Glitter and Be Gay: 60 years of gaiety and grief

TIM HUGHES shares a selection of his writing from the past six decades - from Sixth Form juvenilia, with their early hints of campery, to his many articles in the gay press on both sides of the Atlantic.

In London in the late 1960s he was an associate editor of JEREMY - the world's first glossy gay magazine - scoring early interviews with David Bowie, Ian Mckellan and Quentin Crisp, before they reached iconic fame.

In New York we move from the 70s' post-Stonewall gained gay freedom with its attendant wild and sleazy nightlife venues like the notorious MINESHAFT sex club to the horrors and sadness of the gay plague in the early 1980s - the pandemic that was HIV/AIDS. In a moving penultimate coda prior to his work for ATTITUDE magazine we learn of his grief at the loss of friends, his patients - Tim Hughes re-trained as an HIV counsellor - and lover, Enrique Luna.