44 years of LGBT and human rights campaigning
Peter Tatchell’s hour-long interview with the New York-based TV programme, Gay USA, conducted by Andy Humm and Ann Northrop.
Watch here: http://www.freespeech.org/video/gay-usa-august-7th-2011
Peter Tatchell, Director of the Peter Tatchell Foundation, writes:
Ranging over my 44 years of LGBT and human rights activism, this Gay USA interview includes discussions about my involvement in the gay liberation movement four decades ago, the attempted citizen’s arrest of President Mugabe, my bid for election to parliament as a left-wing gay rights candidate, the Protest the Pope campaign, the bashing by neo-Nazis in Moscow, and my ambushes of Tony Blair and of Britain’s far right leader, Nick Griffin.
It also covers my current campaigns in the UK for Equal Love (marriage equality), against homophobia in football, support for activists in the global south and opposition to the restrictions on gay and bisexual men donating blood (recently eased but not removed in the UK).
The programme features reflections on some of my key political inspirations: the black civil rights movement in the US and, in Britain, the struggle by the suffragettes for the right of women to vote.
In the interview I pay tribute to the many wonderful people I have worked with during my campaigns, and to the heroic democracy and human rights activists in countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Pakistan and Zimbabwe. I salute them.