Angela Mason

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Angela Mason OBE (b. 9 August 1944) is a British activist, the third director of the UK-based LGBT lobbying organisation Stonewall 1992 - 2002.

Born Angela Weir in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, she grew up on the Isle of Sheppey and was educated at Basingstoke High School, Bedford College at the University of London and the London School of Economics.

In 1971, she married scriptwriter William Randolph Mason whom she divorced in 1980. The same year, Mason also met writer and academic Elizabeth Wilson, a co-activist in the Gay Liberation Front, who was to become her life partner. Mason was an activist in the trade union and radical movements. She was one of four activists arrested in 1971 for alleged participation in a bomb plot against Conservative Party officials that was attributed to the Angry Brigade anarchist group. She was acquitted of all charges the following year.

Mason became a lecturer at the LSE then the Principal Solicitor for the London Borough of Camden. In 1985, she gave birth to a daughter conceived via artificial insemination. She became a member of Stonewall in 1989, becoming its director in 1992.

Since 2003 she has been the director of the UK government's Women and Equality Unit, which until summer 2006 was part of the Department for Trade and Industry. The Unit currently sits within the Department for Communities and Local Government. Mason is respected within the civil service for having quickly "gone native", resisting measures (including on LGBT equality) which would disrupt government. Mason has also been a member of the Equal Opportunities Commission and an advisor to the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. She was awarded the OBE in 1999.