'Come out, come out, wherever you are'

Sir Ian McKellen explains why everyone has the right to live openly, as we approach the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

I remember when Michael Cashman, now an MEP, was the first chairman of the lobby group Stonewall. He said that gays would have full equality in ten years. It sounded hopelessly optimistic, but he wasn’t far off the mark. I didn’t know anything about the original “Stonewall” until we were setting up the group. It might as well have been a cricketing term.

This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which began on June 27, 1969 in reaction to a police raid on the gay Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village. It became a defining moment in gay history.

Read the full article in the Times here.