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Gay liberation: 1970-2000
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Thirty years after it started, the London Gay Liberation Front was 're-formed for a day,' at the Mardi Gras, Saturday 1 July 2000.
See this introduction for some of the demands of the GLF in its 1971 Manifesto.
This is the first of four pages of pictures of the day by me, Andrew Hodges.
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This is the GLF float, ready to head the procession to Parliament Square.
The floats were assembled in Grosvenor Square, the military-industrial-shopping complex near Marble Arch, which is dominated by the United States Embassy and memorials to the Second World War alliance. For anyone of the GLF era, Grosvenor Square also recalls the tremendous 1968 demonstration against the Vietnam War. It may be forgotten now that the origin of GLF, in fact the term 'Front' itself, derives from the rise of the New Left in the Vietnam War period. Like the Women's Liberation Front, it was also formed in reaction to those aspects of the New Left which were still dominated by macho male assumptions.
Now instead of Fronts we have Trusts and business-style charities. This is the Terrence Higgins Trust float, with a banner about Section 28. My eye for incongruity sees it behind the memorial to the American fighter pilots who served with the Royal Air Force before the United States joined the war against Nazi Germany.
GLF had an important American inspiration behind it; it followed the GLF of New York City formed after the famous Stonewall riot of June 1969 that Pride days continue to mark. In the early 1970s, American and Canadian groups and publications were in the vanguard. See Nikos Diaman's Gay Liberation Front site, which has much about the United States movement of the 1970s, and John Lauritsen's article with pictures of The First Gay Liberation Demonstration of 1969.
In 2000 the picture is rather different; World Pride is being celebrated in Rome to the extreme annoyance of the Vatican, and the European dimension is very important now to the concept of gay and lesbian rights. Indeed this very fact stokes up the hatred of right-wingers for all things European.
One of the major events of 1999 was the abandonment by the British government, as demanded by the European Court of Human Rights, of their policy of criminalising and dismissing lesbian and gay people in military service. A month after this July 2000 event, the European Court upheld the right to gay men's group sex on the grounds of equality with heterosexuals. I don't think any of this would have been foreseen in 1971.
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