WHO WE ARE

My name's Oliver, though most people call me OJ. I'm Irish, I'm gay, and I'm a dad to three: twin three-year-olds and a six-year-old daughter, who I co-parent with my ex-husband. I came to fighting for our community later in life than a lot of people do.

For twenty years I've been building businesses. That's my craft, starting things and growing them, working out how to reach people and make an idea stand up in the real world. Today I run Friend of Dorothy, a global sexual wellness company for gay men. Two decades of turning thoughts into things that actually work, that's the skillset I'm now pointing at something bigger.

Because at some point I looked at my kids and realised I didn't just want to hand them a safer world, I wanted them to know how you build one. They're still small. They won't remember me explaining any of this. But one day they'll be old enough to look back, and I want them to see that when our community was under attack, their dad didn't look away. I want them growing up understanding that rights aren't something you're handed, and that staying silent has a cost too.

So I'm doing the thing I know how to do. I'm building 1 Million Gays Give A Shit, a movement about ordinary people using their numbers to protect our community and each other. I'm not doing it because I'm fearless. I'm doing it because I'm a father with twenty years of knowing how to make things happen, and I'd rather my kids remember the year I stood up than a lifetime of me staying quiet.