Peter Tatchell

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Peter Gary Tatchell
Peter Tatchell in 1999
Born	25 January 1952 Seddon, Australia

Peter Gary Tatchell (born 25 January 1952) is a British human rights activist, famous internationally for his attempts to perform a citizen's arrest on Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. In the early 1980s, he was selected as Labour Party Parliamentary candidate for Bermondsey and was denounced by party leader Michael Foot for supporting extra-parliamentary action; although 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, being denounced as a 'homosexual terrorist' in the Daily Mail of March 14, 1995. 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 human rights abuses in a much wider field. His willingness to take on human rights issues regardless of their origin has led to him becoming respected among some of the newspapers which have previously denounced him. In 2006, a list compiled by the magazine New Statesman, a magazine Tatchell contributes to,^[1] voted him sixth in the list of "Heroes of our time".^[2]

Contents 1 Early life 2 Political awakening 3 Move to London 4 Journalism 5 Bermondsey by-election 6 OutRage! 7 Zimbabwe 8 Political activity 9 Other campaigns 9.1 Sexual liberalism 9.2 Music industry 9.3 Anti-imperialism 9.4 Allegations of racism 10 Attitude to Islam 10.1 Yusuf al-Qaradawi 10.2 Adam Yosef 11 References 12 External links

[edit] 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. Tatchell has said that he has incorporated the theatricality of these displays into his political activism.^[3]

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 Radio 4's Any Questions, in the context of insurance and legal risks preventing British teachers from being willing to take their pupils on outdoor adventures.)

[edit] Political awakening

His political activity had begun at Mount Waverley High School in Melbourne where he launched campaigns in support of the indigenous population. Tatchell, who was secretary of the Students Representative Council and in his final year, school captain, took the lead in setting up a scholarship scheme for Aboriginal pupils and led a campaign for land rights from 1968. These activities had not been popular with school authorities and led the Headmaster to denounce him as having been manipulated by communists. ^[4] It is an issue he has returned to from 2004 in supporting the renaming of Australian capital cities with their original Aboriginal place names.

He also joined the Australian campaign against the death penalty. Prompted by the hanging of Ronald Ryan in 1967, one night, Tatchell went round the centre of Melbourne daubing slogans against hanging, an action which was not identified as him until he revealed it in an interview nearly 30 years later.^[5]

The following year, Tatchell began campaigning against Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War, which he believed was a war of aggression in support of a "brutal and corrupt dictatorship in Saigon which was notorious for the torture and execution of political opponents". From 1970 he was a member of the committee of the Vietnam Moratorium Campaign; he also joined Christians for Peace. The Australian government attempted to suppress the anti-Vietnam War campaign in Australia by banning street leafletting and taking strong police action against anti-war demonstrations.

[edit] Move to London

Impending conscription led him to move to London in 1971. He had discovered his homosexuality in 1969, and four days after arriving he spotted a sticker on a lamp-post in Oxford Street advertising a meeting of the London Gay Liberation Front (GLF). He quickly became a leading member of the group until it disintegrated in 1974.

In 1973, under the aegis of the GLF, he attended the 10th World Youth Festival in East Berlin, for which he wrote and duplicated nearly 10,000 gay lib leaflets. His interventions brought out considerable tensions on the topic of gay rights within and between different groups of national delegates, including the British Communist Party and National Union of Journalists, which manifested itself in several incidences of violence. Tatchell later claimed that this was the first time gay liberation politics were publicly disseminated and discussed in a communist country, although he noted that legally, gay men had greater rights in East Germany at the time than in the West.^[6] 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'.

[edit] Journalism

Tatchell continued his education at the Polytechnic of North London. There he was a member of the National Union of Students Gay Rights Campaign. On graduating he became a freelance journalist specialising in foreign stories, during which he exposed some scandals including the child labour on British-owned tea farms in Malawi.^[7] A previous 1972 attempt having not seen a response, his application to join the Labour Party was accepted in Hornsey in 1978, shortly before he moved to a hard-to-let flat on the Rockingham Estate in Bermondsey.

From October 1979, Tatchell became a leading member in a group of left-wingers who began planning to depose the right-wing caucus of Southwark borough councillors who were in control of Bermondsey Constituency Labour Party. Similar moves were occurring in many other Constituency Labour Parties as part of a shift to the left following the party's defeat in the 1979 general election. At the Annual General Meeting of the CLP in February 1980, the left group won control and Tatchell was himself elected as the CLP Secretary.

When the sitting Labour MP, Bob Mellish, announced his retirement, Tatchell was selected as his successor in November 1981. The selection was something of a surprise, as Arthur Latham (defeated in 1979 at Paddington by 106 votes, and former Chairman of the Tribune Group) was expected to be selected (Tatchell defeated him by 37 to 30). Later the Militant Tendency were cited as the reason for Tatchell's selection, but as Tatchell pointed out in his book "The Battle for Bermondsey" they had at that time only a handful of members in the constituency and Tatchell had never been a member. He ascribed his choice to being the preference of the "older, 'born and bred' working class; the younger professional and intellectual members swung behind Latham".^[8]

[edit] Bermondsey by-election

See: Bermondsey by-election, 1983.

Tatchell had written an article for the left-wing magazine London Labour Briefing in which he urged the Labour Party to support innovative direct action political campaigning.^[9] The article came to the attention of James Wellbeloved, a former Labour MP who had joined the Social Democratic Party. Wellbeloved, arguing it was anti-Parliamentary, used it at Prime Minister's Question Time in December 1981 to embarrass Labour leader Michael Foot. Unexpectedly, Foot denounced Tatchell, stating that he would not be endorsed as a candidate. Foot narrowly won a vote at the Labour Party National Executive Committee to refuse endorsement to Tatchell.

However, the Bermondsey Labour Party continued strongly to support him, and Tatchell worked on convincing Foot that his article had been misinterpreted. It was eventually agreed that when the selection was rerun, Tatchell would be eligible, and he duly won. When Mellish resigned from Parliament and triggered a by-election, Tatchell was endorsed as the Labour Party candidate.

The divisions in the Labour Party which Tatchell's far-Left views had caused, and his 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. Tatchell was assaulted in the street and at one stage sent a live bullet through the post. Although the Bermondsey seat had long been a Labour stronghold, the Liberal candidate, Simon Hughes, won the election. One of Hughes' campaign leaflets claimed the election was "a straight choice" between Hughes and Tatchell.^[10]. When Hughes revealed his own bisexuality in 2006, Tatchell said that he forgave him for the "dirty tricks", to the extent of stating that, had he a vote, he would have supported Hughes in his bid for the party leadership (now the Liberal Democrats) in 2006.

In the mid- and late-1980s, Tatchell worked as an author, writing books including The Battle for Bermondsey (the story of the by-election), Democratic Defence and an early guide to surviving with HIV and AIDS. His book Europe in the Pink gave an introduction to the different laws on homosexuality through the European Union. In 1990 Tatchell sought (unsuccessfully) the Labour nomination for Hampstead and Highgate, being defeated by actress Glenda Jackson.

[edit] 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. As the most prominent OutRage! member, Tatchell is frequently taken to be the leader of the group, but the few histories of it published demonstrate that this was not an accurate picture during the era they cover.^[11]

In 1991, a group of members of OutRage! announced that they were to form a separate group to engage in a campaign of 'outing' people who were homophobic in public but homosexual in private. The group took the name 'FROCS' (Faggots Rooting Out Closeted Sexuality) and Tatchell agreed to act as the group's spokesman. Considerable publicity and public debate followed this announcement. Embarrassingly for Tatchell, the members of FROCS eventually called their own press conference (without him) to tell the world that their campaign was a hoax intended to demonstrate the hypocrisy of those newspapers which had condemned the campaign despite publishing stories which had the same effect.^[12]

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. In a comment in The Independent in October 2003, Tatchell identified the action with the Bishops as his greatest mistake because it allowed a relevant campaign against the Anglican Church's opposition to homosexual relations to be derailed by putting the focus on OutRage!'s actions.

On April 12, 1998, Tatchell led an OutRage! protest which disrupted the Easter sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, with Tatchell mounting the pulpit to denounce Carey's stance as supportive of discrimination against lesbians and gay people following the Lambeth Conference earlier that year. The protest had a high media profile, and led to Tatchell's prosecution under the little-used Ecclesiastical Courts Jurisdiction Act 1860 which prohibited disruption in a Church. Tatchell was thwarted in his attempt to summon Carey as a witness, and convicted, but the Judge fined him only the token amount of £18.60 which most commentators assumed was a comment on the age of the statute used.

Some in the gay press have dubbed him "Saint Peter Tatchell" following further OutRage! campaigns involving religion,^[13] and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence inducted him as one of their Saints in the mid-1990s. OutRage! protested on the occasion of the marriage between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, and Tatchell was questioned briefly by police after displaying a banner reading "Charles can marry twice! Gays can't marry once."

[edit] Zimbabwe

Part of Tatchell's journalism in the 1970s had involved the Second Chimurenga in Rhodesia, in which he had generally supported the Zimbabwe African National Union and its military wing. However, Robert Mugabe's fierce denunciation of male homosexuality in 1995 led him to help organise a protest by Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe outside the Zimbabwe High Commission in London. He managed to speak to Mugabe on a brief London visit in the late 1990s but was unable to get a substantive response. On October 26, 1997 a letter from Tatchell to The Guardian argued that the United Kingdom should suspend aid to Zimbabwe because of its persecution of homosexuals.

At this point, Tatchell researched Mugabe's Gukurahundi attacks in Matabeleland in the 1980s when Mugabe had sent the Fifth Brigade of the Zimbabwe army against supporters of the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union. He became convinced that Mugabe had broken international human rights law during the attack. Then in 1999, two opposition journalists (Mark Chavunduka and Ray Choto) were tortured by the Zimbabwe Army. The arrest in London of Augusto Pinochet seemed to him a precedent that human rights violations could be pursued against a head of state. On October 30, 1999 Tatchell and young fellow-activist Chris Morris attempted to stop Mugabe's car in London to perform a citizen's arrest. Instead, he and Morris were arrested for a breach of the peace. Mugabe responded by describing the pair as "gay gangsters", a slogan frequently repeated by his supporters, and claimed they had been sent by the United Kingdom government.^[14]

In 2001 Tatchell received a tip-off about a visit by Mugabe to Belgium. He travelled to Brussels, and in the lobby of the Brussels Hilton attempted a second citizen's arrest on March 5. This time, Mugabe's large corps of bodyguards pushed him away roughly and were seen punching him to the floor. The action drew world-wide headlines as Mugabe was by then highly unpopular in the Western world for his government's land reform policy which involved the compulsory seizure of farms owned by white people. Tatchell's actions were praised by many of the newspapers that had previously denounced him.

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.^[15] 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.^[16] However, two Central Intelligence Organization members were spotted and turned away from the launch, as shown in the film "Peter Tatchell: Just who does he think he is?" by Max Barber.

[edit] Political activity

Over the years, Tatchell has developed a largely original mixture of political views. He sees gay rights as more than just a subsection of civil rights and equality of opportunity, but as a revolutionary movement to replace traditional ideals of masculinity, which he sees as a large cause of crime. Such machismo is seen as still present amongst groups that claim to be left-wing and anti-sexist and to have been counter-productive in the struggle for just causes, such as during the UK miners' strike (1984-1985).^[17] He sees his ideas as also liberating to those who do not consider themselves to be gay, as everyone would benefit from a society that is more open about sex and that does not put pressure on people to repress homosexual urges. He has opposed the Miss World contest on the grounds that it demeans women, but he does not believe that there should be any laws against pornography or public nudity.

In February 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. In January 2005 Who's Who announced that he was to be included in that publication for the first time. He is unpaid for his human rights work; he earns approximately £8,000 a year from occasional freelance journalism, media appearances and guest lecturing.

Although Tatchell opposed the Iraq war in 2003, he made it clear that he would welcome the removal of the government of Saddam Hussein by force because of the gross violations of human rights he had committed. He advocated military and financial aid to opponents of his government in order to assist them to overthrow it. Since the war he has signed the 'Unite Against Terror' declaration, arguing that "the pseudo-left reveals its shameless hypocrisy and its wholesale abandonment of humanitarian values" by supporting the resistance and insurgents in Iraq.

The appointment of Ruth Kelly as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government in 2006 led to controversy as the Department had responsibility for equalities while Kelly, a practising Roman Catholic, had not supported equal treatment of lesbians and gay men in any Parliamentary votes. Tatchell complained that "her appointment suggests the government does not take lesbian and gay rights seriously", adding "Tony Blair would never appoint someone to a race-equality post who had a lukewarm record of opposing racism".^[18]

[edit] Other campaigns

[edit] Sexual liberalism

In 1996 Tatchell 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".^[19] Leo McKinstry, in The Sun called it "a perverts' charter".^[20] Tatchell believes there should be no laws at all against pornography and that public nudity may even be healthy for society.^[21][22]

[edit] Music industry

Tatchell has called for laws against homophobic music and participated in protests outside concerts. A long-running target of his criticism has been reggae artists whose lyrics seem to support violence, including murder, of gay men. Tatchell's campaign began in the early 1990s when Buju Banton's song "Boom bye-bye" was released and has continued to date. He has picketed the MOBO Awards ceremony to protest at their inviting performers of what he terms "murder music".^[23] 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.

Tatchell has also criticised the rapper Eminem, commenting that "it's not hard to imagine Eminem as a woman-hating, self-loathing, repressed gay man" on the basis of his appearance and "obsession" with gay sex.^[24] 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 claims that he was secretly homosexual. Tatchell commented publicly that "[Williams'] legal action has created the impression he thinks it is shameful to be gay".^[25]

[edit] Anti-imperialism

While still at school, Tatchell campaigned in favour of better treatment of the aborigines in Australia.^[26] He believes that Australian cities should be renamed to sever the ties with the history of the British empire, and wants the Tasmanian capital Hobart to be renamed Nibberluna, claiming that this shows due respect to Australia's Aboriginal heritage which has been discarded for too long.^[27]

[edit] Allegations of racism

OutRage!'s protest against Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, who supported the idea of eugenics to eliminate homosexuality,^[28] led to accusations that Tatchell was being anti-semitic. OutRage! leaflets likening Jakobovits to Heinrich Himmler were distributed outside the Western and Marble Arch Synagogue on the Jewish New Year in September 1993. Rabbi Julia Neuberger, who had campaigned for gay rights, said "Drawing a comparison between Lord Jakobovits and Himmler is offensive, racist and ... makes OutRage appear anti-Semitic". She believed the action and leaflet "will alienate Jews who are sympathetic to gay rights".^[29]

In May 2004 Tatchell and other OutRage! members joined a London demonstration of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. However, his placards which read "Israel: stop persecuting Palestine! Palestine: stop persecuting queers!" were greeted with hostility by some other demonstrators, and he claims he was accused of being a Mossad agent sent to disrupt the march, of being a racist or a Zionist, a supporter of Ariel Sharon, or an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency or MI5.^[30]

[edit] Attitude to Islam

Tatchell's criticism of Muslims has been interpreted as a "product of Islamophobia",^[31] although Tatchell has condemned Islamophobia in his writings, saying "Any form of prejudice, hatred, discrimination or violence against muslims is wrong. Full stop"^[32], and has described the Qur'an as "rather mild in its condemnation of homosexuality"^[33].

He described Sharia law as "a clerical form of fascism"^[34] and was the keynote speaker at a 2005 protest at the Canadian High Commission over Ontario's arbitration law, which already permitted religious arbitration in civil cases for Jews and Christians, being extended to Muslims.^[35] In 1995 he wrote 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."^[36]

Tatchell describes the umbrella group Muslim Council of Britain as "anti-gay",^[37] asking how "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?".^[38] The opposition of MCB Chairman Sir Iqbal Sacranie to homosexuality and registration of civil partnerships led Tatchell to observe "Both the Muslim and gay communities suffer prejudice and discrimination. We should stand together to fight Islamophobia and homophobia".^[39] Tatchell subsequently criticised Unite Against Fascism for inviting the MCB to share its platforms, describing Sacranie as a bigot and a "homophobic hate-mongerer".^[40] When the MCB again boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day, Tatchell wrote that "the only thing that is consistent about the MCB is its opposition to the human rights of lesbians and gay men".^[41]

Dr Muhammad Yusuf (research fellow with Interfaith Alliance UK) withdrew from a planned lecture on "an Islamic reformation that reconciles Islam with democracy and human rights, including human rights for women and gay people" saying that "senior Islamic clerics" could not guarantee his safety if he went ahead.^[42] The lecture was to raise funds for the Peter Tatchell Human Rights Fund.

Tatchell chose Malcolm X as his specialised subject when appearing on Celebrity Mastermind, explaining that he considered him a hero. However, his implicit endorsement of Bruce Perry's biography in a Guardian article calling for black gay role models^[43] have led to criticism^[44] due to Perry's claim that Malcolm X had male lovers.

Following the hanging of two teenage boys, Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni by Iranian authorities, Tatchell described Iran an "Islamo-fascist state". Tatchell insists the two were hanged merely for being gay, while Iranian records show a conviction on charges of rape of a 13 year old boy at knifepoint. Tatchell observes that such claims are frequent but impossible to verify.^[45] International human rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch preferred campaigners to focus on the propriety of hanging two teenagers rather than the disputed connection to gay sex.^[46] Faisal Alam, founder of American Gay Muslim group Al-Fatiha, argued in the magazine Queer that Iran was condemned before the facts were certain,^[47] and in 2003 the United Nations Committee Against Torture noted that "from different and reliable sources that there currently is no active policy of prosecution of charges of homosexuality in Iran."^[48]

Concerning the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, Tatchell spoke at an event whose organisers termed a "Rally for free expression" defending the publication of cartoons of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and in support for free speech in general.^[49] Tatchell had expected "thousands" to attend the event,^[50] which was held on March 25, 2006, but police estimated only 250 people attended.^[51] Speaking to the Guardian following the release of the Borat film in the UK, Tachell criticizes Sacha Baron Cohen for ‘self-censorship’, saying "he regards Christians and Jews as fair game, he never gives Muslims the same doing over". Two of Cohens most famous characters are of apparent Muslim heritage, one is called Ali, the other is from Kazakhstan. (Ali G and Borat Sagdiyev respectively).^[52]

[edit] Yusuf al-Qaradawi

Ken Livingstone's invitation of Yusuf al-Qaradawi to address a conference on the wearing of the hijab led to a rift between Livingstone and Tatchell, who described Qaradawi as "rightwing, misogynist, anti-semitic and homophobic" and as someone who claimed to have liberal positions in order to deceive Western politicians.^[53] Livingstone issued a dossier in defence of Qaradawi as a moderate.^[54] and accused Tatchell of writing about the conference ^[55] without attending it. The dispute became bitter with Tatchell leading a demonstration against Qaradawi and Livingstone claiming that Tatchell has "a long history of Islamophobia".^[56] IMAAN, a gay Muslim organisation, stated that it disagreed with Qaradawi's views on homosexuality but that it did not help when OutRage! was "continuously misrepresenting Islam".^[57]

[edit] Adam Yosef

In December 2005, the Muslim journalist Adam Yosef came under criticism for an article in Desi Xpress opposing registered civil partnerships and retracted it. His next 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 a "naked appeal to homophobia and xenophobia" echoing "the racist, xenophobic language of the BNP",^[58] and Yosef apologised, claiming the "slap in the face" remark was a "figure of speech". Yosef denied any racism and said the Australian mention referred to "the Islamophobic riots which recently gripped Sydney" referring to the Cronulla riots.^[59]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Official site
• articles by Peter Tatchell for the Guardian newspaper
• Peter Tatchell on “Queen” Mugabe and the scary prospect of being an establishment figure Interview with gay news website PinkNews
• 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
• Radio interview on Little Atoms (2006-04-16)