For a list of the current Friends of the Scottish Review, click here
Ian Dunn
The last time I saw Ian Dunn was at a meeting I had organised during Gay Pride in Edinburgh in 1995. During a lively discussion about the gay movements in Scotland and the Republic of Ireland I made a fairly unoriginal remark about the problems of Scottish masculinity.
Ian, in his role as founding father of the Scots gay movement, publicly admonished me on the grounds that, having spent 20 years of my adult life outwith Scotland, I had no right to make such comments. Pins could be heard dropping to the floor. Six months later, I left Scotland again; three years later he was dead. There was neither discussion nor reconciliation between us about who had the right to speak out about Scots sexuality.
Ian Dunn was one of the founding members of the Scottish Minorities Group (SMG) in 1969 and for several years he was almost the only person in the country who dared to speak out publicly and positively about homosexuality. Not only was male homosexual activity illegal, but the churches and the media ensured that it was thoroughly stigmatised. Ian, however, was absolutely fearless in his determination to pursue the campaign for homosexual law reform as an openly gay man.
His campaigning style was underpinned by the concept that ‘Gay Is Good’ and he rejected anything that sounded like a defensive pleading for tolerance. The first time he came out on a TV current affairs programme a senior police officer next to him could be seen literally jumping away. Such honesty became a mainstay of the SMG’s approach and in 1975 several activists took part in a BBC TV community access programme called ‘Glad to be Gay’. It was an enormous personal risk for them but it paid off in building up a body of support for law reform across the country.
SMG was much more than a lobby for law reform. It acknowledged that social isolation was possibly the greatest problem for gay people. A telephone befriending service was set up and its success led to the opening of Scotland’s first gay centre in Broughton Street in Edinburgh. Social events were organised first in the major cities and then in smaller, less cosmopolitan towns such as Falkirk and Fort William. Not everyone was able to attend such events and a monthly magazine called Gay Scotland became an important forum for the shy and the geographically remote; Ian was, for many years, its editor. He had a strong sense of internationalism and was in regular contact with more established gay organisations in the US and Holland. In 1974, 400 people attended an international congress for gay rights in Edinburgh. The pace of activity in those early years was breathtaking.
In parallel with the law reform campaign, a gay community was emerging and evolving with all the complexities that you would expect from a group of previously isolated people. Tensions and conflicts between men and women were characteristic of gay movements in the 1970s and when Ian described feminism as a red herring, this contributed to the departure of many lesbians into their own networks and their own organisations. Law reform was not, after all, an issue for them and while many lesbians were happy to work in solidarity alongside gay men they were not prepared to be treated as second-class citizens.
1980 saw a high watermark both for SMG and for Ian. That was the year when long-standing political allies, such as Robin Cook, succeeded in pushing through legislation to de-criminalise homosexual activity between consenting male adults over the age of 21 in private. In today’s world of debates about human rights and marriage equality, this may sound all rather grudging and shame-inducing; in 1980, it represented a social and political earthquake.
The period after legislation – or liberation, as some people saw it – brought all kinds of opportunities that had been unthinkable during the years of criminality. There was a cultural blossoming in terms of writing and theatre; an Edinburgh bookshop, West and Wilde, became an important feature of lesbian and gay life. The demand for social venues grew and cafes, bars and late night clubs were opened all over Scotland. By the mid-90s there were no fewer than 11 gay advice phonelines. Many SMG activists took their skills into the campaigns around HIV/AIDS. By the end of the 1980s, dedicated youth groups were targeting young people who thought that they might be lesbian, gay or bisexual.
While these initiatives were underpinned by an egalitarian politics, the kind of political campaigning that SMG had espoused was less central than it had previously been. Ian made the decision to continue campaigning for equal rights but he found himself rather marginalised. When Gay Pride events took off in the mid-90s, he was supportive of them but his support did not have the significance that once it would have done. He was increasingly involved in architectural conservationist campaigns and, had he not died suddenly at the age of 54, that might well have been an area where he could have fruitfully used his campaigning and fund-raising skills.
I was not the only gay person to have found him difficult to work with but driven people such as Ian are often essential to liberation campaigns, particularly in a conformist society like Willie Ross’s Scotland. That Scotland has become a more socially inclusive and less sexually repressive place than it was is, in no small measure, due to leaders like Ian Dunn. He seems never to have thrown away a piece of paper and he made sure that all his correspondence and his papers from SMG were donated to the National Library of Scotland. The evidence they provide will enable historians to be more dispassionate about the legacy of this remarkable man than many of his contemporaries can be.
Bob Cant is the editor of ‘Footsteps and Witnesses: Lesbian and gay life-stories from Scotland’
