playing anything like that in the gay clubs so we used to start travelling around and going to these outdoor festivals, events happening in a few tents in a field somewhere near Kilmarnock. And it just seemed so new and exciting and fresh and the music was just amazing, the DJs were amazing, they had live bands on, huge places, loads and loads of people and I thought the atmosphere was so good and it was so friendly and OK it was very much a straight scene, but everyone was just, because it was all fresh and new, everyone was just really friendly, so if they found out that you were gay, it really didn't matter … I suppose I had only knocked around on the gay scene and hadn't gone to any of the straight places in Edinburgh, so all this was happening at the time and passed me by a wee bit … I have always been interested in music; and then suddenly I was introduced to this new scene and it was like 'Wow! This is fantastic!'

So I said to Maggie, "Well wouldn't it be brilliant if we could introduce this sort of feeling, this sort of atmosphere, this sort of vibe, if you could transplant that into a gay environment, imagine what that would be like; it would be incredible. That was how the idea of Joy started. So this is about the early '90s and we used to put on Blue Moon parties at the time, just hire a venue on a quiet night, Sunday night or Friday in a club that wasn't doing particularly well and just move it around, whatever we could come up with and hand out free tickets in the Blue Moon and just say 'Come along to a party in two weeks time' and these parties started getting really busy and we would be getting 500, 600, 700 people … We really did mix it up; you could have one of those techno tunes and then you played Madonna and then you'd play Rupert the Bear and then you would play whatever, a bit of Bee Gees, 'Night Fever' or something like that, party music really, and just mix it all up.

We wanted to open up people's eyes to a much broader idea of what it was to be gay. … People came out by coming to the bookshop because it was a safe haven … Because it was in the basement and in a side street, we realised it was going to be quite a good place for people just to come. … Apart from saying hello and welcoming people, we weren't there questioning why they were there. The assumption was they were there to buy books, but we made it as relaxing and as safe a place as possible. And it seemed to work.

We put on shows during the Festival … that put us on the map so far as tourists were concerned … People who were in Edinburgh in August, that was what they read: the Fringe programme. These really went on for about 10 years. Sigrid was really the driving force behind that and they were very successful and attracted a lot of people … We became known, really, as the northerly outpost of the lesbian and gay reading and culture scene, you know, culture in the very broad sense … We were definitely making a statement about gay culture, that we are more bedrock than off-the-wall.

We have difficulty sometimes describing exactly what the Thebans are about because the original aim was to set up a rugby club where gay men can play rugby in a safe, supportive, friendly environment. That was the original suggestion and that's how it kicked off. However, along came a married man who said he wanted to play with us and we thought, well, if we now say no, we are potentially as discriminatory as any other club might be perceived to be ….

Since we've started playing as a club against other clubs, predominantly more straight clubs, we've just had no prejudice, no hassle from the clubs. There have been some issues with individuals within clubs, but as far as clubs and governing bodies are concerned there is absolutely no problem at all. So we think we are not a 'gay' rugby club because we've got straight players. We're not 'gay-friendly' because every club - many, many clubs - could call themselves 'gay-friendly' … there are quite a number of gay rugby players in Edinburgh playing in mainstream clubs. And, in some ways, the whole rationale for Thebans being set up has changed from a safe place for gay people to play rugby to be a safe place for gay people to get an introduction to rugby.

… We've never had any club say 'We're not going to play you 'cos you're a gay team'; we've never had any club passing odd comments. There was an incident where a player from a club on the west coast put up a match report which had talked about hairdressers, beauty-therapists, that sort of thing. It was quite a derogatory report and we just contacted the club's chairman and said, 'You do know that this on your website?' He said, 'No.' He looked at it and it was down within an hour because that didn't represent the views of Bishopton Rugby Club; it was purely an individual's views, probably a drunk individual at that ….

Acceptance isn't the right word. The fact that we're predominantly gay players is of no relevance almost … It's a case of 'Can you play rugby? If you can, you've got a game …

You do get a lot of comments from people saying, 'Oh yes, what do you get up to in the scrums, what do you get up to in the rucks and mauls?' And the answer is 'protecting my head'. You've got 15 people with studded boots on running about your head; you're not thinking 'that's a nice pair of legs'.

You know the stereotypical view of a gay man is someone being a wimp, a pansy, effete in some way. If you have this player knocking his pan out week in, week out, at training and in games.… the whole question about the person being effete is gone…

We're making the point that 'just because I'm gay doesn't mean I can't play rugby'… We've got a mixed team. So we've got people who are identified as gay, we've got people who are married, we've got female-to-male transsexual players - and that caused a bit of stick with the SRU, they didn't know quite what to do. So, basically, anyone who can be identified as a man can play. So we've got a very broad mix of people in the club and, yes, we are a gay rugby club, but if you're speaking to one of our players you've no idea if that person's gay or straight. It's not relevant to the fact that you can play rugby.

In the 1990s I thought there were very strong pressures in Edinburgh to behave in a particular way, certainly as a gay man, and there were some people who were in opposition to that kind of pressure: people who earned tens and tens of thousands a week as advocates, and then they went to the New Town bar on a Saturday evening. And although they were wearing different clothes, they were still talking in the same power-tripping way… I think some of them didn't even like to acknowledge that they experienced any discrimination at all, because they were successful white Edinburgh men with flats in the New Town, and I don't know how much they would have had things in common with youths from Muirhouse or Wester Hailes….

I have a bit of an aversion to things being organised. Just because I'm gay doesn't mean that 12 other people will be instant chums… I think and hope there is, but I think that people who go to the LGBT Centre and to Pride and so on find it very dispiriting, trying to appeal to a community….

It often seems to me that there are a lot of gay people in Edinburgh who are real party-animals and I don't feel that I have a huge amount in common with them. I prefer to do my socialising either within my peer group or in mixed circles where I've something in common apart from sexuality. But then, I'm 52, I'm quite comfortable, do you know what I mean? It's very valuable to have this centre in Howe Street and feel comfortable in nice places, like women in Sala and so on. When I was first on my own, after my partner who lived with me, I found these quite good places to be because you can get into conversations without being perceived to be cruising. A bit like the Filmhouse or somewhere like that. You know, people are quite often quite friendly and it's not just me making some great intrusion if you ask someone if you can join them at the table, or whatever.

So I find it hard to answer the question about whether there's a gay community. Well there is in lots of ways, but it can be a little bit specialist. And of course I lost a lot of friends. I had quite a number of friends who went to California and did extremely naughty things before anyone knew about AIDS and quite a few of them died before the drugs are as good as they are now and it was ghastly, seeing your best friends die. But there was a real community. I think - awful - but things like SAM (Scottish AIDS Monitor) and SOLAS did help give a sense of community ….

I suppose most of the LGBT communities don't go to the pub at all. Because, you know, you probably only see a few thousand people in the pub, even if you went there and counted them all up over the course of the year. So there must be a lot more people who aren't going to the pubs at all. I'm sure some of them, I'm sure most of them, do spend a very large time going out, but they go out to non-gay venues. Yeah, and I'm sure a lot of them have social lives that include lots of LGBT people that do it in a non-scene way, which after all is what people used to do 30 or 40 years ago. They're out to all their friends and so on, but just no interest in going out on the scene … Maybe if there was a bigger diversity of venues then the community, other parts of the community, would be more visible. And that would be a good thing …

If you look at surveys, quite a lot of people say they do feel community. And I think when you see people at Pride then it seems pretty clear that people do feel that community there at least. I suppose people's connection with one or more LGBT communities is going to be something that changes quite rapidly. And the size of these communities could be anything from just a handful of people they know to something really big that they might feel part of. I think, from personal experience, that most people probably feel part of lots of different communities, not all LGBT ones ….