Hi, my name is Dave Watkins and I am the founder of A Day In Hand. I'm absolutely passionate about issues of diversity and I hope this project reflects all the different permutations of what it means to be human. I live in London with a bunch of brightly coloured fish and two frisky felines. I'm so grateful to everybody who has sent their pics in. You are the pioneers. To the rest, I hope you find some way of getting involved and that this project helps you to live happier, to love happier and to allow yourself to be loved without fear or restraint.
I suffer some subtle form of discrimination because of my sexuality, every day. There was a time when it felt like dying of a thousand paper cuts. Now it drives me forward to want to change things. That's why I came up with the idea for this project. It has 2 main ideas: 1) We want to see more Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans (LGBT) people living their lives publicly without shame and to the full.
2) When same-sex love is out in the open, people will start to accept the reality of
LGBT lives not so unlike their own. The more you're 'out' the less hard being
'out' is.''
I was on BBC Radio 5 talking about A Day In Hand. An angry gay
man called in and striped me down live on air, asking what planet I was on? Did I not
know that there were parts of the world where you could get severely
queer bashed, glassed, knifed etc. for holding another man’s hand? 7
years ago I tasted the blood from one such queer basher. The
experience stirred a fire within me, a feeling of anger and defiance. I
chose to turn that anger into something positive. Holding hands, where you can, is about being true to yourself and to those you love.
I know that homophobia exists because of ignorance. And I know that every time I hold hands with a man publicly, I am striking a blow for ignorance. Same-sex hand holders, inject a dose of 21st century reality into the minds of people who still believe that to exist you have to hate. And as for me, well the sight of same-sex hand holding stirs the lover and the hero in my heart. I hope it does in yours. Same-sex hand holding? Sshh! Enough talk! Let's do it. You know.. the world won't fall apart. It might actually feel like a better place.
If you want to live in a world where you can hold your partner's hand walking down the street, hold your partner's hand walking down the street.
In his blog for The New Gay, Zack Rosen puts it perfectly “You see one person walking a unicorn in the park and it’s headline news. Three months later you’ll see 200 people walking unicorns in the park and call it a Thursday”.
I hope that, eventually, we’ll all get used to it.
For our German translation click here 
Spanish and Chinese coming soon.
Contact David: info@adayinhand.com
Photo credits: Mel Thomas and Mark Weeks