There are LGBTQ activists and there are famous LGBTQ activists. And then there is Peter Tatchell.
The Australian-born human rights campaigner has pretty much done it all.
In the 1970s, he spoke out against police harassment of gay men and the classification of homosexuality as a medical illness, and helped organise the UK’s first gay Pride in 1972.
He stood for parliament as a Labour candidate in the early Eighties, he co-founded the non-violent, direct-action queer rights group Outrage! in 1990 in opposition to the rise in cases of gay bashing and the number of gay and bisexual men being arrested for having consensual sex, he campaigned against music that he felt incited violence against LGBTQ people, and attending the first Moscow Pride in 2007. He has frequently returned to the Russian capital to protest, being detained by the authorities in 2009.
He even tried to arrest the then president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe… on two separate occasions.
In 1998, he was convicted under an almost 140-year-old law after climbing into a pulpit to denounce archbishop of Canterbury George Carey’s stance on equality for gay men and lesbians. The judge fined him all of £18.60 – seemingly an allusion to the date of the legislation under which he was charged.
But since 2011 he has been the director of The Peter Tatchell Foundation which “promotes and protects the human rights of individuals and nations, in the UK and internationally, in accordance with national and international human rights law.”
Issues the foundation addresses include homophobia, biphobia and transphobia, sexism and gender equality, censorship, suppression of religion and opinions, unjust detention, torture, genocide and the death penalty, and global poverty.
Among its successful campaigns, the foundation fought for same-sex marriage (Peter still believes opposite-sex couples should have access to civil partnerships) and pardons for gay men convicted of historical consensual same-sex activities. Again, he is not entirely satisfied, saying: “A pardon has connotations of forgiveness for a wrong done. These men and the wider LGBT community believe they did no wrong.”
He adds: “The legislation has a few omissions. It does not explicitly allow for the pardoning of men convicted of soliciting and procuring homosexual relations under the 1956 and 1967 Sexual Offences Acts. Nor does it pardon those people convicted for same-sex kissing and cuddling under laws such as the Public Order Act 1986.
The foundation has helped gay asylum seekers, pushed for new mandatory LGBTQ-inclusive sex and relationships lessons in all schools – a campaign coincidentally devised by Cliff Joannou before he became Attitude’s editor in chief - to aid the fight against HIV and bullying.
It also runs a programme to promote the understanding of human rights law and diversity and equality issues.
Put simply, in its own words, the Peter Tatchell Foundation strives for a world where every human being has human rights.
The foundation sees human rights failures over children left malnourished and without clean water, women and girls subjected to female genital mutilation or forced to wear a veil, journalists, lawyer and authors who are censored, arrested or killed, and citizens around the world whose civil liberties have been eroded by the war on terror.
It provides advice, information, support, education publicity and advocacy on human rights issues and law to individuals, organisations and governing bodies.
Its patrons include former EastEnders actor and MEP, Lord Michael Cashman, TV stars and presenters Joanna Lumley and Paul O’Grady, actor and long-time activist Sir Ian McKellen, and Green Party MP and co-leader Caroline Lucas.
Peter first displayed his Green credentials as early as the 1980s - he has championed energy conservation and tidal and solar power - as well as saying “human and animal rights are two aspects of the same struggle against injustice.”
While he has criticised a number of religious figures for their anti-gay views – as well as, in some cases, outright homophobia -- he cites Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr and suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst as his inspiration.
Little wonder then that in 2006 Peter was voted sixth by readers of The New Statesman in their list of “heroes of our time”. Three years later, The Observer named him campaigner of the year. Rumour has it that he even turned down a life peerage.
Little wonder too then that the Attitude Magazine Foundation chose to make a donation of £10,000, to help with the Peter Tatchell Foundation’s general work rather than for a single issue.
Peter, who was born in a Melbourne suburb in 1952, has been attacked for being too pro-Israel and for being anti-Semitic, he opposed the war in Iraq while also backing opponents of Saddam Hussein’s government and calling for them to be armed so that they could overthrow the dictator. He endorsed Jeremy Corbyn’s run to become the leader of the Labour Party but interrupted a speech by him in 2016, feeling he had not condemned the bombing of Aleppo or Russian military intervention in Syria strongly enough.
He is quoted as saying he despised the characters created by John Inman and Larry Grayson “for their negative, stereotypical representation of gay men” in the 1970s. But maybe more surprisingly, he backed the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in favour of a Christian bakery which refused to write a pro-gay message on a cake.
“Although I profoundly disagree with Ashers opposition to marriage equality,” he said at the time, “in a free society neither they nor anyone else should be forced to facilitate a political idea that they oppose.
“I am glad the court upheld this important liberal principle.
“If the original judgement had been upheld it would have meant that a Jewish printer could be forced to publish a book that propagates Holocaust denial.
“It could have also encouraged far right extremists to demand that bakers and other service providers facilitate the promotion of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim opinions.
“That would have set a dangerous precedent.”
No one can ever accuse Peter Tatchell of being blindly one-sided.