Graham Payne & David Sturge
Graham Payne was the Head Gardener of Downing College when he met David Sturge (St. John’s, 1966), who was a research student studying for a PhD in Engineering at the Whittle Laboratory at the time. They have now been together for 50 years, although the law didn’t formally recognise their union until civil partnership in 2006.
From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, David and Graham ran the Cambridge CHE (Campaign for Homosexual Equality) Group, which was mainly a social group for gay people from both the city and university. Graham also ran Cambridge Friend, which hosted a telephone counselling service for gay men in the Cambridge area.
David and Graham featured in a 1986 episode of the BBC documentary series ‘The Trouble with Sex’. The episode followed a fictional character who calls the Gay Switchboard in London in some distress, following which he is referred to Cambridge CHE and Cambridge Friend as part his ‘coming out’ journey.
Multi-talented men, David rowed for Cambridge, and for GB in the Olympics, and Graham has written and published a book on garden plants.
Now retired, David and Graham live in Cairns in tropical north Queensland, Australia, where they run BoyZout, a social group for older gay men.