Peter Tatchell: 'I still hold on to the vision
of something better'
When Downing Street hosted its annual reception for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender luminaries this week, the only real surprise of the night was one conspicuous absence. In a congratulatory speech to more than 150 activists, campaigners and celebrities, the prime minister paid tribute to many of the guests, and in particular thanked Peter Tatchell for his 21-year campaign for gay marriage. But Tatchell wasn't there to hear him, because he wasn't invited.
Tatchell spent the evening alone at his desk in his one-bedroom council flat, working on a campaign against homophobia in Russia. The desk and chair comprise the only discernible furniture in his front room. As I take in the scene, he murmurs nervously: "She's thinking it's a madman's home." In truth, that's what it looks like. Waist-high stacks of manila folders, ring binders, A5 posters and box files fill the room, the only visible carpet space a sliver just wide enough for him to reach his desk. The walls are more or less wallpapered with political posters and badges and radical iconography. I don't even realise there's a sofa until he nods to a mountain of paperwork along one wall, underneath which one is apparently buried. "But I haven't sat on it for about 15 years."
It's twice that long since Tatchell last attended a wedding, and he dreads the prospect of gay weddings adopting all the consumerist excess of heterosexual ceremonies. He is "not personally a great fan of marriage", and has never wanted it for himself – yet already he is hard at work on a campaign for further reforms of its laws, having identified no fewer than six inequalities in the new legislation. As he outlines his proposals he raises his voice and almost leans into an imaginary lectern, the old Tatchell zeal undimmed by any temptation to ease off and savour the moment of success.
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Readmore here: www.theguardian.com
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How the Gay Liberation Front Manifesto
helped to shape me
The 1971 manifesto expanded my civil rights perspective into a radical critique of heterosexism, male privilege and gender roles
The Gay Liberation Front Manifesto was a revolution in consciousness when it was published in London in 1971, and it remains revolutionary today. It offers a radical critique of sexism and what we now call homophobia; as well as a pioneering agenda for social and personal transformation.
Amazingly, it was not written by high-powered intellectuals but by a collective of grassroots activists, driven by idealism and passion for the betterment of queer humanity. They included anarchists, hippies, leftwingers, feminists, liberals and counter-culturalists. The final text was a compromise between these different factions – and it shows. Some of it reeks of writing by committee. In places, the language is dated and inelegant. Some ideas are expressed too simplistically. Often you have to read between the lines to comprehend the full implications of what is being said. But despite these shortcomings, the central theses stand the test of time. They remain fresh, innovative, challenging and inspiring; stratospheres above the frequent mediocrity of today's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender politics.
I did not write the manifesto, but I was a GLF activist and involved in the discussions – and rows – about it. Inspired by the ideas of the black civil rights movement in the US, I had already conceptualised LGBT people as an oppressed minority, similar to black people, and believed that we had a comparable claim for equal treatment.
But the manifesto went much further. It was an eye-opener: expanding my civil rights perspective into a more radical critique of heterosexism, male privilege and the tyranny of traditional gender roles. It woke me up to the fact that queer liberation involved both social and personal change; that we could, within the bounds of existing society, begin to create an alternative culture that would liberate everyone, regardless of gender, sexuality or gender identity.
The manifesto aligned GLF with other liberation movements, such as the movements for women's, black, Irish and working-class freedom. Although critical of the misogyny and homophobia of the "straight left", it positioned the LGBT struggle as part of the broader anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist movement, striving for the emancipation of all humankind.
Most importantly, it argued that LGBT people needed to embrace and ally with feminism: "As we cannot carry out this revolutionary change alone … we will work to form a strategic alliance with the women's liberation movement … In order to build this alliance, the brothers in gay liberation will have to be prepared to sacrifice that degree of male chauvinism and male privilege that they still all possess."
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Read more here: www.theguardian.com
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Gay Liberation Front: Manifesto
London, 1971, revised 1978
Introduction
Throughout recorded history, oppressed groups have organised to claim their rights and obtain their needs. Homosexuals, who have been oppressed by physical violence and by ideological and psychological attacks at every level of social interaction, are at last becoming angry.
To you, our gay sisters and brothers, we say that you are oppressed; we intend to show you examples of the hatred and fear with which straight society relegates us to the position and treatment of sub-humans, and to explain their basis. We will show you how we can use our righteous anger to uproot the present oppressive system with its decaying and constricting ideology, and how we, together with other oppressed groups, can start to form a new order, and a liberated lifestyle, from the alternatives which we offer.
HOW We Are Oppressed
FAMILY
The oppression of gay people starts in the most basic unit of society, the family. consisting of the man in charge, a slave as his wife, and their children on whom they force themselves as the ideal models. The very form of the family works against homosexuality.
At some point nearly all gay people have found it difficult to cope with having the restricting images of man or woman pushed on them by their parents. It may have been from very early on, when the pressures to play with the 'right' toys, and thus prove boyishness or girlishness, drove against the child's inclinations. But for all of us this is certainly a problem by the time of adolescence, when we are expected to prove ourselves socially to our parents as members of the right sex (to bring home a boy/girl friend) and to start being a 'real' (oppressive) young man or a 'real' (oppressed) young woman. The tensions can be very destructive.
The fact that gay people notice they are different from other men and women in the family situation, causes them to feel ashamed, guilty and failures. How many of us have really dared by honest with our parents? How many of us have been thrown out of home? How many of us have been pressured into marriage, sent to psychiatrists, frightened into sexual inertia, ostracised, banned, emotionally destroyed-all by our parents?
SCHOOL
Family experiences may differ widely, but in their education all children confront a common situation. Schools reflect the values of society in their formal academic curriculum, and reinforce them in their morality and discipline. Boys learn competitiv ego-building sports, and have more opportunity in science, whereas girls are given emphasis on domestic subjects, needlework etc. Again, we gays were all forced into a rigid sex role which we did not want or need. It is quite common to discipline children for behaving in any way like the opposite sex; degrading titles like 'sissy' and 'tomboy' are widely used.
In the content of education, homosexuality is generally ignored, even where we know it exists, as in history and literature. Even sex education, which has been considered a new liberal dynamic of secondary schooling, proves to be little more than an extension of Christian morality. Homosexuality is again either ignored, or attacked with moralistic warnings and condemnations. The adolescent recognising his or her homosexuality might feel totally alone in the world, or a pathologically sick wreck.
CHURCH
Formal religious education is still part of everyone's schooling, and our whole legal structure is supposedly based on Christianity whose archaic and irrational teachings support the family and marriage as the only permitted condition for sex. Gay people have been attacked as abominable and sinful since the beginning of both Judaism and Christianity, and even if today the Church is playing down these strictures on homosexuality, its new ideology is that gay people are pathetic objects for sympathy.
THE MEDIA
The press, radio, television and advertising are used as reinforcements against us, and make possible the control of people's thoughts on an unprecedented scale. Entering everyone's home, affecting everyone's life, the media controllers, all representatives of the rich, male-controlled world, can exaggerate or suppress whatever information suits them
Under different circumstances, the media might not be the weapon of a small minority. The present controllers are therefore dedicated defenders of things as they stand. Accordingly, the images of people which they transmit in their pictures and words do not subvert, but support society's image of 'normal' man and woman. It follows that we are characterised as scandalous, obscene perverts; as rampant, wild sex-monsters; as pathetic, doomed and compulsive degenerates; while the truth is blanketed under a conspiracy of silence.
WORDS
Anti-homosexual morality and ideology, at every level of society, manifest themselves in a special vocabulary for denigrating gay people. There is abuse like 'pansy', 'fairy', 'lesbo' to hurl at men and women who can't or won't fit stereotyped preconceptions. There are words like 'sick', 'bent' and 'neurotic' for destroying the credence of gay people. But there are no positive words. The ideological intent of our language makes it very clear that the generation of words and meanings is, at the moment, in the hands of the enemy. And that so many gay people pretend to be straight, and call each other 'butch dykes' or 'screaming queens only makes that fact the more real.
The verbal attack on men and women who do not behave as they are supposed to, reflects the ideology of masculine superiority. A man who behaves like a woman is seen as losing something, and a woman who behaves like a man is put down for threatening men's environment of their privileges.
EMPLOYMENT
If our upbringing so often produces guilt and shame, the experience of an adult gay person is oppressive in every aspect. In their work situation, gay people face the ordeal of spending up to fifty years of their lives confronted with the anti-homosexual hostility of their fellow employees.
A direct consequence of the fact that virtually all employers are highly privileged heterosexual men, is that there are some fields of work which are closed to gay people, and others which they feel some compulsion to enter. A result of this control for gay women is that they are perceived as a threat in the man's world. They have none of the sexual ties of dependence to men which make most women accept men as their 'superiors'. They are less likely to have the bind of children, and so there is nothing to stop them showing that they are as capable as any man, and thus deflating the man's ego, and exposing the myth that only men can cope with important jobs.
We are excluded from many jobs in high places where being married is the respectable guarantee, but being homosexual apparently makes us unstable, unreliable security risks. Neither, for example, are we allowed the job of teaching children, because we are all reckoned to be compulsive, child molesting maniacs.
There are thousands of examples of people having lost their jobs due to it becoming known that they were gay, though employers usually contrive all manner of spurious reasons.
There occurs, on the other hand, in certain jobs, such a concentration of gay people as to make an occupational ghetto. This happens, for women, in the forces, ambulance driving, and other uniformed occupations: and for men, in the fashion, entertainment and theatrical professions, all cases where the roles of 'man' and 'woman' can perhaps be undermined or overlooked [note: last phrase unclear in copy used for HTML]
THE LAW
If you live in Scotland or Ireland; if you are under 21, or over 21 but having sex with someone under 21; if you are in the armed forces or the merchant navy; if you have sex with more than one other person at the same time-and you are a gay male, you are breaking the law
The 1967 Sexual Offences Act gave a limited license to adult gay men. Common law however can restrict us from talking about and publicising both male and female homosexuality by classing it as 'immoral'. Beyond this there are a whole series of specific minor offences. Although 'the act' is not illegal, asking someone to go to bed with you can be classed as 'importuning for an immoral act', and kissing in public is classed as 'public indecency'
Even if you do not get into trouble, you will find yourself hampered by the application of the law in your efforts to set up home together, to raise children, and to express your love as freely as straight people may do.
The practice of the police in 'enforcing' the law makes sure that cottagers and cruisers will be zealously hunted, while queer-bashers may be apprehended, half-heartedly after the event.
PHYSICAL VIOLENCE
On 25 September 1969 a man walked onto Wimbledon Common . We know the common to be a popular cruising ground, and believe the man to have been one of our gay brothers. Whether or not this is the case, the man was set upon by a group of youths from a nearby housing estate, and literally battered to death with clubs and boots. Afterwards, a boy from the same estate said: 'When you're hitting a queer, you don't think you're doing wrong. You think you're doing good. If you want money off a queer, you can get it off him-there's nothing to be scared of from the law, cause you know they won't go to the law'. (Sunday Times, 7/21/1971).
Since that time, another man has been similarly murdered on Hampstead Heath. But murder is only the most extreme form of violence to which we are exposed, not having the effective rights of protection. Most frequently we are 'rolled' for our money, or just beaten up: and this happens to butch looking women in some districts.
PSYCHIATRY
One way of oppressing people and preventing them getting too angry about it, is to convince them, and everyone else, that they are sick. There has hence arisen a body of psychiatric 'theory' and 'therapy' to deal with the 'problems' and 'treatment' of homosexuality .
Bearing in mind what we have so far described, it is quite understandable that gay people get depressed and paranoid; but it is also, of course, part of the scheme that gay people should retreat to psychiatrists in times of troubles.
Operating as they do on the basis of social convention and prejudice, NOT scientific truth, mainstream psychiatrists accept society's prevailing view that the male and female sex roles are 'good' and 'normal', and try to adjust people to them. If that fails, patients are told to 'accept themselves' as 'deviant'. For the psychiatrist to state that homosexuality was perfectly valid and satisfying, and that the hang-up was society's inability to accept that fact, would result in the loss of a large proportion of his patients.
Psychiatric 'treatment' can take the form either of mindbending 'psychotherapy', or of aversion therapy which operates on the crude conditioning theory that if you hit a person hard enough, he'll do what you want. Another form of 'therapy' is chemically induced castration, and there is a further form of 'treatment' which consists in erasing part of the brain, with the intent (usually successful) of making the subject an asexual vegetable.
This 'therapy' is not the source of the psychiatrist's power, however. Their social power stems from the facile and dangerous arguments by which they contrive to justify the prejudice that homosexuality is bad or unfortunate, and to mount this fundamental attack upon our right to do as we think best. In this respect, there is little difference between the psychiatrist who says: 'From statistics we can show that homosexuality is connected with madness', and the one who says: 'Homosexuality is unfortunate because it is socially rejected'. The former is a dangerous idiot-he cannot see that it is society which drives gay people mad. The second is a pig because he does see this, but sides consciously with the oppressors.
That psychiatrists command such credence and such income is surprising if we remember the hysterical disagreements of theory and practice in their field, and the fact that in formulating their opinions, they rarely consult gay people. In fact, so far as is possible, they avoid talking to them at all, because they know that such confrontation would wreck their theories.
SELF-OPPRESSION
The ultimate success of all forms of oppression is our self-oppression. Self-oppression is achieved when the gay person has adopted and internalised straight people's definition of what is good and bad. Self-oppression is saying: 'When you come down to it, we are abnormal'. Or doing what you most need and want to do, but with a sense of shame and loathing, or in a state of disassociation, pretending it isn't happening; cruising or cottaging not because you enjoy it, but because you're afraid of anything less anonymous. Self-oppression is saying: 'I accept what I am', and meaning: 'I accept that what I am is second-best and rather pathetic'. Self-oppression is any other kind of apology: 'We've been living together for ten years and all our married friends know about us and think we're just the same as them'. Why? You're not.
Self-oppression is the dolly lesbian who says: 'I can't stand those butch types who look like truck drivers'; the virile gay man who shakes his head at the thought of 'those pathetic queens'. This is self-oppression because it's just another way of saying: 'I'm a nice normal gay. just like an attractive heterosexual'.
The ultimate in self-oppression is to avoid confronting straight society, and thereby provoking further hostility:Self-oppression is saying, and believing: 'I am not oppressed'.
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Read The Manifesto here: www.fordham.edu
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