Sometime in 1973 a letter fell through the letter box of my flat in West Kensington. It contained a cheque for £500. It had been forwarded to me from an uncle. It was completely unexpected and, considering I was living communally with a group of friends on shared expenses and £3 a week pocket money, it was a very large sum. It turned out that my uncle was an executor for a great aunt and my uncle was dispersing her estate. The money should have gone to my father, but he died young, so my sister and brothers and I each got £500. My life was in a mess at the time so I took the cheque as a sign from above to make some changes in my life. I came out and spent the whole £500 on a camera!

Let’s roll back a bit! I had come down to London from Scotland in 1965 to study architecture. I shared a large five room flat with two of my student colleagues. But the course for architecture was long (five years in college, two years in apprenticeship) and it was the Swinging 60s. We got distracted.

My two friends taught themselves music, wrote songs and started performing at the local folk club. I said 'why don’t you turn professional and I’ll be your manager and agent'. The band was called Gas Works and they quickly became busy and self-supporting. I booked them onto the John Peel Show. I filled their diary with twenty-five bookings a month. They were invited by David Bowie to play at his Beckenham Arts Lab and his Beckenham Free Festival. His producer, Tony Visconti, signed up Gas Works, and made two singles and an LP. We lived a communal life for seven years, me imagining that I was the next Brian Epstein, and them writing a whole catalogue of good songs. Five of those years were very happy years, but the last two got more and more stressful. The band didn’t break through in a big way and I was getting close to a nervous breakdown because I hadn’t come out.

Then that cheque fell through the door.

I told the band that I was gay, cut my hippy hair, invested in several sets of new underwear, splashed on cologne and visited the nearby Coleherne. I soon had a personal life worth talking about. Then I bought a Hasselblad camera. That’s a very unusual thing for a beginner to do but it was the choice of camera of my fashion heroes of the 60s, David Bailey, Dufy, and Terence Donovan. I hung black-out curtains over the bathroom window, put plastic trays on slats of wood over the bath and taught myself to develop film and make prints from weekly articles in a magazine called Photo Technique.

Two friends of mine were keen actors in their spare time and belonged to an amateur theatre group in Paddington called The Martin Beaney Players. I photographed their plays and sold photos back to the actors.

Then I discovered the offices of Gay News were 500 yards from my flat. They were located in a road (Star Road) that I had never walked down in the preceding ten years! I decided to create some articles on spec. I photographed London street names with gay innuendoes - Great Queen Street, Mincing Lane, Dyke Road. I took a self-portrait and wrote an article about my coming-out that might go with their series of coming-out articles which they published regularly. And I wrote up the suggestion that I should visit events in the gay calendar and report on them as a sort of gossip column. Photograph whichever of the participants were willing and publish them with their full names in the paper.

My coming-out article was published. My gay street names became the core of a long-running series of ‘Readers Photos’. People were invited to send in anything that was gay and funny and my photos were used as a fall back if not enough readers photos came through the post.

I was given a regular ‘Scene and Heard’ series which ran for years. I visited public demonstrations, Tricky Dicky discos, Sappho meetings, gay outdoor clubs, biking groups. Even the gay nude beach at Shell Bay! For a while I was freelance, being paid by the article I handed in or the commission I was given. But Roger Baker who was editor of Gay Times magazine, a monthly glossy, soon heard of me and asked me to do some articles. Roger was an inspired and experienced magazine editor. He cooked up an item which I think was called “The Gay We Wear” which was about the various different costumes that people chose to wear - leather, camp, drag, straight, etc. And as is the way in the freelance life, Denis Lemon soon heard about them. He called me in and offered me a full time job.

And that is what I did for the next 10 years.