Glasgay is here again, and after eight years you might think we’d all know what a gay arts festival was for. Just don’t ask its new director, writes Andrew Eaton.

This is what David Leddy’s life is like. He recently took over as director of a Scottish arts festival. He has to run this festival single-handed, on a tiny budget, with little feedback from his employers. If he goes even slightly over budget the festival may well go bankrupt and he will lose his job. He is certain he won’t make a profit, partly because his core audience - gay men and women in Glasgow - is so small. If he programmes the wrong events even they may not turn up, and he will be remembered as the Englishman who came to Scotland - he moved from London to Glasgow in January - and sabotaged a high profile event that has been a success over its first eight years.

While worrying about all this, Leddy also has to worry about his partner, Calum. Since Calum had kidney failure in January he has spent his nights hooked up to a dialysis machine and his days too ill to work. He relies completely on Leddy for money, but Leddy doesn’t have much. Until recently they were living in a dilapidated council house, miles from Glasgow city centre, with missing doors and peeling wallpaper. They had to pester the council for three months to get a shower fitted, Leddy tells me, because Calum can’t use a bath. For one month of this, Leddy was commuting to Edinburgh every day, to perform in a one-man fringe show.

It’s a good thing, then, that the new director of Glasgay, Glasgow’s gay and lesbian arts festival, seems such a positive person. When we meet, he talks non-stop, cracking jokes, doing impressions (a very good one of Gladys Knight) and generally radiating optimism and confidence.

But then, you need to be self-confident to run a festival like Glasgay. Nine years in, it’s purpose is still hotly debated, and everyone has an opinion. What exactly is a gay arts festival? What is gay culture, anyway? Should Glasgay be a political statement, a “community” event, or a celebration to which straight people are invited too?

"You end up talking a lot about why or why not we should programme something," says Leddy. Theatre is straightforward, he says, because there are gay stories to tell, "but then you get into something like visual arts. What is gay visual art? The only really obvious thing is some boring old queen who does pictures of nude boys." He’s much rather get a really interesting abstract artist, he suggests, "but is it enough of a link that the artist is a lesbian?"

There are endless dilemmas. Acts may say no because they don’t want to be pigeonholed as a "gay act." Acts you don’t want will insist they should play Glasgay because "gays love me."

"You have to ask, are we only programming people because they are gay, which is something that I’m very against. I get into trouble with some people in the gay community because they see Glasgay as a showcase for people who wouldn’t be seen elsewhere. But I don’t want to go to the Tron theatre and say ‘I know you wouldn’t normally programme this, but do it for Glasgay.’ It makes the festival look crap." I suspect Leddy finds this whole debate tiresome. "I do think it is important that Glasgay is an arts festival rather than a political organisation. I don’t imagine that as the Si Cuba festival they sit around in their offices going ‘Are these people really Cuban? Do we want Cuban people to come?’ "

It’s a reflection of how far gay rights have come that a Glasgay director can afford to talk this way. But the festival isn’t quite out of the ghetto yet. Leddy talks of celebrating next year’s tenth anniversary by programming "larger scale companies in bigger venues." To make this work, though, he will have to market it, partly, to a straight audience, which leaves him in a quandary he hasn’t resolved. "Funders are always keen for you to say ‘we want straight people to come,’ but then, what’s the point of having a gay festival?"

In the meantime, Leddy is wary of alienating his core crowd to the extent of programming the festival as if ticking off a checklist of gay stereotypes. "I have to think, if I was a fifty-year-old Shirley Bassey queen, what would I come to see at this festival?" So among gay performers such as Scott Capurro, Tina C and Horse there is the singer Barb Jungr, who isn’t gay but has gay appeal.

If Glasgay is full of odd contradictions, so is Leddy. In Scotland he is mostly known for his popular one-man show, On The Edge, a satire on murder-mystery stories in which Leddy wittily deconstructed genre stereotypes - the butler, the maid, the vicar, etc. It got good reviews, but it’s success was hampered by no-one really knowing what it was. It began like a silly Pythonesque comedy, then became dark and political, concluding with a fierce polemic about the constant dramatic portrayal of gay people as mentally unbalanced killers.

Leddy is equally hard to pin down. He’s 28, but looks older; maybe it is the stress, maybe it’s his striking bald head. He is clearly passionate about his work - he knew he wanted to do theatre at the age of seven, he says - yet he gave it up in his twenties to pursue jobs in PR and the pop music industry. Later Leddy changed his mind, partly because at RCA records, where he briefly worked, "no-one cared about music at all. And no-one knew about anything else." He remembers bringing a Martin Amis book to the office one day and no-one knowing who Amis was. "I thought, this is why pop music is the way it is, because you all have this really insular view. Having run a theatre company was seen as a real disadvantage."

Even now he thinks about giving up theatre. "It’s so much hard work. And I’m not desperate for attention. I’ve got friends; I don’t need people I don’t know to clap." He never has, he insists. He was a mostly contented child and remains very close to his father, a factory worker, and his mother, a hairdresser. He had little angst about his sexuality. He told them he was gay when he was sixteen, and they were completely supportive. "I don’t remember ever thinking I was straight," he says. "I’m really fascinated by people who didn’t know they were gay until they were thirty. I just think, what were you doing all that time? Did you just look at people in the street and not notice you found some of them attractive?"

It would be a shame if Leddy gave up theatre, because he’s a compelling and charismatic performer. But he has more important things to think about. He has already delayed touring On The Edge because he worries about leaving Calum. "It’s not like I have to go home and puree food or anything, but I would be very unhappy to be away for that length of time." Already, the illness has put strain on the relationship. "It’s very hard. When one person is so sick that they can’t contribute financially there’s a great inequality that you can’t do anything about. You need them to do things and they can’t and you have to accept it." Calum is constantly forgetting things, he says affectionately; he will go to the shop to buy milk and come back with crisps.

To cope, Leddy dreams up ways to combine his work and home life. Bizarrely, he is planning a show about "illness and death" that he would perform in his flat. "I want to hide people in cupboards so that the audience will go back into a room and think ‘where did they come from?’" I’m not sure if he’s entirely serious.

Andrew Eaton, October 2002