Peter Tatchell cuts a tall, slim, striking figure when you see him for the first time, but not in the way that you might expect from a politician or activist. He speaks clearly, with a distinctively deep voice and calm manner. After listening to him speak for a while, it’s possible to detect the slightest of hints of an Australian accent slipping in between syllables. Born in the 1950s in Australia, Tatchell has lived an extraordinarily varied and busy life since moving to UK.
Sceptics need not look any further than his political record. He first came to public prominence when he stood as Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Bermondsey in 1981 and when he was publicly condemned by then-Party Leader Michael Foot shortly after winning the nomination for writing an article in which he called for direct action against the Thatcher government. He later joined the Green Party, standing as their prospective parliamentary candidate in Oxford East from 2007 until 2009.
Is he a politician though? No, he tells me. “I’m a member and supporter of the Green Party… but I had to stand down as a parliamentary candidate in 2009.” I hesitate to ask why, but he senses my curiosity and fills me in on the details. “I had to stand down because of brain and eye injuries incurred when I was beaten up by neo-Nazis in Moscow.” He explains this in such an expressionless manner that it takes me somewhat aback
“Wow”, I remark clumsily, “not many people can say that.” He does not look impressed.
“I’m not heavily involved with the Green Party,” he continues, “because to ensure the success of my human rights work I have to be fairly neutral, because I’m trying to appeal to people of all parties and none… My Green Party work is not major.” I get the impression that for all his political activity, it is his current work on LGBT rights that is the source of all his energy.
The conversation turns to the position of members of the LGBT community in Britain. “More than half of all young kids suffer homophobic bullying at school, a third of LGBT people at school have suffered hate crimes,” he tells me. “An astonishingly high number. We see people singled out in all walks of life”, he says , “in the street, in clubs, in the work place.”
Despite the clear pressures though, Tatchell is definitely optimistic. He compares the current standing of LGBT members of our society to those of ethnic minorities in the past. He claims he’s not unconvinced by the idea put forward by some campaigners that homophobia is where racism was a few decades ago. In the speech he gave at Corpus Christi shortly before speaking to me, he insisted that at first sight, the recent introduction of same-sex marriage in the UK makes it look like “a battle won”. He goes on to make the case that, as a society, we’re not quite there yet. But he does make it clear that achieving same-sex marriage is “a remarkable achievement”, and one that came about with a pace that is uncharacteristic of most civil-rights movements.
When it comes to channelling his and many other people’s optimism, Tatchell has some clear ideas. On the subject of young people, I ask him, is it just a matter of education? He replies bluntly. “Yes,” he says. A pause follows, after which he adds, “the long-term solution is something like equality and diversity lessons in schools.” On top of this he is adamant that “prosecuting perpetrators is second best. It’s after the abuse has happened. What we want to do is prevent homophobic and transphobic abuse in the first place. That’s why early and on-going education is so important. It can very significantly reduce anti-LGBT hate crime.” This reminds me of something he said in his talk beforehand, namely that children are not born bigoted – it’s society that makes them narrow-minded.
Tackling head-on the values and communal views of a society is something Tatchell is not afraid of. Indeed, on a personal level Tatchell is no stranger to peril and challenging authority. After leaving school at 16, he became a keen surfer and mountain climber. He attributes his willingness to take political risks with this early exposure to the outdoors and to adventure. After moving from Australia to the UK in 1971, Tatchell helped organise sit-ins in pubs that refused to serve homosexuals. He campaigned against the Iraq war, and reportedly sustained severe injuries after attempting a citizen’s arrest on the President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe. Twice.
If he is radical and adventurous by nature, however, he doesn’t let it show during the course of our interview. He sits opposite me, dressed in a shirt and tie, in one of the backrooms of Corpus Christi College, perhaps one of the most famous colleges in a university known more as the breeding ground for career politicians than for revolutionary activity.
Certainly his vision of achieving real change is entirely consistent with working within the law. He tells me that the government should be at the forefront of ensuring complete equality. “Governments need to ensure that sex and relationship education is mandatory in every school and that it is inclusive of LGBT issues and people. Likewise with HIV prevention, and safer sex education. There’s also a potentially valuable role to be played by equality and diversity lessons to challenge all forms of prejudice, including homophobia, transphobia.”
But sadly “parliament is often the last place to get the message”. And, when the government isn’t up for the job, it’s the ordinary person turned active campaigner that comes to the forefront. “Nearly all initiatives for progressive social reform start outside of parliament, often in marginal fringe groups and communities… with persistence and a good plan of action, ultimately they triumph. Protest is the lifeblood of democracy. Without it we’d still be living in the dark ages”.
One such community that is leading the way for the next wave of social reform is the transgender community. They’ve been subjected to increased discrimination up to this point.
“It’s partly because transgender people on the whole have not been as visible as lesbians, gays, and bisexuals. It’s also probably because trans issues make a lot of people uncomfortable in that they challenge traditional ideas of masculinity and feminism, they question gender norms that other people accept as natural and inevitable”.
Can this change though? Yes, suggests Tatchell. The idea that transgender individuals are unnatural is simply wrong. “That’s not the reality”, he says, before going on to point out the way existing campaigns have already improved the situation. He tells me, “sexuality and gender have a strong biological component, but they’re also subject to cultural influences and values. LGBT people have been at the forefront of presenting alternative ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman. Mostly we haven’t fitted the traditional gender stereotypes. In the process of educating and pressuring people to be more accepting of gender and sexual diversity, we’ve helped make Britain a gentler, kinder, more compassionate society.”
In terms of LGBT representation in society, we’ve come along leaps and bounds too. It’s no secret that there are vastly more LGBT people in the media, in sport, in politics. We’ve seen massive changes “compared even to just twenty years ago,” as Tatchell puts it. As a result, it “gives young LGBT people role models they can identify with and helps normalise homosexuality and transgenderism.”
But Britain’s not perfect. The same-sex marriage bill that parliament passed last year hasn’t resulted in total equality. Tatchell popularised the phrase ‘sexual apartheid’ several years ago. He told me, to my surprise, that the ban on gay marriage that existed until recently was very much a modern piece of legislation. The Marriage Act of 1971 was the first to criminalise same-sex marriage. Before then “there was no prohibition”.
He goes on to stress the fact that, although Britain has gone in the last half-century from one of the world’s countries with the highest number of laws discriminating against homosexuality to one of the world’s countries with the fewest, LGBT community members are still actively treated differently. Why do we need an extra set of laws for homosexuals when the government could simply have repealed the Marriage Act of 1971? Why should heterosexual couples be barred from civil-partnerships? These are the questions Tatchell wants answering. Because as it stands, “This is not equality. It is segregation in law.”
Tatchell argues that religious groups should also not be above the law, but that the same anti-discrimination legislation that businesses, governments, and individuals have to comply with should apply to religious organisations too.
Tatchell’s has long been one of the world’s most recognisable faces in the fight for social equality for the LGBT community. For someone like me, who hadn’t necessarily given much thought to the future of the LGBT community after the passing of the same-sex marriage legislation, he certainly makes an impression. And, as my limited time with him comes to a close, I can’t help but feel that, given his passion and drive, he won’t be going away any time soon.
