Fifty years ago, a group of people gathered to lay the foundations for a movement that would change the British LGBTQ community and society’s attitude towards it for ever. The Stonewall uprising in New York on 27 June 1969 a year prior had sent ripples across the Atlantic, emboldening a growing number of activists who, five decades later, continue the battle for queer liberation.
Times were starkly different for LGBTQ people in 1970. ‘Gay’ was a relatively new term that encompassed both men and women. People that weren’t heterosexual were more commonly referred to as homosexuals by the media and in society – we were a peculiar scientific aberration. Trans, non-binary, and intersex identities were decades away from being recognised. We were all queers, in the pejorative sense. Although the word has today been reclaimed in a celebration of non-compliance to expected ways of being, thinking or loving, back then queers were considered perverts and sexual deviants.