At the first Youth March, we had a kiss-in
and there were photographs, which I've just been sent
of me kissing various guys in Hyde Park.
And people think we were being flippant
but actually the sentence
for that kind of behaviour could have been
between five and seven years in prison.
My early years were in America.
I was born in the States from Jamaican parents
who divorced when I was about five or six years old.
My mother had been involved
in the NAACP,
which is the
National Association of the Advancement of Colored People,
which spun off into the civil rights movement.
I was becoming aware that I was attracted
to one particular boy in school.
And when I was about 12 or 13,
I remember waking up in a sweat.
Because I'd had a dream in which we were not very sexual,
but more than just friends and romantic.
And I kind of worried that this was an indication
that I was going to turn into what we then called sissy.
And so I came out to my mother
because I needed to talk to somebody about it.
And I knew that she wouldn't attack me
because the kind of person that she is.
But in fact, it was even more positive than I expected
because,
when she had been in the civil rights movement in America,
one of the speakers who'd spoken to her
about the civil rights movement was Bayard Rustin,
who was the organiser
of the great civil rights march
at which Martin Luther King gave his
‘I Have a Dream’ speech.
You can find a quote of Bayard Rustin saying in 1964,
oh sorry, ‘63, which is six years before Stonewall,
that one day homosexual people would be fighting
for their rights,
the same as Black people were.
I was - I helped organise
the first two marches
through central London.
The first one was the 1971,
the Youth March,
sorry,
the Gay Liberation Front Youth March
in protest against the unequal age of consent laws.
And the first Youth March, we had a kiss-in
and there are photographs, which I've just been sent
of me kissing various guys in Hyde Park.
And people think we were being flippant
but actually the sentence
for that kind of behaviour could have been
between five and seven years in prison.
But we decided to challenge the police on the grounds
that doing so publicly would show the public
the kind of hostility and homophobia
that we were facing.
Those first few years of activism
were just a reflection of what my mother
had already been through in the civil rights movement,
because one of the things that people don't realise,
is that the civil rights movement
was not a single issue campaign.
It was about getting justice for workers,
for women's rights,
for homeless people,
all sorts of categories.
It wasn't simply about
overturning the racist segregation laws in America.
And in fact, the British branch of the Gay Liberation Front
was kind of launched by the Black Panther Party,
when they set up
the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention
in Philadelphia in 1970,
when Huey Newton,
who was the commander of the Black Panthers
argued and wrote a letter, a public letter,
saying that we should all work together
and that gay people were not the enemies of the people,
and in fact,
many gay people could be even more revolutionary
than Black people.
In 1982,
I think it was or ‘81,
some young people were having a birthday party
and they insist that some white person
stuck a lit oily rag
through the letterbox and set the house on fire.
And 13 teenagers died in the fire
and the police didn't investigate it properly.
Right? So they set up an organization called
Lewisham Action on Policing
for the Black community
to liaise with the police and try to impel them
to respond on a fair basis.
This is years before Stephen Lawrence.
Yeah.
And so I went and worked for
Lewisham Action on Policing for 10 years,
but I also had a gay department
in Lewisham Action on Policing,
and I was an out Black activist
in Lewisham action on policing.
And it was while there that I appeared
on ‘The Word’ TV programme
in response to Buju Banton's record ‘Boom Bye Bye’,
advocating that gay people should be shot and killed
by machine guns and all the rest of it.
Just around that same time, Justin Fashanu
was discovered by The Sun newspaper to be gay.
The Voice newspaper came up very, very strongly
against Justin.
And now Justin was a very successful footballer.
I think he was either the first,
he was certainly the first Black footballer
to be worth a million pounds in 1990.
And they did a headline article
featuring Justin's brother saying,
"My brother is an outcast.
It's shameful that he's gay,” and so on and so forth.
So, we went for The Voice,
had a year long campaign,
a boycott,
and won a right of reply,
which I think was very successful.
The Voice started having gay adverts and so on.
That was very successful.
Black lesbians and gays against media homophobia.
I still got some of their posters.
But we existed before online communication.
So, you won't find us online,
but I still have copies of our documents
and the letters of support that we have,
I have the whole folder.
Well, we've become aware of two factors.
The first one is that the early Gay Liberation Front
paid very little attention to older people.
Very similar to the rest of society.
Unfortunately, once you reach a certain age in this culture,
you're almost invisible
and we've become aware
of severe problems in the care community
and the care facilities in this country.
The needs and the emotions and the self identity
of elder LGBT people
are as valid
and as essential
as those for young people.
And we shouldn't abandon those people
when they wind up in care facilities
that do not cater for them.
My opinion of the LGB Alliance
and their attacks on trans community
is surprise and disappointment.
I'm also surprised and shocked
by the vehemence of their attacks.
They don't just criticise trans people.
They seem to hate them.
And hatred is not a feature
of any progressive rights campaign.
LGBT Pride used to mean
a determination by people in the LGBT community
to support each other
and to support others in their self identity,
in their search for rights.
What's happened is Pride has unfortunately
become a commercial celebration
with almost no focus
on the need for rights within this country
or abroad
where LGBT people are suffering considerable abuse
and need support.
The message I would like people to take
from my Pride Award is that individual action
is extremely important.
In the same way that prejudice and hostility
is inflicted by individuals to individuals
and collectively turns into a serious social problem,
so to action
in support of human rights
on an individual basis has an effect on society as a whole.
And an example I would give is
from what happened with George Floyd.
It was the action of that young woman keeping the camera
on Derek Chauvin and George Floyd for nine minutes
that led to the Black Lives Matter movement
to the publicity and the outrage of the general population.
And for once actually caused a police officer
to be taken to account for the brutality
that was being inflicted on the Black community.