#peter tatchell

The year is 1988...🏳️‍🌈

LGBT campaigner Peter Tatchell refuses ‘national treasure’ jubilee offer

Exclusive: veteran human rights advocate, a lifelong republican, says Queen has snubbed LGBT+ people for 70 years

No thanks, Ma’am. For LGBT campaigners like me, your jubilee is nothing to celebrate

Helen Pidd

Sun 15 May 2022 18.17 (CEST)

Peter Tatchell has refused an invitation to be declared a “national treasure” at the Queen’s platinum jubilee because of the monarch’s “neglectful stance towards the LGBT+ community”.

Tatchell, who has been campaigning for gay rights and equality since 1967, had been invited to attend the pageant outside Buckingham Palace as one of more than 100 “national treasures”.

But he declined, stating his lifelong republicanism and also that: “To my knowledge, [the Queen] has never publicly acknowledged that LGBT+ people exist. The words lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender have never publicly passed her lips and she has never visited or been a patron of any LGBT+ charity.”

He added: “To be ignored for 70 years feels like a deliberate snub.”

In a letter to the platinum jubilee co-chair, the former publishing titan Nicholas Coleridge, Tatchell also claimed that for many years palace staff were prohibited from bringing same-sex partners to the Christmas ball.

He wrote that “after the 1999 Soho gay pub bombing, which killed three people and injured over 70 others, the Queen did not visit the scene or the victims in hospital”.

The pageant is due to take place on Sunday 5 June and will feature more than 10,000 participants – including members of the royal family – parading through the streets of Westminster and along the Mall to Buckingham Palace.

For the finale, Coleridge invited Tatchell to be among an “ensemble of over one hundred ‘National Treasures’ to join us as we pay tribute to Her Majesty”.

He explained that national treasures “means the celebrated, respected and admired people from many spheres – theatre, film, television, music, literature, sport, the sciences and business”.

In an interview with the Guardian, Tatchell said the pageant was “propaganda for the anti-democratic system of an unelected and unaccountable head of state”.

He added: “To join the celebration of the Queen’s reign would give legitimacy to an elitist and anti-LGBT+ monarch.”

He said he also objected to the royal family because of the way future monarchs are chosen, with “the first-born of the all-white Windsor family” ascending to the throne. “For the foreseeable future no black or brown Briton, no matter how worthy, can be made head of state,” he said.

Tatchell said he planned to spend the jubilee weekend talking about trans rights at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in Hay-on-Wye, Wales.

Buckingham Palace has been contacted for comment.

ID: There are two photos featuring lifelong global LGBT+ activist Peter Tatchell. In both photos he holds a sign reading No LGB without the T. United we stand!

So; we finally got a new coalition government in Ireland five months after the general election. Only relevant coz that means we have new ministers and the new minister for Children, Disability, Equality and Integration is Roderic O’Gorman, a gay man. A gay man being the minister for children was always gonna bring the far right out of the woodwork so they went digging. They found one photo of him at Dublin Pride with British LGBT activist Peter Tatchell (the one and only time the two met) and then found an op-ed written by Tatchell years earlier in which they claim he condones paedophelia. I won’t comment on the letter or Tatchell’s clarifications on its content coz I’m still a bit iffy on both but you can get a summary of the situation here:

The point is that the new minister for children took one photo with someone he’d never met before or since at a Pride parade, that’s the extent of their association. The far-right has latched onto this as evidence of the inherent danger of LGBT “ideology” to children of course.

Now I’m sure everyone’s aware of Ireland’s horrendous history of abuses committed against children by the Catholic Church. Sexual abuse, forced labour, forced adoptions of children of unwed mothers for profit, hundreds of deaths of children of unwed mothers at church institutions .etc. You might not be aware that it went beyond the church too. Politicians, police and senior members of the church assisted in covering up these crimes for decades. And while the clergy men and women who perpetrated them have been and are being brought to justice, their enablers? Not so much.

So we have ex-politicians, clergy and police who 100% knowingly enabled the horrific abuse of children for decades, still alive and unpunished in this country. But the far-right’s calling for the resignation of an elected official because of a photo taken years ago and a letter whose content isn’t clear cut. The same devoutly Catholic far right who love the police yet have never called for action to be taken against all those people who enabled abuse. Who bemoan the righteous vilification the Catholic Church now enjoys in Ireland because of those heinous acts because it’s not fair.