The ideals and activism of the early 1970s gay liberation era.
On 27 August 1971, I arrived in Britain from Australia. The next day, I saw a lampost sticker near Oxford Circus advertising the Gay Liberation Front. My immediate reaction was a feeling of exhilaration. Four days later, I was at my first GLF meeting. Within a month, I was helping to organise many of GLF’s bold, irreverent zaps.
I had long wanted to contribute to the struggle for queer freedom, ever since I first came out at the age of 17 in 1969. At the time, however, in my home town of Melbourne, there were no gay organisations and no campaigns for gay rights. All I could do was write letters of protest against homophobia. I felt isolated and frustrated.
Getting involved in London GLF changed all that. It was a tremendous personal liberation; probably the most exciting and influential period of my life. GLF made history. For the first time in Britain, hundreds of openly lesbian and gay people proudly and defiantly asserted – against the bigotry of centuries – that “Gay Is Good!”. This simple three-word slogan was revolutionary. It challenged, in a most uncompromising way, the dominant social view that homosexuality was bad, mad and sad.
GLF transformed attitudes, both within the lesbian and gay community and throughout the wider society. No longer were we queers prepared to remain passive victims of injustice. Rejecting defensive pleas for toleration, we demanded nothing less than total acceptance and full equality. Our aim was to change society to create a homo-positive and sex-affirmative culture where everyone could love who they wanted without suffering guilt, prejudice or discrimination. We had a bold, bright vision of a new egalitarian sexual democracy, beyond capitalism and patriarchy.
Being involved in GLF was incredibly empowering because it turned the tables on every smug straight assumption. Whereas society problematised homosexuality, we said society’s homophobia was the problem. Contradicting heterosexual presumptions of superiority, GLF dared to question straight supremacism, likening it to racism and misogyny.
GLF’s unique style of political campaigning was ‘protest as performance’. Imaginative, daring and witty, it was both educative about gay issues, and hugely entertaining.
A twelve-foot papier-mache cucumber was delivered to the offices of Pan Books in protest at the publication of Dr. David Reuben’s book, Everything You Always Wanted To Ask About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask, which claimed that gay men were obsessed with shoving vegetables up their arses. Mary Whitehouse’s Festival of Light rally in Central Hall Westminster was invaded by a posse of gay nuns who proceeded to release dozens of mice into the audience and kiss each other ostentatiously when Malclom Muggerridge expressed his distaste for homosexuality.
There were also more serious acts of civil disobedience to confront the perpetrators of discrimination. We organised freedom rides and sit-ins at pubs that refused to serve ‘poofs’ and ‘dykes’. A lecture by Professor Hans Eysenck was disrupted after he advocated electric-shock and nausea-inducing aversion therapy to cure homosexuality.
As well as being politics with fun, this activism helped banish our internalised shame, repairing much of the damage that homophobia had done to us. Through GLF, we became happier, more confident queers, unafraid to challenge even the most powerful homophobes.
Published as “This is how it started…”, Pink Paper, 24 November 1995.
* For a history of the London Gay Liberation Front see: Come Together – The Years Of Gay Liberation 1970-73,Aubrey Walter (Editor), Gay Men’s Press, London, 1980; No Bath But Plenty Of Bubbles – An Oral History Of The London Gay Liberation Front 1970-73, Lisa Power (Editor), Cassell, London, 1995.
© Copyright Peter Tatchell, 1995. All rights reserved.