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 “cure” homosexuality.
The following year, in East Berlin, he was arrested and interrogated by the secret police – the Stasi – after staging the first ever gay rights protest in a communist country.
Throughout much of the 1970s, and beyond, he was active in anti-imperialist solidarity campaigns, supporting the national liberation struggles of the peoples of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Oman, Palestine, Western Sahara, East Timor and West Papua.
He also campaigned against the dictatorships in Franco’s Spain, Caetano’s Portugal, the Colonel’s Greece, Marcos’s Philippines, Suharto’s Indonesia, Pinochet’s Chile, Somoza’s Nicaragua, Saddam’s Iraq, the Shah’s and Khomeini’s Iran, and Brezhnev’s Soviet Union and its satellite regimes in Eastern Europe and the Baltics.