 First events of LGBTQ History Month at the Library, a little housekeeping before we start, if you're not familiar with the set up of this platform. If you have any questions for any of the panellists during the event, you can submit those using the question box below. A selection of questions will be answered towards the end of the event when we have a bit more of a come together and a conversation. Please use the menu above to provide us with feedback about the event, and it's also a place where you can donate to the library. If you feel that, that's something that you can do at the moment. Your support helps us to open up the world's knowledge and inspire as many people as possible to engage with the written word. You can also find a bookshop tab where you can buy books, which will be mentioned throughout the course of this event. One of the participants in that is Gaze The Word Bookshop, who are Britain's longest running LGBTQ bookshop. You'll also find social media links below this video in case you want to continue the conversation on other platforms. You can also find the biographies of all of our speakers tonight and the event description. So this event is called Reflections, Gay Liberation Front at 50. And as a queer person born in 1980, I was of a generation directly impacted by legislation such as course 28, which prohibited local authorities from talking about or promoting homosexuality anyway, including in libraries. And the library in the early 1990s in the small northeastern town where I lived was the place where I could go to try and find myself hidden in indexes and paragraphs of literature. But in my view, it's largely thanks to the work of the Gay Liberation Front during the 1970s and the subsequent generations of LGBTQ activists that I'm in this incredible position of privilege that I am at the moment where I'm able to talk to you tonight as a representative of the British Library. I first encountered Gay Liberation Front on a Saturday afternoon in 2010 at a cinema in Notting Hill. It was the 40th anniversary of Gay Liberation Front and the programme of events that day was fiercely interrupted by a humorous, angry, passionate debate about the treatment of Gay Liberation Front activists by civil liberty groups and local authorities at the time. And the thing that I took away from that event was the work of the GLF was in no way over, and it was in no way history. And I left that event with my 40th anniversary edition of the Gay Liberation Front manifesto, which included a paragraph by one of its co-authors, a writer called Elizabeth Wilson. And I'm going to quote some of that for you now. The manifesto reads today is a fairly one dimensional attempt to account for gender and sexual victimisation. However, it asks an important question and one that is still relevant about the sources of prejudice and hatred. The Gay Liberation Front manifesto group met in my basement living room throughout a rather hot summer. The atmosphere was often tense and febrile. But however black and white the answers we developed might appear today, it seemed crucial at that time to understand better the nature of the society that we lived in and continue to live in. If it seems both raw and oversimplified now, it did actually, along with the work of feminists, spark a way of thinking about human relationships in society that has led to significant social change. Like all pioneers, we sometimes got it wrong, but we believed in what we were doing. We believed in our power to change society, and that is surely a good thing. End quote. That was Elizabeth Wilson. So the British Library was hoping to be able to help everybody to engage with the legacy of Gay Liberation Front by having a case dedicated to the printed material of the Gay Liberation Front. In our Treasures Gallery. So the Gay Liberation Front manifesto, its newspaper come together in its various pamphlets, would be alongside Magna Carta, St Cuthbert, the Greek and word Bible, and various literary manuscripts from renowned authors. And that case sadly was cancelled due to COVID-19 in the summer of 2020. It was rescheduled for February this year, but unfortunately that is also being postponed. But do keep an eye out on our upcoming exhibition programme where we will be commemorating the Gay Liberation Front very, very soon. We can't go into the entire history of Gay Liberation Front tonight, but by way of brief introduction, GLF was founded by two students, Bob Mellers and Aubrey Walter, who travelled to America independently of each other during the summer of 1970. What they encountered in America was a country in following the events of the Stonewall uprising in June, July 1969. Aubrey and Bob actually met in Philadelphia at the Black Panthers parties, revolutionary people's constitutional convention. And it was there that they joined one of the Gay Liberation Groups and brought all of that information that they gained in Philadelphia via that conference to London and began meeting at the London School of Economics in October 1970. The group grew from 20, which morphed into 18, which morphed into hundreds of activists, which spawned consciousness raising sessions, newspapers, pamphlets, phone lines, discos, demonstrations, communes, street theatre, marches, and the legacy of GLF goes on long after 1973 when they stopped organising. So tonight, our first speaker, we're trying to keep it as GLF as possible by giving everybody a platform for a set amount of time, and then we'll all come together and have a conversation later. So our first speaker tonight is Stuart Feather. Stuart encountered GLF in its first month of meetings. He was a participant in street theatre, and Stuart was arrested, dressed as Mary Whitehouse, in one of the more infamous GLF actions around the fundamentalist Christian organisation, the Festival of Light, during 1971. Stuart, I'm going to give the floor to you. Well, I went along to Gay Liberation Front. I heard about it through two friends of mine and my then boyfriend who had gone out shopping in Oxford Street and returned with a pamphlet from the Gay Liberation Front asking them to join, and so we decided to go. And I had read a tiny little two paragraph article, I think, in the Sunday Times, the year previously, and it mentioned the Gay Liberation Front. And I thought that was a bit strange because I didn't know what Gay Liberation could mean, really. I mean, I'd heard about the Palestinian Liberation Front and the Liberation Front of the Western Sahara. So this was my opportunity, and along we went and we entered this classroom at the London School of Economics, and it was quite crowded with all these young people. I was 30 at the time, they were in their 20s or some even younger than that. And all the men were kind of had long hair, and indeed some of them were wearing very sort of hippie outfits with, you know, Afghan coats and stuff like that. The women were more my age. There was some very young lesbians there, but and the thing that got me was that one of the women stood up and dressed as newcomers and said, um, how I want you to think about how you behave at work in order to disguise your sexuality. And suddenly I had this vision of all the games that I played to do just that. And I felt rather disgusted by it. And that made me kind of realise how much of my behaviour had been, in a way, forced on me by society. And so that became the motive for joining the Gay Liberation Front and for discovering that, you know, the personal is political. A few months later, around about Christmas time, there was a Gay Liberation Function Group formed called the Street Theatre Group, and I thought, well, I've done so, I'm a dramatic, and I haven't been able to find any other function group in GLF that appealed to me, or I felt capable of contributing to, but with the Street Theatre Group I did. And so I joined. And thanks to Angela here, who came along to Gay Liberation, she invited us to perform or demonstrate for, and on behalf of the Women of Women's Liberation, who'd been arrested at the Albert Hall after demonstrating against the Miss World Contest in 1970. And so my first experience of performing on the pavement was that event. And I was also, well, a lot of us were in drag, certainly I was, and it proved really amazing. We got such a crowd around us, and the BBC were there with their cameras. I think we were all left on the cutting room floor, because after the event, we all rushed back to Paul Theorbell's place where we'd sort of got together and got our costumes on and things. And we sat all day waiting for it to appear on the news and it didn't. There were reasons for that, but there we are. The other thing was that I kind of put the feeling of how strong drag is in affecting people and how antagonistic they can get. I mean, we did a second performance at Bo outside Bo Street Magistrates Court, and we had the Covent Garden porters coming and throwing rotten tomatoes at us. And because we were in the now and hadn't done any rehearsal and had no structure, we kind of couldn't carry on. We kind of lost it because of that lack of discipline, if you like. So we retreated and grabbed our things and got away. And I remained with the Street Theatre group for the rest of my time in the Gay Liberation front. My progress, because of the politics of Gay Liberation, meant that I began to meet other people who thought the same way as I did. So I became a drag queen and eventually a hippie comedy drag queen living in a commune in Notting Hill. And I took part, as Stephen's already said, dressed as Mary Whitehouse in this big demonstration we held against the group called the Festival of Light, organised by such moral leaders as Mary Whitehouse and Lord Longford and Malcolm Muggeridge and Cliff Richard. And they held an inaugural meeting in the Methodist Central Hall, which we disrupted time and time again. Little groups doing things in the middle of someone's speech, letting off mice which scattered around the floor and freaked people out, others standing up and kissing each other in the middle of the church, all same sex couples. And the nuns, we had nuns there who did a can-can all the way down the aisle before they were caught by the stewards and thrown out. A dear friend of mine and a sister communard dressed as an American, you know, sort of evangelist woman who believed in being saved and suddenly stood up and announced that in the middle of Malcolm Muggeridge's speech, and she was so effective that people actually thought for a moment, you could feel it, that they thought for a moment it was real. And of course he was grabbed as well and whisked off. But the final act was the action group of the Gay Liberation Front getting into the basement of the Central Hall Westminster and turning half the halls lights off. And the headline, not the headline, but in the article in the Guardian the next day was, you know, about the lights being turned off in the middle of this evangelical meeting. And then they had a big rally in Trafalgar Square, followed by a march and an even bigger rally in Hyde Park a couple of weeks later, which is when the police came along and they were now looking for demonstrators who were going to be protesting against them, the festival light. And we were, and we were told after singing all things bright and beautiful in front of St Martin's, St Martin in the Fields Church that we were part of the Angribigade, which is a group of Cambridge students who were fighting the Government using explosives and their aim was to damage property and unfortunately no one ever got maimed or injured in any way or killed, should be even worse. And we just couldn't believe it. And then they divided us and pushed us up against the plinth of the Nelson's column. And the only way out of that was to climb up the plinth and there was Mary White House on the north side of the plinth. You know, with all the other big people and they're all singing hymns and rallying all these thousands and thousands and thousands of people who are all screaming Jesus saves Jesus saves over and over again. We were very manic. And we were pulled off and a lot of us were arrested, I managed to escape with one or two others to go to Hyde Park and join the rest of GLF, and we were arrested in Hyde Park. So, you know, we appeared in court in our drag, because the courts were another, you know, sort of theatre of protest or we turned it into that. And two of us got off and two of us were found guilty of breaking the peace or something like that. And there's a photograph now just come up, I see, of my arrest and the arrest of Nicholas Bramble, who was the spirit of Paul in Hyde Park. And from there, we drag queens grew closer and closer. And because a lot of us had problems, not me personally, but a lot of other people I was associated with had problems with landlords who were through all my friends out of their flats for being drag queens. We turned into squatting. And we had a commune in Notting Hill, as I mentioned, where we joined in with the local people protesting housing conditions there and so on. And we joined the carnival, of course, that year. Initially, we broke up after about nine months. And that was the end of Gay Liberation for me. But we caused quite a stir within Gay Liberation by our activity of many thought of us as letting the side down or appearing like people's worst nightmare of what homosexuals were like and the way they behaved. We were controversial. And it was all great fun. Thank you. Thank you so much, Stuart Feather. There's a virtual round of applause from the green room for Stuart there. And our next speaker is as is Ted Brown. Ted first encountered GLF when he was handed a leaflet outside of the cinema. He encountered the GLF youth group. And at the time they organised the first public march of LGBTQ people in the UK, the GLF youth march on the 28th of August 1971. Ted has a reputation which precedes him. He's founder of the black lesbians against media homophobia and the most notable campaign being that against Pato Bant, Bio Bantam, and his reggae song Boom Bye Bye, which resulted in the recording being banned. And Ted, I believe, received a televised apology as well. Ted, the platform is yours. OK, right. Well, I want to give an overall statement because GLF means so much to me that if I get into a lot of detail, I'm likely to run on until tomorrow morning. So initially I want to say that I believe that like the others here, GLF is still very high in my heart, in my feelings, and in my mind. It changed my life in many ways, and I still feel myself to be a GLF activist even 50 years later. Also a slight correction because although I agree with you that the 1971 march, the youth group march against the unequal age of consent laws was the first march through central London, GLF had actually had a smaller demonstration in Finsbury Park. No, yeah. The very fields, Ted. The very fields, I think. The very fields, sorry, the very fields against police entrapment of men that were codging, and that was consisted of about 150 people. It was small and it was spontaneous. The march that you speak of is the first march through central London and it preceded, well, came before. I can't talk now. This is also emotional. To the first gay pride march, which happened a year later in 1972. So I'm going to begin by giving a slight summary of the circumstances in which, from which I became a GLF activist. Some of it may seem irrelevant, but you'll understand when I get into a bit more detail. I was born in 1950 in the United States of a mother who had two other young children, but had divorced. She was Jamaican. She didn't have American citizenship, but she was very much involved in the civil rights movement that was being led by Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and other notables. The FBI kept an eye on people like her, and she wasn't lucky enough to get her citizenship. So she was deported from the States. And with me and the her younger children, and we wound up in Greenwich and Depford in a small shop where we were subjected to some severe racism from the local National Front organization. They were breaking our windows. They were pushing dog mess through the letter box. They were writing obscenities on our walls and so on and so forth. And my mother was able to stand this because she had experienced even worse in America, which was one of the reasons that she joined the civil rights movement. Now, I went to school in that area as a young child, and I think I began to have an inkling that I might be homosexual, because those are the only terms that were available to us in those days when I was 1961 or so, when I was 11 years old. And people often forget how early homophobia is installed in children. When I first became aware that I possibly might be homosexual, I remember reading, I think it was the Dino or the Dandy, which featured Dennis the Menace. This may not seem relevant, but I'll explain why, because Dennis the Menace was a boisterous character. Probably everyone has heard of him, but he used to bully a character called Walter, who now has, in current television, is now presented as a snob and a sneak and so on. But in the early days, the problem with Walter was that he liked flowers and poetry. And for those reasons, it was okay for Dennis to beat him up, to threaten him, to insult him, and this was being pumped out to the kids at the time. And I was actually, oh, already? Oh my God. Five minutes in. Okay, well, let's run on through then. My mother died in 1965, just a few months after I had told her that I felt that I was becoming homosexual. She, I knew would understand, and she was sympathetic. We cried on each other's shoulders. She said she knew that I was going to have to deal with racism, as well as hostility towards homosexual people. But she gave me support, and she pointed out to me that when she was working with the Civil Rights Movement, that she had heard of Bayard Rustin, who was the openly gay black man who helped organize the Great March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King gave his, I have a dream speech, and that the Civil Rights Movement had actually been arguing not just for equal rights for black people, but for women's rights, and for sexual rights, and for better conditions for children and so on and so forth. So I had, was very lucky to have a good background there. I lives with watching the television. I saw a program. If you want to have an idea of what the atmosphere was like at the time, I recommend that you watch a film called the Children's Hour, which featured Audrey Hepburn and Shirley McLean, based on a true story. And another film called Victim, which was actually used to argue against the persecution and blackmail of gay men. And it starred Dirk Bogard, who should get an award from the LGBT community for the work that he did in that film. Oh, my God. Anyway, I went to see the film Boys in the Band. I was very upset about it because the basic theme seemed to be that the only problem gay men have is that they're self-hatred. It did not mention the prejudice that they suffered. And on leaving it, the odium list of square seeing this film, I came across leaflets, people leafleting against the movie and saying it was a distortion of gay life. I went to my first meeting at the Middle Earth in Covent Garden where I walked into a room where there must have been maybe 200 openly lesbian and gay people, something I had never seen before. And I felt welcome and very positive. I joined in some of the actions that Stuart has spoken about, one of which I remember brightly, which was called in response to a book called Everything You Want to Know About Sex by a man called David Rubin, in which he claimed that typical gay sex involved in inserting cucumbers anally. So we demonstrated outside PAN books with our eight foot long paper mache cucumber, led by the editor of Gay News magazine who bent forward and we waved the cucumber around his bottom as we rushed into the offices of Anyway, of the PAN books protesting against his book. There were other actions. I joined the Bound's Green commune. Last year I went with Dan de Lamotte who produced the film Are You Proud and found the location in Bound's Green Road, very close to Queens Road, which was our original commune location. And I remembered many, many events which I can enlarge upon. I won't ramble on, but sorry. Eight minutes goes fast. That's amazing. It's a lot, isn't it? I realised when I asked you all if you would come together and reflect on your time with GLF that asking you to speak for, you know, between five and eight minutes was a really tall order. But I would encourage anybody who is out there watching if you do have questions for Ted if there's things that you'd like to know more from either Stuart or Ted. There is the question box. So please do send those through and we can address them later. Our next speaker is Angela Mason. Angela was a student at LSE during the early 1970s and was active amongst the Gay Liberation Front women. And specifically their interaction with the women's liberation movement as well in 1971. Angela has gone on to be a stalwart of LGBTQ battles for rights and just a general person that has been there for this community through an awful lot of things. Angela was director of the Stonewall between 1992 and 2002. She was the national advisor for the Equalities and Cohesion at the Improvement and Development Agency and was chair of the Fawcett Society between 2007 and 2013. In 2010 she was elected as a Labour councillor for Camden, Borough Council. Angela, platform is yours. Thank you. Thank you, Stephen. I sound like a stately homo of England. Stately homo of England indeed. Thank you to the library which is in Camden for organising this event. It's great and lovely to see everybody. I'm actually just sitting here thinking, God, was it 50 years ago? It does seem absolutely amazing and I'm glad we've all survived one way or another. And of course not everybody has, which we also remember. When I think of GLF, I think of it really as a dazzling firework which absolutely lit up the sky. And we never saw things the same way again. And it wasn't just a rocket, there was bone candles and casting wheels and bangers and a whole political extravaganza. I think it's important to remember that some of the ways we organised, you did mention the beginning, Stephen, they were quite novel at the time. We were much more used to the sort of organisation you had in the campaign for homosexual equality, which essentially was a parliamentary lobby group or traditional left-wing parties. But this was really anarchic, I think is the word, iconoclastic and freewheeling. And sort of it was a political extravaganza, which is a sort of great sweetie jar from which you picked the thing that you wanted to become engaged in. And some of the things I think, I mean we did go on demos, we had loads and loads of actions and we did the newspapers. But I think Stuart's described a little about the street theatre and how challenging and opening out that was. We also had lots of things called thinkings and I'm always trying to tell my fellow councillors now, that's what we ought to do, we ought to sit down and have a thinking. And they were great because there was an equality between everybody. And whatever your background or circumstances, it was an opportunity for us all to come to grips with things that we bottled up and not talked about in the main for most of our lives. So, and then the other things like consciousness raising that we I suppose borrowed from the women's movement. So, and Stuart said that I hadn't realised quite that I told the street theatre about the Miss World demonstration. These were, this was the arrest and the trial at Bow Street of the women who had been in the Miss World demonstration, including me, although I wasn't one of the ones arrested. And I had to say that my experience was in the women's liberation movement before gay liberation. And I wasn't, you asked us to talk about what happened when we came into the room, so to speak. And I wasn't actually brave enough just to go to the meeting. I did know, I can't remember how I knew about it, but I knew about the meetings at LSE. So I decided to go as a messenger from the women's liberation movement. And I think I gave greetings from the Toughnell Park Women's Group. And I think I was encouraging people to come to a demonstration. It may have been the Miss World one, I can't remember quite, but so I got up and I was very, very excited and nervous because I was then about 26 and seven. And I had never told anybody I was gay, except the psychiatrist. So it was really, it was something that was an enormous trouble to me and was sort of ruining my life, basically. Anyway, so I got up and gave this message of solidarity from women's liberation. And then the chair of the meeting who was a man called Warren Haig. Do people remember Warren Haig? I'm sure people do. And said, oh, thank you. Thank you, Angela. Thank you for your message. And you must remember that we have a rule here if you speak at a GLF meeting, you have to say whether whether you're straight or gay. I thought, oh, Christ, what am I going to do now? And anyway, I thought, well, I'll have to finally go for it. And so I said, I'm a lesbian and sat down collapsed actually. I was just doing afterwards in the LSE bar. But I mean, really, really for me, it meant my life was never the same again. And I think we all shared that sort of revelatory, revelatory experience. So, although GLF was coming together of lots of different political thinking, it was a very feeble, quite exciting time. Gay liberation, women's liberation, black liberation. I mean, Ted touched on this. I mean, that was also very, very important. And when we used to meet, I think the stewardess mentioned as well, we used to meet in Notting Hill Gate. So there was all sorts of connections with the people who later win the mangrove child, which has just been celebrated on television, not before time. So it was a great sort of mixing of ideas. What I think made it work was one simple, two simple ideas that the way forward, if you wanted change, was to come out. That's what you had to do. And the second simple, enormously powerful idea was that gay is good. And if you took those two ideas together, that created enormous psychic emotional energy. And by God, we did think we could do anything. And we were quite brave in a way, because if you did come out in any sense, you were attacked. I mean, there wasn't really much a question about that at all. So I know we haven't got very much time, but I guess I'll end with a couple of points. I was reflecting on what was the most important. I think you've perhaps asked us, Stephen, to think about what was the most important contribution of GLF. And I don't know if I've got this right, because it was so many things. But I think one of the really, really important contributions was that men, gay men, questioned a really toxic masculinity, which was dominant. And I think that was an incredibly brave thing to do, and was in itself totally revolutionary and relevant today. And I want to mention Stuart's book, because there were lots of people listening, and Stuart has written the most wonderful history, I think, of GLF. And there's a little bit on camp, he's actually writing on camp. But he says, what impresses men is a feudal masculinity nurtured for millennia on the ideas of military rulers. Masculinity needs new ideals. The 19th century gay socialist ideals were based on sandals. Modern socialism requires a masculinity poised on high heels. So I think that's another wonderful quote. And that was in the way, the unique contribution of gay lib. You asked us two other questions if I just have got time. I'll just quickly deal with those as well before I finish. One is what gay lib didn't do. And I'm not going to go for that one because I think there was so much actually that gay lib did do. And although I've used the analogy of a firework, which I was expressing the sky and then it's gone, gay lib absolutely left an important legacy. We had gay news, the wonderful Andrew Lumsman, we also had Dennis Lemon, which was really, really important. We had all sorts of new pubs and clubs. We had groups, we had networks. I don't think that we would have been able to and particularly men would not have been able to respond as well as they did to the advent of AIDS, which we're all thinking about now with the new Russell Davis show on TV. And if you think about that show, even the couple of episodes have been now, those men came out to a scene. And the fact that was an open scene is one of the legacies of GGLF. And you mentioned that I think later became director of Stonewall. And sometimes Stonewall is seen as the antithesis of gay liberation, not really revolutionary. But I think in fact that whole process of coming out of people being able to be proud of ourselves is what made the work of Stonewall possible. That finished that, as you've given me the sign to stop. Thank you. Thank you, Angela. That was really amazing. That was really amazing. And just to mention as well, Stuart's book, Blowing the Liz, is available through the book tab, which is on the top there, which links to to gaze the words. We're going to move on to our final speaker. Saving the best till last we have. Well, that's terrible. I shouldn't say that because we do have a room full of people who are hard to beat. Let's be completely honest. Ross Keveney. Ross Keveney will tell you about her encounters with GGLF. And so I will just tell you what Ross has been up to since, well, briefly since. Ross is an award-winning nominated writer, poet and a renowned pop culture critic. A semi-autobiographical work, Tiny Pieces of Skull, which was published by Team Angelica in 2015 depicts the life of an English innocent in the late 1970s America and won the American Literary Award for Best Transfiction. And her collection of selected poems will be published in May 2021. Ross, the platform is yours. Well, GGLF for me was as much the people that came into my life through it as anything else. I mean, there I was this messed up, insecure, trans, but in the closet, bisexual, but mostly virgin, 22-year-old graduate student working in the British Library on William Morris's Manus Groups. And I rang up GGLF because I needed to sort out my life. And I went round to an office somewhere in Chelsea and met some amazing people who said, you need to talk to Rachel. So they rang up Rachel and I went to see Rachel. And Rachel is Rachel Pollock, who's been one of my best friends for the whole of my life and my mentor in so many ways. Rachel is also a science fiction writer, also a poet is amazing. And we were both part of the, what we'd now call the trans corpus of GLS, but in those days it was TV straight TS because who knew. But one of the good things about the corpus was that we didn't make distinctions is that if you kind of wants to be part of the corpus and had a gender complex identity, you were part of it. And you hung out and we didn't diss each other for not wanting surgery on or wanting surgery or any of it. We didn't diss each other. We just sat around in rooms and smoked for our offer, I'm afraid. And wrote, I'll tell you what it was like. Quite recently, some of my friends, my young friends unearthed the manifesto that TV TS group produced back in 72, which are already water reprinted and come together. And people said, well, you, you, you help write this one. And there are phrases in it that are pretty standard me terms of phrase, but absolutely no memory of it because that's, you know, you know the old joke about if you if you can remember the 60s you weren't there. Well, that's kind of what Jeff was like for me. It was amazing. It was spectacular. There were these wonderful meetings of inventive, angry, wishy people, all jammed together in a church hall in Notting Hill, often shouting at each other. For a while it radicalized me. I remember we went off to other places. A bunch of us went to talk to the gay group in Birmingham. And again, I met a couple of people that I've known all my life. It was that sense of a moment. And like all moments, for me, it ended for a bit because I got swayed by friends that I was thinking I was transsexual, I had a cross consciousness. And that was also quite convenient because there I was wanting to have proper careers. And so I went back into the closet for a couple of years and got thoroughly miserable. And there was a point when I realized I don't have to take this. And why did I know that because of GLF, because of that sense that you could do what you wanted, but you didn't have to conform. And when I did transition, in order to get past the gatekeepers for trans hormones and surgery and all of that, back in the late 70s, there was a lot of pressure to be quiet and mousy and stealth and drift through society to remove. Because of GLF, I was in a position to say, well, screw that. I'm proud of who I am. And I'll always be grateful for the atmosphere and those church halls that gave me that confidence. I loved those people. I still do. Some of the people in the TTS group are no longer with us. They're behind rather tragic ends, in fact. And that's the thing. That world was full of people one remembers forever, because it was that sense of a moment that's special. And I think one of the things that's important about events like this is to carry the torch forward and pass it on and pass on that sense of refusal to accept second best. Refusal to let anyone tell you what to do except yourself. And hey, I love you all. I was really beautiful. Thank you very much for us. Thank you for sharing with us. There's a virtual round of applause there. If you do have any questions, please use the question box below. In the spirit of Gaelib, I was going to give us five minutes, maybe if anybody wanted to respond to anything that anybody has said amongst the four of you, if you'd like to comment. Otherwise, I have a question which I would quite like to ask. Make sure you wouldn't meet yourselves, please, so we can hear you. I'll ask my question then, shall I? Okay, my question is, and actually I wonder whether our wonderful tech support Ollie might be able to show on the screen gay liberation front actually had a set of demands eight demands which they set out. I think Angela was waving some of the sort of type script copy of it earlier on the screen as well. Yeah. There were eight demands and I wondered if we can show the image of the eight demands that would be great, just if people aren't familiar with them. I wondered if any of you had anything that you wanted to maybe say about the demands, maybe ones that were there which still you feel haven't been addressed or if you wanted to add a demand maybe what the demand might be. I'll start with you Stuart if that's okay. Yes, fine. I mean, I was thinking about this, and I decided that the demand that was missing really was the right to change gender by self declaration, the right to free physiological change and sex modification. And I say that because there weren't very many transsexuals in GNF and we had then very strange ideas really who we thought transsexuals were. And I used to think they were, you know, they were really black and white straight homosexuals who couldn't bring themselves to recognize themselves as homosexuals, and therefore they sort of decided they were women of course it's ridiculous because of the way we thought, and certainly the way I thought, and also I think there was a great deal of confusion in those days between what or who transsexuals are, and what transvestites are, I think, I think a lot of people were really confused about that. So that was my idea. It was your demand that you would add. Ross, did you want to come in on that? Well, there's no joke in the community about what's the difference between a transvestite and a transsexual about six months. Well, that's the thing. Ross, how did you feel about the demands, anything that you had? They were solid stuff. I mean, obviously access to, access to surgery was indeed a utopian demand, because back then it's the, even now you've got people trying to demand that access to surgery be removed, that white self identification such as it is be removed. There's a major campaign going on about that against us. One of the things that I really welcome is the solidarity of all the other people against that nonsense, but it's from people who want to know better it's people who were there in some cases. But it's also the assumption that, well, I say the assumption that trans people are straight. Well, I assumed I was straight. I was. I was straight. I was when I transitioned I had sex with guys that I got bored. You saw sense. Ted, you're still on you. Would you like to say anything about the demands or. Angela, maybe you'd like to say something while Ted on you. I say, what the paper was waving around says the principles of the great liberation front and then it's got the eight demands as you say, but there's a whole point argument in front of the demands. And that is all about solidarity with other movements. And it says GMF therefore sees itself as part of the wider movement aiming to abolish all forms of social oppression. It will work to allow itself with other oppressed groups, whilst preserving its organizational independence. In particular, we see these groups including and there's a list women's liberation, black people and other national minorities, the working class young people are rejecting bourgeois lifestyle, people oppressed by imperialism. I think that situation of gay liberation and our concerns within the context of more general struggle for liberation and against oppression is something that's rather died away and makes it actually more difficult for us to. I think form form alliances and explain some of the rather bitter disputes that now now go on. Yes, I agree. I mean, it was one of the points I tried to make earlier about the civil rights movement. One of the ways in which we are oppressed is by the technique of divide and rule, where each group seems to be fighting for their own little area. One of the things that the civil rights movement recognize. And, for example, the Black Panther Party realize is that we're all in this truly all in this together, and that to sum it up, there is no freedom for anyone, while any of us are oppressed. One of the ways that we have this successful divide and rule is that people are under the impression that the civil rights movement or the women's movement are only fighting for their own particular corner. But GLF showed that that was not true. Everyone knows, for example, about GLF support the miners. People were very surprised and they recognized that the economic oppression and the business oppression that miners were suffering was as much a cruelty and injustice as the oppression of women, the oppression of gay people, the oppression of Black people. That's great. Thank you, Ted. You've actually answered quite a few of the questions which you've come through from members of the audience, many of which are talking about what is the significance of gay liberation over gay rights. So what's the difference in that vocabulary? And I think what you've articulated really well there is this idea of it's the liberation of the self rather than legislating for change. Sorry, sorry, go on, Angela. I think it's not one or the other. I mean it's both. And the actual demands are very sort of liberal reformist demands, not to be discriminated at work to have an equal age of consent. They're all the sort of actually bread and butter of what Stonewall actually set out to do and largely did. So you don't need to see those issues as separate from a wider struggle for liberation. Another question that we've had in from Rachel is how did gay liberation interact with women's liberation? Were there many lesbians involved in both? I don't know whether, Angela, would you like to maybe? Well, it was quite a strong interaction. There were quite a lot of women in gay liberation, some of whom have been in women's liberation, but certainly not all. And I suppose one of the early strengths of gay liberation was that it was for men and women, it was men and women working together. And as I've tried to suggest in a very sort of poignant and meaningful way, at least to me. But those, as everybody will know, there were fantastic discussions and differences about whether women should remain working with the men or they should go off and organise separately. And I, on the whole, was of the view, although I'd come from the women's liberation movement, that women should not separate from the men. However, and there was Elizabeth Wilson, who quoted earlier, who had to declare as my partner actually amongst other things, women's gay liberation movement gave me a partner. 50 years, not bad. She's always argued that, in fact, in a way, some of the men were sort of using radical feminism to push the women out, encouraging them to go out. And these are all topics that Stuart deals with in his book. So I think one has to say that the relationship wasn't really resolved. There were conflicts. But I think there was a common understanding of the oppression of very stereotype gender norms, the way that was expressed in the family, the way it was expressed often in schooling and in education. So that was common ground and an important sort of new development in politics in this country. But neither, I think, transgender issues were entirely resolved by, I don't know what Ross thinks, by gay liberation. So arguments about that and about transgendered people becoming women's groups. I was one of the ones who started the women's group in GLF because I thought we ought to be able to meet separately as well. So, and these arguments continue. That's not necessarily a bad thing if we can do it with slightly less acromedium is happening at the moment. When I'll say to comment on the relationship between gay live and women's live. Ross. I'm just going to say if you look at the, I come to get the document this and come together. One of the points that's made in there is what we now call intersectionality that trans identities, particularly trans women's identities work. Our destiny is closely bound out up with women's liberation. Whatever that relationship ends up being, there is no liberation for us without women's liberation. It's as simple as that. We were saying that in 1972, and we're saying it now. Amazing how these things come around in so many of these things come around in cycle these issues come around in cycles. Stuart Ted, did you have anything that you'd like to say about women's live and GLF. Yes. I remember that there was an ongoing argument about using the term gay for women, a lot of the women felt that they were being disappeared by having to use the term gay instead of instead of lesbian. There was a point at which the women left some of the meetings at at Notting Hill, I remember in particular, because what we have to remember is that the oppression works within all of all of us in some ways. And many of the men and many of the gay men in GLF had the same attitudes that many heterosexual men had. We would have occasions where there would be a break in meetings, and the men would sit back, expecting the women to make the tea. And we had that's what the thinkings were about, looking at the minutiae of oppression and of stereotyping and of the limitations that we were all living under, and sometimes weren't aware of. Stuart, what would you like to say? Well, I think the greatest achievement was getting people to look at themselves and the society from every single angle possible, and to try to change them because those are the ways that we are oppressed. I think on what you were saying about gay women, I think was really a generational thing, because since we've been using the word gay, which I think really began in the 1930s in America, and came over here first of all with those who could afford to travel to America in the 30s gay men, or women, and that we talked about gay men and gay women in those days, and right at the beginning of GLF it was gay men and gay women. And what happened in Notting Hill was really the younger generation of radical feminists who wanted, who are proud of the lesbian, they wanted to be known as lesbians. But I didn't think any of the older women objected to that at all, because they were as proud of being lesbians as were the younger ones really. One of the things that I find really fascinating as a librarian, especially working in an organisation like the British Library is the ever evolving nature and power that words can have. It's incredible and it's actually one of the things that really attracted me to GLF when I first encountered them was the use of the word gay and I found it so confusing in a way to think of gay women rather than lesbians. So even within my sort of generational knowledge I found that connection quite strange to make at first. And just to mention before we move on to the next question that we do mention come together quite a few times and you can also from the bookshop at Gays the Word purchase this wonderful verso edition of come together which was the official newspaper official. Anything. The paper of gay liberation friends. And this is a compilation of all of the issues which was compiled by Aubrey Walter. And this new verso edition is really lovely but you can pick that up from Gays the Word as well. The women all did come together. We did a whole women's come together. That's right. Yeah, that's right. The women's issue have come together. We all dressed up as sort of, I don't know, there actually. I'm going to have this as our final question and I think it's kind of pertinent giving the gay liberation front was was organising up until sort of like late 1973 early 1974 in London anyway. Could we maybe think about or say something about the relationship between GLF and the regions. So, GLF London we everybody who's here tonight was was part of the GLF London. But I wonder if any of you had any thoughts on how GLF London impacted on the UK maybe more broadly. I was similar. At the same time I was coming to GLF meetings I was very involved with gay action in Oxford. And again, there was a small, there had always been a CHE group in Oxford and we were the annoying radicals who found various aspects of CHE and appealing. It was a campaign for homosexual equality just in case you had the acronyms. Group organises sexual privileges. There was that and then I was involved with the group in Leeds, which was when I was living in Leeds in 1973-74, which was just like a small, reaching of GLF and it was taking place in someone's living in Leeds having the same arguments, the same rounds. Anybody else any thoughts on that? I think I remember spending an awful lot of my life in a van going up and down road today trying to spread the cause of liberation. And we did go up to lots with Bradford, Burnley, Preston. We were always going up to a sort of zap. I think that's what various things and to express solidarity. And later on when I was at Stonewall, I went to out of London all the time and it was very interesting. You did see a member going to Birmingham for the first pride. And one of the great things that had happened, this was that the major cafe meeting place in Birmingham was actually had windows for the first time. And so many when you went up to out of London, there were awful lot of places that were odd pubs clubs, but they were all hidden away. There were no windows. You couldn't see out and nobody could see in. So I think it was perhaps a shock to me in London how tough and closeted things were for a very long time. And I was just looking up some statistics that Peter sort of put out. In 1989 there were 3,000 men arrested for criminal offences. Things were tough. And Gay Liberation didn't knock down all the barriers all in one go. It's been quite a long process actually. But quite an exciting one. Yes, I remember now. Sorry. So one of the demands is about the police on about the police just staying out of people's lives is actually now in the in the. Now we're actually talking about defund the police as a political slogan. Can you imagine Stuart, you wanted to say something about well I was just going to say. That we had a national thinking in Leeds in 1971 with both GLF and CHE because there were like no GLF groups in Manchester, or they were all CHE groups there. There had become a clash between CHE and GLF. And I, yes, I remember Burnley, particularly where we were invited to go and help Burnley who had got into difficulties. Or CHE in Burnley got into difficulties because they had an idea of opening these clubs there. And right at the last moment, a couple of priests, a Roman Catholic and an Anglican got word of it on the local radio and persuaded the corporate of society who were going to lease out one of their properties for the club. And forced them to persuaded them to withdraw the offer. And we went to Edinburgh I remember that to where we took part in all the Travers trials at the Travers Theatre where they had meetings on controversial issues. And we had academics from Edinburgh University and professional psychologists giving their versions and I remember Andrew Lumsden particularly speaking so well at that meeting. Ed, any thoughts that you'd like to share with us about GLF outside of London, any thoughts or? Did you get to leave London at all or were you very much there a Londonite? I was very much a Londonite. I think, I think one of the ways in which I became aware of how different things were outside of London was the short stint that I had working for Gay Switchboard. Because there were people who would call and not jokingly feel themselves to be the only gay in the village and in many ways technically they actually were. And the kind of support that we gave to people was very important. It's no underestimation to say that we saved several people's lives, people felt that they were at the end of their tether. I didn't go outside of London very much myself except with my partner who stemmed from Birmingham. He remarked to me when we met some of his gay friends, but he sensed a different attitude in them coming out to what he experienced in London. And he tried to ensure himself that he wasn't being elitist, but I felt it too. So much still to think about isn't there about how that relationship, how all of our relationships with ourselves as I'm going to use the word queer identified people to capture us all under an umbrella. How we all found ourselves in these kinds of systems which maybe weren't built for people like us. And I include that as myself as being somebody born in 1980 as much as for the for the GLF as well. We've run slightly over time and I hope nobody out away from our group is offended. I've had a really lovely evening hearing your reflections and talking with you. So I'd like to thank you very very much for giving your time and sharing with all of us your thoughts on GLF. So thank you very much to our panellists. And thank you very much to our audience for attending as well. Please do keep an eye on our what's on pages for other things which are coming up at the library over, especially the course of February. So some events which might pique your interest if you come to Gay Liberation Front Reflections are life drawing with Alison Beckdale, which will be happening on the 17th of February. And Molly Houses and Madams, which will be happening with Mark Ravenhill on the 16th of February. And please do send us some feedback forms as well. We would love to hear what you thought about today's event. It will help us to to sort of scheduling programs for our cultural events in the future. Thank you very much to our panellists and thank you all very much for joining us tonight at the British Library.