DR: In 1998, I was sitting on my own thinking there must be other gay fathers out there and I phoned One Parent Families Scotland and they gave me the number of the only other gay father they knew. They said they didn't have a Lesbian Fathers Group, they had a Lesbian Mothers Group. Well I thought you'd be going some to have a Lesbian Fathers Group! But they gave me Dirk's number and we got friendly from there.

DR: There's a sort of core of 10 of us but people come along because they've got a particular question they want to ask and they get the experience of everybody else in the group as to how they dealt with the issue. I suppose one of the most frequent ones for the group of people who come just now is 'How do you come out to your kids?' 'When's the right time?' 'How did you do it?' Those are the experiences that people want to know about and want to share. We had one guy that came recently and had listened to what everybody had said and had come out to his son and things had gone great. It was super to hear that and it was nice to have been the instigators of creating a space where that was possible for people.

IR: I found that the general gay community didn't always necessarily recognise me in a sympathetic way in terms of me being a parent and so when I saw the poster for the Gay Dads group, I thought good, I'll go along. And in a funny sort of way it was like coming out all over again. It was great. I kind of walked in and found that I was able to share experiences with other people who had had kind of similar experiences to my own.

DG: One of the nice things about being a gay parent is that you can be very creative, you can throw everything up in the air and say right we don't have to conform to any social norms or whatever. We'll sit down, we'll pull everything apart and we'll discuss whatever we want to do and decide how we want to tackle a particular kind of problem.

DR: The interesting twist on it that my kids have given me...several things they have said over the years and I remember one of them saying to me, "It's really good that you're gay Dad because that way nobody can take Mum's place." So for any married man in the situation I was, thinking 'What am I doing to my kids by leaving?", the reality is that you're securing their mother's position - you're not weakening it.

IR: Society probably looks at gay men as having had made a choice which is about being gay and that by making that choice they are somehow therefore sacrificed or have excluded themselves from the possibility of parenthood. Of course, that's a nonsense. The key issue, I think, regardless of whether you're a man or a woman about parenting is about love. It's about the fact that you love, protect and care for your child.

DG: People will say perhaps our sexual orientation will influence the sexual orientation of the child. And yet how many gay people grow up in heterosexual families. And then the counter-argument to that is that even if they did influence the sexuality of our children, what's the problem. Is there a problem with having more gay people in the country. When you bring it right down, it's always coming right back down to the bottom level and that's dealing with homophobia and discrimination. People don't like gay people.

IR: Scotland did repeal Section 28, or Section 2A as it was called here, and that's good and I'm pleased that that happened. But what was the road to it? What kind of journey did we have to go through to get there? One thing I remember was getting on a bus in Glasgow going into the centre of town, and there were about 5 or 6 different billboards which I had to pass, and every single one of them was taken up with a poster which was against the repeal, full of pictures of parents and other concerned individuals talking about how they had to effectively defend their children from the homosexuals! I picked up a newspaper the following weekend and looked at it. And splashed all over the cover was poll after poll after poll of how 70-80% of the Scottish population didn't think that Section 28 should be repealed. And I got scared, for the first time in all my time as a gay man, I got scared. I suddenly looked about me and didn't feel safe in my country. So, I'm glad Section 28 was repealed but we've got a long way to go before people finally accept that life is not just one single vision of the one that they happen to believe in. The human experience is a varied experience.