Peter Tatchell – Human Rights and LGBTQ+ Rights Campaigner

Peter Tatchell has been campaigning for human rights for almost 60 years, since 1967, on issues of democracy, civil liberties, social equality, LGBT+ rights, environmental protection, peace and global justice.

His political inspirations are Mahatma Gandhi, Sylvia Pankhurst, Martin Luther King and, to some extent, Malcolm X and Rosa Luxemburg.

He began his human rights campaigning in 1967, against the death penalty, for Aboriginal rights in his homeland of Australia and against the war in Vietnam.

From 1971-74, he was a leading activist in the Gay Liberation Front in London, helping organise the UK’s first Pride in 1972. In 1973, he staged the first LGBT+ rights protest in a communist country, East Germany, which resulted in his detention and interrogation by the Stasi.

Peter was the defeated Labour candidate in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election; the dirtiest, most violent and homophobic election in Britain in the twentieth century.

In 1987, he established the world’s first organisation dedicated to the human rights of people with HIV, wrote the world’s first HIV Human Rights Charter and helped persuade the World Health Ministers Summit in 1988 to declare against discrimination.

The same year, he successfully lobbied Thabo Mbeki and the ANC of South Africa to renounce homophobia and make its first public commitment to LGBT human rights. Later, together with others, he helped persuade the ANC to include a ban on anti-gay discrimination in the post-apartheid constitution – which became the first constitution in the world to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation.

He co-founded the queer rights direct action group OutRage! in 1990.

OutRage! outed 10 Anglican bishops in 1994, accusing them of hypocrisy for complicity with the church’s homophobic stance. Four years later, Peter interrupted the Easter Sermon of the Archbishop of Canterbury in protest at Dr Carey’s support for laws that discriminate against LGBT+ people.

In this period, he helped expose the Nazi war criminal, SS Dr Carl Vaernet, who experimented on gay concentrstion camp prisoners and who escaped justice after 1945, with apparent Allied collusion.

In 1999, in London, he ambushed the motorcade of the Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe; attempting a citizen’s arrest on charges of torture. A repeat attempt in Brussels in 2001 resulted in him being beaten unconscious by Mugabe’s bodyguards, which left him with permanent cognitive and vision problems.

Three years later, he confronted boxer Mike Tyson over his homophobia and persuaded him to make a statement condemning anti-LGBT+ discrimination – the first major macho straight sports star to do so.

In 2003, he ambushed and halted Tony Blair’s motorcade in protest at the Iraq war.

He was bashed by neo-Nazis and arrested at the Moscow Gay Pride parade in 2007, when he went there to support Russian LGBTs.

In 2011, behind-the-scenes, he successfully lobbied the Conservative government to agree the legalisation of same-sex marriage in the UK. Marriage equality came into effect in 2014.

Three years later, he and others won royal pardons for gay and bisexual men convicted of consenting adult same-sex acts under historic anti-gay laws.

In 2022, Peter staged a one-man protest in Qatar, just before the start of the football World Cup. He highlighted Qatar’s abuse of the human rights of LGBTs, women and migrant workers – securing global media coverage to nearly a billion people. After being detained by police for almost an hour, he was ordered to the airport to leave the country.

The following year, Peter’s human rights foundation launched the #ApologiseNow campaign, urging all UK police chiefs to apologise for past homophobic witch-hunts. The London Metropolitan Police Commissioner was the first to say sorry and to enact new pro-LGBT+ policies. Since then, a total 21 out of 45 police chiefs have said sorry.

Peter was placed under house arrest in his hotel for three days in Mumbai, India, in October 2023, when he attempted to lobby the International Olympic Committee against giving the 2036 games to a sexist, homophobic dictatorship.

He is still campaigning as Director of the Peter Tatchell Foundation: www.PeterTatchellFoundation.org