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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 third of four pages of pictures of the day by me, Andrew Hodges.
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The Gay Liberation Front float heads the procession along Park Lane and into Piccadilly.
Street Theatre, which GLF pioneered, is back for a day.
Alan Wakeman, in the centre with the long hair, doesn't seem to have changed a bit.
He is inviting me to join the group on the float. What an honour! I sit at the back with some of the people who got this flower power back together:
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Above, Graham McKerrow.Left: Andrew Lumsden. |
In the 1970s our marches were ridiculed or more usually ignored. In those days it was a major event when a newspaper carried an article on a gay-rights issue. This has completely changed; after about 30 years of fighting against mentioning something 'new', newspapers have accepted social reality. This Mardi Gras was advertised widely on the Underground, covered in newspapers, featured as a music festival on MTV.
In 1970, only a few dozen people, self-organising, self-publishing, dared take a full public stand for equality. Now it is unusual to hear a public stand made for inequality: principally it is the christian right-wingers who do, although their equivalents in the minority religious cultures are not far behind.
The GLF demands didn't mention religion, but it is notable that it is the christian churches which are trying to get the European directive on human rights nullified, and personally I think religion is still a major enemy.
March of Time
Here's a bit of the crowd at Hyde Park Corner. Recently I read in Derek Jarman's diaries a very jaded view of these annual events - that 'gay' had become nothing but commerce, consumerism, conformity with fashion and so on. There is something in this, and with one part of my mind I can see the Mardi Gras as a capitulation to pink-pound capitalism that would represent the total defeat of GLF ideals. But I can still feel how exciting and liberating it is for many people to come from all over the country and take over a space at the centre of London for a couple of hours.
In the midst of all this I see and talk to people I know from the past: the march is always a march of time.
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The crowd is looking at these guys.
So am I. And it brings back to me how liberating it was in 1971 for me to be open about desiring men, living with a lover, sweeping away all the fear and self-hatred of my appalling teenage years. Unfortunately one thing about GLF was that its meetings largely succeeded in turning this joy into personal aggravation and political arguments about sexism. One reason for this was the fragile alliance between gay men and lesbians. never capable of bearing all the ideological baggage it was supposed to. This has changed — especially since 1988, when Section 28 for the first time gave lesbians and gay men a common political issue.
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I didn't stay for the music event but Andrew Lumsden told me that he went on stage to bawl out the original GLF demands and Peter Tatchell of OutRage gave a progress report to tremendous cheers.
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This is the picture Andrew Lumsden took of me as I photographed the GLF float. I am not just a camera, I have been involved in this wonderful movement of the twentieth century. Its unstructured expression of the need for love and truth-telling has influenced me profoundly. But I'm not very good at giving tremendous cheers.
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