How did you meet your significant other?
We met in the 5 Star club in Leicester.
I met my husband in the 5 Star Club in Leicester in the 1990s, then the only gay club in the city, though we would see each otjer at the Dover Castle. I can’t remember why I was there though often the Gaysoc from the University used it for nights out and perhaps it was one of those that I was at. Geoff told me once he was attracted to me because I was such fun, though he knows better now, some fifty years later.
At tne time he asked about me to two friends we had in comon, a couple united not just by love but an enduring love of Stalin and aggressive ‘tanky’ Russian communism. They warned him off me as too much on the Euro left, a believer, that is of democratic left transition and rainbow coalition. Geoff probably though all that nonsense being a committed anarchist of the peace News type, which he sometimes wrote articles on Gay Liberation for.
I remember dancing with him, and that he came to our student house in the University Quarter, where the washing up towered well over the sink. We met more usually after that at Gay Liberation Activist meetings at the local radical bookshop and I remember twice him making time to see me off at Leicester Station for first a weekend in Nuneaton with an old University friend and then when I went back to my parents in Honley.
I first lived with him in his cottage in Sileby, before we got a house together in Leicester that became the base of Leicester Gayline-Friend – a service with specialists nights each for lesbian, trans, teenage and student only groups,and a commitment to co-training inand between each group and a code of practice for co-counseelling and referral onward issued where wanted.
That was so long ago and much has changed in and between us in the intervening years. Geoff studied at Ruskin College and Brunel and we went to live in London when I got a a job in tne Roehampton Institute. We both are much older now: me in my 70s and Geoff in his 80s Of course, what has not changed is my love for him.
All my love
Steven xxxx
Steve_Bamlett_blog 