Talk:Bob Mellors

Creation
Bob is mentioned in a few places and on the basis of many references to his work in "No Bath but Plenty of Bubbles" certainly should have a small bio on wiki. I have created a mini, mini bio and will try to get time to come back to expand it.-- Ashley VH 15:30, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Expanded
I've removed the stub tags as the bio is in much better shape. Luckily I tracked down the Gay Times article from May 1996 as a useful alternative source.-- Ashley VH 10:30, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Categories
Little bit of research to ensure categories make sense for this page - please checkout and amend if changing categorization: Category:LGBT
 * Category:LGBT organizations
 * Category:LGBT rights organizations
 * Category:LGBT history
 * Category:LGBT rights activists
 * Category:LGBT people
 * Category:LGBT people by nationality
 * Category:LGBT people from the United Kingdom
 * Category:LGBT people from England
 * Category:LGBT culture
 * Category:LGBT literature
 * Category:LGBT writers
 * Category:Gay writers

Obituary
I have tracked down the full text of Mellors' obituary in the Guardian and will add it as a source ref:

April 13, 1996 GLAD TO BE GAY AND RADICAL; Obituary: Robert Mellors

BYLINE: Elizabeth Wilson

(THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 32)

BOB MELLORS who has been murdered in Warsaw at the age of 46, was a founder member of the British Gay Liberation Front (GLF). In the summer of 1970 he visited New York with a fellow gay student from the London School of Economics, and they were so impressed by American gay political militancy that, on their return, they called a meeting at LSE to set up a similar movement. Soon meetings grew to several hundred strong, and this hugely successful initiative inaugurated a two-year period of outrageous militancy.

One of the high points was the invasion of a Festival of Light rally at Westminster Central Hall in the autumn of 1971, when Cliff Richard and other speakers were horrified by scenes of mayhem as "nuns" danced a can-can and "repenting" gays gave fake testimony. There were also "kiss-ins" in public parks, demonstrations and street theatre, leading, on occasion, to court appearances at which the legal proceedings were themselves mocked and parodied.

Although GLF was probably most effective when at its most theatrical, Bob himself was a deeply serious, shy and thoughtful person, whose influence - in a radically democratic movement with no leaders but many flamboyant personalities - was an intellectual and conciliatory one. When splits inevitably occurred between revolutionary Marxists and those who favoured a strategy of "radical drag", he wrote a pamphlet attempting to bring the warring sides together seeking to preserve the unity of the movement.

Indeed, in the long term, although GLF as an organisation burnt itself out, its vision - and here Bob played a key role - was the start of growing confidence and political determination in the lesbian and gay community, almost creating the basis for this community as it exists today in all its variety.

Bob came from a religious home, and was at LSE during a period of political upheaval, but having completed his studies, he rejected both the established routes to success and any cut and dried ideological solutions to the questions that troubled him. (I remember him sitting in my kitchen and worrying about the unhelpfulness of Louis Althusser's famous essay Ideological State Apparatuses as a guide to moral conduct).

His philosophical quest resulted in a growing fascination with the central European conman and guru Charlotte Bach, who spent the second half of his life as a woman. Bob pursued exhaustive research into Bach's life and work, whose writings re-worked Darwinian theory in a more hedonistic and less utilitarian direction.

Bob, who was at that time working at the Electric Cinema box office in the Portobello Road, would travel long distances to interview surviving friends of Bach, sometimes surprising them with revelations of the transformation whereby Carl became Charlotte after his wife's death. Bob dedicated himself to gaining public recognition for Bach's work and had completed a major biography of this extraordinary character, but had not yet found a publisher for it at the time of his death.

Robert Mellors, gay activist, born October 28, 1949; died March 22, 1996

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