I speak to Peter Tatchell by Zoom from Sydney, where he has recently arrived after his day in Qatar, protesting against that nation’s human rights abuses. He hasn’t slept in three days but is perfectly lucid and the weariness only tells in his minute corrections: “No, let me rephrase that”; “Sorry, let me think.” He is 70 years old, wrung out, back in Australia where he was born and raised, talking to me while fielding frequent phone calls. Has he no plans just to hang out for a bit, see some cousins? He’s a bit bemused by the question: “That’d be a very fine thing. But after Qatar I’ve got two other campaigns coming up – quiet time would be a stretch. I, with many others, have contributed to so many positive changes. It’s a great motivator.”
The protest in Qatar, which happened on 25 October, comprised only Tatchell and a colleague, Simon Harris, from Tatchell’s eponymous foundation. It featured a single placard, which they had smuggled into the country between the pages of a copy of the Daily Telegraph. “The only existing broadsheet newspaper today,” he says, pleased at the irony of the paper coming in handy, despite itself. The wording on the placard was: “Qatar arrests, jails & subjects LGBTs to ‘conversion’ #QatarAntiGay.” “I never dictated the terms,” he says. “I took the message directly from my contacts in Qatar.”
Tatchell held up his placard outside the National Museum of Qatar in Doha at 11.30am. “A Muslim woman walked past,” he says, “a horrified look on her face. She said: ‘You’d better put that away, you’ll end up in prison.’” He corrects himself. “Maybe those weren’t her exact words; she basically warned me that it’s not permitted.” He didn’t put it away, and 35 minutes later, state security officials arrived in big white Land Cruisers, the police soon joining them, nine men in all. Harris managed to upload some video of the protest – on Instagram, Tatchell looks dignified, solitary and incongruous, stood on sandy pebbles in front of the statement architecture of the museum – before the police took his camera and deleted the rest. The pair’s details were taken, their documents scrutinised. Tatchell says they were told, “what you’re doing is illegal, it’s not permitted in Qatar, the conversation was a mixture of broken English and broken French. It was very clear that we were not free to leave. We were there for 49 minutes before they eventually said: ‘OK, we advise you to go to the airport and get your flight.’ I interpreted that as a warning.”
There was some beef on social media later, as Tatchell’s YouTube channel had described the men as being “seized by the Qatari security services”; one academic at Qatar’s research university complained that Tatchell had misled people, lied even, since they were not arrested. It was just the fog of protest, the office losing contact briefly with Tatchell and Harris. Maybe Tatchell himself puts things a little strongly at times, but it’s hard to overstate how much sheer cortisol is coursing through the man during actions like these. “I knew that it was possible I’d spend some time in a police cell and possibly be prosecuted, even jailed. The view was that was unlikely and more likely that I’d be deported straight to Sydney. But I was very anxious, and we were always worrying that we’d made some inadvertent misstep and put the security services on to us. On Sunday night [before they left London], I hardly slept, rehearsing in my mind all the different scenarios. On the Monday night – it was an overnight flight – I was so anxious I couldn’t sleep a wink. In Doha on the day of the protest, my stomach was churning over, I had a very strong headache and despite the heat, I felt cold and a bit shivery. I had a constant urge to urinate and defecate.” The idea that he does this stuff blithely, for self-promotion, is for the birds, I think.
Yet, as last year’s Netflix documentary, Hating Peter Tatchell, puts it pithily, he is the focal point of an awful lot of hatred: “I’ve got a lot of bile and hatred against me over the decades because I ruffle feathers. I have made powerful people and their apologists very angry. It’s led to tens of thousands of hate mails, hundreds of death threats, hundreds of violent assaults.” He says this in a matter-of-fact kind of way, but has said in the past that the assaults have left him with PTSD and minor permanent brain and eye injuries. Much less violent, but still a drumbeat, is the criticism from the liberal left, which clusters round the idea that he does it all for attention and is a little bit ridiculous.
But if you engage seriously with what Tatchell is saying, I feel that he’s only doing what we all should be doing: the World Cup is about to take place in a country where LGBT+ people, women and migrant workers are oppressed and victimised. In waving this through on the promise that Qatar would somehow change, between the decision in 2010 and now, Fifa has legitimised the nation’s impunity and traduced the idea of universal human rights as a minimum entry requirement into the international club. The foreign secretary James Cleverly – this was presumably inadvertent, like so many of his remarks – distilled what this actually means, when he asked football fans to be “respectful of the host nation”, concluding: “I think with a little bit of flex and compromise at both ends, it can be a safe and secure World Cup.” Be a bit less gay, fellas, just for a couple of weeks, and it’ll all be fine. Prince William has just announced he won’t be attending, citing a diary clash. Given that he’s president of the FA, and the dates have been well known for a year, this is, as Tatchell points out, implausible.
The method of Tatchell’s protest wasn’t new – he staged a similar one in 2018 outside the Kremlin, in Moscow, which was not his first rodeo there, either. He got his head kicked in in 2007 “when I went to support the very brave Russian LGBT+ campaigners who were seeking to hold a lawful pride parade,” he recalls. But the Qatar one was months in the planning, because “it is one of the world’s most highly surveilled societies.” Tatchell says he and Harris studiously avoided being seen together, or even making eye contact, from the moment they arrived at Heathrow, so that if one of them was arrested, the other might not be. “We were advised that there was a high probability that I would be refused entry at the airport,” Tatchell says, and he had a made-up story prepared about “having to go back to Australia to deal with my mother’s death and to clear up her property and possessions”.
I am moved to check at this point whether or not his mother is still alive; no, he says, she died in July. Would she have approved of this subterfuge? Or would she be looking down, going: “Son, I’m barely even cold in the ground and you’ve turned me into a campaign tactic”? He considers this carefully. “She grew up in the 1930s in a very conservative working-class family. She wasn’t political but she was an evangelical Christian, in the pentecostal faith. Pretty hardcore but what is interesting is that, over the years, she grew. She supported my human rights work. She still does believe …” He corrects himself. “She still did believe until the day she died that homosexuality is wrong. But she came to the point that it’s certainly not a major sin and that homophobia is a worse sin.” This is an extremely conflicted moral position, that it’s bad to be gay and to be anti-gay. One can’t help but notice the contrast with her son’s moral clarity, which is absolute. “The primary motivation of my work has always been a love of other people and a love of freedom, justice and equality of all human beings on this planet. I wouldn’t like to suffer. If I was suffering, I’d want other people to help.”
Tatchell recently celebrated on social media that it was 53 years since his first LGBT+ protest, at the age of 17. His quest for justice predates even that: in 1963, four young girls were killed in a racist bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, and this seeded his lifelong fight against prejudice of all kinds. It’s a very telling origin story, because he was in Melbourne at the time, and 11 years old; Alabama was impossibly far away and he was just a kid.
Tatchell arrived in London in 1971, fleeing the draft in Australia, and was at the vanguard of LGBT+ activism from the start, as one of the organisers of the first Pride events in 1972 and a key member of the Gay Liberation Front until its demise in 1974. To the self-styled “hippies, anarchists, feminists and counter-culturals”, he was a well-known figure, but this activism was extremely niche, partly because it was so high risk. Violent assault by organised gangs of racists and homophobes was common. By the mid-80s, though, he was beginning to be a household name, as the visibility of the cause grew, and thanks in part to the Bermondsey byelection, which, if you want a whistle-stop tour of savage British homophobia in the political and media classes, you should definitely Google. In the 90s, he started OutRage!, a direct action LGBT+ group, and by this time, he was a household name. Yet he never became a mainstream figure, having little interest in the media element of activism, the sofas on current affairs shows. He has a long-term partner – whose close relationship with his mother he describes to illustrate how much she changed. “She was always supportive of my partner. And that’s an incredible thing for someone of quite an extreme religious upbringing.”
Throughout his life, Tatchell’s campaigns have had this roaming, slingshot quality, David on tour, looking for Goliath. What does this guy, who lives in Elephant and Castle, south London, think he’s doing in Memphis, confronting Mike Tyson, as he did in 2002, with some more homemade placards: “Mike Tyson! Stop your homophobia!” and “Knock out Tyson’s sexism and homo hatred”? Who does he think he is, staging (in 1999) a citizen’s arrest of Robert Mugabe on his way into Harrods? The mixture of naivety, audacity, certainty, single-mindedness, all of it so intense, isn’t unique – you could probably build a through-line all the way from Joan of Arc to Greta Thunberg – but it’s exceptional. These are “issue saints”, people who see things very simply, to whom the world responds in emotionally complicated ways. To him, of course, his choice of causes is obvious: “I tend to focus on campaigns where activists or victims in communities have asked for my support,” he says. “So I completely support the struggle for democracy in Myanmar but lots of people are supporting that campaign. I choose the campaigns that aren’t getting the same focus.”
Precisely because he concentrates on the niche, the untended, the obscure, he often becomes the story, which is what leads to the accusation that he has “white saviour complex”, a top-down, great-man-of-history approach that fails to properly respect both the grassroots campaigns and their cultural context. This was levelled at him after Qatar, on social media (since deleted), and he gives it short shrift – he was deeply involved with civil rights activist groups in Qatar, not just LGBT+ causes, as well as feminist and migrants’ rights. The malcontents were a side group: “For many weeks, I offered to help amplify Qatari LGBT+ voices. I arranged trusted journalists and secure interview encryption methods. But no one in the online group that is now criticising me was willing or able to give interviews, not even anonymously. That’s another reason why I did the protest.”
More broadly, though, he thinks this is part of the problem, that relativism has become a fashionable stance among liberals in the west – the collision of postcolonial guilt (no regime can be as bad as anything we were, in our pomp) and cultural sensitivity (maybe those women are more comfortable wearing a hijab). “It’s as if non-white people don’t merit the same solidarity,” he says, indignantly. “Every year, on International Women’s Day, women in Iran rally to demand an end to the hijab. Those women are beaten, and imprisoned, but there’s hardly a squeak in the western media.” I can just imagine him, on his own, in Valiasr Square, with a placard saying, “women demand an end to patriarchal oppression” and a load of haters on TikTok asking: “Why is a dude saying this?” Because that is no ordinary dude: that is Peter Tatchell.
The last time I met Tatchell was six years ago, when he was embroiled in a row with the NUS – their LGBT rep wouldn’t share a platform with him, because he’d signed an open letter against “no-platforming”, which she said was transphobic.
“The level of toxic vitriol,” he says, “is completely off the scale compared to just six years ago. My response is always that biological sex and gender identity are two different things, but both are equally valid. There doesn’t need to be a conflict between the two. When I was supporting the women’s liberation movement in the early 1970s, the slogan was ‘biology is not destiny’. Now some sections of the women’s movement seem to be saying that biology is destiny.”
He draws on decades of deep knowledge to illustrate his points; the importance of international amplification he remembers from the anti-apartheid campaigns of the 70s; what he sees as the left’s problem with female and LGBT+ emancipation (“I was denounced by many on the left as an apologist for capitalism and imperialism”) reminds him of the first ever gay rights protest in a communist country, East Germany, in 1973. He hasn’t come out unscathed from this life. “It’s very tough,” he says at one point. “I have periods of real emotional meltdown and depression, feeling that despite the efforts of myself and many, many other people, we haven’t been able to prevent some terrible abuses.” But “lots of the issues that I and others championed decades ago are now mainstream,” he adds. Besides, “when you’re living under a tyrannical regime, you need international solidarity. The roll of issues that need to be addressed is endless.”
