This is going to be a longish, rambling, bottle-of-wine-in-the-afternoon thread about why I take the dereliction of duty by (while conveniently continuing to fundraise in my name & presuming a right to still speak for me) nominally LGB orgs like Stonewall so personally.

I stupidly came-out to my schoolfriends at age 15 when unexpectedly challenged about it and unable to come up with a witty reply (always have a quick comeback ready, guys!)

When section 28 came in I used the opportunity to make the best of a bad situation and came out to my family too, marching down the stairs to tell me my poor bemused mum that I had something to tell her and then taking the best part of an hour to actually spit it out.

It wasn't fun but my parents took it pretty well, comparatively. There was a little life lesson for me too, my northern working-class dad took it in his stride, my posher politer mum struggled a bit. The opposite of what I had expected. Moving south had warped my perception.

From that point on I was "the gay" in the little Gloucestershire market town I was l living in at the time. Although a bit girly I am six-feet tall, solidly built and can use my fists(after decades away I am still a geordie boy at heart) so taunting was at a distance & in groups.

I had some great friends at school, mostly girls and the best all called Nicola (for some strange reason) so with their support I managed just fine. Much as I love them now, I fell out with my family in my late teens and ended up as a house boy in a Bristol gay pub...

...there is a book in that (if not a trilogy) and I may write it one day once the major players are safely dead(!), but all I will say now is that being on the fringes of society as we were then meant that you mixed with some interesting people of all persuasions and backgrounds.

This was back in the day when national newspapers like the Express would run two-page spreads titled 'The Twilight World of the Homosexual". We carried on with our secret multi-coloured glittery lives while laughing away the fear these headlines caused(warned you about the wine!)

And then of course there was AIDS. In those days everything was about AIDS. We'd had the massive stone block of the government ad smashing down on us regularly. Some hid from it, some took to the saunas in defiance of it, most of us treated it as a name like "Voldermort"...

...something you didn't mention in case you summoned it. A boogeyman that you sniped at and whispered about for shocked giggles. Then people started dying and it all got very real.

There had always been an habitual divide between gays and lesbians up to this point. In fact the one pub that served both (The Elephant) still had an unofficial one-side-for-each in practice (although the dividing wall had been taken down). But as AIDS hit this wall dissolved...

...lesbians have always been the group least affected but they immediately stepped up and were some of the loudest voices calling for care and help for sufferers. Perhaps because many of them worked in the NHS and as carers, perhaps because they weren't scared by public opinion..

..who knows, but they did and loudly and we were all grateful. I don't remember any transvestite (of whom you would see a few at the weekend sometimes) saying anything, in fact they were notable for not interacting with anyone at all generally. We were just an audience for them.

There were many gay drag queens of course. Some of whom we lost. It has been forgotten that drag was not primarily about performance, lip-synching for your life and all that. The majority of them just came out in drag and were vile and funny and loud. It was a statement.

When I fell out briefly with my family it was the drag queens who came to my rescue. My oldest dearest friend when I first met him was 7 feet tall in heels and dressed like Elizabeth I with a beard. He was a man in a dress and designed to offend. I loved him then and still do.

As I was a pretty young chicken at the time (this was years ago ) there was of course the traditional round of "is he desperate enough to fuck me?" but once that limithad been set I had a full set of raucous mother hens who may have dragged me for laughs but never let me down.

Again, like lesbians during the AIDS crisis, the drag queens got nothing for themselves but gave freely and gladly. This is the community that has been lost in constantly crawling to daddy (the state) for rights. The police at the time were issuing public statements about us...

..."swimming in a cesspool of our own making" and trawling the cruising grounds for quick arrests. When I was robbed in my own home the investigating officer gave me a 20 minute lecture on the dangers of my "lifestyle". We didn't seek permission to live our lives. Nobody should.

When did the LGBT become so conformist and spineless that we can't function without a pat on the head from the GOVERNMENT(!) I don't need Reverend so-and-so to applaud my on my brave rimming-I just want him to LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE and in return I will LEAVE HIM THE FUCK ALONE.

Anyway, I digress. We slogged through thirty or more years from the decriminalisation of homosexuality to same -sex marriage. We lost people to AIDS, we were beaten in the street, we were fired, we were ridiculed for being homosexual. But at least society got over that, right?

Um, no. The same heterosexual people who used to turn up at the weekends in our bars and not speak to us are now all over the media with the assistance of nerds who used to be at great pains to insist they weren't actually gay (they just liked Star Wars collectibles)...

....but nowadays have blue-haired genderfluid girlfriends and are together telling us that we are all just regressive "genital fetishists". "Queer" "inverts" take your pick the actual label is irrelevant. And they are now empowered and amplified by the betrayal of LGBT orgs.

As women are now learning to their cost, once you remove any meaning to a definition, any gatekeeping to a community, the majority floods in and it all becomes about them.

Why are the T in LGBT you may ask? Transgender isn't a sexual orientation. Because this is the "freaks box" for straight people. They're all a bit fruity from our perspective so stick 'em all in there together. The weirdos. And our foremost gay charity agrees!

But some trans people are gay, you may say. Okay, what about gay left-handers, acrobats or stamp-collectors? Why don't they get a letter in the ever-growing all-inclusive acronym?

As the saying as it "once you let someone speak for you they become your tyrant." Or as Harvey Milk put it "we need gay people to speak for gay people not sympathetic liberals." Because they will always get it wrong (Hi, black people. I know what you mean now!)

Here's Stonewall in 2014 admitting we are separate communities with different needs. You can watch them take the wrong decision as if you were there in the room! https://www.stonewall.org.uk/system/files/trans_people_and_stonewall.pdf

"Almost everyone we spoke to rejected this option as it would be unfair for a lesbian, gay and bisexual organisation to decide which trans organisations and campaigns are most worthy of funding....

...The second is for Stonewall to nominally become an LGBT charity but support a sibling organisation to work on issues which specifically affect trans people...

... The advantage of this option is that a sibling organisation could have access to our operational infrastructure but employ its own methods and strategies to achieve change...

...However some people felt this would mean that we would delegate the more difficult aspects of campaigning for trans equality to another organisation who would lose the benefit of our existing brand and relationships...

...The process of setting up a separate but constitutionally connected organisation would be both time-consuming and legally complex. We believe that it would be unwise to spend time and resources doing so rather than working to achieve change" Why we were sold out, folks

Because gay rights is too "time-consuming and legally complex" for the complacent cash-fat charity that feeds of us and our names to bother. Their own words.

And while I have your attention, Stonewall may have abandoned gay people in return for richer funding opportunities and the social lives of its handsomely rewarded officers but here is the one organisation that hasn't; https://lgballiance.org.uk/donate/  @ALLIANCELGB