I’m writing this on the train home from Manchester, four days after I arrived for Manchester Village Pride, and I’m still processing it in the best possible way.

This was the first event delivered by a new organisation fronted by the local businesses in and around the Gay Village, and I’ll say this straight away: they got so much right. In previous years, and most noticeably in 2025, the village felt really, really overcrowded, with a sense that ticket sales had been prioritised over the overall attendee experience. This year felt different. Yes, there were the usual pockets of large groups of people outside the likes REM, BarPop, Onbar and the junction by Church and the Leven Hotel, but there was also space to breathe, to take it all in, to actually be present rather than just survive the crowd. And for me, that space is everything, because what I value most at a Pride event that gets the balance right between performance, community and wider purpose is the room to reflect.

Which brings me to the harder conversation, because Pride events remain one of the most contentious talking points both within our community and outside of it, and I think that tension is worth sitting with rather than flattening.

Nearly sixty years on from Stonewall, we are in a moment that feels quite dark for our community, and I really don’t want to minimise that. The case for visibility, for protest, for making noise, is real and urgent… But, I’ve never fully accepted the idea that protest means only one thing. Visibility. Joy. Showing the world the breadth and brilliance of our community. These are all forms of protest – the demonstration that we aren’t letting those against us win.

The fact is, we live in a multifaceted, multicultural, and an increasingly multi-opinion society, and the question of how Pride reflects that complexity is one that needs to be asked, but the answer is, actually, a difficult one to come by. We should never accept bigotry, ignorance or prejudice, but acknowledging that nuance exists in many of the conversations around us isn’t the same as accepting those things.

One of the quieter points of tension during Manchester Village Pride was around HBO’s involvement as a sponsor and supporter, and I do understand the instinct behind the criticism, and I’m not dismissing the very real concerns many people have around the incoming Harry Potter series and JK Rowling’s position. However, I’d push back on the idea that one production completely defines an organisation of HBO’s scale – what about the queerness woven through House of the Dragon, The Last of Us, Looking, and, come on, Heated Rivalry? A company like that operates across multiple business units, each with their own management structures feeding into a wider group, and decisions made in one part of it don’t reflect the values or output of the whole, not unlike how many large corporate entities operate across different arms before you reach group level. Boycotts can be powerful, but they need to land in the right place to have impact, and I’m not really sure this one does.

This connects to something I feel more and more strongly about, which is that some of the push away from mainstream support for LGBTQ+ causes hasn’t only come from the likes of Trumpism and its various global counterparts. Some of it has actually come from within our own community. When the conversation turns to pinkwashing, it often focuses on what we see, a rainbow logo in June, a Pride float, a sponsored banner, without any consideration of what that organisation might be doing internally for its LGBTQ+ staff, or the charitable work it does under the radar and without fanfare – as many shout “they should just be doing it!” Many of them are!

And at a moment when Pride events are cancelling across the country, when small LGBTQ+ charities and community groups are downscaling or closing entirely due to lack of funding, we need to think very carefully about who we’re pushing away and why.

Because the question isn’t abstract. It’s this: is it better to take money from an imperfect organisation, money that in many cases comes directly from queer people and allies working within it, to fund a service that genuinely needs it, or to turn it away on principle and watch that service close? I know where I land on that, and I think the community needs to have that conversation more honestly than it currently does.

The anger I see directed at people who hold more pragmatic views on these questions frustrates me, not because I don’t respect the need for anger, I absolutely do, but because it’s so often pointed at the wrong targets. Imperfect allies are not the enemy. People who are trying to work within broken systems while also pushing against them are not the enemy. Saving that energy for the people and institutions actively working against us seems not just more effective, but more honest about where the real threat is coming from.

I really do believe that we are at a crossroads as a community… The world is difficult right now in ways that require us to stick together, to find common ground with those willing and wanting to work alongside us, and to resist the urge to demand ideological purity from people who are, broadly, on our side. That doesn’t mean abandoning principles, it just means being strategic about where we direct our energy, and honest about what we’re actually trying to achieve.

Manchester this weekend gave me hope. The village felt like a community reclaiming something, doing it with care and intention and a clear sense of what it’s actually for.

I came home tired, in the best possible way, and more convinced than ever that the conversation we need to be having is not about who’s pure enough to stand with us, but about how we build something worth standing for.

I don’t get to London often, but when I do, it tends to leave a mark… and this weekend was no exception. I’ve come home sitting with a feeling I’m still trying to properly articulate, somewhere between gratitude, inspiration, and a (not so) quiet hunger to do more.

It started on Friday afternoon at the Chancery Rosewood, at the tenth anniversary of the Peugeot X Attitude Pride Awards Europe, supported by British Airways. I was there as the guest of my friend Carl Cashman, and without his invitation I wouldn’t have been anywhere near it, so I can’t thank him enough for taking me along!

The Pride Awards focus on the ones doing the work in communities, in schools, in activism, in sport, often without the visibility their efforts deserve. Among this year’s ten winners were Ryan O’Neill and Kaue Garcia, the Keighley Cougars owners who have made trans inclusion central to a rugby league club’s identity, and Dean Atta, the BAFTA-winning poet whose work centres Black queer stories with real craft and tenderness. You can read the full list of winners on Attitude’s website.

The Pride Icon Awards went to Placebo, Cat Burns and ABC journalist James Longman, and the evening was hosted by Emma Willis with performances from Delta Goodrem and Heather Small. Russell T Davies was in the room, which, given everything I’d written recently about Tip Toe, felt VEEERRRYYY significant… gutted I didn’t take the opportunity to speak to him!

Being surrounded by people who have spent years doing the work, taking risks, building platforms, creating space for others, does something to you. It’s humbling in the most specific way, not in a self-deprecating sense, but in the sense of being reminded how much is possible and how much further there is to go.

I left wanting to be in more rooms like it, not for the sake of it, but because I genuinely believe that the more visible Proudly Said becomes, the more people it can reach and the more space it can create for voices that don’t always get to be heard.

The following morning was the Pride in London parade, marching for the first time alongside Carl and the Attitude and Peugeot group, and it was something I hadn’t quite prepared myself for emotionally. The scale of the crowd, the noise, the visible weight of support lining the streets, affected me more than I realised.

Check out my wee Instagram reel here.

What struck me most was how many organisations, city bodies, employers and institutions were there out of simple, genuine desire to be present. There was an infrastructure of allyship on display that felt hard won and something that had been worked at for a long time. The anti-LGBTQ+ messaging on the streets was almost invisible, though a glance at the online commentary told a very different story, and that gap between the physical reality and the digital one is important to take note of.

But I want to be careful not to romanticise it entirely, because London is London. The scale of what happened on Saturday is a function of being the capital, with funding, population, political weight and cultural infrastructure that Liverpool cannot replicate in the same way, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone. The more useful question to bring home isn’t how do we do this, but what are the underlying conditions that make it possible, and how do we cultivate those locally in a way that’s true to what Liverpool actually is.

The Will and the community is there. The infrastructure and institutional buy-in is a more complicated conversation, and one worth having openly and honestly.

I came home from this weekend feeling inspired and a little hungry for what comes next, which is usually a sign that something was worth doing. There’s work to do, locally and beyond, and weekends like this one are a good reminder of why it matters.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently writing about fear, about the world feeling darker, about the rhetoric that’s crept back into public conversation, about what it means to be LGBTQ+ right now and sit with that unease. So when I say that last night at the Queer Student Awards in Manchester felt like a genuine exhale, I mean it in the most specific way possible.

I was there to capture the highlights of the evening for the awards, smartphone in hand, moving through a room full of young queer people being celebrated for the things they’re doing in their schools, their colleges, their communities. And honestly, I wasn’t entirely prepared for how it was going to feel.

The Queer Student Awards, founded by Steve Keith, exists to recognise the contributions of LGBTQ+ students across the UK, the ones who are setting up GSAs, running awareness campaigns, supporting their peers, making noise in spaces that don’t always make it easy for them. The youngest winner on the night was 14. Fourteen. And when his name was called, he jumped up and ran to hug his mum, and I think that image is going to stay with me for a very long time.

Because here’s the thing about that… We are living through a period where young LGBTQ+ people are being told, in various ways and from various directions, that their existence is up for debate, that their identities are a problem to be managed, a conversation to be had, a policy to be reviewed. And in the middle of all of that, a 14 year old boy is standing in a room in Manchester being cheered for being exactly who he is and doing something extraordinary with it.
That tension, between the world as it is and the world as it should be, stuck with me all evening.

What struck me most was the energy in the room. These weren’t people waiting for permission to exist or to act… they were already acting, already building, already showing up for each other in ways that many adults twice their age haven’t managed. There’s something both humbling and hopeful about being in a space like that, particularly when the broader conversation around LGBTQ+ rights feels so relentless and so exhausting.

I’ve written recently about fear, about Tip Toe, about the violence that hides behind little things. And I stand by all of it. But last night reminded me that alongside the fear there is also a generation of young queer people who are not waiting for things to get better before they start making them better. They’re doing it now, in classrooms and common rooms and school corridors, often with very little support and a great deal of courage.

The highlights video is coming soon, and I can’t wait to share it. But in the meantime, if you haven’t come across the Queer Student Awards before, go and find them – what Steve and the team have built is something really important, and last night was proof of that.

Some rooms you leave feeling heavier. Last night wasn’t one of them.

Something has been bothering me for a while, and the recent conversation around Tip Toe, and the wider political landscape it reflects, has brought it into much sharper focus… There seems to be a growing assumption, particularly in certain corners of social media, that being LGBTQ+ comes with a pre-assigned set of political beliefs. That our identity places us, automatically and without question, in one particular box. And, honestly, I think that’s worth pushing back on.

Just to be clear about where I’m coming from, and my position – I’m a liberal. I stood in the 2024 General Election for the Liberal Democrats, and I’ll be standing in the 2027 Council elections. Before that, I served as an elected Alliance Party representative in Northern Ireland. My political identity is not something I’m coy about, even if I don’t shout it from the roof tops like others, and it is, I’d argue, a perfectly natural home for an LGBTQ+ person, not least because the Liberal Democrats have a long and consistent track record of fighting for LGBTQ+ rights, while also holding space for a range of views and respecting the ability of people to hold them.

BUT! My political identity and my LGBTQ+ identity are not the same thing, and I’d challenge anyone who tried to tell me they should be. They definitely have overlap and cohesion, but not to every issue.

What unites us as a community is not ideology. It’s experience. It’s the prejudice we’ve faced, the rights we’ve had to fight for, the spaces we’ve carved out for ourselves in a world that hasn’t always welcomed us – that’s the common thread, and it’s a powerful one, as the response to Tip Toe has shown. When Russell T Davies holds a mirror up to the threats facing our community, we recognise ourselves in it collectively.

But recognising shared experience is different from assuming shared politics, and I think we’re on a genuinely dangerous path if we start treating political pluralism within our community as a kind of betrayal. The global population will never speak with one voice, and it would be foolhardy to think otherwise. But, what we can do is work together in common interest, find the ground we share, and engage honestly with the things we disagree on, including with each other.

I’m a pragmatic person, and I like to think the best of people, trying to listen even when I disagree, and I think robust, respectful debate is healthy. What I don’t think is healthy is the assumption that because someone is LGBTQ+, they must hold a particular economic position, or support a particular party, or view the world through a specific ideological lens. We are not a homogenous group. We are individuals with different backgrounds, different experiences, different priorities, brought together by something real and significant, but not by a requirement to think identically.

The one caveat I’d always hold to is this: pluralism has limits. Viewpoints that would endanger our community, reduce our rights, or treat us as less than equal don’t fall under the banner of reasonable difference of opinion. That is very important, and it shouldn’t be blurred. But within that, there is enormous space for disagreement, for nuance, for people to hold genuinely different views about economics, governance, and the role of the state, without that making them a bad LGBTQ+ person or a traitor to some imagined collective.

We fought for the right to be seen as individuals. It would be a strange thing to then demand that we all think as one.

I recently finished watching Channel 4’s Tip Toe finale, and I’m still sitting with it in a way I wasn’t entirely prepared for. Russell T Davies described it as the strongest thing he’s ever written, and said he had to write it “because the world is getting stranger, tougher and darker, and frankly, the fight is on.” Watching that final episode, I understood exactly what he meant, because it didn’t feel like watching a drama, but more like watching a mirror being held up to something I’ve been trying to articulate for months and haven’t quite managed to.

The show follows Leo, a gay man who runs a bar on Canal Street in Manchester, and his neighbour Clive, and over five episodes it traces how prejudice doesn’t just happen… but creeps in gradually, through small moments and wrong turns and the slow radicalisation of someone who, at the start, just seemed like a difficult neighbour (even though the 5 episode arc takes place across ten days, we can assume Clive has been indoctrinated over a longer period from things he says).

Whilst the finale is absolutely horrific, emotionally and visually, it’s the epilogue that does something I found genuinely devastating, as a culmination of some of the accusations laid against Leo: it tells you what becomes of every character, and the final note it lands on is that within 18 months of Leo’s death, a search for his name returns the result “Leo Struthers, convicted paedophile.“

It wasn’t true… but it was allowed to be. His legacy, even in the wake of one of the worst deaths imaginable, falls victim to the same bigotry that killed him.

I watched that and I felt sick, because it isn’t fiction – it’s one of the oldest and most corrosive weapons used against LGBTQ+ people, the accusation of being a predator, a paedophile, a danger to children, and it gets deployed with a casualness that its users are rarely made to account for. I’ve experienced it myself, something I’ve spoken about publicly and to the Irish press, and three years on from leaving Northern Ireland, I’m still dealing with iterations of it. Seeing it depicted so unflinchingly on screen, and seeing how it outlives a person, how it gets to rewrite someone’s story after they’re gone and can no longer defend themselves, was one of the most affecting pieces of television I’ve watched in years. That is the highest possible compliment I can give to Russell and to Alan Cumming, whose portrayal of Leo, warm and funny and stubborn and quietly terrified in equal measure, is something I’ll carry with me for a long time.

Then there’s Clive. David Morrissey’s performance is remarkable precisely because Clive is not a monster, and that’s what makes him so hard to watch. He’s someone you find yourself shouting at, wanting to grab by the shoulders and ask when he last had a single thought that wasn’t fed to him by something he saw online. He’s someone who had choices, who had a person standing right next to him whose humanity was entirely visible, and who chose, again and again, to believe the algorithm over his own eyes. The horror of Clive is that versions of him exist everywhere, in comment sections and around dinner tables and in positions of influence, people who have outsourced their critical thinking to outrage and who have stopped asking whether any of it is actually true.

And whilst I’m applauding the cast, a specific mention for Iz Hesketh, who plays Zee. Someone I’ve crossed paths with, and it was a joy to see them in something this significant, particularly at a time when transgender and non-binary identities are being debated, dismissed and weaponised in the public conversation – the importance of authentic representation, of transgender and non-binary performers playing transgender and non-binary characters, cannot be overstated. The portrayal is quiet, considered, and lands exactly as it should. Go on, Iz.

But the reason I’m writing this isn’t really about the show. It’s about what the show is reflecting back at us, and whether we’re honest enough with ourselves to look at it properly.

Because the world that Tiptoe depicts isn’t a dystopian fantasy or a worst case scenario, but the world that’s been assembling itself around us for a few years now, in increments small enough that it’s easy to dismiss each one individually:

• The social media commentary that grows steadily nastier, and bolder.
• The casual erosion of DEI.
• The reemergence of rhetoric we were told was consigned to history.
• The way ignorance has been handed a platform and, more dangerously, a sense of legitimacy.

None of it feels like a crisis individually, and that’s precisely the point – Leo says it in that final scene, reflecting on whether the LGBTQ+ community’s increased visibility was a mistake: “every tiny little thing that happens… it seems like little things, but there’s a violence behind it.” I’ve been thinking some version of that thought for months without being able to say it that cleanly.

As an LGBTQ+ person, I’m finding the current landscape genuinely frightening in a way that’s difficult to admit without feeling like you’re being dramatic, and part of what Tip Toe does so well is validate that fear without sentimentalising it. It shows you how quickly things can escalate when prejudice is left unchallenged, how the people who enable it are rarely the ones who consider themselves hateful, and how the communities on the receiving end are left to absorb the consequences while the conversation moves on. It’s something that a lot of us are living inside of right now.

So yes, this is an applause for Russell T Davies for writing something this necessary, and for having the nerve to end it the way he did without softening it into something more comfortable. And it’s an applause for a cast who brought these characters to life with honesty and without flinching, including Morrissey, who made Clive exactly as ordinary and therefore exactly as terrifying as he needed to be. But more than anything, it’s me trying to put into words something I’ve been carrying around for a while, which is that the fear a lot of us feel right now is not an overreaction, and it is not nothing, and we are allowed to name it.

Every tiny little thing. And there is a violence behind it.