Catalogue Number
NMLH.2004.1.1.12
Object Name
badge
Title
GAY LIBERATION FRONT
People
Gay Liberation Front
Description
Purple circular badge with whit text reading "GAY LIBERATION FRONT" at the top. In the centre a raised fist contains two each of the female and male symbols, overlapping in the centre.
The UK's Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was a radical left wing gay activist group which was founded in 1970, after students Bob Mellors and Aubrey Walter attended a Black Panther Party conference in the United States and encountered activists from the US version of the GLF. The GLF held weekly consciousness raising meetings for between two and three hundred people, and practiced direct actions known as 'zaps' which often included elements of performance, including disrupting the 1971 church morality conference "Festival of Light". They produced a liberation manifesto in 1971, which was radical in demanding an end to oppression of gay people, de-medicalisation of homosexuality (which was seen as a mental illness at the time), and full legal equality.
Members of the GLF included Peter Tatchell, Ted Brown, and Nigel Young, who all went on to be significant participants in later LGBTQIA direct action groups including Outrage, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, Gallop, and a number of HIV and AIDS groups.
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