Paul O’Grady, TV presenter

I remember being in a huge fight with the people who used to run the Lesbian and Gay Centre in London when it was open. Back then I was doing Lily (Savage) at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. They told me they wouldn’t allow drag queens on the main stage at Pride. They probably thought it was anti-women or something. Anyway, I said, “I beg your pardon. If it wasn’t for drag queens you wouldn’t be knee deep in mud at this bloody festuval. It was the drag queens that fought bakc against the police during the Stonewall Riots. It was always the drag queens on the frontline, kicking off their heels and fighting back in those days.

The great thing today is civil ceremonies. Too many gay couples had been treated unequally. I lost count of the number of times, one would die, then a family who you’d never seen would decsned out of nowhere, scoop up his possessions and kick his partner out of their home. Thank God the law is on our side now. But we should be able to get married in the full, proper sense. If you want to sail down the aisle in a big white dress you should be able to.

We’ve come a long way: John Barrowman and Graham Norton are on primetime and you’ve got me — an ex-drag queen with a daughter and a grand-daughter with another on the way — on at teatimes. There is still a lot of homophobia around. The tabloids still use words like “bender”. Don’t get me started on those crazy Christians who know notjing about tolerance and respect. How could any self-respecting gay Catholic listen to the Pope’s nonsense about saving gay humanity from homosexuality as saving the rainforests. The Mormons that come round look like porn stars though, and the Sally Army sat through the night with the early guys who got AUIDS. They didn’t judge. They’re lovely.

I get described in the press as “camp comic Paul O’Grady”. Last week, on the street, someone shouted at me, “Shut that door!” (the old Larry Grayson catchphrase) and I marched over there and said to him, “I’ll shut your fucking windpipe”. If anyone is ever homophobic to me, I confront them. I know from some of the letters I get from younger people they still regard “gay” as a stigma, which is sad.

There needs to be more gay solidarity too. It used to be that you’d go down to your gay local and there would be a sense of community of some kind there. Now people are getting twatted on crystal meth and dancing in big clubs or ordering sex online. There’s no friendly queen leaning acros the bar and advising the new boy in town: “Oh I wouldn’t go near him, dear.” One of my friends Reg, who was the drag queen Regina Fong, despiared of one younger gay man who hadn’t heard of Lana Turner. “There’s no camp anymore,” he said.

I hate being described as “openly gay”. I just am gay. I’m not some delicate flower. I own my fucking business. I’ve got my own production company. I’m fucking Mussolini. “Don’t fuck with me fellas!” That’s what Joan Crawford says in Mommie Dearest and that’s my catchphrase. Get rid of the nicey-nicey rainbow flag for gay rights and have that written on a deep purple background. That should be our catchphrase. You have to stand up, say your piece and be counted. As Gypsy Rose Lee’s mother said: God will protect us, but just to make sure, carry a big stick”. It’ll never happen but I hope for a day of total acceptance.

Mark Ravenhill, playwright

“Stonewall was both a blessing and a curse. It showed that gay men and women could change things through direct action. But it meant that gay rights became tied in with an American identity — an emphasis on the individual, on YMCA Village People iconography.

"Coming out is almost a mirror-image of born-again Christianity. I much prefer Brian Sewell’s attitude: 'I never came out, I just slowly emerged.'

“At Edinburgh this year I’m doing a show with the performer Bette Bourne, exploring the early years of the gay liberation movement in the UK and his experiences living in a drag commune in London. Gay people were risking their jobs, family, relationships; they were laying everything on the line to fight for something. You do think: 'God, how much could I do? How brave would I be?' "

Jeanette Winterson, author

Gay rights are civil rights, and any movement for political change needs an organisation that can lobby, inform, educate, protest. Think how far we’ve come since the Wolfenden Report. Now, most people know someone who is gay, just as most people know someone who is a single parent, in a mixed marriage, divorced, all the unthinkable things, even as late as the 60’s. The shape of family life, the shape of individual sexual choice has really changed, but that hasn’t happened by accident. Tolerance never happens by accident; it is a slow process of visibility, understanding, and of course, legislation. The law must be fair to all and equally applied to all’ discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexual orientation is wrong. We have learnt a lot over the last 50 years, and Stonewall has been a huge force for good.

We’re not finished yet. I long for a time when we won’t even have to talk about this anymore.

I don’t care whether people are gay, straight, bi-sexual, whatever. I want to know what kind of people they are, not the gender of their sexual partner. It isn’t interesting. One day the tabloids will realise that, and stop using ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ as pejorative adjectives. I would like to have a real fight with the press council over the use of the words ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’. We need to stop saying ‘lesbian lover’, ‘gay couple’, ‘gay policeman,’ ‘lesbian social worker’, etc, which immediately subsumes whatever is the story into a gawp about bed.

For myself, I am not a lesbian writer, whatever that is; I am a writer. Nobody calls Paul Auster or David Mitchell ‘heterosexual writers.’ As an adjective it is still used to reduce the scope of someone’s reach – assuming that heterosexual, like male, includes everyone, whereas ‘gay’, like ‘female’ is specific and limited. That will change, but there is work to do, just as there is work to do on gay marriage and gay parenting. Stonewall will be doing the work, and really, anybody who cares about equality, regardless of their sexuality, should support Stonewall.

Ruth Rendell, who is a good friend of mine, is not gay, but she has supported Stonewall from the start – just as she voted in the Lords for the repeal of Section 28, and for gay partnerships.

She is a great example of how we should work together, and how little it should matter whom we choose to love or desire.

John Barrowman, actor

I didn’t know anything about the Stonewall Riots growing up in the Midwest. It was only when I came to London that I heard the story of how a bunch of drag queens changed the course of history for gay people. Revolutions start withn ordinary people saying “No”. I remember watching Ian McKellen camping outside the House of Commons campaignging for an equal age of consent and being so proud and respectful of him. He not only helped found Stonewall, the campiagning group, twnety years ago, he’s my third party connection to the original Stonewall — he is one of those people who has consistently stood up and spoken out for what he believes in and that’s inspiring.

I’m proud that now, being in the public eye, that I can speak out too. I get loads of letters from young people about being gay and coming out. I say, “Believe in yourself” and “Be as good as you can be”. If there’s one thing that annotys meit’s the media that calls me “gay” as a refix to everything, or “flamboyant” or refers to my “lover” Scott. He’s not my lover — he’s my partner and we have a civil partnership. We should remain watchful. I sometumes think younger lesbians and gay men don’t realise how quickly we could lose the rights we have won. It’s lovely to have them but we need to mae sure we keep them. And we should also campaign for gays in more repressive places or countries too.

Ben Summerskill, Chief Executive, Stonewall

The brave men and women who fought back against hate inspired people the world over. Twenty years later, they inspired those in Britain who fought back against homophobic hate too in the form of Section 28. Their British admirers borrowed the name Stonewall, not just because they were doggedly determined to secure equality but also in honour of their campaigning cousins across the Atlantic. The legacy of the Stonewall riots has been to spread the message of equality on an international scale That’s why Stonewall still works tirelessly towards this in Britain today.

Edmund White, author

For me Stonewall was a public occasion that also marked a crucial turning point in my personal life. I suppose there have been other dates like that (Martin Luther King's assassination or Watergate) but the other ones I can think of were negative in their impact, whereas for me at least Stonewall was entirely positive. Before Stonewall gays considered themselves to be criminals or sinners or mentally ill; after Stonewall they thought of themselves as members of a minority group. It doesn't sound like much but in fact this redefinition gave gays political clout and , more important, the feeling they had the right to that sort of power. We fought back. We asserted ourselves. We took charge of defining ourselves.

The original leaders of the lesbian and gay movement in the 1970s were all political radicals. Aids in the 1980s saw a transfer of leadership to more middle-class and conventional people, who often were outed by the disease itself. As the LGBT movement became less radical, it became much more assimilationist. The international effort to legalize gay marriage is the final outgrowth of assimilationism. I'm all for it since gays should have the same rights as everyone else, though i personally counsel straight and gay friends not to get married--it's clearly an institution that rarely works.

The goal of leveling all differences seems obtainable--except in the religious parts of America and the religious parts of the Middle East. In California the successful fight against marriage equality was led by the Mormons. In Iran teenage male lovers are hanged. Koranic capital punishment for homosexuality is still in full force, just as in Christian America hate crimes against gays and lesbians are still flourishing, And the human cost cannot be counted just in deaths; it must also be reckoned in the numbers of young church- or mosque-goers whose kind of affection and sexuality is scorned and punished and subjected to scare tactics. The fight against monotheistic bigotry is still the biggest struggle in the world that the LGBT community must wage. Third World AIDS, whether it affects gays or (more usually) straights, must also elicit LGBT sympathies and concrete help, since we've been acquainted with the epidemic longer than anyone else.

Peter Tatchell, activist, founder of Outrage

"Those of us who were part of the early gay liberation never called for equality. Our demand was liberation. We wanted to change society, not conform to it. The Gay Liberation Front wanted a political and cultural revolution. We supported the struggles of women, black people and workers, and the global movements against apartheid, war, dictatorship and colonialism.

"Our radical, idealistic vision involved creating a new sexual democracy, without homophobia and misogyny. Erotic shame and guilt would be banished, together with compulsory monogamy, gender roles and the nuclear family. There would be sexual freedom and human rights for everyone - gay and straight. Our message was 'innovate, don't assimilate.'

"We had a beautiful dream, but it is fading fast. In the 40 years since Stonewall, there has been a massive retreat from the ideals and vision of the early gay liberation pioneers. Most gay people no longer question the values, laws and institutions of mainstream society. They are content to settle for equal rights within the status quo. Conservatism and respectability have taken over the gay movement.

"In the late 1960s, we saw the family as a patriarchal prison that enslaves women, gays and children. Four decades later, the focus of most gay campaigners is on safe, cuddly issues like civil partnerships and adoption. Gay people are increasingly reluctant to rock the boat and more than happy to embrace traditional heterosexual aspirations.

"This political retreat signifies a huge loss of confidence and optimism. It also signals that the gay movement has finally succumbed to the mainstream politics of conformism and moderation. Forty years after Stonewall, the gay community needs to rediscover the vision thing. That means daring to imagine what society could be, rather than accepting society as it is.”

Paul Burston, author and Gay pages editor, Time Out

For me, Stonewall has attained an almost mythic quality. If everyone who claimed to have been there on the night the riots broke out was really there, the bar would have been the size of the 02 and the police wouldn't have stood a chance!

Truth and reality have become so entwined that it's hard to separate fact from fiction. Allen Ginsberg famously said that after Stonewall, gay men lost that victim expression they had before. Maybe that was true. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking. Even before Stonewall, there were groups like the Mattachine Society who campaigned for gay rights. Maybe they weren't as exciting as the Stonewall rioters, but they laid a lot of the ground work for the activists who came afterwards.

Here in the UK, the impact of the Stonewall riots is more difficult to measure. We've had our own direct action groups, for the Gay Liberation Front in the 60s to OutRage in the 90s. In 1994, after the age of consent vote, a small group of gay men and women stormed the House of Commons. I was among them. Afterwards, some gay commentators described it as 'our Stonewall'. It wasn't, but it's a fair indicator of the power of the myth that people should have made that comparison.

Remy Blumenfeld, director, Global Formats, ITV

There is no question that the Stonewall activists did much of the heavy lifting for gay activists in the UK who later equalised the age of consent, lifted the ban on gays serving in the military, allowed same-sex couples to adopt, repealed section 28 and secured civil partnerships. Even growing up in the ‘70s of Quentin Crisp, Larry Grayson and John Inman, I felt reasonably free and self-expressed – if not so much as to actually say I was gay, then at least enough to swish around school in a Viennese opera cape. Because, if nothing else I knew that being gay wasn’t illegal. Salvatore Romano, the closeted Art Director on Mad Men which is set in the early ‘60s is a peripheral character who communicates in a language of signals, paralysed by fear into living a lie.

It is thanks to the men and women of Stonewall forcefully asserting their rights to equality under the law, that TV is now inhabited by men such as Kevin Walker, the 35 year old lawyer who’s a central cast member on Brothers and Sisters, living a life he loves where being gay is in most ways incidental. While it’s easy to take the gay rights and freedoms we have for granted, there are still 80 countries in the world where homosexuality is illegal and several countries where gay acts are punishable by death and it is hard to imagine what kind of an act of love and courage it would take to make freedom and self expression possible there.

Sean Mathias, theatre director

I’m just celebrating the first anniversary of my civil partnership which is probably one of the most powerful symbols of the progress we’ve seen in the last 40 years. I was 16 in 1973 when I first went to Greenwich Village. I saw men holding hands: it was one of the most overwhelming and confusing things I have ever seen. I didn’t know about the Stonewall Riots then, I don’t even think that they had entered “history” at that point. But by the time I directed Bent, in one of the first fundraisers for the founding of Stonewall the organisation in 1989, so much had informed the movement: Section 28, an unequal age of consent and — most profoundly — the impact of AIDS.In the next 40 years, I’d hope it would be normalised further: the next big battle will be gay eople and children; the idea that we can have them and be just as capable of caring for them whether as natural, adoptive or foster parents — and the ultimate challenge of being part of the afbric of society and not set apart.

It’s still hard being gay outside big cities, in smaller towns and villages. There are still queerbashings and murders and our Government should be doing more to help gays lving in more repressive parts of the world. And we should have full marriage: partnership rights are fine, but what is the point of two thirds equality. It’s hypocrisy, we’re either equal or we’re not. I think coming out is powerful: if we tell the truth we have nothing to fear