Peter Tatchell
Peter Gary Tatchell (born 25 January 1952) is an activist based in Britain. Starting with Gay rights, he has more recently become involved in some general Human rights campaigns. He first came to prominence in the early 1980s, when he was selected as Labour Party candidate for Bermondsey and was denounced by party leader Michael Foot for supporting extra-parliamentary action; the Labour Party subsequently allowed his selection. When he ran in the Bermondsey byelection in February 1983 he was strongly attacked by tabloid newspapers and by graffiti in the constituency.
In the 1990s he was a prominent campaigner for gay rights through the direct action group OutRage! which he co-founded, and was identified as a supporter of outing, memorably being denounced as a 'homosexual terrorist' in the Daily Mail of March 14, 1995. Later that decade he twice attempted a citizen's arrest on Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe for human rights violations. More recently, his human rights work has led him to set up the Peter Tatchell Human Rights Fund to assist his activities, and to take on what he identifies as human rights abuses in a much wider field, including in Muslim societies. His willingness to take on such targets has led to him becoming popular with some of the newspapers which have previously denounced him.
Early life
Tatchell was born in Seddon (an inner-city, industrial suburb of Melbourne, Australia) and brought up in a religious household by his mother and stepfather. His father was a lathe operator in an engineering factory; while his mother, a housewife, was a chronic asthmatic, and the family's finances were strained by medical bills. As a result he was unable to continue his formal education beyond a basic level, and in 1968, at age sixteen, Tatchell started work as a window-dresser in Melbourne's principal department store. He worked all-year round to develop attractive window displays for the Christmas period.
While in Australia he began a lifelong interest in outdoor adventurous activities such as remote climbing, which he has recently explained as helping him develop the courage to be a political risk-taker in adult life. (He was speaking on BBC One's Question Time, in the context of insurance and legal risks preventing British teachers from being willing to take their pupils on outdoor adventures)
Political awakening
He discovered his homosexuality in 1969. His political activity, begun in 1967 with the Australian campaign against the death penalty (prompted by the hanging of Ronald Ryan), was focussed the following year on Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War. Impending conscription led him to move to London in 1971. Four days after arriving he spotted a sticker on a lamp-post in Oxford Street advertising a meeting of the Gay Liberation Front. He quickly became a leading member of the group until it disintegrated in 1974. At the celebrated GLF disruption of the Festival of Light meeting at the Methodist Central Hall, he was part of a group instructed to 'demonstrate spontaneous homosexual love'.
Journalism
Tatchell continued his education at the Polytechnic of North London, and he later became a freelance journalist specialising in foreign stories. He joined the Labour Party in 1978, shortly before moving to a hard-to-let flat on the Rockingham Estate in Bermondsey. In 1980 he was part of a group of left-wing members who won control of Bermondsey Labour Party. When the sitting Labour MP, Bob Mellish, announced his retirement, Tatchell was selected as his successor in November 1981.
Bermondsey by-election
As a result of Tatchell's advocacy of direct action political campaigning, in December 1981 the Labour Party leader Michael Foot denounced him in the House of Commons, and endorsement for his candidature was refused. However, the Bermondsey Labour Party supported him strongly. When Mellish resigned from Parliament and triggered a by-election, Tatchell was eventually endorsed as the Labour Party candidate.
Tatchell's far-Left views and homosexuality were used against him by many opponents in an election campaign which was widely regarded as one of the dirtiest in modern British history. Although the Bermondsey seat had long been a Labour stronghold, the Liberal candidate, Simon Hughes (who revealed his own bisexuality in 2006), won the election. Tatchell subsequently forgave him for the "dirty tricks", to the extent of stating that, had he a vote, he would have supported for Hughes for the leadership of his party in 2006.
In the mid- and late-1980s, Tatchell wrote books including The Battle for Bermondsey (the story of the by-election), Democratic Defence and an early guide to surviving with HIV and AIDS.
OutRage!
- See also: OutRage!.
Increasingly Tatchell took part in gay rights campaigning over issues such as Section 28. Following the murder of actor Michael Boothe on 10 May 1990, Tatchell became one of thirty founding members of the radical gay-rights group OutRage! and has remained a leading member. The group fuses theatrical performance styles with queer political protest.
Some of the activities of OutRage! have been highly controversial. In 1994 it unveiled placards inviting ten Church of England bishops to "tell the truth" about their homosexuality. Shortly afterwards the group wrote to twenty UK MPs, urging them to reveal their homosexuality. Sir James Kilfedder, who had received one of the letters, died two months later of a sudden heart attack on the day one of the Belfast newspapers ran a story about him. Although no definite connection could be proved, Tatchell was widely denounced in the press for having caused the death.
Some in the gay press have dubbed him "Saint Peter Tatchell" following further OutRage! campaigns involving religion. [1] OutRage! protested on the occasion of the puported marriage between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, and Tatchell was questioned briefly by police under the Terrorism Act after displaying a banner reading "Charles can marry twice! Gays can't marry once."
Tatchell has long been involved in human rights more generally. He has twice attempted to place Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe under citizen's arrest on charges of torture. This has drawn praise from many of the newspapers that had previously denounced him. He is unpaid for his human rights work; he earns £8,000 a year from occasional freelance journalism, media appearances and guest lecturing.
Political Party Membership and Elections
In 2000 he resigned his membership of the Labour Party, citing its treatment of Ken Livingstone, and in support of Livingstone he fought unsuccessfully for a seat on the London Assembly as an Independent Green Left candidate. On 7 April 2004, Tatchell announced that he had joined the Green Party but that he did not envisage standing as a candidate in any future election.
Establishment recognition
In January 2005 Who's Who announced that he was to be included in that publication for the first time.
Critics
During the 2004 campaign by OutRage! to stop the incitement of violence against gay people by Jamaican reggae artists such as Beenie Man (see [2]), Tatchell received death threats and was labelled a racist. Tatchell defended himself by pointing to a life's work campaigning against racism, and stated that his statements on Jamaica were in support of terrorised black groups within Jamaica.
In December 2005, UK singer Robbie Williams won £200,000 damages from The People newspaper and the magazines Star and Hot Stars after they published false and defamatory claims that he was secretly homosexual. Tatchell commented publicly that "[Williams's] legal action has created the impression he thinks it is shameful to be gay" (see [3]).
In late 2003 Tatchell acted as a press spokesman for the launch of the Zimbabwe Freedom Movement which claimed to be a clandestine group within Zimbabwe committed to overthrowing the government of Robert Mugabe by force [4]. The civic action support group Sokwanele urged Tatchell to check his sources with the group, speculating that it may be an invention of supporters of the Zimbabwe government in order to justify violent action against its opponents [5].
Tatchell has drawn criticism from many quarters for his dislike of the concept of an age of consent. In 1996 he led an OutRage! campaign to reduce the age of consent to 14, with an agreement that there should be no prosecution at all if the difference between the ages of the sexual partners was three years. He was quoted in the OutRage! press release as saying "Young people have a right to accept or reject sex, according to what they feel is appropriate for them".
Attitude to Muslims
Having established a policy of opposing restrictions on human rights from whatever source, Tatchell was naturally unwilling to exclude homophobia from Islamic sources from his criticism. However, as in other fields, his criticism of Islam has sometimes been interpreted by some as a form of prejudice, or Islamophobia. He has described Sharia law, the religious rules for Muslims, as "a clerical form of fascism" and "barbarism"[6], and was in 2005 the keynote speaker at a protest outside the Canadian High Commission in London over the Ontario arbitration law (permitting the choice of religious arbitration in civil cases) being extended to Muslims.[7]
He has written that "although not all Muslims are anti-gay, significant numbers are violently homophobic.. homophobic Muslim voters may be able to influence the outcome of elections in 20 or more marginal constituencies. Their voting strength could potentially be used to block pro-gay candidates or to pressure electorally vulnerable MPs to vote against gay rights legislation (and other liberal measures)."[8]
In July 2004 Tatchell attacked Mayor of London Ken Livingstone for inviting Yusuf al-Qaradawi to London, referring to Qaradawi's analysis of homosexuality as homophobic [9]. He referred to al-Qaradawi as "rightwing, misogynist, anti-semitic and homophobic". Livingstone explained that Qaradawi had been invited to address a conference on the wearing of the hijab and issued a dossier in defence of Qaradawi as a moderate [10] He later criticised Tatchell for writing about the conference in the New Statesman [11] without having attended it; Tatchell asserted that speakers at the City Hall conference had not spoken up for the right of Muslim women to choose not to wear the hijab, whereas Livingstone claimed that they had.[12]
A group of Anti-Racists and Gay rights campaigners signed a letter to the Guardian expressing thier " concern at the tenor and pitch of the campaign by Outrage! and others, in relation to Yusuf al-Qaradawi", saying they "believe fits in with what is a rising wave of anti-Muslim hysteria."[13]
Livingstone further accused him of having a ""Muslim-fundamentalist-plot-to-take-over-the-world" conspiracy theory" [14] and has cited the Muslim gay group IMAAN, in his support. IMAAN wrote that "What is not helpful in the fight against homophobia and Islamophobia, oppressions that equally victimise LGBT Muslims, is having the media and groups such as GALHA, OutRage! and others continuously misrepresenting Islam."[15]
Tatchell is critical of the Muslim Council of Britain, calling it "anti-gay"[16]. He questioned "how can they expect to win respect for their community, if at the same time as demanding action against islamophobia, they themselves demand the legal enforcement of homophobia?"[17]. When its' head, Sir Iqbal Sacranie described homosexuality as harmful and criticised civil partnerships. Tatchell's response was to observe that "Both the Muslim and gay communities suffer prejudice and discrimination. We should stand together to fight Islamophobia and homophobia" [18]. Tatchell went on to criticise Unite Against Fascism for inviting Sacranie to be on one of its platforms, describing him as a bigot and a "homophobic hate-mongerer" [19]. He has said that the "only thing that is consistent about the MCB is its opposition to the human rights of lesbians and gay men"[20]. Recently Tatchell called Iran an "Islamo-fascist state" in the wake of the hangings of two teenage boys. [21]
On 20 March 2006, Dr Muhammad Yusuf, a research fellow for Interfaith Alliance UK, had to withdraw from a planned lecture he was intending to give to raise money for Tatchell's human rights fund. Dr Yusuf was hoping to argue for "an Islamic reformation that reconciles Islam with democracy and human rights, including human rights for women and gay people", but withdrew when senior Islamic clerics told him they could not guarantee his safety if he went ahead.
Tatchell used Bruce Perry's biography of Malcolm X as a kick-off point to a Guardian article in July 2005 calling for black gay role models. The book and article claim that the Black Muslim American campaigner had male lovers. [22] Tatchell chose Malcolm X as his specialised subject when appearing on Celebrity Mastermind, explaining that he considered him a hero, but Perry's claim and Tatchell's article were described as "shocking" and "inappropriate" by Peter Akinti, the editor of Black In Britain.[23]
Adam Yosef
In December 2005, the journalist and RESPECT The Unity Coalition member Adam Yosef wrote an article for the Desi Xpress in which he opposed the introduction of civil partnerships for same-sex couples. Yosef may have been making an attempt at satire but he subsequently retracted, claiming to have been mis-interpreted). The following month, Yosef's column identified Peter Tatchell, British National Party leader Nick Griffin and Omar Bakri Mohammed of Al-Muhajiroun as the top three "hate filled bigots", saying that Tatchell needed "a good slap in the face" and his "queer campaign army" should "pack their bent bags and head back to Australia".
Tatchell denounced the article as "a naked appeal to homophobia and xenophobia" which echoed "the racist, xenophobic language of the BNP" [24]. Yosef issued another statement apologising for this article, claiming the "slap in the face" remark was a "figure of speech". Yosef asserted that he did "not hold a racist view towards Mr Tatchell's Australian origins", and that the "pack their bent bags" was made to "compare the his views with the Islamophobic riots which recently gripped Sydney" referring to the Sydney riots [25].
External links
- Official site
- Peter Tatchell: Just Who Does He Think He Is? (concerning a 2004 biographical film by Max Barber)
- Observer interview (2004-12-19)
- The left's retreat from universal human rights
