HERE'S WHAT I HOPE WILL BE A REGULAR FEATURE ON THE THE 'LG' SITE IN WHICH MEMBERS MAY LIKE TO RECALL A FORMATIVE GAY FRIEND THEY'VE ENCOUNTERED, LATELY OR IN THEIR PAST. THESE ARE THE SPECIAL PEOPLE WHO'VE TOUCHED MANY OF OUR LIVES AND WHOM I LIKE TO THINK OF AS OUR 'GAY GODFATHERS'.

TO START US OFF ...

KIERAN HICKEY, FILMMAKER:

"My gay godfather was Kieran Hickey, an Irish filmaker. He was a family friend and, I believe, the first adult to see the gay in me.

Although he was in his 40s and I in my teens when we were first introduced, we drifted into an easy friendship and in a gentle hand-on-shoulder kind of way he nurtured my growth into early adulthood. I'd never suggest he drew me towards a gay lifestyle but that just happened to be the world he lived in, and through his example I could see that the condition of being gay was as real and as valid as one of being heterosexual. Not some perverse aberration as society then felt compelled to insist.

Sometmes he could be a dauntingly stern and private figure. Growing up queer amidst the bigotry of a holy catholic Ireland, wholly unlike the gay-friendly society of today, had made him acutely cautious and untrusting and at the first opportunity he was away to London's less repressive lights to work as an insurance clerk. Anything to escape.

Although he was the son of a working class railway worker growing up on Dublin's South Circular Road - about as glamorous a location as any city's circular road - he was determined to move on. Not to shirk off his lowly origins perhaps, but more to feed an innate appetite he had developed for all things artistic. He always wanted to know what I was reading, what I had been to see and he never tired of urging me to write and expand my own horizons.

Eventually, Kieran, his self-education complete, returned to Ireland to carve out a successful niche for himself as an independent filmmaker. Actually at a time when there was scarcely such a thing in the land. He would also host an informal Open House (the same one he had grown up in on the South Circular) at which fledgling young Dublin gays could take their first steps in a still deeply hostile environment.

Looking back, I suspect he can't have failed to see that I was gay, but he never ever brought up the subject with me, nor did he ever drop any hints. I think he knew that I would find my way in time.

Anyway, even if he had said anything, as had another friend, I would have ignored him.

I last met him in London in the summer of '91 following a call out of the blue. I was working for the BBC World Service in Bush House and he was across the road at the LSE visiting a friend. 'I'm coming across in five minutes!', he declared. I vividly recall him strutting across Aldwych and marking the change in our times: out, loud and proud in a check shirt with cropped hair and a trim, butch moustache. Masculine but with a sparkle in the eye.

He was utterly in his prime, flitting between San Fran, New York and Sydney, making up for decades of closet living and sending me postcards regular as clockwork.

It must have been about eighteen months later when I was checking the messages on my answerphone. There, between work and social calls was a muted message from my father informing me that Kieran had undergone by-pass surgery. He'd not revived after the operation. He thought I should know.

Well, thanks for that, Dad, I murmured as the first tears stung my eyes.

Now, fifteen years on and with a straight marriage behind me, I'm fully out and able to strut across the Aldwych myself, but how I wish I could spot Kieran coming the other way. As ever, he'd be in a mad rush to make his next appointment, but even so, I'd hold him just long enough to say, 'I made it, Kieran. God love me, I made it!'

He probably never doubted for a moment I would."

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