Peter Tatchell

Peter Tatchell was born in Melbourne in 1952 into an evangelical Christian family and became involved as a teenager in campaigns against the death penalty and Australia's role in the Vietnam War. Realising he was gay at 17, he moved to London in 1971, partly to avoid conscription, and joined the Gay Liberation Front, helping organise Britain's first Pride march in 1972.

In 1983 he stood for Labour in the Bermondsey by-election. The campaign against him was one of the dirtiest in modern British politics. A rival's leaflets described their candidate as "the straight choice", he received death threats and was physically attacked, and he lost what had been a safe Labour seat by a huge margin. Many people would have withdrawn from public life. He concluded instead that parliamentary politics was not for him and turned to direct action.

In 1990 he co-founded OutRage!, whose stunts included a mass kiss-in at Piccadilly Circus and, in 1994, a threat to name bishops who were privately gay while opposing gay rights, which drew accusations of cruelty even from allies. In 1999 he attempted a citizen's arrest of Robert Mugabe in London on charges of torture. When he tried again in Brussels in 2001, Mugabe's bodyguards beat him unconscious. At Moscow Pride in 2007 he was beaten again, and he has said the attacks left him with lasting damage to his eye and brain.

He now runs the Peter Tatchell Foundation and has campaigned on Russia, Chechnya, Uganda and Qatar, where he was briefly detained in 2022.