Author: ZilSu

Ongoing

Although great progress has been made in repealing anti-gay laws in the UK, he is still campaigning to complete the unfinished battle for queer equality: for an end to the ban on same-sex marriage, action against homophobic hate crimes and bullying in schools, and the enforcement of the laws against inciting homophobia violence. He is […]

The 2000s

In 2000, he stood unsuccessfully as an independent Green Left candidate for the London Assembly. He attempted another citizen’s arrest of President Mugabe in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel in Brussels in March 2001, which resulted in him being beaten unconscious by Mugabe’s bodyguards and; suffering permanent minor eye and brain damage. In 2002, Peter […]

The 1990s

After playing a prominent role in the London chapter of the AIDS activist group ACT UP, in 1990 he and 30 other people jointly founded the radical queer human rights direct action movement OutRage!. Most notoriously, in 1994 Peter Tatchell and OutRage! outed 10 Church of England Bishops and called on them to “tell the […]

The 1980’s

After being initially banned by the Labour leadership for his advocacy of extra-parliamentary action, Peter stood as the Labour candidate in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election. He was defeated in the dirtiest, most violent and homophobic election in modern British history. In the mid-1980s, he, Bruce Kent and others risked arrest on charges of sedition and […]

The 1970’s

After moving to London in 1971, Peter became a leading activist in the Gay Liberation Front (GLF); organising sit-ins at pubs that refused to serve “poofs”, and protests against police harassment and the medical classification of homosexuality as an illness. He famously disrupted Prof Hans Eysenck’s 1972 lecture which advocated electric shock aversion therapy to […]

Early Years

Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1952, Peter began campaigning for human rights in 1967, aged 15. His first campaign was against the death penalty, followed by campaigns in support of Aboriginal rights and in opposition to conscription and the Australian and US war against the people of Vietnam. In 1969, on realising that he was […]