Queen of Diamonds

George Broadhead is 75 today – Happy Diamond Birthday, George!

George has been a campaigner for gay rights and humanist values for forty years, and, with little sign of hanging up his spurs, has recently turned his focus to the Pink Triangle Trust (PTT), Britain’s first and only gay humanist charity.

Together with his partner Roy Saich – a founding trustee of the PTT – George set up one of the first local groups of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE), in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, in the early seventies. Then, in 1974, after moving to Kenilworth, he and Roy (who also runs the award-winning Humanists website) set up the South Warwickshire Area Gay Group (SWAGG) and, later, Coventry & Warwickshire Humanists. SWAGG was mainly a social group, organising events at the 18th-century Pump Rooms in Royal Leamington Spa to raise money for groups campaigning for gay rights.

For more than a quarter of a century, George was Secretary of GALHA (the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, which started out life as the Gay Humanist Group), of which he is now a Vice President. For many years, he was the editor of Gay & Lesbian Humanist magazine, for which he wrote his "World Watch" column.

But it isn’t all work for George, who enjoys a quiet hour sipping chilled white wine on his patio, surrounded by treasured exotic plants and a most unusual water feature. If our fickle British summer allows, I hope George finds the time to be there today to raise a glass or two in celebration of his three-quarter-century diamond birthday! And I wish that I could be there to join him.

So, George, a very Happy Birthday and long may your ammonite gurgle!