To celebrate LGBT History Month, I want to look back at an important moment from Scotland’s recent history. Eight years ago this month, on the 4th of February 2014, the Scottish Parliament passed a momentous piece of legislation that campaigners had been working towards for decades.

Little is known about Ellen and Margaret, two “Moorish lassies” who worked as ladies in waiting to the daughter of King James IV in the early 1500s. We don’t even know their real names, because “Ellen” and “Margaret” were the names given to them after they were baptised as Christians. But we do know that these two African women held prominent positions in service at the royal court.

Watching a community protect their neighbours from deportation in Glasgow made me want to write about how Scotland has been shaped by migration. It’s influenced everything about our country as we know it, from people moving across continents thousands of years ago right up to our most recent new Scots.

Malvina Wells was born into chattel slavery in Carriacou, Grenada around 1804 and died in Edinburgh in 1887. She’s the only known person buried in Edinburgh who was born enslaved, although it is likely there are others. Although the information we have about her is sparse, it points to a remarkable life.

Frederick Douglass was one of the most prominent African American abolitionist voices of the nineteenth century, and many people will be familiar with his powerful speeches denouncing the horrors of slavery. Fewer people are aware that he made several visits to Edinburgh and that you can still find numerous places in the city where he made public speeches or visited local abolitionists.

Because women throughout history have mostly been excluded from male-dominated spheres of power like politics and higher education, their more domestic revolutions were often overlooked. We tend to associate early women’s rights activism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with suffrage campaigns, but women at all levels of society were also engaged with the project of improving daily life.

For as long as Edinburgh has existed, LGBTQ+ people have walked the city’s streets. Their stories can be harder to uncover, because for most of history people had to hide their identities from the eyes of society, but once you start digging you find a wealth of LGBTQ+ experiences buried in the fabric of the city.