The incomparable and tireless champion of gay rights, civil rights and free speech, Patron Saint here at Dolores Delargo Towers, Mr Peter Tatchell is 70 years old today!
From his own Foundation's press release:
Peter Tatchell is one of Britain’s best known and longest surviving LGBT+ and human rights campaigners. He’s supported nearly every major human rights campaign for the last half a century – and taken on everyone from Mike Tyson to Tony Blair and the Archbishop of Canterbury.He first began campaigning while still at school in 1967 aged 15, against the death penalty and the execution of Ronald Ryan in his home state of Victoria, Australia. He went on to champion indigenous Aboriginal rights and oppose Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. On moving to London in 1971, he was prominent in the newly-formed Gay Liberation Front and ... helped organise the UK’s first LGBT+ Pride parade in 1972 – this July being the 50th anniversary...
He stood as the Labour candidate in the notorious 1983 Bermondsey by-election – often regarded as the dirtiest, most violent and homophobic election in Britain since 1945. In 1990 he was a founding member of the LGBT+ campaign group OutRage! Its activism against homophobic discrimination included the most numerous and sustained direct action protests in Britain since the suffragettes.
Over the last five decades, he’s participated in 3,000 peaceful protests, been arrested 100 times and suffered 300 violent assaults by homophobes and far right extremists, including 50 attacks on his flat. He has described the violent assaults as like living through a low-level civil war. For many years he suffered from PTSD.
He was beaten unconscious by President Mugabe’s bodyguards when he tried to make a citizen’s arrest in Brussels in 2001 and suffered a severe beating by neo-Nazis in Moscow in 2007 when he supported the bid by Russian LGBTs to hold a Pride parade.
“My coordination, memory, balance, vision and concentration are somewhat impaired. Campaigning is more difficult but I still manage. I’ve no regrets. Compared to the jailing and torturing of human rights defenders in China, Russia, Syria and Uganda, I’ve got off lightly,” said Mr Tatchell.
All hail!
We would really love to see the recent film of the great man's life - co-produced (i.e. funded) by Sir Elton John and Peter Furnish, and featuring (among others) commentary and tributes from esteemed gayers such as Stephen Fry and Sir Ian "Serena" McKellen - Hating Peter Tatchell, but unfortunately it seems to have been snapped up by that behemoth Netflix, a service to which we stalwart BBC-ers would never subscribe, so I doubt we will get the opportunity for a while...
Regardless, we charge our glasses to a true hero!
Peter Gary Tatchell (born 25th January 1952)
Today also happens to be Burns' Night - yet another excuse for Scots to get pissed on whisky and eat pig guts - so what better way to pay tribute to Mr Tatchell's milestone birthday than with one of Scotland's finest bands and an appropriate choon?
OCH, AYE!
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