Andy was outed when his mother found his diary.

After that there was no going back in the closet as his daily entries told the story of a young gay man visiting London regularly to meet up with other queer people, his relationship with his lover and visits to Hampstead Heath.

Being gay pushed him towards political activism and it's something he's still passionate about today.

He spoke about his time spent in clubs dancing for a 8 hours straight to disco music, being abandoned in America by his boyfriend just days after arriving there, his multiple Pride marches (including one which was rerouted to Bow Street police station to demand the release of a wrongly arrested protester) and a lot more.

You might know Jonathan Blake from the film Pride and the famous scene where his character (played by Dominic West) dances with most of the women in the little mining village in Wales to Shirley & Co's 'Shame Shame Shame'.

Jonathan was one of the first people in Britain to be diagnosed with HIV and, obviously, it changed his life forever.

I met him and his partner Nigel at their house and spent the whole afternoon there, chatting, eating and being shown around his amazing garden.

His stories are brilliant and he is hilarious.

Janet’s mother always told her to find a ‘good jewish man’ to pull herself out of (what her mother called) her ‘Elizabethan’ phase.

She started her ‘lesbian career’ by exploring her sexuality at swinging parties. Janet’s full of great stories from her time on the lesbian scene, to her time at different pride events and her work at the Terrence Higgins Trust.

The title of her book ‘Rebel Without A Clue’ sums up her life quite well.

Colin has given so much of his time away. During his life he’s committed himself to helping people dying of AIDs in Australia, supporting a Welsh mining community and now publishing his blog Gay in the 80s and his book by the same name.

His stories are funny, heartwarming and sometimes sad but his warmth is clear in every word.

Colin was fantastic to talk to and is a wealth of knowledge on queer history.

We reference a couple of articles and pictures during the conversation, head over to the Instagram page @QueerMargins to see them.

Queer Margins is a series of conversations with members of the LGBTQ+ community who are rarely heard from.

This season we'll be sitting down with older queer people to talk about their life experiences.