Peter Tatchell

Early life

Tatchell was born in Melbourne, Australia. His father was a lathe operator and his mother worked in a biscuit factory. His parents divorced when he was four and his mother remarried soon afterwards. He had a half sister and brothers.

Since the family finances were strained by medical bills, he had to leave school at 16 in 1968. He started work as a sign-writer and window-dresser in department stores. Tatchell claims to have incorporated the theatricality of these displays into his activism.

Raised as a Christian, Tatchell says that he "ditched [his] faith a long time ago" and is an atheist. It has been wrongly reported that Tatchell is a vegan; however, Tatchell himself has stated that although he eats no meat, he does eat eggs, cheese, and, according to Richard Fairbrass, wild salmon.

He became interested in outdoor adventurous activities such as surfing and mountain climbing. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Any Questions about how insurance and legal risks were making British teachers reluctant to take pupils on outdoor adventures, he said outdoor activities helped him develop the courage to take political risks in adult life.

Campaigns in Australia

Tatchell's political activity began at Mount Waverley Secondary College, where in 1967 he launched campaigns in support of Australia's Aboriginal people. Tatchell was elected secretary of the school's Student Representative Council. In his final year in 1968, as school captain, he took the lead in setting up a scholarship scheme for Aboriginal people and led a campaign for Aboriginal land rights. These activities led the headmaster to claim he had been manipulated by communists.

Prompted by the impending hanging of Ronald Ryan in 1967, a 15-year old Tatchell protested against the use of the death sentence, writing to the press and spraying graffiti to raise awareness of the issue. Ryan was convicted of killing a prison warder while escaping from Pentridge Prison in Coburg, Victoria. Tatchell wrote that the trajectory of the bullet through the warder's body made it unlikely that Ryan could have fired the fatal shot, casting doubt on the conviction. His protests were unsuccessful.

In 1968, Tatchell began campaigning against the American and Australian involvement in the Vietnam War, in his view a war of aggression in support of a "brutal and corrupt dictatorship" responsible for torture and executions. The Victoria state government and Melbourne city council attempted to suppress the anti-Vietnam War campaign by banning street leafleting and taking police action against anti-war demonstrations.

In 2004, he proposed the renaming of Australian capital cities with their Aboriginal place names.

Gay Liberation Front

To avoid conscription into the Australian Army, Tatchell moved to London in 1971. He had opened up about being gay in 1969, and in London became a leading member of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) until its 1974 collapse. During this time Tatchell was prominent in organising sit-ins at pubs that refused to serve "poofs" and protests against police harassment and the medical classification of homosexuality as an illness. With others, he helped organise Britain's first Gay Pride march in 1972.

In 1973, he attended the 10th World Youth Festival in East Berlin on GLF's behalf. His plans to protest at the festival were not well received by either the British delegation or the GDR hosts, but he was eventually allowed to give a speech at Humboldt University. His lecture was subject to various disruptions; it ended in his denunciation as a "troublemaker" by a member of the audience. The following day, Tatchell attempted to hand out leaflets at a concert: an official of the Free German Youth objected and encouraged fellow concert-goers to destroy the leaflets. Tatchell intended to carry a placard advocating gay rights at the closing rally of the festival. The British delegation incorrectly translated the placard to read "East Germany persecutes homosexuals"; this was put to a vote and the majority decided the placard was not acceptable. Yet, in defiance of the collective decision, Tatchell carried the placard anyway and was then beaten. The placard was torn in half.

Tatchell later claimed that this was the first time gay liberation politics were publicly disseminated and discussed in a communist country, although he noted that, in terms of decriminalisation and the age of consent, gay men had greater rights in East Germany at the time than much of the West.

Describing his time in the Gay Liberation Front, he wrote in The Guardian that:

[The] GLF was a glorious, enthusiastic and often chaotic mix of anarchists, hippies, leftwingers, feminists, liberals and counter-culturalists. Despite our differences, we shared a radical idealism—a dream of what the world could and should be—free from not just homophobia but the whole sex-shame culture, which oppressed straights as much as LGBTs. We were sexual liberationists and social revolutionaries, out to turn the world upside down. ... GLF's main aim was never equality within the status quo. ... GLF's strategy for queer emancipation was to change society's values and norms, rather than adapt to them. We sought a cultural revolution to overturn centuries of male heterosexual domination and thereby free both queers and women. ... Forty years on, GLF's gender agenda has been partly won. ... Girlish boys and boyish girls don't get victimised as much as in times past. LGBT kids often now come out at the age of 12 or 14. While many are bullied, many others are not. The acceptance of sexual and gender diversity is increasing.

Graduation

After taking A levels at evening classes, he attended the Polytechnic of North London (PNL), now part of London Metropolitan University, where he obtained a 2:1 BSc (Hons) in sociology.

At PNL he was a member of the National Union of Students Gay Rights Campaign. On graduating he became a freelance journalist specialising in foreign stories, during which he publicised the Indonesian annexation of West Papua and child labour on British-owned tea farms in Malawi.

Politics

Tatchell popularised the phrase "sexual apartheid" to describe the separate laws that long existed for gays and heterosexuals.

Labour candidate for Bermondsey

In 1978, Tatchell joined the Labour Party and moved to a council flat in Bermondsey, south-east London. At the Bermondsey Constituency Labour Party's (CLP) AGM in February 1980, the left group won control and Tatchell was elected Secretary. When the sitting Labour Member of Parliament (MP), Bob Mellish, retired in 1982, Tatchell was selected as his successor, despite Arthur Latham, a former MP and former Chairman of the Tribune Group, being considered the favourite. While Militant was cited as the reason for Tatchell's selection, Tatchell disagrees and ascribes his selection to the support of the "older, 'born and bred' working class; the younger professional and intellectual members swung behind Latham".

In an article for a left-wing magazine, Tatchell urged the Labour Party to support direct action campaigning to challenge the Margaret Thatcher-led Tory government, stating "we must look to new more militant forms of extra-parliamentary opposition which involve mass popular participation and challenge the government's right to rule". Social Democratic Party MP James Wellbeloved, arguing the article was anti-Parliamentary, quoted it at Prime Minister's Questions in November 1981. Foot denounced Tatchell, stating that he would not be endorsed as a candidate and a vote at the Labour Party National Executive Committee denied Tatchell's endorsement. However, the Bermondsey Labour Party continued to support him and it was eventually agreed that when the selection was rerun, Tatchell would be eligible, and he duly won. When Mellish resigned from Parliament and triggered a by-election, Tatchell's candidacy was endorsed, and the ensuing campaign was regarded as one of the most homophobic in modern British history.

Tatchell was assaulted in the street, had his flat attacked, and had a death threat and a live bullet put through his letterbox in the night. Although the Bermondsey seat had long been a Labour stronghold, the Liberal candidate, Simon Hughes, won the election. During the campaign, Liberal canvassers were accused of stirring up homophobia on the doorsteps. Male Liberal workers campaigned wearing lapel badges with the words, "I've been kissed by Peter Tatchell" following the suggestion that he was attempting to hide his sexuality; this campaign was criticised by Roy Hattersley at a Labour news conference. One of Hughes' campaign leaflets claimed the election was "a straight choice" between Liberal and Labour. Hughes has since apologised for what may have been seen as an inadvertent slur and later came out as bisexual in 2006.

Democratic Defence

Tatchell published the book Democratic Defence in 1985. In it, he outlined his suggestions for a defence policy for the United Kingdom after it underwent nuclear disarmament. Tatchell argued that Britain's military was primarily organised on a strategy of basing troops abroad rather than defending Britain itself from outside attacks, which he claimed was a legacy of the British Empire.

Citing the difficulties that the British Army was facing in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, he argued that their current methods had proven ineffective against guerrilla warfare, along with arguing for UK military personnel to be allowed to join trade unions and political parties, and to end strict adherence to "petty regulations". He praised the Second World War-era British Home Guard as an example of a "citizens' army", as well as the armed forces of Sweden, Switzerland and Yugoslavia as positive examples for the UK military to emulate.

In the book, Tatchell also argued for a British withdrawal from NATO and for the establishment of a European Self-Defence Organisation, independent of both the United States, as he felt that Europe had become too dependent on their military protection, and the Soviet Union, which he condemned for their invasions of Czechoslovakia and of Afghanistan, as well as its internal repression. He quoted with approval Enoch Powell's argument that the threat from the Soviet Union to Britain was greatly exaggerated. The book was reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement in May 1985.

Green Party

In February 2000, Tatchell resigned from Labour, citing the treatment of Ken Livingstone during the nomination of a candidate for Mayor of London, and of similar cases in the Scottish and Welsh elections, as evidence that the party "no longer has any mechanism for democratic involvement and transformation". He fought unsuccessfully for a seat on the London Assembly as an Independent candidate within the Green Left grouping, in support of Livingstone.

On 7 April 2004, he joined the Green Party of England and Wales but did not envisage standing for election. However, in 2007, he became the party's parliamentary candidate for Oxford East. On 16 December 2009, he withdrew as a candidate claiming brain damage he says was caused by a bus accident as well as damage inflicted by Mugabe's bodyguards when Tatchell attempted to arrest him in 2001 in Brussels, and by neo-Nazis in Moscow.

Tatchell opposes nuclear power; instead he advocates concentrated solar power.

In Tribune, he pointed out the adverse effects of climate change: "By 2050, if climate change proceeds unchecked, England will no longer be a green and pleasant land. In between periods of prolonged scorching drought, we are likely to suffer widespread flooding."

For many years, he supported a green–red alliance. More recently, he helped launch the Green Left grouping within the Green Party. He urged links between trade unions and the Greens. On 27 April 2010, he urged Green Party supporters to vote for Liberal Democrats in constituencies where they had an incumbent MP or a strong chance of winning.

In August 2021, Tatchell endorsed Tamsin Omond and Amelia Womack in the 2021 Green Party of England and Wales leadership election.

Iraq War

Tatchell opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent occupation of Iraqi territory by Coalition forces. For nearly three decades, he had supported the Iraqi Left Opposition, an organization opposed to the government of Saddam Hussein due to human rights violations that Hussein had committed against democrats, left-wingers, trade unionists, Shia Muslims and the Kurdish people, and because under Saddam's dictatorship there were no opportunities for peaceful, democratic change. He advocated military and financial aid to opponents of the Saddam government, suggesting that anti-Saddam organisations be given "tanks, helicopter gun-ships, fighter planes, heavy artillery and anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles". While opposing western intervention, he advocated regime change from within in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria.

Tatchell has written that on 12 March 2003 he ambushed Tony Blair's motorcade in an anti-Iraq war protest. He forced Blair's limousine to stop, and then unfolded a banner that read "Arm the Kurds! Topple Saddam". He added that in terms of the political struggle within Britain (as opposed to struggles against absolute tyrants like Hitler and Saddam, where violent resistance can be the lesser of two evils): "I remain committed to the Gandhian principle of non-violence". After the war he signed the 'Unite Against Terror' declaration, arguing that "the pseudo-left reveals its shameless hypocrisy and its wholesale abandonment of humanitarian values" by supporting resistance and insurgent groups in Iraq that resort to indiscriminate terrorism, killing innocent civilians.

In 2003, Tatchell said he supported giving "massive material aid" to Iraqi opposition groups, including the "Shi'ite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq" (SCIRI), to bring down Saddam. But in 2006 Tatchell noted that SCIRI had become markedly more fundamentalist and was endorsing violent attacks on anyone who did not conform to its increasingly harsh interpretation of Islam. He claimed that SCIRI, the leading force in Baghdad's ruling coalition, wanted to establish an Iranian-style religious dictatorship, with a goal of clerical fascism, and had engaged in "terrorisation of gay Iraqis", as well as terrorising Sunni Muslims, left-wingers, unveiled women and people who listen to western pop music or wear jeans or shorts.

In September 2014, Tatchell advocated arming the Kurdistan Workers' Party to fight against ISIS, and argued that the US and EU had been wrong to designate it as a terrorist organisation.

Syrian civil war

A previous supporter of the Stop the War Coalition, Tatchell and many other public personalities expressed concern with the coalition's allegedly unduly favourable view of Bashar al-Assad's government in Syria, and has called for the Labour leader and former Stop the War Chair Jeremy Corbyn not to attend the Coalition's Christmas fundraiser 2015. In December 2016, Tatchell and others disrupted Corbyn's speech on human rights on the basis that the Labour leader had responded insufficiently to the bombing of Aleppo and urged him to condemn Russian military intervention in Syria.

On 14 February 2015, Tatchell was one of a number of signatories to a letter criticising the trend in the National Union of Students to apply a No Platform policy to activists who criticised the sex industry or challenged demands made by certain groups of trans people. In particular, the letter cited the denial of a platform to Kate Smurthwaite at Goldsmiths College and to Germaine Greer at the University of Cambridge.

Tatchell received death threats after signing the letter. He later stated that he would have worded the letter differently to clarify that he supported the human rights of trans people and sex workers, but that he had signed the letter nonetheless because he believed in the message of free speech on campuses. He said that the initial draft that he signed contained the sentence "Some of us have disagreements with the views expressed [by activist critics of trans people]", and that he was "not happy" that this was cut out of the final letter.

On 13 February 2016, Fran Cowling, the national LGBT representative for the NUS, refused to share a platform with Tatchell at Canterbury Christ Church University to discuss the topic of "re-radicalising queers". Cowling said that Tatchell supported speakers who are "openly transphobic and incite violence" against transgender people, and also that Tatchell had used "racist language". Tatchell responded that no evidence could be produced to support either claim, and that Cowling had never consulted the NUS membership before deciding to make pronouncements on their behalf, and said, "This sorry, sad saga is symptomatic of the decline of free and open debate on some university campuses. There is a witch-hunting, accusatory atmosphere. Allegations are made without evidence to back them—or worse, they are made citing false, trumped-up evidence."

Campaigning

Peter Tatchell has campaigned for many civil rights issues, including protests against repression, racism, homophobia, censorship and the death penalty. As a result of his protests and campaigning, Tatchell has been attacked more than 300 times, has had a live bullet through his door and has survived two stabbing attempts (all as of 2009). He was beaten unconscious by Robert Mugabe's bodyguards in Brussels and far-right protestors in Moscow left him with permanently blurred vision in his right eye. He suffers memory loss, concentration issues and problems with balance and coordination as a result.

OutRage!

Tatchell took part in many gay rights campaigns over issues such as Section 28. Following the murder of actor Michael Boothe on 10 May 1990, Tatchell was one of thirty people to attend the inaugural meeting of the radical gay rights non-violent direct action group OutRage!—and although he did not convene this first meeting, he drafted its first Statement of Aims, and has remained a leading member. The group fuses theatrical performance styles with queer protest. As the most prominent OutRage! member, Tatchell is sometimes assumed to be the leader of the group, though he has never claimed this, saying he is one among equals.

In 1991, a small group of OutRage! members covertly formed a separate group to engage in a campaign of outing public figures who were homophobic in public but gay in private. The group took the name FROCS (Faggots Rooting Out Closeted Sexuality). Tatchell was the group's go-between with the press, forwarding their news statements to his media contacts. Considerable publicity and public debate followed FROCS's threat to out 200 leading public personalities from the world of politics, religion, business and sport. With Tatchell's assistance, members of FROCS eventually called a press conference to tell the world that their campaign was a hoax intended to demonstrate the hypocrisy of those newspapers that had condemned the campaign despite having themselves outed celebrities and politicians.

Some OutRage! activities were highly controversial. In 1994, it unveiled placards inviting ten Church of England bishops to "tell the truth" about what Outrage! alleged was their homosexuality and accusing them of condemning homosexuality in public while leading secret gay lives. Shortly afterwards, the group wrote to twenty UK MPs, condemning their alleged support for anti-gay laws and claiming they would out them if the MPs did not stop what they described as attacks on the gay community. The MP Sir James Kilfedder, an opponent of gay equality who received one of the letters, died two months later of a sudden heart attack—on the day one of the Belfast newspapers planned to out him. In a comment in The Independent in October 2003, Tatchell claimed the OutRage! action against the bishops was his greatest mistake because he failed to anticipate that the media and the church would treat it as an invasion of privacy.

On 12 April 1998, Tatchell led an OutRage! protest which disrupted the Easter sermon by George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, with Tatchell mounting the pulpit to denounce what he said was Carey's opposition to legal equality for lesbian and gay people. The protest garnered media coverage and led to Tatchell's prosecution under the little-used Ecclesiastical Courts Jurisdiction Act 1860 (formerly part of the Brawling Act 1551), which prohibits any form of disruption or protest in a church. Tatchell failed in his attempt to summon Carey as a witness and was convicted. The judge fined him the trivial sum of £18.60, which commentators theorised was a wry allusion to the year of the statute used to convict him.

UK campaigning

In 2006, Peter Tatchell opposed the appointment of Ruth Kelly as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government as Kelly had not supported equal treatment of lesbians and gay men in any parliamentary votes. Tatchell said "her appointment suggests the government does not take lesbian and gay rights seriously", adding "Tony Blair would never appoint someone to a race-equality post who had a lukewarm record of opposing racism".

In 1996, Tatchell led an OutRage! campaign to reduce the age of consent in the UK to 14 years (as per Romeo and Juliet laws), to adjust for studies that showed nearly half of all young people had their first sexual experiences prior to 16 years old, regardless of sexuality. He stated that he wished to exempt these people from being "treated as criminals by the law", and that there should be no prosecution if the difference in ages of the sexual partners was no more than three years, provided that these youths were consenting and were given a more comprehensive sex education at a younger date. On 10 March 2008, in the Irish Independent, he repeated his call for a lower age of consent to end the criminalisation of young people engaged in consenting sex and to remove the legal obstacles to upfront sex education, condom provision and safer sex advice.

In 1997, Tatchell wrote a letter to The Guardian defending an academic book about "boy-love" against what he has said was "censorship". In the letter, Tatchell said "Whilst it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful", citing examples of "Papuan tribes and some of my friends" who did not feel harmed by these experiences. Tatchell later said that the letter was edited, and that he "was not endorsing their viewpoint but merely stating that they had a different perspective from the mainstream opinion". Tatchell has, on several occasions, since reiterated that he does not condone adults having sex with children and that his "articles urging an age of consent of 14 are motivated solely by a desire to reduce the criminalisation of under-16s who have consenting relationships with other young people of similar ages". Following the publication of a photo of Tatchell alongside the Irish Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Roderic O'Gorman, on Twitter, at a Pride event, O'Gorman issued a statement outlining that the apparent views in Tatchell's letter—written 23 years ago, when O'Gorman was 15—were "abhorrent" to him, and that he appreciated that Tatchell had since clarified his own position.

International campaigning

While still at school, Tatchell campaigned in favour of better treatment of, and full human rights for, Aboriginal Australians. He has said that Australian cities should be renamed with their original Aboriginal place names. For example, the Tasmanian capital Hobart would be renamed Nibberluna. Tatchell said this would be a fitting tribute to Australia's Aboriginal heritage, which he said has been discarded and disrespected for too long.

Since 2006, he expressed concern for the Baloch people facing military operations in their homeland, Balochistan in Pakistan. From 2007 to 2009, he campaigned in defence of two UK-based Baloch Muslim human rights activists, Hyrbyair Marri and Faiz Baluch, accused of terrorism and tried in London. Both men were acquitted in 2009. He alleged collusion by the British and U.S. governments in regards to the suppression of the Balochs, including arms sales to Pakistan, which he says were used to bomb and attack Baloch towns and villages.

In May 2004, he and a dozen other lesbians and gay men from OutRage! and the Queer Youth Network joined a London demonstration organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Their placards read: "Israel: stop persecuting Palestine! Palestine: stop persecuting queers!" Tatchell says that others present accused him of being a Mossad agent sent to disrupt the march, of being a racist or a Zionist, of being a supporter of Ariel Sharon, and of being an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency or MI5. Tatchell has written a number of articles in The Guardian on the issue.

Tatchell is a critic of Iran's criminal code, which has parts based on sharia and which prescribes punishments for zina offenses, including consensual sexual relations between same-sex partners.

In 2005, Iran executed two teenagers, Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, aged 16 and 18, who were accused of raping a 13-year-old boy at knifepoint. Tatchell said that Iran has a history of arresting political activists on false charges and extracting false confessions from death penalty convicts, and declared that he believed the original crime was consensual sex between the two, which is illegal in Iran.

Tatchell reiterated his long-standing view that Iran is an "Islamo-fascist state". He said that information from Iranian exile groups with contacts inside Iran was that the teenagers were at a secret gay party before they were arrested. International human rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch preferred campaigners to focus on Iran violating the Convention on the Rights of the Child (which forbids the execution of juveniles) rather than the allegation of consensual sex.

Social issues

Tatchell is an active supporter of animal rights, saying "human rights and animal rights are two aspects of the same struggle against injustice", and that he advocates for a "claim to be spared suffering and offered inalienable rights" for both humans and animals.

Tatchell campaigned on the issue of the constitutional status of Cornwall. In November 2008, The Guardian carried an article by him entitled "Self-rule for Cornwall," in which he said:

Like Wales and Scotland, Cornwall considers itself a separate Celtic nation—so why shouldn't it have independence? [...] [Cornish] Nationalists argue that Cornwall is a subjugated nation, in much the same way that Scotland and Wales once were. Not only is the historic Cornish flag—a white cross on a black background—excluded from the Union Jack; until not so long ago Cornish people needed planning permission to fly it. Comparisons with Scotland and Wales are valid. After all, Cornwall has all the basic cultural attributes of a nation: its own distinct Celtic language, history, festivals, cuisine, music, dance and sports. Many Cornish people perceive themselves to be other than English. Despite the government's resistance, under [the] Commission for Racial Equality and Council of Europe guidelines, they qualify for recognition as a national minority. [...] Cornwall was once separate and self-governing. If the Cornish people want autonomy and it would improve their lives, why shouldn't they have self-rule once again? Malta, with only 400,000 people, is an independent state within the EU. Why not Cornwall?

This article received the largest number of comments to any Guardian article, according to This Is Cornwall. Over 1,500 comments were made, and while some comments were supportive, Tatchell found himself "shocked and disgusted" by the anti-Cornish sentiment shown by many commenters.

For over 20 years, Tatchell has written and campaigned about environmental problems including global warming and resource depletion, pointing out that they often have a disproportionately negative impact on developing countries. In the late 1980s, he was co-organiser of the Green and Socialist Conferences, which sought to ally reds and greens. He championed energy conservation and renewable energy; in particular tidal, wave and concentrated solar power. On 24 May 2009, he appeared on the BBC Daily Politics programme to oppose the Elephant and Castle regeneration scheme, which he said would bring few benefits to local working-class people. However, most of his campaigning continues to be in the areas of human rights and "queer emancipation".

Writing

Tatchell has written numerous articles in newspapers and magazines related to his various campaigns. He was highly critical of the media coverage of the Admiral Duncan pub bombing, claiming that the homophobic attitudes of news outlets had helped fuel the attack, and that the press concerned themselves almost exclusively with the one heterosexual victim, rather than the two other deaths and the dozens of maimed patrons, saying that:

As soon as it became known that not all the victims of the blast were gay, the media suddenly de-gayed its coverage by focusing almost exclusively on the heterosexual victims. The News of the World led with "Pregnant wife killed", and The Sun reassured its readers that "the victims were certainly not all gay". Nik Moore, the gay man who died, was not even mentioned in The Mail on Sunday, and he was relegated to a footnote in The Mirror.

In 1987 Tatchell appeared on the second programme of the first series of After Dark, a discussion on press ethics with, among others, Tony Blackburn, Victoria Gillick, Johnny Edgecombe and Paul Halloran, a Private Eye journalist.

On 5 August 1995, Tatchell was interviewed at length by Andrew Neil on his one-on-one interview show Is This Your Life?, made by Open Media for Channel 4.

As of 2009, he has been an Ambassador for the penal reform group, Make Justice Work.

In 2011, he became the Director of the Peter Tatchell Foundation.

Tatchell is a patron of Humanists UK, an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a committed secularist, saying, "As an atheist, secularist and humanist I believe that reason, science and ethics—not religious superstition—are the best way to understand the world and promote human rights and welfare."

He contributes to The Jeremy Vine Show on BBC Radio 2.

Role models

Tatchell chose Malcolm X as his specialist subject when appearing on Celebrity Mastermind, explaining that he considered him an inspiration and a hero (his other inspirations were Mahatma Gandhi, Sylvia Pankhurst and Martin Luther King Jr.). On Malcolm X's birthday in 2005, Tatchell endorsed Bruce Perry's biography of the African American activist in an article calling for black gay role models, outlining the book's reports of X's same-sex relationships and sex work. This led to criticism from Peter Akinti, editor of Black in Britain, who said the article was insulting and reductive; he said it was the wrong time to write about Malcolm X's alleged sex work and that gay black men did not agree with Tatchell's recommendations for role models.

Awards

In 2006, New Statesman readers voted him sixth on their list of "Heroes of our time".

In 2009, he racked up multiple awards. He was named Campaigner of the Year in The Observer Ethical Awards, London Citizen of Sanctuary Award, Shaheed Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti Award (for reporting the Balochistan national liberation struggle), Evening Standard 1000 Most Influential Londoners (winning again in 2011), Liberal Voice of the Year and a Blue Plaque in recognition of his more than 40 years of human rights campaigning.

In 2010 he won Total Politics Top 50 Political Influencers. A diary journalist reported rumours that he had been recommended for the award of a life peerage in the British New Year Honours. He was said to have turned it down.

In 2012, the National Secular Society awarded Tatchell Secularist of the Year, in recognition of his lifelong commitment to the defence of human rights against religious fundamentalism.

On 21 September 2012, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement award at the UK's first National Diversity Awards. Alongside Misha B, Jody Cundy, Peter Norfolk and others he was a patron for 2013 National Diversity Awards.

In January 2014, Tatchell was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws by De Montfort University.

In 2024, the National Portrait Gallery in London acquired a portrait of Tatchell by Sarah Jane Moon for its permanent collection.

Legacy

The Peter Tatchell Papers are held at the London School of Economics in the Hall Carpenter Archive. Supplementary papers are housed at the British Library. The papers can be accessed through the British Library catalogue.

Peter Tatchell Foundation

The Peter Tatchell Foundation (PTF) is a non-profit, nonpartisan organisation based in the United Kingdom which "seeks to promote and protect the human rights of individuals, communities and nations, in the UK and internationally, in accordance with established national and international human rights law" and its stated aims and objectives are "to raise awareness, understanding, protection and implementation of human rights, in the UK and worldwide". Tatchell started the Foundation as a company in 2011, which gained charitable status in 2018. The organisation was named after Tatchell to honour his 50+ years of globally campaigning for human rights. The charity's celebrity patrons included Sir Ian McKellen and Paul O'Grady who died in March 2023.

The organisation works with a variety of human rights issues globally, such as homophobia, transphobia, sexism, gender inequality, racism, political freedom, censorship, religious discrimination, unjust detention, freedom of association, capital punishment, asylum and refugees, trade union rights, self-determination of oppressed peoples, torture, genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and poverty.

In 2012 the foundation gained funding from The Funding Network for three projects: "Casework & Advice", including adding an "Advice" section to its website; "Equal Love", campaigning on same-sex marriage and opposite-sex civil partnerships; and "Olympic Equality Initiative", working against sexism and homophobia in the Olympic movement.