Peter Gary Tatchell - UK Gay Activist - A Profile

[Aquilla]

Peter Gary Tatchell

Peter Gary Tatchell (born 25 January 1952) is an Australian-British human rights activist, who is best known internationally for his attempts to perform a citizen's arrest of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe in 1999 and 2001, on charges of torture and other human rights abuses.

Peter was selected as Labour Party Parliamentary candidate for Bermondsey in 1981, and was denounced by party leader Michael Foot for supporting extra-parliamentary action against the Thatcher government; although the Labour Party subsequently allowed his selection, when he ran in the Bermondsey by-election in February 1983, he was smeared and attacked by the tabloid press and by fascist graffiti in the constituency. He has since joined the Green Party and is a supporter of its Green Left grouping.

Peter became a prominent campaigner for gay rights through the direct action group OutRage!, which he co-founded; he was identified as a supporter of outing hypocrites and homophobes and denounced as a "homosexual terrorist" by the Daily Mail in March 1995. More recently, his activism led a group of his friends to set up the Peter Tatchell Human Rights Fund assist his campaigns against human rights abuses. His willingness to tackle a wide variety of human rights issues has earned him the respect of news organizations that used to criticize him. In 2006, the New Statesman , a magazine Tatchell contributes to, polled its readers and they voted him sixth on their list of "Heroes of our time".

In April 2007, Peter, along with rival party activist Matt Morton, sought the nomination of the Oxfordshire Green Party to be the prospective parliamentary candidate in the constituency of Oxford East for the Green Party of England and Wales in the next United Kingdom general election.
He was selected to challenge incumbent MP Andrew Smith with 63 % of the vote, according to a party-internal announcement.

Tatchell had been active on green issues since the mid-1980s. He helped coordinate the two Green and Socialist conferences in the late 1980s. At around the same time, he wrote chapters in two green books, Getting There: Steps to a Green Society, and Into The Twenty-First Century. These writings variously predicted global warming and climate change, eventual resource depletion and wars for the control of diminishing resources, and advocated a red-green political alliance. He currently has a weekly internet Television programme, "Talking with Tatchell", broadcast on 18 Doughty Street. He also writes regularly for The Guardian's Comment is Free website.

Peter was recently beaten up in the streets of Moscow, when he led a rag band of protesters, to demand gay rights in the Russian Commonwealth.

Article originated from the Gay Times, edited and added to by aquilla for publication reasons on this site. All rights very gratefully acknowledged.