User talk:Peter Tatchell

Hi Wikipedia editors,

Can I please offer a few thoughts about my entry?

First, thanks to everyone who has worked on it.

I have some qualifications and suggested additional areas to suggest for inclusion.

The main omissions are that my left-wing, green and non-gay human rights campaigning is massively under-represented.

Here are some examples of the desirable tweaks:

I do not think it is correct to suggest that I have "recently" broadened my concerns beyond gay rights. Right from the age of 15 I was involved in a broader human rights agenda.

The bit about Aboriginal rights needs to be expanded to something like “campaigned for Aboriginal land rights, a scholarship scheme for scheme for Aboriginal pupils and from 2004 for the renaming of Australian capital cities with their original Aboriginal place names.”

I did not become critical of Mugabe over his anti-gay stance. It was way before that – over the Matabeland massacres.

Unless my skimming has missed the references, can I advise you of the following omissions re my political activism?

Here are some examples:

Peter's key political inspirations are Mahatma Gandhi, Sylvia Pankurst, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

After moving to London in 1971, he became a leading activist in the Gay Liberation Front (GLF); organising sit-ins at pubs that refused to serve “poofs”, and protests against police harassment and the medical classification of homosexuality as an illness (masses more could said about this – see my website).

Two years later, in East Berlin, he was arrested and interrogated by the secret police - the Stasi - after staging the first ever gay rights protest in a communist country. There is much more about this that could said (re my speech at the east Berlin conference etc. (it is on my website under Queer History).

He stood as the Labour candidate in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election, but was defeated in what many commentators say was the most violent and homophobic election in modern British history.

In 1987, Tatchell launched the world's first organisation dedicated to defending the human rights of people with HIV, the UK AIDS Vigil Organisation. In 1988, the UKAVO persuaded the World Health Minister's Summit on AIDS to issue a declaration opposing government repression and discrimination against people with HIV.

The HIV section could be beefed up to mention my two books and HIV campaigning.

A long-time anti-apartheid activist (from 1969), Peter’s lobbying of the ANC in 1987 contributed to it renouncing homophobia and making its first public commitment to lesbian and gay human rights. Later, together with others, he helped persuade the ANC to include a ban on anti-gay discrimination in the post-apartheid constitution (he assisted in drafting model clauses).

After playing a prominent role in the London chapter of the AIDS activist group ACT UP, in 1990 he helped found the radical queer rights direct action movement OutRage!.

Most notoriously, in 1994 Peter Tatchell and OutRage! outed 10 Church of England Bishops and called on them to "tell the truth" about their sexuality - accusing them of hypocrisy and homophobia for publicly supporting anti-gay policies, while privately having homosexual affairs. This led to him being denounced in parliament and the press as a "homosexual terrorist" and "public enemy number one".

Four years later, he interrupted the Archbishop of Canterbury's Easter Sermon in Canterbury Cathedral; condemning Dr Carey's advocacy of discrimination against lesbians and gay men.

The following year, 1999, in central London, he and three OutRage! colleagues ambushed the motorcade of the President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, and made a citizen's arrest of the President on charges of torture and other human rights abuses.

He attempted another citizen's arrest of the President in Brussels in March 2001, which resulted in him being beaten unconscious by Mugabe's bodyguards.

In 2002, he bought an unsuccessful legal action in the British courts for the arrest of the former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, on charges of war crimes in Vietnam and Cambodia.

In the late 1980s, he coordinated two national “Green and Socialist” conferences, which attempted to bring together the red and the green in a new green left synthesis. He has written chapters in two books on green themes (see my website Bibliography).

Peter Tatchell's anti-imperialist activism began in 1968 and involved campaigns against the war in Vietnam and, soon afterwards, support for the freedom struggles in Mozambique, Angola, Guinea Bissau, Namibia, Eritera, Oman, New Hebrides, Western Sahara, Palestine, East Timor and West Papua. From the early 1970s he was also involved in campaigns against the dictatorships in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Iraq, Iran, Nicaragua, El Salavador and Chile. He is currently active in solidarity campaigns for democracy and human rights in Darfur, Western Sahara, Palestine, Iran, Iraq, West Papua, Zimbabwe and Uganda.

He opposes ID cards, nuclear weapons and energy, and the erosion of civil liberties by draconian anti-terror laws. He advocates a single, comprehensive, all-inclusive Equal Rights Act to harmonise the uneven patchwork of equality legislation.

He has proposed an internationally-binding UN Human Rights Convention enforceable through both national courts and the World Court; a permanent rapid-reaction UN peace-keeping force with authority to intervene to stop genocide and war crimes; and global agreement to cut military spending by ten percent to fund the eradication of hunger, disease, illiteracy, unemployment and homelessness.

He is currently campaigning on asylum and prisoner rights issues, and in defence of free speech and against all forms of religious fundamentalism.

PeterTatchell is the author of six books, including Democratic Defence – A Non-Nuclear Alternative (Heretic Books/GMP) and We Don't Want To March Straight - Masculinity, Queers & The Military (Cassell).

For more information about his human rights campaigns: www.petertatchell.net

The Biographical and History sections on my website give additional info on some of these issues.

I hope this gives a flavour of some of the omissions.

What do you think?

Thanks again for your efforts.

Solidarity! Peter

END