On the afternoon of Saturday 7 July the Sussex Gay Liberation Front and friends met in Norfolk Square off the Western Road in Brighton. They marched down Western Street to Embassy Court on the corner with the Kings Road, on past the Kings Hotel and finished at the Old Ship Hotel.
With banners held aloft they handed out 2,000 leaflets as they went…
“A Gay Pride Week is when gay men and women show that they are not ashamed or embarrassed by their sexual orientation. It is a chance to come out of the closet, for gayness will never be accepted until everyone does this. Come out of the closet with us.
Love and kisses, Sussex Gay Liberation Front.”
The leaflet also listed all the events for that week:
Tuesday 3 July
Rose Robertson of Parents Enquiry speaks at the Stanford Arms, Preston Circus, Brighton at 8.30pm on the problems of homosexuality and the family.Friday 6 July
Disco at the Stanford Arms 8.15–11pm with a raffle and prizes for the most outrageous and the most conservative dress. Afterwards there will be a Gay Wedding between John and Graham on the second beach to the west of the Palace Pier at 12pm. Bring a bottle for celebrations.Saturday 7 July
Gay Pride March starting from Norfolk Square, Western Road at 2.30pm. We shall march down to the seafront and along to the fish market opposite the Ship Hotel, distributing leaflets as we go. The more people who march the greater impact we will make. Those with any gay pride in themselves will be there.Saturday Evening
Gay Dance at the Royal Albion Hotel, 8–12pm, tickets 50p.Sunday 8 July
A Gay Picnic will take place on the beach to the west of the Palace Pier from 1pm.
Who were they?
As Mark Rowlands recalls: “We had been actively preparing to form a [Sussex] university group of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) but had encountered considerable nervousness and bureaucracy from national CHE. What impressed us [about GLF] was the informality of the group and its lack of rules. There was no membership; people simply turned up. Meetings did not have fixed agendas. Anyone who wanted to speak was encouraged to do so. The politics were unashamedly radical; as others afterwards would put it, ‘we’re out and we’re proud’.
“Brighton GLF was officially formed in January 1971. Later we changed the name to Sussex GLF to reflect its wider geographical membership”.
SGLF member Doug Coupe remembers “It was a very fluid kind of organisation. People came in and we saw them for a few months and then they disappeared. This whole organisation was thrown together. We often didn’t know people’s full names. Some people stayed for years but some just drifted away.”
A logical step
The SGLF had staged a Gay Day in 1972, the same year London GLF had held the first UK Pride event, so the next logical step was Gay Pride in Brighton.
Peter Duxbury remembers handing out leaflets alongside a chap in a dress, David Maplesden, who was into ‘genderfuck’ – subverting traditional notions of gender identity and gender roles. “He was a character with his dress and everything. He used to go to work in his dress as well, at the Electricity Board, ‘cause I worked at the Electricity Board as well.”
I’ve had it confirmed that it was Graham Wilkinson (who went on to set up the Sussex AIDS Centre) and his boyfriend John Roman Baker (who later set up the AIDS Positive Underground Theatre), who were the John and Graham that got married on the beach as mentioned in the leaflet.
Some members of the SGLF did not attend the march, for example Doug Coupe: “There was a lot of fear you know, when Gay Lib was coming to be known, there were an awful lot of people who were scared to death to be involved.
“I was a teacher, so I was a bit careful about where I was seen. I didn’t really want to be appearing in newspapers. As it happened when I was outed, it was a very difficult time, for years. In the end I had a breakdown. I went to work at Boots.”
How did it go?
It was reported in Gay News and the Brighton & Hove Gazette as a ‘Gay Demo Flop’. SGLF spokesman Graham Phillips said “many homosexuals in ‘responsible jobs’ steered clear of the demo march for fear of being publicly identified and perhaps sacked as a result”. Nevertheless he “felt the march was one more step towards getting homosexuality accepted”.
While the actual demonstration may have only involved about 20 people, we know that the dance at the Royal Albion Hotel was “highly successful”, attracting 200 people.
To quote Gay News again, “A spokesman for Sussex Gay Lib tells us that they are the only provincial GLF group to hold regular dances of this size and feel that with a larger venue they could attract 300 to 400 people. The music is provided by the gay group’s own disco and it particularly attracts the local gay girls who travel from such exotic places as Eastbourne, and the boys from faraway Portsmouth, where hardly any gay life exists.”
Radicals!
As John Rossington remembers, we were “actively campaigning to promote Gay Pride and encouraging people to come out.”
It may be hard for us to imagine now, but this was very radical for the times. The literal criminality of being queer was still very fresh in the collective memory.
“Much attention was paid to changing the attitude of the commercial gay scene. Each weekend we sold the newspaper Gay News outside the Heart and Hand Pub in Ship Street, and sometimes outside other venues. All the gay venues were closeted and refused to sell the newspaper, as did almost all newsagents.”
More conservative members of the local gay community were not impressed by the antics of the SGLF. Peter Duxbury remembers another SGLF march where “we walked all the way through Brighton in dresses, placards, into Hove, on to George Street, Blatchington Road. And this [gay] man in a raincoat and hat dashed up to me and he said something like ‘You’ll never get people to understand you dressed like that. Why are you doing this?’”
He doesn’t say what he replied, but they were succeeding in getting people’s attention.
