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Today in London religious history, 1971: protests against the reactionary christian Festival of Light continue
Posted on September 25 by mudlark121
Just over two weeks after the Gay Liberation Front, women's liberationists and other activist from London's underground had made a laughing stock of the reactionary Christian Festival of Light at Westminster Central Hall, the climactic event of the Festival was to take place on September 25th, with a rally in Trafalgar Square followed by a march to Hyde Park.
The opposition got into gear again… An alternative 'Festival of Life' was called for Hyde Park.
Thanks to the continued presence of the GLFs infiltrator in the Festival office, maximum confusion was wreaked on the organisation in the run-up to the 25th. Fake parking plans were mailed out, sending delegations form other town and cities to park miles away; letters were sent out a couple of days before announcing false time changes, and claiming the Trafalgar Square event had been cancelled.
In the Square, 'old men in dark suits who carried signs that said, "Fear God" and "The Wicked Shall Be Turned Into Hell," and young people, many more young ones than old, holding up the regulation Festival of Light poster, a map of the British Isles blazing brightly against a blue background. Young girls walked with rings of Jesus buttons pasted on their foreheads and in a circle on their hair. They wore T-shirts embroidered with buttons in the shape of a J that ran between their breasts, and the slogan "Smile, Jesus loves you" scrawled on the back. Even the Blackstone lions that guarded Nelson's column had orange Jesus buttons glued into their eye holes.'
A number of GLF and feminist activists tried to disrupt the event in Trafalgar Square:
'Michael [James] was a lady schoolteacher with a cane; Nicholas Bramble was the Spirit of Porn, Paul Theobald and Carla and others were dressed as riot police carrying the coffin of freedom, Mary McIntosh and others as choirboys, Michael Redding, Chris Blaby and Douglas MacDougall as nuns, me as Mary Whtehouse. We all met in Covent Garden, in Henrietta Street because we knew there would be heavy security hearer the Square, and we changed into our costumes in shop doorways. We got as far as the steps of St Martins, where I conducted the choir in 'All Things Bright And Beautiful'. We had planned to join the crowd and process to the rally in Hyde Park but we got as far as the south of the Square and we were blocked by the police.' (Stuart Feather)
'I was in the choir singing at Trafalgar Square. We knew the bit about the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate… that may have been the only verse we sung. We had to repeat it over and over.' (Mary McIntosh)
'I was part of a little Street theatre and we all organised ourselves into heterosexual couples and were chained together as heterosexual couples. There was a sort of sex symbol and a business man and I think I was a downtrodden housewife, and we had discussion with the people around us. So we formed this straggling little procession and we did manage to get to the base of the column… it was a pretty effective protest because people couldn't quite suss whether we were hostile or not. We came up the back of the plinth and generally infiltrated into the crowd and the mass of Christians were basically confused as to whether this was just some odd it of the entertainment or not.' (Sarah Grimes)
'Richard Dipple was carrying a cross and there were thousands in Trafalgar Square, it was jammed to the gills. There was another group singing hymns and carols, I never knew who they were. Stuart stopped to conduct them. Then there were Womens Lib, they had a demo with prams and dolls and things. They were going across the top of the Square in front of the National Gallery. We slipped down by South Africa House and sidled up to the back of the column, no problem. I was a schoolteacher and I had all my kids in school costume, roped together and I was the oppressive schoolmarm with the cane and an earphone type wig. We had no intention of disturbing the rally itself at all. We were grossly outnumbered. What we were going to do was march with them or beside them. Mary Whitehouse and people were at the front. The police got freaked out – we were outside the railings on the pavement away from the Square itself, looking down towards Whitehall and they told us to stand there and we said, 'We want to stand here, we're not going anywhere else', and this police inspector or sergeant or something freaked out and they started pushing us and pushing us until they hemmed us in to that little space between two of the lions. Well we had nowhere to go but up, because they were getting heavy, so up we went and we were quite happy there…' (Michael James)
Mary Whitehouse took the podium. A former schoolteacher, her name was synonymous in Britain for opposition to publications like Oz, sex on the telly and dirty words on the wireless. She'd appeared on a panel show with Mick Jagger once and attacked him for "living in sin" with a woman. She is 61. "The eyes of the world are on what's happening in Britain at this time," she said, as a women's lib banner began circling the crowd. It read "All God's Children Got Nipples."
'They invaded the rostrum and the fake Mary Whitehouse, Stuart, was up there with the proper one. There were several Mary Whitehouses and very funny they looked.' (John Chesterman)
'We were gathering a crowd at the back, we had no microphones, so we were quite happy to have our little discourse. But then of course the police got up and of course we could only go higher and they got very rough and grabbed hold of me by the arms and legs and I was hauled down to the ground. I was terrified I was going to be thrown down another six feet from the plinth.' (Michael James)
'There were police chasing transvestites in all directions, smoke bombs going off… it looked like a revolution.' (John Chesterman)
'I saw this police inspector who'd started it all coming towards me. I was laying down with one leg free and I just gathered that leg up and shot for his balls. And I hit him, right in the balls. But he never knew it was me, because there were so many people there, all around us. But I got him. Then the next thing I knew, I was being see-sawed off the edge of the plinth. Then they dropped to the ground and I was being carried by the arms and legs, looking up through all these Christians who'd started marching off. They were screaming 'Hang him! Birch him!' I thought, 'Yeah, that's exactly where you're at now, isn't that exactly it.' I felt quite good about that, 'I've dug you out, you've said what you really believe. We've got the truth.' Once you get that, you know what you're dealing with.' (Michael James)
'They accused us of being the Angry Brigade, that was what some Assistant Chief Constable said to us. As were pushed back against Nelson's Column and our only way of escape was to get up on it, so we did. The 'choirboys' were at the bottom of the plinth, so we all started singing 'All Things Bright And Beautiful' again. The police were chasing us all over the plinth and they arrested some people And on the north side of the plinth were Mary Whitehouse, Lord Longford, Cliff Richard and Malcolm Muggeridge and so on. Michael Redding was accused of waving a cucumber obscenely while dressed as a nun. Some people escaped and made it to Hyde Park, but the police swooped on them and arrested them there.' (Stuart Feather)
'I was the only GLF woman arrested in the Square. Mary O'Shea heard a senior officer point at me and say 'Get that one.' Richard (Dipple), who was Jesus, took off his robe and crown and disappeared into the crowd. I was taken to Bow Street and put into a cell with the women from Women's Street theatre who'd come as the nuclear family. Michele Roberts was dressed as the vicar's wife, Alison Fell was the vicar's son. They had come as a family and chained themselves together, so when the police picked up one of them they got the lot.' (Carla Toney)
'A few of us decided to use the occasion to try to expose the perverse morality of the Festival organisers. On the one hand they condemned lesbian and gay people for victimless consenting relationships, yet on the other hand they were totally silent about the war in Bangladesh which was resulting in the death and displacement of millions of people. We got some collecting tins from the organisation that was fundraising to help refugees in Bangladesh and went amongst the crowd in Trafalgar Square, soliciting donations. We challenged them over their apparent disinterest in the starvation and murder of people in Bangladesh. It very successfully put them on the spot over their distorted sense of moral priorities. They found it very embarrassing.' (Peter Tatchell)
'I was slung into the van. They'd got Michael Redding previously because he was a nun. I don't know how they'd managed to get him. Douglas MacDougall was also a nun. I think there were three nuns. And I think one of them escaped. Whoever got into the green van – the women were already there, they'd already picked the women up from the top and they'd done nothing. So it was clear that we were not going to be allowed to express our opinions at all. We were taken down to Cannon Row police station, just by Old Scotland Yard and there were more women there when we arrived, they'd got the singers and the dykes, they'd picked them off first. They knew what to look for, they knew who to look for. We were eventually bailed about nine or ten o'clock that night.' (Michael James)
The Festival continued on its way to Hyde Park, harassed by activists, among them the GLF Youth Group. Several hundred demonstrators (mainly straight hippies, apparently), gathered at Marble Arch, pelted the marchers with stink bombs and jeered…
'In detachments a block long, the marchers streamed out of the square to Hyde Park. They marched behind a wooden cross with the band booming… At Hyde Park, the sound of the band brought freaks running from all over the park across open green fields, swirling through fallen leaves and vaulting over a high spiked fence to join others already wheeling up Park Lane. Surrounding the band on all sides, a raggle-taggle army with right hands outstretched in a Hitler salute, chanting "Sieg Heil." Freaks reading madly from the Bible with no one listening as they marched, freaks carrying little children in their arms, freaks carrying signs that read "Go To Hell — It's More Fun" and wearing jackets that said "God Speeds." '
In the park, huge numbers of police were arresting any protestors on any pretext. 'The most beautiful of the GLF banners, with three interlocking circles, in red, purple and white, was confiscated by police as an offensive weapon and never returned, it is thought to have been destroyed at a later date.'
'Sweeping into the park like a conquering army with the band playing for them, laughing people with long hair and open faces, goose-stepping along on the green grass singing "Lloyd George knew my father … father knew Lloyd George" in perfect time to "Onward Christian Soldiers."
"Oh, do be quiet," folksinger Judy Mc Kenzie scolded from the stage. "Praise God. Now I'm going to sing, 'He's Got the Whole World in His Hands.' He's got the whole world …" she began.
"Between his legs," the crowd screamed.
"He's got the whole world …" she repeated.
"In his pants," the crowd howled.'
As at Central Hall, Tony Salvis was dressed a vicar again, lecturing to a large crowd… So, this time around was 'Father Fuck of Tooting':
'We always have younger cannabis in the Church of Aphrodite at Elmbourne Road in Tooting… we keep it in the Chalice on the altar. We… said that our church's contribution in the Festival of Light will be a sacrificial cake baked in the shape of a phallus with half an ounce of cannabis as one of the ingredients, that we'll take it to Hyde Park and share it with the people as the sacraments of the church… three of us took it to Hyde Park… I got up on our sacrificial altar and a crowd of about 100 heads gathered round me.
I told my listeners that the prick is the symbol of our Church because the prick with a lovely pair of ball is the symbol of life and the cross is the symbol of death. The heads were saying 'Lets have the sacrament now'… I performed the religious ceremony: I broke off the knob of the prick, crushed it in my fingers and as the crumbs were falling to the ground I was praying aloud For Peace, For Love, For Freedom. Having thus prayed I broke off another piece of it for myself and handed the rest to the people to be shared as the sacrament of our Church.
Man, you've never seen a faster castration of the prick. It just disappeared in ten seconds… great happiness all round!… Later I got a bit closer to the Jesus people, put up our altar, got on it and started to indoctrinate my listeners… about 100 people were listening to me, some Jesus people, some heads… I was grabbed by a bobby and about six of them started to drag me to the waiting police van… A girl, a psychologist, walks beside us and keeps asking the policeman 'Why are you arresting this man?'… she too is pulled into the van. Then they drive us to Hyde Park police station. A bobby says to me 'What's your occupation?' 'Reverend Father Fuck' says I. 'Occupation?' 'Minister of religion' says I. 'Will you sign for bail?' 'Yes' says I. 'In what name?' 'Reverend Father Fuck' says I. 'I can't accept that name' says he and they lock me up in the cell till Monday.' (Father Fuck)
[NB: Father Fuck, aka Paul Pawlowski, was later one of the organisers of the somewhat abortive Windsor Free Festival in 1972. The Church of Aphrodite was apparently dedicated to 'psychedelia and shagging'.]
'Cliff Richard, once Britain's Elvis and now a convert to Christ, came out and plugged in.
"Ooooh, it's Cliff," a GLFer moaned, swooning, "Oh, Cliff."
"If we get honest with ourselves …" Cliff is saying on stage.
"Be honest, Cliff," someone shouted. "Admit you're a homosexual. … Come out, Cliff." '
[2018 Note: he never has yet!]
'Everyone was charged with breach of the peace and put in the cells, but Nicholas Bramble got charged with assault, which was much more serious. I was opposite him in the line when they charged him and all it was, was that a policeman had cut his little finger on Nicholas Bramble's diamante bracelet while arresting him. Nicholas was a trained dancer and when the policeman had grabbed him, he'd locked his arms and the policeman's hand had slipped. He ended up having a separate trial from the rest of us, but he was found not guilty. We went to court in the drag we were arrested in. I was Mary Whitehouse, in the dock with Paul Theobald and Chris Blaby. We used friends as Mackenzie lawyers and a Catholic Worker priest gave evidence to say that he hadn't been offended, but wherever nuns appeared they were found guilty even though the rest of us weren't. Nicholas Bramble felt that there was very little support within GLF for the people who'd been arrested and he said so at a meeting…' (Stuart Feather)
'We came up at Bow Street and we all had Mackenzie lawyers, defending ourselves. Michael Redding appeared first, in a frock I think, he was done for being a nun, they accused him of masturbating with a cucumber. I had big floppy trousers, a wrapover dress and a long maxi-coat and an Indian headscarf wound round. I don't think I was wearing make-up. My nails were painted though. Michael was found guilty. I went in and the magistrate screamed at me straight away, 'Take that hat off!' I thought, what on earth's he talking about? He said 'You take that hat off' and I said 'but I'm not wearing a hat.' I wasn't, I was wearing a scarf, not a hat. He said 'Take that thing off your head' and I said 'Excuse me, I'm coming here to be tried on a charge, what I wear is entirely up to me, it's not up to you, you don't buy my clothes, you've got no say over what I wear.' 'I'll also charge you with contempt of court.' I said 'I'm not in contempt of court, I'm in contempt of you.' 'Get out of here and don't come back while you've got the hat on!' So I'm led from the well of the court by two detectives, but just as I'm leaving Douglas (MacDougall) is coming in with a full circle skirt and a broderie anglaise blouse. And I thought, go on girl, you deal with that now.
Douglas came out and I was called back into court and the magistrate said to me 'I see you still intend to remain contemptuous of this court' and I said 'I'm not contemptuous, but as I pointed out to you, you do not buy my clothes and you've got o right to tell me what to wear. This is a free country.' He went 'Hmph! Let's get on with it then.' So we got on with the case and the policeman who arrested me was lying his head off and I cross-examined him. He accused me of shouting this obscene rhyme, it was very bad and I thought 'what!' and said something very dismissive like 'If I'm going to make up rhymes I'm sure I can do better than that.' I said 'That was made up in a police canteen and it sounds like it.' We hadn't been shouting anything obscene at all, not as far as I was aware.
The dock was actually about a foot away from the magistrate, I could reach over and touch him. He said 'Tell me what happened' and I said 'Can I start from the beginning?' I went into the background of the demonstration and my part in it. He said 'What were you?' and I explained I was meant to represent a repressive schoolmarm. He said 'Did you have button boots?' and I said 'Oh yes, I did.' And he said 'I think I'll dismiss this case' and he did. Obviously a shoe fetishist.' (Michael James)
'The elements of camp and theatricality gave a lot of the actions a strong humorous edge which police officers often found hard to deal with. They were used to responding to belligerent macho left-wing demonstrations, but because GLF didn't fit that traditional pattern they found it a bit unnerving. If we had followed the orthodox leftist way of doing things with the clenched fist, all very serious and quite threatening, the police would have come down on us heavier and quicker. Because some officers could see the amusing side to what we were doing it was psychologically disarming for them… The GLF style of protest was political jujitsu – we threw the police off balance by not conforming to their expectations.' (Peter Tatchell)
'…we were being festive. We had a lot of debate about the Festival, how it was moral rearmament and fundamentalist. We did see it as very dangerous. It might have developed as something rather unpleasant and I think it was one of those rare events that [the opposition] succeeded in tis objectives. Everyone loved putting energy into doing it, it was a target made for us.' (Sarah Grimes)
The Festival organisers' predictions for the mass turnouts expected at the final rallies turned out to be grossly exaggerated – about 35,000 turned up, rather than the forecasted 100,000. The protests helped to deflect the plans the Christians had to step up their movement, which never won the mass public support they had aimed for.
Sarah Grimes' conclusion, that the GLF-inspired disruptions had effectively crippled the Festival of Light's grandiose plans, seems to be borne out by some of the organisers' own hindsight. John Capon, the official historian of the Festival, concluded that the press coverage of the main events and the opposition had reduced the whole movement to ridicule. This was summed up by the response of a man in the street to an interviewer asking what they knew about the Festival: 'Isn't it something about mice and nuns?'
This post was nicked from Lisa Power's excellent 'No Bath But Plenty of Bubbles: An Oral History of the Gay Liberation Front'.
and some came from here
Today in London religious history, 1971: the Gay Liberation Front mash up reactionary christian Festival of Light
Posted on September 9 by mudlark121
"Excuse me, Sister, we've heard some homosexuals and radicals are going to try and disrupt our meeting here tonight. Will you pray for them?"
The National Festival of Light was founded in 1971. The original founding impulse had come from two christian missionaries, Peter and Janet Hill, on their return to England after spreading the word of god to the benighted – whether the benighted wanted it or not.
After four years as evangelical Baptist missionaries in India, the Hills experienced a sense of culture shock when they discovered that sexually explicit content was more prevalent in the mass media than when they had left. Getting in touch with vocal figures in the media, the couple helped launch the National Festival of Light in May 1971, to oppose "pornography and moral pollution".
Journalist and author Malcolm Muggeridge, "clean-up TV" campaigner Mary Whitehouse, Labour cabinet member Lord Longford, and Bishop Trevor Huddleston soon became the faces of the Festival, which vowed to campaign against what they saw as the growing trends in the mass media for the explicit depiction of sexual and violent themes and for the restoration of conservative Christian morality in the UK. Pop star Cliff Richard and actress Dora Bryan were key supporters of the NFOL; many evangelical churches supported the movement, including the repulsive Salvation Army. The Festival quickly gained support among rightwingers, reactionaries and neo-fascist throwbacks of various stripes… Signs of impending apocalypse many of the Festival supporters included the growth of sex outside marriage, the proliferation of sex in films, homosexuality, the Oz trial…
The movement had two expressed aims: to protest against "sexploitation" in the media and the arts, and to offer the teaching of Christ as the key to 'recovering moral stability in the nation'. Some supporters naturally emphasised the first, and others the second. Plans were made for major public events, including the lighting of beacons on hilltops throughout the United Kingdom, and culminating in a massed march to a public rally in Trafalgar Square and an open-air concert of Christian music in Hyde Park.
The administrative task of enlisting the support of Christian churches and denominations throughout the UK was a colossal one, as indeed was the necessity for public relations with the press and the general public. The committee and many local volunteers were occupied with this throughout the first half of 1971.
From the start, its overtly Christian proselytising attracted the critical attention of the counter-culture, which saw the message of moral reform as code for sexual repression, censorship and a return to the puritanical social values of previous eras. Homosexuality and women's liberation, the one having been decriminalised (for men over 21) only 4 years before, and the latter in its early days challenging centuries of patriarchal domination, were both viewed dimly by many of the Festival's supporters. These movements were not slow to rise to challenge the evangelicals' attempt to return Britain to the dark ages…
It was the Gay Liberation Front who took the initiative in opposing it. They sent an undercover volunteer to infiltrate its headquarters and report back on its plans.
The Festival was scheduled to launch officially with a huge prestigious rally on September 9th 1971 in Westminster Central Hall; the organisers saw this as their chance to get publicity for the campaign in the media. The GLF, women's liberation movement and other underground groups set their sights on disrupting this rally and making it a disaster. As a result, the day became what the Festival themselves admitted was a total laughing stock…
'The Festival of Light was put to us in the middle of the summer and we were told it was this group of League of Empire Loyalists and all sorts of strange people and anti-gay. All the information was got for us by people from the Monty Python team and it was funded by Graham Chapman and others via Denis Lemon. Janet went to work in the Festival office and she got tickets and things so that more could be forged.' (Michael James)
The GLF had been founded the previous October, and was then at its most active and creative. It was holding meetings of 400-500 every week, bursting with energy and pushing at the boundaries in almost every direction it could explode.
'We would spend whole weekends talking about ways of furthering gay liberation and countering our opponents. John Chesterman had the kind of mind that could work out plans like kidnapping a statue or subverting a book. The festival action was much more than just Street Theatre people. They were there from other hippie groups and from the underground press.' (Stuart Feather)
' 'Networking' as a word didn't really exist then but its what we did over the Festival of Light. We started to put word out through the underground press. I persuaded Janet to volunteer for the Festival, in their main office, so we had access to all the literature and even the mailing list. Ae sent out fake mailings on it. For the big final rally, we sent out false parking plans for the coaches, which gave people real hassle.' (John Chesterman)
The action to disrupt the September 9th rally became known as Operation Rupert. A number of groups were organised, each acting independently, who would kick off inside the rally in turn…
'John Chesterman… asked us in advance to think of ideas for something to do, but not to tell anyone what our idea was. We met in the office, identified who our groups were and he gave us a number each. I was number seven and I knew who number six was. He said that once number six was finished, you won't know what they're doing, but you then take off from there in your own time.' (Michael James)
'John handed round a note: Festival of Blight – opening ceremony… Enter the hall in small groups. Ones or twos. Act unobtrusively. Dress conservatively. Act cool. Make no sign of protest until it is your turn. Do not speak to each other. Sit as close to the centre of your row as possible. Let the previous demonstration finish completely before you start yours. Let everyone settle down and the speeches start again. Part of the purpose is to slow down and delay proceedings. Stick to the agreed form of protest and/or slogans and do so clearly and loudly. Offer passive resistance only. Do not fight back. A general brawl will only confuse he media image. If there is any aggression, let them look like the villains in the press reports. Do not carry anything that could be construed as an offensive weapon. Do not carry dope or anything else illegal. You may be arrested so make arrangements… beforehand. Make no statements to the police until you have legal assistance. They can not force you to do so. Do not speak to the press or TV.
The Festival of Light demonstration was the most enjoyable one because it was perfectly orchestrated. All the libertarian left groups collaborated and nobody leaked it, which was amazing…' (Tim Clark)
As a number of GLF members discovered a prodigious talent for forgery, there were more than enough tickets to the Festival for all who wanted to get involved in the disruption…
'We all met at Cleopatra's Needle beforehand. Underneath a suit I had a beige lace dre4ss with pearl buttons all the way down the front, long sleeves and a full circle lace skirt. I don't know how I'd managed to crush it all up and get it into my trousers, but they weren't looking for things like that. Peter Flannery and I chose this space right at the back of the Central Hall… It has this incredibly steep rake, so we sat against the back wall in the middle of the row. Gradually the hall filled up and we saw various people sitting around the hall in various spots.' (Michael James)
Many of those who had infiltrated the hall were unaware of the scope of the plans, so tight had security been kept.
'At Central Hall, I was with a group of people from the Youth Group who were in the balcony… it was left to everybody's common sense and judgment about when to erupt and what to do. All we did have worked out was that different people were assigned different things… the group I was with was assigned to erupt and express same-sex affection at a relevant moment.' (Peter Tatchell)
'It had taken just over ten days to organise. Fifteen independently operating but coordinated groups. GLF, Womens Lib, IT, Oz, Frendz, and others. But mainly GLF. Phone calls; meetings; leaflets to be written, printed and distributed; costumes; banners; all the last minute panic, hustle and briefings. About 150 people from almost all the radical groups in London. That was probably the most important thing of all. NCCL came along as observers. Many individuals came on their own and stood on their own in that huge audience.' (John Chesterman).
The Festival organisers had possibly got some wind of the likelihood that disruption could expected; but had no idea of what they would face:
'To cope with any disruptive tactics or opposition within the hall a strong body of marshals was recruited. It could hardly have been visualised how necessary they were going to be… Stewards had noticed several members of the audience who, to say the least, looked unlikely to be supporters of the Festival. Among the characters regarded with suspicion were half a dozen young 'nuns'. Stewards quickly spotted that some of the were young men in disguise. To minimise trouble a steward was stationed behind each 'nun' in the audience!' (And Then There Was Light, John Capon – the official history of the Festival of Light)
'Janet and I had the white mice and Mary Whitehouse recognised Janet. She said, 'Don't I know you?' but she couldn't quite make the connections, and when the disruption was at its height she turned and gave Janet a very hard look. People did see us release the mice and this woman started hitting me over the head in a frenzied manner with her handbag, yelling 'Jesus loves you' again and again.' (Jane Winter)
'I can remember a woman coming up to Tony Salvis, who was dressed as a bishop. She made some remark about how we were living in a very sinful world, none of us is without sin. Tony turned to her and said 'Don't worry sister, keep right on sinning.' The woman just stood there frozen for several seconds with her mouth ajar and looked Tony up and down and just walked off in utter bewilderment.' (Peter Tatchell)
'Where the hell were the others? Had they got past the heavies on the door? The faces more than fifteen feet away ran into a blur. Nuns. There should be nuns. One group, yes, two, three. Were they ours? They looked too genuine. Jesus, they were actually praying. Damn this sweat. The stewards at the end of the row were looking this way. The one with the glasses had been down on the Embankment when we were assembling. Cameras, microphones, choirs, people. Hundreds, thousands of them. All the galleries full and more coming in. Somewhere out there were the groups. They had to be. Waiting for the signal. Had they got the right positions? How many of the props had they got in? Stop trembling, it must be a dead giveaway. Smile. Suddenly, a couple of yards away, a small white mouse ran like slow clockwork across the aisle. They were there.' (John Chesterman's notes).
'The choir was up on stage in plum velvet cloaks. The first thing that happened was the applause – we just went on applauding, loud and slow, which has a certain menace.' (Bette Bourne)
'Things started and there was clapping going on too long – I think that was John Chesterman – and so they asked him to leave.' (Michael James)
'I didn't get slung out because I wasn't disruptive. One of the things I thought was impressive about it was that when Trevor Huddleston spoke, nobody interrupted him because we did all respect him and we thought he'd made a mistake. Michael Brown and I wrote him a letter with our awareness group, asking him not to be part of it and he actually went and met with this group and eventually withdrew from the Festival of Light. And I think that's partially because we didn't just abuse him. Because we knew in a way that he was misguided. I remember various folk groups and then people coming and talking sodomy and unchristian marriage and abortion, those were the kind of people who got interrupted.' (Nettie Pollard)
'We got everyone spaced around the hall and then I noticed that opposite the front row where I was sitting there was a row of plugs. I managed to pull out two but it wasn't enough. I kept going back in after being thrown out. The trouble was pacing people; everybody wanted to do their bit straight away.' (John Chesterman)
'I remember all the mice being released. Two elderly women holding on to each other suddenly unfurled a banner from the balcony saying 'Cliff for Queen'. It became total mayhem as he incidents started to pile up into each other. We deposited fake religious literature around which had religious covers, so they would be picked up and taken away to be read – only inside it was porn.' (Tim Clark)
Danish evangelist Johannus Facius lectured the audience of the terrible fate of his home country after it had liberalised censorship laws – only to be nearly drowned out by the saboteurs in the crowd. The organisers tried to out-noise the protest with loud hymns…
'What was most bewildering to the Festival goers was the range of tactics used and the layers of reality abused. People were blowing bubbles peacefully alongside displays of same-sex affection, suddenly disrupted by respectable-looking people erupting into obscenity or arguing with the speakers while mice scuttled around the hall. Talcum powder and pornography inside christian texts showered down from the balcony. Worst of all, you couldn't even trust the church.
'Tony Salvis was going round (as a vicar) going 'Bless you, my son.' He did look absolutely right for the part. All these Christians were coming up very worried about these dreadful homosexuals and then eventually he revealed himself in some way and it was 'Oh no, not another one!' Because he looked so respectable.' (Nettie Pollard).
'And then Malcolm Muggeridge came forward to speak. Because of his thorough recantation of his earlier liberal views he, like Cliff Richard, was a particular target for the demonstrators and he compounded their feelings almost immediately. 'Malcolm Muggeridge was vile. He was the one who said he disliked homosexuals or something like that.' (Nettie Pollard)
'When Muggeridge made a statement about hating gays, that was when our youth group got up and started kissing. Lesbian couples and gay couples started kissing. We got jeered and abused by the Festival of Light people in the seats around us. Some of them tried to push and shove us out of the way but we just carried on kissing for about ten minutes.' (Peter Tatchell)
'When Malcom Muggeridge started to attack homosexuals, Simon (Benson) stood p a few rows in front of him and said, 'If hat is so, you must really dislike someone who is both homosexual AND Jewish.' (John Chesterman's notes)
Malcolm Muggeridge was so badly heckled that the choir was brought back on to sing 'How Sweet the name of Jesus Sounds' – wheeling the choir on seems to have been the standard response to disruption – while attempts were made to restore order by the stewards.
'Plainclothes men were practically carrying me down the corridor. 'Think yourself bloody lucky. We want a word with you outside.' Suddenly the corridor was blocked by a large bald-headed man wearing a bible. 'You homosexuals are SCUM. You are nothing but BESTIAL FILTH' He was breathing into my face, shaking with rage and hysteria. 'Read this and find out what subversive MUCK you are.' (John Chesterman's notes)
'It was round this time that the nuns acted. I was just by them and I remember someone saying to them, 'Pray for us, sisters', and I couldn't believe they honestly thought they were nuns. They were a mixture of men and women including Sue Gimore. As far as I remember, they started walking towards the front and then started running and whooping and about then the mice were released, I don't know who did that. But they got right up the front and people were absolutely staggered, they couldn't believe it. Somehow it hadn't occurred to them that people would dress as nuns. They thought they were real nuns and they couldn't cope – it was incomprehensible, these people had gone mad suddenly. It was the first time we had used nuns on a gay demonstration in Britain.' (Nettie Pollard)
[Dressing as nuns however had been used previously by womens liberation groups to confuse the police on their demos…]
The GLF nuns had been part of a grander plan which had not come to fruition. According to John Chesterman, they were sitting around in the GLF office one day planning the action when Graham Chapman of Monty Python's Flying Circus stuck his head round the door.
'He was always the sort of person who wouldn't come right into the room, he just hovered in and out. He said 'D'you want any camels?' and there was a sort of stunned silence and someone said 'yes'. The after a few seconds pause, someone else said, probably joking, 'And nuns.' Camels and nuns' he said, 'Okay'. But there were all sort of regulations and licences, we were supposed to find camel handlers, for God's sake. So in the end we just had the nuns.
I was dressed up as an American evangelist's wife with some bloke from round here, it drew in all sorts of people. We had football rattles and we were supposed to run up and down the aisle shouting. It was co-ordinated really well and so it was triggered. You could have mice and then stink bombs and snow and the football rattles. Anyway, we got thrown out and I went 'Oh my God this is terrible. They've just thrown me out and I'm an innocent woman going to the toilet!' Then this husband and I ran down the middle shouting 'Fuck for Jesus' in front of Cliff Richard. Anyhow we got thrown out again. Meanwhile the nuns came out, and all the audience was going 'yes sisters!' and then they turned round and started doing the cancan and people realised they were men.' (Julia L)
'The nuns took off in a flying phalanx, down the aisles towards the platform. A banner unravelled with a personal invitation to Cliff Richard to take over the monarchy. On the platform he had the grace to blush.' (John Chesterman)
'In the midst of all the confusion, the nuns get up and begin dancing in front of the stage. The security guards wrestle with them. The crowd's shocked, one of the nun's robes comes off … hairy legs and big ugly boots … it's Russ, of the Pink Fairies rock & roll band. They throw him out along with the rest of the bogus nuns and bring up the choir to sing and drown out the noise.'
'A mouse, sailing through the air, landed on a lap full of hymn sheets. A section of the audience erupted. Peter (Bette Bourne), unstoppable, was loudly complaining of the atmosphere of violence, the disturbing vibrations and how could he concentrate on God? A woman turned around in front of him. 'There you are' he said, 'I can see the violence in your eyes.' 'No, no, it's the light of Jesus.' (John Chesterman's notes)
'I was eventually thrown out, I was shouting out 'There is violence in this room, there is violence' and me and John Church, who were two trained actors, gave it lots of voce.' (Bette Bourne)
'My cue was Bette Bourne because I knew Bette. Bette was sat across the other side of the hall in the front row dressed as Colonel Blimp, tweeds and things. The demo previous had been a 'Cliff for Queen' banner which had suddenly been unfolded over the front of the balustrade. They had been hustled out with a great noise and pushing and shoving and ranting and raving. Bette started in this wonderful county voice, going 'There is violence going on here, these men are being beaten up, there's no reason for physical violence.' He shocked everyone because it was quite true and it freaked the stewards, who were kicking people, to have it brought to everyone's attention.
They sussed that Bette was part and parcel o the demo and he was asked to leave, but during this time I'd transformed myself from the three-piece suit, slipped out of that, given it to Peter next to me, who'd put it into a carrier bag, plumped out this lovely coffee lace dress, put the shoes and a little bit of eye shadow and lipstick on and a wig. Nobody noticed – we were at the very back of the hall and people were standing up to sing every time there was a demonstration and I was sat down getting ready behind them. The people next to me didn't notice, they were too busy looking to see what was happening around the rest of the room.
It was in the middle of Malcolm Muggeridge's speech. He must have paused and I shot up in the back of this row and screamed out 'I've been saved! I believe! I see the Lord!' just doing this terrible cod impression of a Southern belle who's suddenly seen the light. Being where we were, in the middle of a row with that steep rake, they had to be very gentle getting us out. We didn't fight, Peter and I came quietly but we made sure they came to us first. So they had to get everybody out the first half of the row and shuffle in disruption and I had this wonderful huge steep staircase to the exit in full view of everybody in the hall. I came down very slowly with this beautiful dress wafting the lace all over people's heads and continuing on in the same vein 'I believe! I've seen the Lord! I've been saved! Glory hallelujah!' all the way down these stairs.' (Michael James)
'I remember when Michael [James] said 'I've been saved!' people went 'Hallelujah!' thinking that somebody really had found Christ. I think these Christians were extremely naïve, because I don't think any of us looked right. I mean, this extra-ordinary over made-up man dressed as a woman… and he was right at the back, up against the wall and stood on his seat or something. I didn't actually know who it was at the time, then gradually he was revealed as a man.' (Nettie Pollard)
'He came down the steps in full drag with all these people cheering, they didn't know whether to take it seriously. The meeting was totally disrupted, people were taking out the nuns and the elderly because they thought it was going to get violent, but it wasn't violent at all, it was harmless apart from the stewards, but it was extremely powerful in term of disruption.' (Bette Bourne)
'As if all that was happening within the hall wasn't enough, a small squad from the office collective, led by Martin Corbett, had managed to get into the basement below and interrupted part of the electricity, causing problems for people trying to film and adding to the air of general anarchy. 'Mine was one of the last actions of the day. We just put on Ku Klux Klan drag and stood there demanding that perverts be burnt at the stake… we all got thrown out by stewards wearing crosses, who got quite a few thumps in to prove to us that they were the church militant, I suppose.' (Stuart Feather)
John Capon, in his official history of the Festival of Light, claimed that after this the protest largely ended and the speakers were able to speak unhindered – however, most GLF memories suggest otherwise, and that small-scale protests and heckling continued.
'Outside, a nearby pub was crowded with post-mortems and high spirits. Check leaflets for distribution. 'Is someone outside to direct he groups in here? When does the audience come out? Hey, the BBC TV news cameras are out there.' Tony being interviewed 'Are you a Roman Catholic or Protestant?' 'I'm a priest of the liberation.' Crowds sweeping out. Leaflets. 'Read our side of the story.' The leaflet with crosses on it is easiest to give away. They take them as a reflex action.
The bald-headed steward is there again. 'Get out of here. You are ANIMALS. You are intruding on our privacy.' 'It's a public meeting.' 'Only if you have tickets.' I give him a handful. Eleven or twelve. He tears them in two and throws them on the floor.
'Litter' I remind him gently, and dodge.
(John Chesterman's notes)
'I don't think anyone got arrested, which is fairly amazing. There was an attempt to arrest somebody outside for kissing a policeman, but it didn't work. There was this enormous sea of lesbians and gay men suddenly around the policeman and I remember him looking around and thinking, I don't think this is worth it, and he shuffled off. It was very, very funny indeed. You often saw police at a disadvantage because they didn't know how to handle us. I remember there was a stall with Christian books and people from GLF started stealing them. I got one of Trevor Huddleston's books that someone gave me and I said to Paul Theobald, 'I don't think we should be stealing these books' and he said, 'Of course we should.' He believed it was tight but I'm not sure.
There was a definite decision to try and talk to people as they came out. It was a really nice atmosphere and I genuinely think that talking to some of those people did have an effect and they did think twice about whether or not they should be involved. Because they weren't just being shouted at. Although we did such outrageous things we were real people prepared to talk with them. I went to the thing OutRage! disrupted in Brighton. The Christian Family thing about three years ago, and what happened there was that they rushed the stage and got thrown out and then as everybody was leaving they went through a cordon of angry lesbians and gay men shouting abuse at them. I just thought, what is the point of this? Because we're neither preventing them from doing this nor are we making them think. All we're doing is making them think we're rabble.' (Nettie Pollard)
The whole area of pavement outside the entrance is covered with arguing groups as a public discussion gets under way with the Children of God. Inside there is a confrontation with those of the organisers and speakers who are prepared to talk. The Jesus-freak, the beautiful one with the long blond hair and flowing beard, the one with the pale blue eyes, screams, 'You people are an abomination!' (John Chesterman's notes)
Press coverage of the Festival launch dwelt heavily upon the disruption, and some papers took the mick out of the christians. The Daily Mirror reported 'five bogus nuns… fending off hefty stewards'. The Guardian reported about 150 protestors, making special mention of the nuns, the Southern belle and Bette Bourne's Colonel Blimp. The publicity was a serious blow to the Festival; it fatally undermined their attempt to be taken seriously, and opened the gates for other protestors to take a potshot at them elsewhere. As local Festival rallies took place around the country, opposition began to mount up. At Rochdale, a Festival rally was disrupted by the White Panthers. The central plank of the Festival was the lighting of a series of beacons across the UK to symbolise the urgent warning against sin and the cleansing moral fire. One of the beacons was mysteriously burnt down the night before its scheduled date… Others were prevented by objections to local authorities…
Just over two weeks later, the climactic event of the Festival was to take place on September 25th, with a rally in Trafalgar Square followed by a march to Hyde Park…
This was nicked from Lisa Power's excellent 'No Bath But Plenty of Bubbles: AN Oral History of the Gay Liberation Front'. A very fine book…
There's a short video here of some of the ex-GLF disruptors talking about their part in the protest.
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Today in London gay history: the South London Gay Centre evicted, Brixton, 1976
Posted on April 21, 2018 by mudlark121
In 1972, some transpontine activists in the Gay Liberation Front founded a South London branch, which initially met from 1972 in the Minet Library, North Brixton. Among their early actions was street theatre in drag, parading though Brixton market. After meetings at the Library, the GLFers often went to the Paulet Arms in Paulet Road round the corner for a drink, although the pub wouldn't let them use the function room for discos (Fun fact: 25 years later the early planning meetings for the 1998 Brixton Reclaim the Streets party were also held in the Paulet)… Later the South London group met at the Hanover Arms in Stockwell, (where they WERE allowed to have socials upstairs!), at the crypt in St Matthews Church opposite the Town Hall, where they were once besieged and bottled by bigots; then at Oval House Theatre in Kennington… Later still at the Hamilton Arms in Railton Road (a lovely pub, another old hangout of yer past tense typist, where we sometimes held 121 Collective Centre meetings in the late 80s/early 90s, on days when the 121 was too cold to even sit in! – this pub is sadly now gone).
The GLFers also met at the Women's Centre at 80 Railton Road. GLF socials and dances – attended by 100s of people – were held at the Surrey Halls in Stockwell and even at Lambeth Town Hall.
The GLF group was still active in 1974, doing a Gay community zap (action) against Tescos (not sure of the reason).
In 1973 or 74, three South London GLF members stood as GLF candidates for the Council elections; none got in; later Malcolm Greatbanks stood again in the second General Election of 1974. "Being against Parliamentary Democracy as a meaningless sham it was pointed out that we were just doing this for the free publicity." Canvassers came in for a fair share of abuse, including a deliberate attempt to run one down – possibly by NFers, as the GLF had been active in opposing NF candidates in Brixton that year. At the Election count a number of GLF drag queens in feather boas livened up the evening!
The Railton Road 'frontline' was an alternative and rebellious hotchpotch at this time – along with the black street culture and numerous blues parties, squats, there was a constant sense of siege from police, sparking various confrontations. It was also diversely counter-cultural: there were two women's centres on Railton Road, an Anarchist News Service, Squatters Groups, a Claimants' Union for those on welfare benefits, the Brixton Advice Centre, Icebreakers (a gay liberation counselling group), the Black Panthers and Race Today Collective, black centres and bookshops… and a food cooperative, all on the frontline, or on nearby streets like Shakespeare Road and Atlantic Road.
However, Gays on the frontline often faced hostility, from some local blacks and some other local whites: GLF members were thrown out of two local pubs, the George (The George had also previously been prosecuted under the Race Relations Act for barring black people) for holding hands, and picketed the pubs over it.
In March 1972 GLF activists were thrown out of the Union Tavern in Camberwell New Road, for leafleting; the landlord's son had punched one of the GLFers the previous day… (Not sure if any of this was purely homophobic, or anti-political – sometimes venues that were ok with gay events were quietist, wanting to avoid anything political or activist/lefty – or possibly rightwing-based? Especially interesting as The Union Tavern was hosting gay skinhead dances a couple of years before this time, late 1960s, I think: "Tuesday night was skinhead night and you could walk into the pub and there'd be a sea of crops. Fantastic! And everyone was gay! We'd dance to reggae all night, you know, the real Jamaican stuff, and all in rows, strict step. It was a right sight seeing all those skins dancing in rows. The atmosphere was electric."
The South London Gay Centre
In May 1974, no 78 Railton Road, (next door to one branch of Brixton Women's Centre at no 80) was squatted, giving birth to the South London Community Gay Centre.
"During the short period of its existence the Centre acted as a focal point bringing together gay people from many different backgrounds through social activities and political action.
The Gay Centre, as a self-determined group, also took its place among the other community based groups to challenge prejudice, discrimination, heterosexist attitudes and the complacency of officialdom.
There were many different activities at the Centre. A modern dance group was formed and run by Andreas Demetriou.
There was a wrestling group in the basement and, to counter the 'macho' posturing of the group, a sewing bee and knitting circle was formed in the upstairs front room run chiefly by Alistair Kerr and Malcolm Watson."
The Centre was sneeringly described by a visiting reporter as "a shabby set of rooms"! Another visitor to the Squat said: "I was expecting some sort of brotherhood and it wasn't like that. It was rather like… people who were all already close." The Centre seems to have lasted till around 1976. The Centre applied for a council grant at one point, but were turned down… the Council was old school right wing Labour at this point, so being gay was deeply suspicious, and squatting in council property probably didn't help. Some of the young New left labourites objected to their being turned down, including Norwood Councillor, soon to be infamous Lambeth would-be Lenin Ted Knight!
"There were weekly discos in the basement, individual counsellors and regular meetings of the Centre 'collective' to determine which campaigns and social events we would support and be involved in.
Discos were also organised at Lambeth Town Hall and an open day was held for members of the public to come and meet us.
Besides all of this there was a regular duty rota so that all the people who visited the Centre would be greeted and made welcome. The 1976 Gay Pride event was also organised by Brixton Gays."
NB: Around this time, there was actually a black gay 'blues' club, on Railton Road, quite well known in the pre-Gay Liberation days, run by a Jamaican woman named Pearl (who was also mildly famous as a 'naïve' painter); although according to one source "there was little contact between black and white gays on the Frontline", others remember things differently, that some ex GLFers did go to Pearl's shebeen. "It wasn't quite Queer Nation, but we did enjoy ourselves, in an environment that was free from the usual racism that was pretty much run of the mill prejudices encountered by black people on the gay scene at the time." (Terry Stewart)
The Centre drew a number of people into the area, who squatted several back-to-back houses on Railton and Mayall Roads, (both very run down then, with lots of empties and knackered houses) with a shared garden in between them.
These houses became the nucleus for further political activity after the closure of the Centre but equally it grew, over time, as an experiment in new communal living arrangements for gay people with varying levels of success.
South London Gay Liberation Theatre Group
"The South London Gay Liberation Theatre Group, which later became the Brixton Faeries, produced several plays, sketches and street theatre performances. They were mostly unashamedly agit prop but later became more sophisticated with better characterisation and plotting. Beginning with a Gay Dragon paraded in a local street festival the group went on to perform sketches for local community groups.
The first play, 'Mr Punch's Nuclear Family', was performed at the Centre and in a local school playground at a community event. The play attacked patriarchal values by showing the devastating effects on the wife and gay son of 'rule by the father' and the collusion of the male-dominated authorities in acquitting the father of murdering them (1975).
Next came 'Out of it' (1975/76) showing the relationship between patriarchal values, fascism and the extremes of christian morality and how they contributed to gay oppression. This was followed by 'Minehead Revisited or The Warts that Dared to Speak their Name'.
A highly topical and controversial play at the time about the Jeremy Thorpe trial at the Old Bailey. As leader of the Liberal Party he had been accused of plotting to have a former male lover intimidated and even killed in order to keep him quiet about their affair (1977-80).
'Tomorrow's too Late' was an anarchic blend of music, song and fantasy around gay activist groups and the banning of Gay News by WH Smith for carrying an advert about a paedophile group and later a poem by James Kirkup suggesting a homosexual relationship between Christ and a Roman soldier (1977-80). 'Gents' told the story of 'cottaging', that is, the reasons why men have sex with other men in public toilets.
The more respectable gays viewed cottaging as repulsive and giving ordinary, decent gay people a bad name. The police frequently arrested and charged men with 'gross indecency' often ruining their lives in terms of losing jobs and destroying relationships.
Brixton Faeries decided to expose the oppressive nature of police entrapment and to present cottaging in positive terms as an ideal fantasy even going so far as to suggest the local council attempting to stump up funding to 'improve facilities' (1978-80).
We also did Joint productions with various other groups such as Gay Sweatshop in 'Radio Gay' at the Oval House Community Centre.
Most of the productions were at fringe theatres or community centres and one performance of 'Out of it' was in front of the Young Communist League who were shocked to see two men kissing on stage."
Many people who used the Centre were unemployed and could not afford to fund it. Infighting between different factions and lack of funding contributed to the demise of the Centre."
However the final blow came when the Centre was evicted, on 21st April 1976, by police and bailiffs so that the private owners could take vacant possession of the property and sell it to Lambeth Council for redevelopment.
The building was however re-squatted, at least for a while:
"The Gay Centre did not close due to eviction. We re-squatted the next day !
It closed after the principal people involved gave up the struggle with those we rudely called "The Nerds" who took over but were so un-together that they failed to pay the electricity and phone bills and and within months, it had collapsed."
This marked the end of the "first public and visible institution with a clear gay identity. With this closure the focus for political and social activity shifted from the Centre to the gay squats."
From about 1972 on there had been a number of gay squats/communes in Railton and Mayall Roads, later there seem to have been 11 houses in a group, back to back with a big communal garden. They had discos in basements… "people would bring their own records… we just had a few coloured lights, although it could get quite randy down there. It was more Dante's Inferno than 'Disco Inferno' "(Ian Townson). Apparently the attempt to establish a 'common gay identity' didn't really work, and there were divisions, due to different class and backgrounds of the residents… often the splits came down to "love and peace and brown rice" versus "political activists". Later several of these squats joined Brixton Housing Co-op, and were redeveloped into single person units.
"While this made for more secure accommodation and the shared garden was kept in tact it led to a more 'privatised' existence and some of the original elan and spirit was lost as a result.
However the gay households are all still there with more or less permanent inhabitants.
Gay people arrived at the squats for many different reasons. Some were desperately fleeing from oppressive situations in their lives. Others were glad to find the company of unashamedly out gay people rather than remain confused and isolated.
Some consciously saw this as an opportunity to attack 'straight' society through adopting an alternative lifestyle that challenged the prevailing norms of the patriarchal nuclear family and private property.
There were many visitors from overseas. Everything would be shared in common including sex partners and gender bending was encouraged to dissolve rigid categories of masculine men and feminine women. For others dressing in drag was a sheer pleasure and an opportunity for ingenious invention.
The 'cultural desert' in South London offered little social space in which to gather strength as 'out' gay people. The 'straight' gay scene was inhospitable, exploitative and a commercial rip off (it is now gay-owned, exploitative and a commercial rip off).
With a common garden between the houses the back doors were often left open so that people could come and go in and out of each others squats.
The kitchen more often than not became the hub of food, conversation and play. In the shared garden people would gather to dine Al Fresco or play music or even rehearse for various theatre productions. Even just camp it up for the hell of it."
Many of the Centre's gay activists continued to be active in Brixton after the demise of the Centre. The National Gay News Defence Committee was originally based at 146 Mayall Road and then moved to 157 Railton Road. The group was set up when Mary Whitehouse, a right-wing moral crusader, prosecuted Gay News on a charge of blasphemous libel for carrying the notorious poem by James Kirkup, imagining Jesus having sex with a roman soldier…
"This happened at a time when there was also much police activity against gay people in different parts of the country on cottaging charges and the wrongful assumption that we were paedophiles."
With the successful prosecution of Gay News the NGNDC became the Gay Activists' Alliance, a late-70s attempt to repoliticise the gay scene and link gay liberation to other struggles; which continued with both national and international campaigns with many locally active groups.
There was also a gay socialist paper "Gay Noise'. Some ex-GLFers set up 'Icebreakers' in Brixton, this was a radical counselling group which helped many people to come to terms with their sexuality and come out. The idea had arisen from the GLF's 'Counter Psychiatry' sub-group, which attempted to challenge psychiatry's treatment of lesbians and gays as sick or mad.
"Also the fascist National Front was particularly active at this time; mostly against immigrants, black people and left-wing organisations but also several gay establishments had been attacked by them including the Vauxhall Tavern in South London.
In 1978 a massive Anti-Nazi League march came along Railton Road for a Rock Against Racism festival in Brockwell Park. We fully supported the demonstration and the marchers passed under a banner we had slung high across Railton Road saying: Brixton Gays Welcome Anti-Fascists.
Also there was Anita Bryant, the Florida Orange lady, who campaigned in the United States against gays. Her famous phrase was: 'God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' and she became even more famous when an irate gay activist shoved a cream pie in her face in full view of television cameras.
Union Place Community Resource Centre in Brixton… encouraged us to go along and make posters, diaries, badges, calendars and banners for our campaigns. Ian Townson and Colm Clifford from the gay community became employees and Colm initiated 'Homosexual Posters' from there producing pictorial biographies of gay people and even gay Christmas cards.
Brixton Riots
A special mention should be made of the Brixton riots of 1981 which happened chiefly as a result of the racism and heavy-handed harassment of black people by the police. The riots were centred around Railton Road and when Brixton was burning we showed our solidarity with the oppressed by joining them on the streets.
We even took tables and chairs out onto the street in front of the gay squats for a celebration party – some people in drag – getting a mixed reception from people on the street. Some hostile, others indifferent, some amused."
Two of the Brixton gay squatters were sent to prison for a couple of years for supplying petrol to the rioters for Molotov cocktails…
Many of the original gay squats survive as co-op houses in Railton and Mayall Roads, lots with their original residents.
Some of this post was nicked from here
(where there are lots of great pics of the Centre and other gay squats, and a great thread of comments from former South London GLF folk and Centre goers)
and from No Bath but Plenty of Bubbles: An oral history of the Gay Liberation Front, ed Lisa Power.
But… there are some other accounts available now of gay lib and related skulduggery of the times…
here's a previous post we did on Bethnal Rouge, another offshoot of the GLF
Today in queer history: acid-drag queen commune Bethnal Rouge opens, Bethnal Green, 1973
Posted on March 1, 2018 by mudlark121
Bethnal Rouge was a gay bookshop/commune opened in 1973 by a group of 'radical femme acid queens' – a group of gender-nonconformist queers, who emerged from the London Gay Liberation Front (GLF).
The Bethnal Rouge collective had to some extent evolved from the loose group of radical drag queens that had coagulated as members of the GLF, some of who had been living communally since early 1972 in various parts of London.
London Gay Liberation Front had been born in late 1970 (inspired by GLF's birth in New York) and had rapidly become a large and brilliantly confrontational movement in the capital, which spread throughout the country in the next couple of years. But it was always a diverse and to some extent fractious alliance. If gay men and lesbians had initially been united in fighting the massive social prejudice and violence against them all, divisions soon opened up, as the women's liberation movement blossomed, and the male dominance in the 'liberation' front became a major issue. But other bones of contention was whether a class-based evolution was the first priority, as an immediate need that would help sort everyone's sexual oppression out (er, eventually), and if liberation was what people were fighting for – for many was it acceptance and assimilation into straight society, recognised as gay but equal?
The GLF became gradually fragmented, between a number of fractions – groups aligned for a while who in time discovered political and social differences that in the end led them in different directions. Lesbians eventually got pissed off with male dominance in GLF; varying left, Marxist and anarchist influences produced their own splinters. The movement as a whole had also always united political action with a massive personal and sexual flowering that attracted both people interested only in their own sexual adventures and those who thought sexual adventures and living arrangements could be the basis of an overturning of heterosexual and homophobic social structures.
The queens who founded Bethnal Rouge had been among the faction called 'Radical Feminists' in frustration by their GLF critics, (confusingly this label was applied to the men in drag, and should not be confused with the more usual use of Radical Feminists). They had broadly allied with lesbians in GLF in opposition to the more 'straight' gay activists who dominated GLF meetings in the early days, but as GLF grew, sections split off and local groups proliferated, the 'Radical Feminist' drag queens came to be one of the most vocal and eventually dominant factions in GLF in London, though their confrontational all-out assault on hetero-capitalist society was not universally popular in the gay movement and could freak newcomers and tentative young gay folk somewhat…
"We didn't take the label radfems. It got thrown at us one night in an argument … 'You radical femme acid queens!' … it was something from outside. We never used words like that. We would say 'get a frock on dear' whenever they were ranting away". (Bette Bourne)".
"It started with jellabas and kaftans and long hair and flowers … then we discovered glitter … and then nail varnish. Later, some of of us – a quarter of the men, I'd say, at some time or other – would get a nice new frock for the next Gay Lib dance. Then a few people began wearing it to meetings. It just evolved." (Michael James)".
It then became street theatre, notably the Miss Trial demo outside the Old Bailey in support of the women who were on trial for disrupting the Miss World contest, and then the disruption of the 1971 Christian Festival of Light. Some GLF queens wore drag because it felt right, some for fun and some for political reasons.
Generally the queens were living in communal squats and in poverty in Brixton and in Notting Hill, and wore drag all day every day. They aligned themselves with lesbians against the masculine gay men who were dominating the GLF meetings. When the women finally split from GLF in February 1972, the Rad Fems began to dominate at the All-London meetings at All Saints Hall in Powis Square.
However the RadFems also demonstrated against the launch of the feminist magazine Spare Rib, (mostly on the basis of what they saw as the middle class nature of the Spare Rib collective) which allowed The Sunday Times to run an article on the irony of feminist men telling women how they should behave. The fledging Gay News used this to disassociate from what they referred to as 'fascists in frocks'. The initial issues of Gay News were hostile to GLF in general and even more so to the queens.
In July 1972 a group of the most radical drag queens were renting a house in Athlone Road, off Tulse Hill in Brixton, and got into a barney with some local somewhat homophobic kids from Tulse Hill School, who had attacked their house. This resulted in about 30 of the queens and friends 'invading' the school to hand out leaflets. Julian Hows, later a leading light of Bethnal Rouge, was an already out pupil, who had been suspended from Tulse Hill and had got involved with the commune.
From Brixton, the commune moved to the then slightly more gay-friendly Notting Hill, to set up in Colville Terrace and then nearby Colville Houses. The main GLF meetings had started to fall apart as various factions argued and moved off in different political directions. The queens had clashed with other groupings over their insistence on personal liberation, with a lifestyle-oriented, but confrontational, all out, in your face. This ended in head-on clashes with those who saw themselves as more practical, such as the GLF office collective.
"There was a very strong movement against monogamy, couples were really uncool. Because everybody wanted to have sex with everybody! But politically, we were breaking up the nuclear family and we were not going to have any ersatz nuclear families and 1 can't bear gay weddings. 1 think it's disgusting! All these silly queens imitating their oppressors. Please, do something original, what is this contract, is this a business? It's like doing a deal with someone. I think it's really naff. Really naff. One of the great things in the commune was, it was so taboo because it was so fatal. I mean, I've got an eighteen‑year relationship now and it's very different from living with a group of people. It's very powerful, but it's not good in a group." (Bette Bourne)
In March, the Colville commune moved into a new home – Bethnal Rouge.
A communique announcing the birth of Bethnal Rouge was written in red pen by someone with gorgeous handwriting and ended with a kiss in a similar coloured lipstick):
'Dear Brothers + Sisters,
Bethnal Rouge, a commune of gay people, have taken over the former Agitprop bookshop. The shop will continue with the emphasis on gay's, women's + children's books and periodicals. We open up on March 1st, our hours are Mon-Sat 11am-7pm. There's plenty of room here for people to relax, chat and have coffee, so come on round.
Love Bethnal Rouge Collective
P.S. Tube: Bethnal Green (Central) Bus: No. 8″
The radical Agitprop bookshop had moved around various parts of London for a couple of years, most recently in Bethnal Green:
"… it was this bookshop cum warehouse and you walked into a kitchen which went into open plan East End camp with a built-in bar in tacky plastic. The place had originally been owned by one of the Krays' bankers, who was serving twenty-five years in Maidstone, and Agitprop had been very nice to his wife, who they thought got a rough deal. It was the first house I ever lived with a wall safe and we kept looking at various places for hidden money, under the floorboards and so on." (Julian Hows)
Agitprop had faced increasing police harassment and raids, as cops more and more cracked down on the capital's underground, anarchist and fringe left scenes in the hunt for the group of bombers who used the name the Angry Brigade. Agitprop had been raided repeatedly, two of the collective members had been arrested on firearms charges and accused of being part of the Angry Brigade, two more were threatened with deportation. The collective decided to call it a day.
"Bethnal Rouge came about through Andrew Lumsden, Richard Chappell and Steven Bradbury, who hung around together. The three of them got the building from Agitprop, in the spring of 1973. Agitprop were giving up the lease on the building and wrote to various groups offering the premises. I brought the letter back to the commune and after we decided not to move there we passed it on to Andrew and Richard. The people who went to Bethnal Rouge included Steven, Matthew Dallaway, Michael Kennedy and Margaret."(Stuart Feather).
Andrew Lumsden recalls: "The bathroom was filled with Peanuts cartoons from the Observer. It seemed rather endearing, this in the revolutionary Agitprop premises. They were rather large, we had a bookshop on the ground floor and the publishers were very easy going about supplying books on credit. We had a till by the door and we sold some, though it never made any particular profit. We were supposed to take it in turns to run the bookshop. We painted a mural at the far end of the ground floor and upstairs we turned the living room into the same as 7a (the previous commune at Colville Houses) – drapes and hangings everywhere, mattresses strewn around the floor, and various people came to live there and visit. We used to go to the local pub which was staggered by these drag queens turning up, but it was a standard cockney pub, they had a piano and they liked to have a singsong and quite a lot of the people in the commune were very good at sing songs, so that made us reasonably popular and we spent quite a lot of dole money on there, so that was all right… We even took the door off the loo because we didn't believe in privacy, everything had to be done in public. I left eventually because of the heavy drug use in there. Lots of heavy straight men began coming round…"
The Bethnal Rougers lost little time 'integrating' into local life: "I managed the Kentucky Fried Chicken shop in Bethnal Green under a false name. I went along for a part-time job and became the manager in weeks because it was two queens who were brothers who were running it and took a shine to me. So we managed it and the rest of the staff left because they couldn't cope with me, and the whole of Bethnal Rouge tried to manage it. We were making an awful lot of money because we were going across the road to Tesco's and buying cases of chicken, cutting them up and using Colonel Sanders names to pull the punters." (Julian Hows)
[Bethnal Rouge could clearly teach KFC of 2018 a bit about management and ensuring chicken supplies… Ed].
Life in the commune was generally chaotic, by all accounts, with people arriving and hanging around and departing constantly, and (presumably, though not mentioned) a fair amount of sex going on.
A special Bethnal Rouge issue of the GLF new-sheet in June 1973 contained a spoof, but clearly not completely inaccurate, diary of life in the commune-bookshop:
'Doin' the Bethnal Rouge
6am – we go to bed; except Nicole who gets up and Geoffrey who rises for his bath.
9am – forget to put the dustbins out, Michael turns off central heating. Open door to sunroof – going to be blazing hot day.
10am – 33 unknowns appear from bed for breakfast. Matthew makes station hotel breakfast for 85.
11am – man turns on hot water system; Lydia looks for her giro; Andrew can't find the Wall Street Journal.
12am – forgotten to open the shop; huge queue – oh they're waiting for the bus. Lydia quieter.
1.00– cocktails and California beachwear on roof; social security visitor expected; gramophone red hot.
2.00 – shop opened; thermostat mad for 4th week: can only have jot water if central heating at full blast; fat visitor melts.
3.00- we've forgotten to buy food for supper. Remember its early closing. [For you young'uns, in the 1970s Wednesday used to be early closing day, when shops would shut early. Like all shops. You were buggered if you had run out of milk.]
4.00- Michael turns off central heating. Lydia turns off SS visitor.
5.00- everybody awake. Man puts on hot water & accordingly central heating.
5.30 – the party continues. Somebody steals £50. Richard starts getting supper together from somewhere – Michael makes salad from unpaid bills.
6.00 – cocktails on the sun roof. Someone steals £40 & the green shield stamps. Gramophone explodes.
7.00 – guests arrive. Full meeting of commune efficiently deals in quarter of an hour with all practical and emotional problems.
8.00 – do bookstall at GLF meeting. The men state thinking about sex. Central heating explodes. One million for supper.
10.00 – somebody steals the furniture; we get thrown out of Tricky Dicky's disco.
12pm – somebody steals Bethnal Rouge; we go to sleep in the dustbins'
(the following week somebody slyly added a missing footnote:
'8pm – Margaret also thinks about sex – then does the washing up.'
If, like your editor here, you have spent time in the fun hinterland where squat lifestyle rebellion meets activism, you may fondly recognise the dynamics here… There's no denying the fun to be had, but if you have also been there trying to run an anarchist bookshop with chaos, partying and infuriating dithering going off (and yes, also combined with the kind of technical issues with power, heating etc… if only we had had fucking central heating at our place however… some days it was too cold to open and we held meetings in the pub up Railton Road.)
The setting up of Bethnal Rouge coincided with the fragmentation of the main London Gay Liberation Front group, which had been slowly drifting apart for months, but now imploded. The queens, of whom Bethnal Rouge might be said to be the focal point, and the GLF office collective, based at the Housmans Bookshop, 5a Caledonian Road, represented two increasingly at odds poles in the gay activist scene.
The office collective felt they did all the real work and were ignored or unappreciated; some of he other folk hanging on in GLF thought the office collective were too allied to what they called 'straight gays', activists in name, but aspiring for a kind of respectable equality and a niche in hierarchical fucked-up old society. The queens didn't want 'equality' and acceptance, they wanted to tear the whole structure down and were out to provoke and experiment with new forms of living. Bethnal Rouge and the office collective fought constantly in the weekly meetings (by now held at Conway Hall), through leaflets and the pages of the GLF newssheet. In August 1973, a leaflet was issued denouncing the office collective:
"It's happened again. The MEN have: formed a GROUP…. Took over the CAPITOL (our office) – started to make rules for others than themselves… printed PROPAGANDA on a newssheet… took complete control of PUBLIC property… THE SAME OLD RITUAL… wot next? Forms in triplicate, secretaries, candidates for parliament???? … The office collective say 'ALMOST' anyone can join. I don't want to 'join' anything, so apparently I can no longer use 'our' office… and of course ALL the GLF mail and expressed opinion is now to be answered by the MEN from the Stone Age, men who don't sue their own minds, but copy all the mistakes MEN have made since the world began. I don't want to stop them using OUR office, but I and perhaps others expect to be able to sue it as well without 'joining' anything."
Whether this leaflet issued from a Bethnal Rouger or not, shortly after this, a proposal to move the GLF office to Bethnal Rouge was discussed at the end of September 1973, but nothing decided. The next morning the Bethnal Rougers took direct action, staging a raid on the office in Housmans, attempting to seize as much GLF material as they could, and a physical struggle ensued. Julian Hows, Stuart Feather and Richard Chappell of Bethnal Rouge were involved. Office collective worker (and longtime Housmans Bookshop worker) David 'Max' McLellan, (RIP you mad old tankie!), summed it up thus: "I remember fighting with Julian Hows over a pile of [GLF] manifestos. Julian lost." However, the Rougers did apparently depart with lots of the office bumf…
The office collective's view of the raid summed up the now crevassic difference of opinion now polarising gay activism; but also starkly illustrates two views of how you change the world. Which if we're honest, both have something going for them:
'And on the Third Day They Came'
Last Wednesday morning, Stuart Feather, Richard and half a dozen others arrived at the elegant and well appointed 5 Caledonian Road and loaded everything into a truck, including the worldly possessions of some of the members of the office collective, tore everything off the walls and generally caused as much indigestion as can be caused by that number of people at that time of the morning. Cherubim, hearken unto your fairy godmother, the place looked like Cinderella's coach at two after midnight.
That, apart with getting foot and fist heavy with odd peaceful people standing around or offering oral objection, was what happened. Why is a much more difficult question to answer. At the all London meeting at the Conway Hall the previous evening the possibility of moving the office from 5 Caledonian Road had been discussed, but naturally, the all London meeting being the all London meeting, no decision had been taken. And indeed, 5 Caledonian Road does not exist only for the benefit of London, so presumably the forty five other GLFs should have had some say in the matter, but a small group of people in GLF have got themselves so liberated that they have now gone a complete circle and adopted the methods of our flat-footed brothers. [The cops, ed]. This incident is merely the cumulation of two months of bickering, internecine warfare, and general nastiness which has driven people away from the meetings at Conway Hall, wasted the efforts of the offive collective and of the Bethnal Rouge Commune so that nothing has been done to further the liberation of London at all, with the exception of two demos. Well you may ask brothers, where our communal head is at, I'll tell you – it's stuck between our legs, fist fucking.
In the middle of all this, why have an office at all? The process of liberation is a long and painful one which never finishes; there are people all over the country who are in various stages of the process. They need pamphlets, badges, information, contact, speakers, assurance and a voice to fill fantasies while they wank off into a public telephone booth. Laugh not, brother, for there you go. In addition, in London, there needs to be somewhere where posters can be made and stored, demos got together, and something done about turning London on. Finally there needs to be somewhere central for people all over the world to drop into when they find themselves in this big wicked city.
By whom can this function be filled? Bethnal Rouge commune is on London and has plenty of space; it has someone there almost all the time and has gay people who are trying to make a go of a totally new life style… On the other hand they are… so liberated that they can't communicate with most of the human race, and most of the human race can't communicate with them.
Unfortunately most gays are still members of the human race; you must remain within shouting distance of those you want to relate to. On the other hand, the office collective has been able to answer all mail, provide a reliable service as promised, pay off a lot of the debts, build up a certain amount of confidence, and pay the rent. …"
Not long after this the GLF office collective announced its effective divorce from London GLF and its re-organisation as the Gay Switchboard, which went on to do sterling work as a point of contact for gay folk from all over the place, and continues today…
Bethnal Rouge, in the meantime, claiming to be the true voice of the movement, in a 'Court Circular' dated October 3rd-9th, responded they had 'not taken over the office but merely liberated it from the grip of male oppression', branding the GLF Office Collective an 'obscene parody of straight middleclass liberal do-gooders.'
Bethnal Rouge continued for a few months after these events.
In February 1974 Bethnal Rouge was invited by Goldsmiths College Gay Society to give a talk before their regular disco. "They were dressed for the occasion in their best Disco Diva Drag." Whilst enjoying a pre-talk drink they were attacked by Group 4 Total Security, who worked for the College, and badly beaten up. When Lewisham police arrived sthe security told that Bethnal Rouge had come to the disco to cause trouble. One queen needed hospital treatment; another who was head butted and lost two front teeth. One was arrested and later that night thrown through a glass door in the police station. The rest escaped.
Shortly afterwards the commune was evicted from 248 Bethnal Green Road.
"And we got evicted from Bethnal Rouge and lived in Parfitt Street, in one of the few back to backs left in the East End." (Julian Hows)
Parfett Street was one of the early streets that became fully squatted in London's East End: some of its history can be read here
The Bethnal Rouge queens continued their struggle against 'heteronormativity' in their own many ways… Stuart Feather, Bette Bourne and Michael James became performers (Stuart later became a painter). Andrew Lumsden later became a tour guide and a painter. Julian Hows achieved minor celebrity when he insisted on wearing female uniform when working for London Underground. He is now an Aids survivor. Stephen Bradbury and Richard Chappell died of Aids in the early 1990s.
Some of the fundamental arguments that produced Bethnal Rouge continue today, and have, if anything, gained topicality. The question of an acceptable gay culture that is benignly tolerated and smiled upon by 'straight' capitalist society, versus a subversive sexuality that undermines not only imposed gender roles and toxic and oppressive masculinity, but exists as part of wide movements to radically alter social and economic relations – today we live with the result of the victory of the former tendency. The influence of the radical queens who created Bethnal Rouge, as with much of the most starkly innovative theorising and experimenting of the era, has become sidelined, somewhat, in comparison to the 'straight' gay activism that the queens railed against. Ironically though, much of what passes for mainstream gay culture has become completely de-politicised, bound up with consumerism and craving for 'acceptance' and 'normality', when compared to the GLF era. This is of course to some extent inevitable, for social movements fighting for change: that the early flowering against hostile 'norms' produced radical positions, which tend to slowly fade as wider society is actually forced to accommodate the change. GLF and its ilk helped create the change that made their protests less urgent, over decades. But its also true that movements are rarely homogenous, and common interests can unite people with widely varying views or needs, which break under stress, or sometimes split as some achieve partial victories, while others in the wide movement do not. Before the Bethnal Rouge/office collective split, the first divisions in GLF emerged as lesbians protested against domination of the organisation by gay men who they saw as fundamentally seeking gains for themselves without really caring about gay women much.
Drag, of course, was as old as the hills – but even the subversive political drag had mostly dissipated in its impact by the 1990s, reclaimed by the old music hall dynamic: fun, in itself, but hardly threatening socially.
Now, with the strange permutations of queer culture and the resolution-based posturing of much of post-millennial politics, men dressing as women is often labelled as 'cultural appropriation' – unless you are declaring yourself as transgender, men shouldn't be dressing in dresses. Student Unions have denounced and passed resolutions against the very idea.
For those of us coming into radical movements in the 1980s, influenced by 70s feminism, gay liberation, as well as class, race, and our own backgrounds, many of those I grew to work with felt most at home with the ideas of the radical feminists – both the drag queens and the lesbians. Gender, the expectations of behaviour and the social relations that it implied, were a social construct, born and reinforced in the power relations of men over women, but with the layered complications of class, masculinity and femininity, sexuality mixed in… we fell in behind the aim of the Bethnal Rouge queens – we wanted to help dismantle the whole social structure that imposed gender on us all. Freeing us all from power of men over women, but also from the stereotypes and narratives of what men and women do, look like, behave like, and ARE. Most of us still do (from the fleeting conversations I still have with old mates). Among other aims.
Times have moved on, as they tend to do.
These days, men who dressed and acted as the radical queens did would, like as not, be expected to be part of the transgender movement, in one form or another. Though this might or might not in reality reflect their actual aims. There is a strand of historical looking back that retrospectively classes many gay rebels and especially transvestites as effectively transgender… in some cases there's a basis for that, in others without real historical justification. Often making modern assumptions for social situations that are utterly unlike our own, seeking ancestors in the past who reflect out own experience in our own times. This is a basic misunderstanding of both the nature of social change, and the vitality of the DIFFERENCE between us and those who we look to/inspire us in history. Our experiences and views are different partly BECAUSE of them and their struggles.
Transgender politics is obviously central to current hot debate. Major questions exist as to whether gender is either an inherent trait in us, fundamental to us as a person, despite the biological sex we are born into – or a socially conditioned set of attitudes, reflexes and assumptions, based in the power relations of patriarchy, capitalism and race supremacy, which we have imposed on us, more or less successfully, and which we resist and subvert…
Some of the GLF queens reputedly did transition and become women – others remained fiercely gay men, who dressed in drag to undermine the whole hetero-normative caboodle. Which represents the true tradition? Does such a thing exist?
Like the Mormons, you can try to baptise you ancestors in your image – they may refuse to stay dead and co-operative, however.
I would have liked to write more on these issues and how the history intersects with the now – but at some point you have to just post (time's tight, and I'm supposed to be doing Proper Work etc), but comments and angry denunciations welcome. On a postcard.
Much of this post was taken from No Bath But Plenty of Bubbles: An Oral History of the Gay Liberation Front, ed Lisa Power. But other sources are out there.
2018 London Rebel History Calendar
Check out the Calendar online
Today in queer outstory, 1994: Gay male age of consent vote cop-out sparks mini-riot at Parliament.
Posted on February 21, 2018 by mudlark121
On February 21st 1994, the House of Commons voted to reduce the gay male age of consent from 21 to 18. The crowds gathered outside were bitterly disappointed that it had not been reduced to 16, and a riot ensued in the precincts of Parliament for the first time for 150 years.
This came just a few years after the tory government had introduced Section 28, severely restricting local authorities' right to 'promote' homosexuality (ie to keep anything pro-LGBT in libraries, schools, publish or teach anything positive about alternative sexualities or suggest that the straight missionary position wasn't all there is to sex). The huge resistance to the imposition of Section 28, coming on the heels of the AIDS crisis and the massive community solidarity dealing HIV had created, had helped create a large and multi-faceted lesbian and gay movement (all the other initials BT etc were pretty much yet to be added…). But the horrors of AIDS, links of lesbian and gay activists to other movements in the 1980s, had also contributed to a groundswell of mass support for at the very least basic equality under the law.
The campaign for the age of consent to be reduced had been building for several years. However, the challenge it faced was a large bloc of MPs, mostly tories but not entirely, who either blatantly would have liked to bring back imprisonment for gay sex entirely, or expressed their prejudice more subtly as 'concern for the safety of young people'. In the parliamentary debate, many evocative arguments were brought up, such as 'Putting your penis into another man's arsehole is a perverse…' (Nicholas Fairbairn MP, who was, er, cut off, by the Speaker before he could finish his sentence)
There was general consensus on the ground in gay communities that the male age of consent for sex should be equalised with everyone else, at 16. But 18 was seen in some quarters as a fall back position, a compromise that could be agreed with more cautious or reactionary MPs. The campaign was based largely on Parliamentary lobbying, and there was a noticeably lower level of mass mobilisation / direct action than had been the case in anti-Section 28 movement, around AIDS provision with ACT-UP, or even in the recent OutRage actions…
18 was proposed in legislation – but tory MP Edwina Currie in fact introduced an amendment to change this to 16.
Many Tories who backed 18 were content to follow the lead of John Major and Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, but some Labour MPs were staggered that frontbench Labour spokespeople on the key areas of health and education – David Blunkett and Ann Taylor – did likewise, instead of going for 16.
It would have taken just 14 more Labour MPs supporting Edwina Currie's amendment to have won the day. Instead, the provision, which 42 Tories supported, was defeated by 27 votes.
If the opposition parties, not the Tories, were the age 16 lobby's natural supporters, the Labour Party refused to whip MPs despite a conference policy commitment – 35 voted against 16, including David Blunkett, a heavily moralistic MP (and formerly 'leftwing' council leader) for Sheffield Brightside.
The compromise did little to appease thousands of angry gay rights campaigners who had rallied outside of Parliament. The gates into Parliament had to be closed to shut out angry protestors. Many chanted the names of the two rightwing cabinet ministers widely reputed to be closeted gay men and having an affair with each other – Michael Portillo and Peter Lilley. (Not a pretty picture: Gollum and Brideshead Revisited in love tryst…)
At one point, several hundred protesters stormed an entrance, prompting the police to lock the gates. Three protesters were arrested and one police officer was slightly injured in the demonstration. Crowds rampaged to the nearby G.A.Y. disco and owner Jeremy Joseph gave them free entry.
The night was made more emotional for many as the provocative iconic gay film maker Derek Jarman had died the night before, from AIDS, news which was still filtering through the crowd on the night of the vote, adding poignancy to the protest. Ian McKellen, a leading figure in gay reform group Stonewall, and now seen as a kind of radical gay elder statesman, came out from Parliament to address the crowd after news of the vote for 16 being defeated had sparked agro, and lambasted them: 'When it came out that they'd voted to lower the age of consent to 18 and not equality, there was basically a riot. I felt that this was the dignified response. McKellen came out and made this speech scolding the crowd and blaming us for the vote going the wrong way. I thought that was disgraceful and told him at the time.' (Paul Burston). Thus confirming Derek Jarman's previous criticisms of McKellen, among other lesbian and gay figures, for being profoundly conservative and working for gay assimilation, not liberation.
It wasn't until 2001 that the age of consent was finally equalised. It was two MORE years before Section 28 was finally repealed.
Today in London radical history: OutRage! demo opposes Assembly for Islam, Hyde Park, 1995.
Posted on August 13, 2016 by mudlark121
On August 13th 1995, gay campaigning group OutRage demonstrated at Trafalgar Square, opposing the Hizb ut-Tahrir Rally for Islam.
Hizb ut-Tahrir (Arabic: حزب التحرير Ḥizb at-Taḥrīr; Party of Liberation) is an international, pan-Islamic political organisation, which describes its "ideology as Islam", and its aim as the re-establishment of "the Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate)" or Islamic state. In 1995 Hizb-ut-Tahrir was at the forefront of public Islamic fundamentalism, (though this was before the current war on terror really got going, so other forces have achieved higher profiles since then).
Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain was led by Syrian-born Omar Bakri Muhammad from 1986 to 1996. The party first recruited from among Muslims who came from countries where the party was banned and were temporary residents of the UK, but in 1993 expanded its targets for recruitment to include second generation Muslim immigrants.
Many activists who passed through Hizb-ut Tahrir in various countries went on to harder things – a number of prominent al-Qaeda members were former members. The party is generally seen as "entry-level Islamism" – a kind of introductory forum which draws people into fundamentalism, and can lead them on to more active violent arenas; however it scrupulously preserves its legality, obeying the law in countries it is active in to keep its legal status.
However, by the mid-1990s, Hizb was "a fixture on university campuses, organising societies and debates", known for its "fierce" rhetoric, young audiences, and aloofness from other Muslim organizations or initiatives. It also reportedly engaged in vigilantism against non Muslims and secular Muslim women, "prowling London, fighting Indian Sikhs in the west and African Christians in the east", and pressuring Muslim women to wear the hijab.
Groups like Al-Muhajiroun, which effectively splintered off from Hizb-ut Tahrir, have taken a more pro-active part in encouraging muslims to sign up for jihadist activities.
Hizb ut-Tahrir staged a major rally in Trafalgar Square on 13th August with the aim of offering Islam to non-Muslims. The rally was described as "an American-style evangelical extravaganza with the group claiming to have a list of almost one hundred people who will publicly announce their conversion to Islam". A leaflet announcing the rally proclaimed, "Last year the International Muslim Khilafah Conference rocked the world; this year, the voice of Islam will shake the very foundations of Western civilization… Reject the evils of freedom and democracy, the pillars of the west! Support Islam… the Supreme Ideology". Posters advertising the rally were in evidence in many parts of London and other cities.
The rally itself was sparsely covered in the press with more attention being given to the counter protests by Outrage! and the Jewish Socialists' Group. OutRage were protesting against Hizb ut-Tahrir's violent condemnation of homosexuality.
OutRage had previously picketed the international Islamic fundamentalist conference held at Wembley Arena, London, on 7th August 1994, organized by Hizb-ut-Tahrir. OutRage! members Peter Tatchell and Glenn Halton, had been arrested during the peaceful protest against the murder of an estimated 4,000 lesbians and gay men since 1980 by the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Iran — most of the victims being beheaded, stoned and burned to death. During this protest, Muslim fundamentalists threatened to kill members of OutRage!. 'We will find you and kill you', they said. The police took no action against them.
Its worth checking out OutRage! An Oral History
An entry in the 2016 London Rebel History Calendar – check it out online
Today in London history: Subversive playwright Joe Orton murdered by his jealous boyfriend, Islington, 1967.
Posted on August 9, 2016 by mudlark121
The wicked and subversive playwright, Joe Orton, was murdered on August 9th 1967 in their Islington flat by his jealous and depressed boyfriend Ken Halliwell, who then committed suicide. It was a tragic end to a life full of rebellious and outrageous promise, a career of provocation which was really just taking flight…
Orton is celebrated for a series of sharp, dark, farcical, sexually charged plays like Loot, Entertaining Mr Sloan and What the Butler Saw, works that outraged the taboos of the still somewhat staid society of the time and tilted head on at hypocrisy, morality, class hierarchies and authority figures.
"While often described as 'promising', the posthumous success of his plays reveal a far greater talent. With What the Butler Saw, Orton had matured into satirical and farcical master, who was prepared to speak the unspeakable and tackle society's taboos and hypocrisy head on. Orton rejected conventional morality and followed his own path, both with his works and his life.
There is a danger that Orton's private life could overshadow his work, as his life story could be a script from one of his own plays: semi-literate, working class boy suffering years of penury and rejection sent to prison; a promiscuous homosexual in an age when it was both illegal and actively persecuted by the police; success, wealth and awards, ending with murder.
Orton's life is undeniably bound up with his work, but it cannot be forgotten that the most successful period of his life, 1963 to 67, were also years of major social and political change. As Dr Francesca Coppa writes:
'Orton was a young man in the midst of an exploding youth culture…working class at a time when the working classes were forming an alternative British intelligentsia.' "
But our favourite Orton is the one he and Halliwell created together, collaboratively.
'Libraries might as well not exist; they've got endless shelves for rubbish and hardly any space for good books.' Orton, 1967.
Before Orton became famous as a writer, he and Ken Halliwell had already gained public notoriety together. In 1962 they were jailed for six months and fined for theft and malicious damage, having been convicted of stealing books from the local Essex Road Library.
Orton late hinted they had been sparked off by the poor choice of books available at the Library. Over three years they had been altering book covers, adding lewd new blurbs to dust jackets, swapping heads and pasting in surreal and satirical collage – then replacing books secretly on the shelves. They also used torn out illustrations to decorate the walls of their Noel Road flat with a growing collage.
These acts of guerrilla artwork were an early indication of Orton's desire to shock and provoke. His targets were the genteel middle classes, authority and defenders of 'morality', against whom much of Orton's later written work would rail against.
'I used to stand in the corners after I'd smuggled the doctored books back into the library and then watch people read them. It was very fun, very interesting.'
Islington Library did not share the joke and set about tracking the culprits down. They had been suspected for some time and extra staff had been drafted to catch the culprits, but with no success.
"They were eventually caught by the careful detective work of Sydney Porrett, a senior clerk with Islington Council. A letter was sent to Halliwell asking him to remove an illegally parked car. Their typed reply matched typeface irregularities in the defaced books and the men were caught… On April 28th 1962 police raided the flat and Orton and Halliwell were arrested. They were charged with stealing 72 books and removal of 1,653 plates from art books, used to decorate the flat. Pleading guilty to 5 charges of malicious damage at Islington Magistrates they were sentenced to 6 months in prison. This seemed a harsh sentence and later Orton commented that the court had realised they were gay and that the severity of the sentence was 'because we were queers'. "
In the way that acts of rebellion that in one decade get you sent down, but a few years pass and it becomes a fond memory… The book covers that Orton and Halliwell vandalised have since become a valued part of the Islington Local History Centre collection. Some are exhibited in the Islington Museum. The same local authority that prosecuted them now lionises them… A cynic might say that of course, Joe Orton later went on to become famous, and died, so he can be used to sell Islington a little as a tourist attraction, while if some ordinary bod did the same as Ken and Joe today they'd still get prosecuted. Rebellious acts of any stripe can be acceptable – as long as they're safely in the past. Good job we're not cynics.
It has been suggested that the two different prison experiences of Halliwell and Orton mark the beginning of the diverging of their fortunes that would end in Ken bludgeoning Joe to death five years later. Orton found prison useful in pulling together his view of the world, and the lesson seems to have set him on his way to his onslaught on social mores. Ken's already depressive nature only grew more marked and more morose; Orton's increasing success as the '60s went on highlighted to him both how he was not making something of himself, but also how Joe was drifting away from the relationship. Although the murder and suicide of August 1967 casts a long shadow backward… I always think of them both when I visit Essex Road library…
Here's a good website on Joe Orton's life and death
Today in London's rebel history: released from prison, Oscar Wilde stays with radical vicar Stewart Headlam, Bloomsbury, 1897.
Posted on May 19, 2016 by mudlark121
In the mid-1890s, playwright Oscar Wilde was at the height of his fame, lauded for his brilliant, witty theatrical works, poetry, and novels, and his lavish lifestyle and sharp, barbed comments.
But his star was about to crash and burn… Wilde's relationship with Lord Alfred ("Douglas") was to lead to his imprisonement and disgrace.
Wilde was forty years old at the time of the trials; Lord Alfred was sixteen years his junior but no child, at age twenty-four, and certainly not an innocent. They first met in the early summer of 1891. Douglas was a devoted fan of Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, claiming that he had read it either nine or fourteen times. Lord Alfred was a slight, handsome, impetuous young man who already had a very difficult relationship with his father. He had homosexual relations with several boys at Oxford and was blackmailed in the spring of 1892. He was especially irresponsible about money, often insisting that Wilde spend lavish amounts on him.
Lord Alfred's father, the Eighth Marquess of Queensberry (1844–1900), was irate about the relationship between his son and Wilde and sought to discredit Wilde. In February 1895, he left a card for Wilde at the Albemarle Club, addressed "To Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite," misspelling the last word. Homosexual activity was illegal in England.
Unwisely, Wilde resolved to sue Queensberry for libel – a fatal decision, since the accusation was true, and Queensberry's legal team was able to prove it. Wilde's case collapsed, and he was arrested and charged with sodomy.
The second trial began on April 26. Clarke again represented Wilde, this time without fee. The most dramatic part of the trial involved a poem written by Douglas and titled "Two Loves," which ends with the words, "I am the love that dare not speak its name." When asked what that might mean, Wilde responded with such eloquence that many in the gallery burst into applause, although some hissed. Wilde alluded to Michelangelo and Shakespeare, among others, as older men who had "deep, spiritual affection" for younger men in "the noblest form of affection." He argued that such relationships were much misunderstood in the nineteenth century and the reason for his being on trial. One dare not speak the name of this noble love, he concluded, because it was so misunderstood. The speech probably influenced the jury's inability to agree on a verdict.
The third trial, a second attempt to prosecute Wilde (after the hung jury of the second trial), opened on May 22. Again, friends urged Wilde to flee the country, but he wrote to Lord Alfred that he "did not want to be called a coward or a deserter." The prosecution benefited from the previous trial and won. Wilde was found guilty of indecent behavior with men, a lesser charge but one for which he received the maximum penalty under the Criminal Law Amendment Act: two years at hard labour.
Imprisoned in several prisons, Newgate, Pentonville, Wandsworth, and finally Reading Gaol, Wilde served two years, colapsing and becoming very sick under the pressure of hard labour. Many of Wilde's friends abandoned him, and his adoring public shunned the former profit of a decadent age…
One who stood by Wilde however, was socialist clergyman Stewart Headlam. Headlam had found half of the £5000 bail money set for Wilde when he was remanded for criminal trial in 1895, though he did not know him personally. Later, on 18-19th May 1897 Wilde visited Headlam's Upper Bedford Place house, after release from Pentonville Prison, on his way out of the country. Headlam's support for such a contraversial figure as Wilde cost Headlam's Guild of St Matthew many members – he was also threatened by a reactionary mob, and his housemaid fled his house in horror! Headlam was later one of first 24 to receive a presentation copy of Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol.
From Bloomsbury, Wilde fled to France, where estranged from his family, pretty much skint, he lived in exile, increasingly resorting to drink, and never to return to England. He died in 1900. His grave in Paris' Pere Lachaise Cemetery is worth a visit – last time I was there, it covered in thousands of colourful kisses and wondrous global graffiti tributes. It didn't then merit a constant security guard prescence like nearby (and much more tedious icon) Jim Morrison's immortal resting place, but Wilde's has since apparently had a glass screen erected to prevent the alleged damage the kisses are doing to the headstone.
While Headlam did not approve of homosexuality, his willingness to help Wilde may have been due to the fact that "others close to him had been caught in similar sexual tangles". Headlam's own short-lived marriage in 1878 had been to a lesbian, Beatrice Pennington. Headlam's close relations with other homosexuals included his Eton master William Johnson and his friend C. J. Vaughan.
Headlam may have been vilified for sheltering Wilde: but he was no stranger to controversy, and unafraid of being unpopular. Influenced by the ideas of the christian socialists Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles Kingsley, (who both taught him at Cambridge), Headlam believed that God's Kingdom on earth would replace a "competitive, unjust society with a co-operative and egalitarian social order."
Ordained and appointed curate of St. John's Church, Drury Lane, he was shocked by the poverty there and was determined to do all he could to reduce the suffering of the poor. This led him to clash repeatedly with John Jackson, Bishop of London. He also met and befriended theatre people – actors, dancers etc – then widely shunned as highly disreputable socially (churchgoing theatrefolk often concealed their profession from fellow parishioners). In 1873, moving to St. Matthew's Church, Bethnal Green Headlam found conditions even worse than in Drury Lane. The vicar at the church, Septimus Hansard, was another Christian Socialist.?In sermons, Headlam attacked the wide gap between rich and poor, warned the working class to distrust middle-class reformers(!) and presented Jesus Christ as a revolutionary and the new testament as a 'Socialist Document'. His socialist political activities, friendship and political alliance with secularists like Bradlaugh and Foote, and vocal support for the theatre, especially ballet got him suspended from the curacy by the Bishop of London in 1878. (In fact the theatre problem was the most offensive to Bishop Temple of London, who seems to have had a special problem with male ballet dancers' stage attire… don't ask, I guess!) The Church authorities managed to keep him from preaching in church for many years (apart from when friends lent him their pulpit).
However Headlam toured the country preaching Christian Socialism, advocating a tax on land and the redistribution of wealth to end poverty – denouncing wealth as robbery and inconsistent with Christianity. No dabbler politically, he acted wholeheartedly on his beliefs, his clearly stated aim was to overthrow the establishment and society as then ordered and build the Kingdom of Heaven. Practically he fought for an 8-hour working day, complete education for all kids, nationalisation of the land, fair wages… grassroots democracy in church, bishops elected by parishioners not appointed by the state, and the rich.
In 1886 Headlam joined the reformist socialist Fabian Society, and remained a leading member till his death in 1924; in fact they often met at his house here. In contrast with many contemporary churchmen (and socialists, many of whom expressed puritanical disapproval of popular entertainment) he enthusiastically supported the theatre and opposed 'puritanism', His Church & Stage Guild, founded 1879, aimed to break down anti-theatre prejudice in the church and promote theatre as a form of worship. This Guild did link church people and theatre folk, meeting monthly, sometimes in Drury Lane theatre, and fought puritanical attitudes and prejudice for 20 years. Headlam's support for Wilde grew out of this love of arts and theatre.
Headlam also worked to improve education for the working class,and was elected to the London School Board (the body which controlled public education) in 1888, with fellow socialist Annie Besant. School Boards were one of first places Fabian (and other reform-minded socialist groups') practical influence was felt. Headlam & other progressives fought years of battles with conservatives over measures like abolition of fees, free school meals special classes for what were then seen as 'retarded' children, provision of swimming facilities, keeping class numbers smaller, raising teachers' wages, building new buildings, requiring proper trade union rates for any contracts, acquisition of pianos for music classes… but especially the role of the church and compulsory religious teaching in schools! In 1897, dominating the Board for the first time, progressives enacted most of their reforms. But the question of Religion in schools so tied up the progressive and conservative factions on that the Board was abolished in 1903.
Elected to the London County Council in 1907, Stewart Headlam remained active in politics until his death in 1924. Personally he was said to be very honest and open, with a strong and magnetic personality; people either loved or hated him. He was also described as being as autocratic and stubborn in his organisations as his friend Bradlaugh was in the Secular movement.
Today in London's publishing history: Police and customs raid Gays the Word bookshop, 1984.
Gay's the Word, London's first gay bookshop, opened in Bloomsbury's Marchmont Street, in January 1979. Inspired by lesbian and gay bookstores in the States, a small group of people from Gay Icebreakers, a gay socialist group, founded the store in 1979. Initial reluctance from Camden Council to grant a lease to the bookstore was overcome with help from Ken Livingstone, then a Camden councilor.
From the beginning, Gays the Word has been more than shop – the space has served as a community and information resource for lesbians and gay men. Hundreds of people drop by every week to pick up the free gay papers, hang out in the back, drink tea or coffee or check out the free noticeboard detailing numberless gay organisations and upcoming events. Sadly the piano, centrepiece of the musical evenings of the early days has since vanished…
Organisations using the shop as a meeting place over the years include Icebreakers, the Lesbian Discussion Group (still going after 27 years) Gay Black Group, the Gay Disabled Group and TransLondon.
Gay books weren't generally available in ordinary bookstores, and for a while most of the bookshop's stock came mainly from the vibrant US gay publishing scene. It was only in the '80s that lesbian and gay publishers like Gay Men's Press, Brilliance Books, Onlywomen Press and Third House were established in Britain. This shortage of gay books meant that initially a fair amount of the stock was imported. This was to lead to trouble…
On 10th April 1984 Customs and Excise officers raided London's Gay's the Word bookshop and seized all their imported books. This was the start of so-called 'Operation Tiger'. The operation also included raids on the homes of the shop's directors and the retention of thousands of pounds worth of other imported books at their ports of entry.
The basis for this assault was the Customs Consolidation Act of 1876. Just as rightwing christian moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse had used archaic blasphemy laws to prosecute Gay News in 1977, the British government was using antiquated legislation to attack this gay community bookshop. The 1876 Act is, in effect, a way of skirting round the provisions of the much more realistic Obscene Publications Act of 1959.
This latter Act allows for the defence of publications on the grounds of literary or artistic merit. However, it only applies to documents published in the UK. The Customs Consolidation Act, on the other hand, does not allow such a defence to be applied to imported material.
Given that the UK's lesbian and gay publishing industry was still relatively small at that time, it follows that an LGBT community bookshop would necessarily seek stock from abroad.
But it was clear that Customs and Excise decreed any book imported by GTW to be obscene and, therefore, seized. This 'obscene' material included works by Oscar Wilde, Armistead Maupin, Tennessee Williams, Kate Millet and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Some works – such as The Joy of Gay Sex and the Joy of Lesbian Sex – were sexually explicit, yet their heterosexual equivalent (Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex) was never subjected to such measures. It seemed that Her Majesty's Government saw 'homosexuality' and 'obscenity' as one and the same thing.
'Operation Tiger' represented a massive assault on Gay's the Word. The raid on the bookshop itself had led to around one third of its stock being removed. They were also advised that a further £12,000 of stock had been seized in transit. And in October they received a further 20 seizure notices detailing 144 titles, many of which were standard academic texts.
This immediate and unanticipated withholding of stock obviously generated financial pressures for GTW. But there was another, less obvious, impact as Customs played its arbitrary game of censorship. Paul Hegarty, who worked at the shop at that time, said that books were occasionally released by Customs. However, when they were received they were generally damaged as a result of poor treatment 'in custody'. In consequence, it was impossible to sell them at their full market price so another financial loss was incurred.
And then there were the legal costs. In December the shop's eight volunteer Directors and member of staff, Paul Hegarty were charged with "conspiracy to import indecent or obscene material". In spite of the huge outcry that had greeted the initial seizures, HM Customs were determined to keep up the assault.
Support for GTW came from a wide range of sources. Obviously the LGBT community got behind the bookshop, helping to raise money for a defence fund. But many other people also saw the prosecutions for what they really were – a serious assault on civil rights and freedom of expression. Authors, the book industry, MPs, civil rights groups, Trade Unions and many others also gave their support. Leftwing gay pop act the Communards made their first public appearance at a GTW benefit at Heaven in London.
Somewhat bizarrely, it would appear that German sex dolls had a key role to play in the case eventually being dropped.
Some months prior to GTW's case being brought to court in June 1985, a company called Conegate had tried to import sex dolls from West Germany. HM Customs seized these as "indecent or obscene articles" but the company had fought back. They took their case all the way to the European Court arguing that there was no restriction on manufacturing the same items in the UK, therefore a ban on imports was a restriction on trade.
They won their case and it set enough of a precedent for the judge in the GTW case to throw it out of court. Customs and Excise also dropped the charges but no apology has ever been received from them or the Government for this orchestrated attack on an LGBT institution.
So Gay's the Word lived to fight another day – although they still have to contend with other problems such as rising rents, online retailers like Amazon and, sadly, homophobic attacks on the premises…
Nicked from the excellent Gay in the 80s site
Today and tomorrow, in London's shopping history: bread riots in Whitechapel, 1861
Today in London religious history, 1819: Followers of millenarian prophetess Joanna Southcott 'cause a riot' in Cannon Street
Today in London history, 1987: Michael Delaney killed by scab TNT truck, Wapping.
Today in London's anarchist history, 1993: Leah Feldman, veteran of the Russian Revolution, cremated
Today in London Black history, 1787: anti-slave abolitionists, the Sons of Africa, write to Granville Sharp
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