Tower Hamlets, Palestine, Massachusetts, Compton Street and Beijing

I FELT SLIGHTLY GUILTY about not having attended any LGBT History Month events, ever, despite being a ‘history buff’ and a bit of an historic relic myself.  So, on Monday February 25th, I took myself to Brixton Library (it’s just beside the Ritzy cinema – turn left at the tube entrance and it’s a two minute walk) to hear an “international panel of speakers”.  They were to speak to The Global Struggle for LGBT Liberation. They didn’t.  It’s too big a subject for a meeting that lasted for about an hour and a half.

The speakers were Jeffrey Weeks “leading UK gay history and politics writer”, Jinan Coulter “lesbian and Palestinian activist”, and Paul Fredericks Chair of Tower Hamlets LGBT Forum, who ‘stood-in’ for Viv Smith “UK based activist involved in the campaign for LGBT rights in South Africa”;

Tower Hamlets

He kicked off by talking about Tower Hamlets (he said he was standing as a Respect candidate in the GLA (Greater London Authority)) elections.  As a Gay man he had had very few problems living in a heavily Muslim area.  There were some: forms of racism directed at all non-’Whites’ in the area.  He had noticed a growth of Islamophobia since 9 / 11 2001, and something of a hardening of lines on the part of some – largely younger – Muslims.  (He did not mention that one of the people behind a particularly shrill ‘Islamist’ faction is an English convert).

He held out the hope that we would survive this downturn in community relations and war fever (at least among the governments and authorities.  A recent example of this obsessive, aggressive, approach to Muslim people was the saturation of the relatively short Blackstock Road in north London by six hundred police personnel in riot gear.  They blocked off the road – quite an important highway – with scores, if not hundreds of vehicles.  Nobody was arrested, but the street has not recovered commercially from the ‘invasion’ and dozens of law-abiding small traders had had their businesses put at hazard.  They are largely Algerian in origin and can only surmise that they were being intimidated simply because they are largely Muslim.  The ‘Met’ is going to have to do some heavy-duty thinking about this sort of thing.

The Lebanese were stirred up last year by the Israeli invasion of their country – I had not realised there were so many Lebanese flags in London never mind people – at the demonstration against the invasion.  What is the point of turning another (largely middle class) group of Arabs against the UK authorities through this piece of pointless harassment?  If the London Metropolitan Police are under the impression that news of this sort of thing does not travel, suitably embellished, all the way to Algeria, and back, they are living in a dream world – or are following seriously stupid orders.  Which they should urgently question).

Paul made some remarks about the ‘murder music’ campaign, suggesting that no Black Gay people – of any gender – were involved in it.  To the suggestion that it concerned all Gay people, and that no Black Gays women or men put themselves forward, he countered that they had not been asked to come forward.  And that that was inherently patronising, if not racist, he clearly felt strongly about the matter – even though the campaign’s short-term (apparent) result is welcome.

Palestine

The next speaker was Jinan Coulter (who has a mid-Atlantic accent), she pointed out that the attitude of Arab people to homosexuality is considerable more complicated than ‘our’ media acknowledges.  Beirut, the capital of Lebanon had had its first LGBT Pride demonstration the previous year, and the LGBT group had been directly involved in opposing the invasion through welfare and medical work.  It had received an award from one of the groups involved in the military end of the resistance (not Hezbollah, but it had also acknowledged its role).

A great deal of the harassment of Gay people, in Egypt for example, had political overtones.  Gay women and men are in a difficult position in that the ‘West’ leaning governments pick on us to show the Ultras that they are still Muslim, and the Islamists accuse us of being a westernising element.  Despite all that Jinan thought the future was bright for Gay people in the Middle East.  The Palestinian groups range from the pro-Gay to neutral, and they are not lined up the way a British audience might assume.

Transnational Weeks

Jeff Weeks said that many revolutionary regimes persecuted Gay people, and the USA had the most advanced positions on our rights.  He went through, essentially, the British history of legislation on Gay matters.  Dr Weeks seemed to me to be a bit over-sanguine about some matters.  He and myself were probably the only people in the room to actually remember 1967, and some could not recall 1994, when Northern Ireland was left out of the further widening of Gay legal liberation.  He said ours was an on-going grass roots revolution, and that the 1967 Act campaign was led by a liberal elite.

Would Allan Horsfall, Life President of CHE, regard himself as either liberal or elite, one wonders?  He (Jeff Weeks) noted Hirschfeld’s attempts to introduce an element of scientific discipline and detachment into the study of sexuality, and Wolfenden and the effect of the latter on insular mores.

GLF (the Gay Liberation Front, which as Jinan Coulter had noted was named on the same principle as the Vietnamese NLF (National Liberation Front), was a more confrontational organisation than CHE (the Committee, then Campaign for Homosexual Equality).  He did not say whether or not it had a greater effect than CHE.  That is slightly unfair, many people were members of both.  And GLF was a state of mind and not really a coherent political tendency – GLF did the job of confronting the obnoxious likes of the Festival of Light / ‘Blight’, the psychiatrists in conference, and not least the National Front.  The first Gay Prides were GLF-type matters, though they were actually organised by CHE.

Jeff Weeks said that because LGBT people are inevitably transnational in our identities we have equally inevitably made the demand for sexual human rights a global matter.  Sue Sanders of Schools Out made an intervention saying that the USA has a pretty grim history in regard to legal Gay Rights.  Jeff Weeks acknowledged that but said that the movement there was in terms of scope and activity second to none.  And that at State level much had been done, Massachusetts, Hawaii and California come to mind.  Sue Sanders also mentioned the up-coming Olympics and an attempt to get the rainbow flag flown at the opening ceremony.

Beijing 2008 — London 2012

I suggested that matters are too far forward for the Beijing Games, and that the 2012 (London) Games might be problematical.  I suspect this was pretty opaque for the audience.  They, and the speakers, clearly think of London as a great multi-cultural city.  I was thinking of it as an Imperial capital.  Flying the rainbow flag in London might not send out the sort of message we would want.  It would probably be assumed by the many millions of people watching the events that Gay women and men were lining up with the neo-imperialism of Gordon Brown, Cameron, and Clegg.

What Sue Sanders was interested in was the International Olympic Committee’s Montreal Declaration, which mentioned LGBT people, and the fact that the Olympic Games have a huge world audience, in the billions.  It would be a great platform to demonstrate that Gay women and men had ‘arrived’ in society — and that we were not going to return to our closets (even quite comfortable closets like Compton Street).

I must apologise to the Chair, who kept the show on the road, very dextrously and courteously whose name, (I think), was Paul O’Dell.  And to other speakers from the floor whose interventions I did not note.  And to the speakers, whose talks I have reduced – to gibberish – probably.

Seán McGouran