DOCUMENTARY
A Trip Through UK Leader’s Activism
“Hating Peter Tatchell” spotlights longtime LGBTQ advocate
BY ANDY HUMM
The new Netfl ix documentary
on United
Kingdom-based gay human
rights activist Peter
Tatchell is a breathless 90-minute
trip through just some of the great
man’s 54 years of fearless activism
on behalf of LGBTQ people and all
those oppressed by dictators and
bigots.
Tatchell’s most famous direct actions
are documented: He took the
pulpit from the Archbishop of Canterbury
in his cathedral on Easter
Sunday 1998 to decry Anglican opposition
to legal gay relationships;
exposed homophobic, hypocritical
gay bishops in a pair of confrontations
that brought him lots of
hate; and made two attempts at
a citizen’s arrest of Zimbabwean
strongman Robert Mugabe, turning
Tatchell into a national hero
after he risked getting run over by
Mugabe’s car and wound up getting
beaten while shouting out the
late president’s crimes against humanity.
Tatchell even takes on Queen
Elizabeth II, urging her through
a bullhorn to “stop homophobia
in the Commonwealth!” as she
walked to a meeting of the Commonwealth
nations she so values,
many of which still criminalize gay
sex under laws imposed when they
were UK colonies.
Gay singer Tom Robinson,
who has seen Tatchell in action
for decades, calls him a “brave
mother******.” Archbishop George
Carey calls him “a bullying kind of
chap.”
Tatchell is aided in telling his
story by two gay national treasures:
Ian McKellen, who interviews him
throughout, and Stephen Fry, who
offers commentary, praising him
at the outset for his “extraordinary
contributions to the happiness of
millions who never heard of him.”
Fry, who played Oscar Wilde on
fi lm, tips his hat to Tatchell as “a
performance artist” who always
knows how to get into the spotlight
to put an image and a message
across. Elton John, who executive
Peter Tatchell gets arrested at the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Moscow.
produced the documentary
with his husband, David Furnish,
praises Tatchell’s “bravery and
courage.” McKellen, Fry, and John
are celebrated performers but they
are also gay and AIDS activists
in their own right and know from
whence they speak.
This is the feature documentary
debut for director Christopher
Amos, who produced the drag documentary
“Dressed as a Girl” and
who, like Tatchell, is Australian
British. He is a veteran LGBTQ
journalist, activist, and fi lmmaker
and takes us back to Tatchell’s
youth in Melbourne, the stepson of
a fundamentalist mom and a brutal
stepfather who beat him often
and instilled in him a lifelong hatred
of bullies.
Tatchell was deeply affected at
age 11 by the murder of four little
girls by white supremacists in Birmingham,
Alabama in 1964, and
he modeled his own fi ghts for justice
on the US civil rights movement.
As a student, he was active in
the raucous protests against Australian
involvement in the Vietnam
War and left for Britain in 1971 so
as not to be drafted into that immoral
confl ict.
At 19, he arrived in London,
where men could be arrested for
kissing each other good night and
where other aspects of gay male life
were still unlawful, given the very
partial decriminalization of 1967.
He threw himself into the Gay Liberation
Front, helped organize the
UK’s fi rst Pride march in ’72, and
went to East Berlin to raise gay issues
at the World Festival of Youth
in ’73 as he saw ours as a global
movement.
He got a real taste of backlash
when he was Labour’s candidate
for Parliament for the Bermondsey
constituency in 1983. His
Liberal Party opponent used his
homosexuality against him and
crushed Tatchell at the polls. Undaunted,
it made him fi ght harder
for gay rights and against the burgeoning
AIDS crisis in Britain that
was compounded by the anti-gay
bigotry of Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher, whose infamous Section
28 banned mentioning gay issues
in schools.
Tatchell helped the group Out-
Rage! to organize direct actions
against Section 28, the ban on gays
in the military, police entrapment,
WILDBEAR ENTERTAINMENT
and a spike in anti-gay violence —
as well as as challenging the ban
on same-sex marriage from 1992.
We hear disagreements on tactics
from insiders such as Angela
Mason of the Stonewall group (like
our Human Rights Campaign) and
Chris Smith, the fi rst out gay MP.
There is footage of David Hope, a
bishop he urged to come out, and
audiences and panelists on talk
shows ripping into Tatchell on that
issue and for “intruding” on the
Canterbury Easter service. Unbowed,
Tatchell shoots back, saying,
“It is a bit rich for the church
to talk about ‘intrusions’ when
they have been intruding on the
lives of lesbian and gay people for
centuries, saying we’re sick and
immoral and going to burn in hell.”
Tatchell got used to being called
“counterproductive” and says the
same condemnations were leveled
at suffragettes and civil rights activists.
Disclosure: I hosted Peter Tatchell
on a visit to New York once and
he gives me some of his precious
time when I visit London. Walking
with Tatchell is an experience,
➤ TATCHELL, continued on p.57
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