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Antony Grey
Many
readers will know the name of Antony Grey
(pictured above), one of Britain’s
first-ever gay-rights campaigners. I’m sad
to say he’s died. He was 82, and hadn’t been
in good health for some time. He had
leukaemia and died at King Edward VII
Hospital in London last Friday.
Anthony Edgar
Gartside Wright (his birth name) was
instrumental in getting the government of
the day to push through the 1967 Sexual
Offences Act, which led to the first major
breakthrough in gay equality. Gays were not,
of course, equal, but the Act did
decriminalise sexual activity between two
consenting adults (over 21) in private. It
was a step along the way.
Grey began
campaigning for sexual equality in 1968, as
you can read in
this Pink News
article.
It was then
that he joined the Homosexual Law Reform
Society, later joining and becoming
secretary of the Albany Trust, a charity set
up to help gay men who had developed
psychological problems after being
persecuted.
Grey also
wrote several books, including Quest for
Justice: Towards Homosexual Emancipation,
Speaking of Sex and Speaking Out:
Sex, Law, Politics and Society.
Grey had
lived with his partner, Eric Thompson, for
50 years, even during the years when it was
considered dangerous for a male couple to
share a house.
Grey’s
death was the “end of an era”, says
Thompson, who recalls in the Pink News
article how things had changed from the
early 1960s. “One night, when we were living
in Hampstead, there was an almighty crash,
as though the chimney had fallen down. A
coach had crashed into several houses.
“But the
first thing we did was not to call the
police – it was to make up a spare bed,
because you knew that when the police came
round they would have been far more
interested in our sleeping arrangements than
the crash.”
“I don’t
think the younger generation realises how
things were in those days.”
George
Broadhead, secretary of the Pink Triangle
Trust (PTT), has told us that he, too,
mourns the death of Antony Grey, a former
PTT sponsor, whom he got to know well when
the former was secretary of the Gay Humanist
Group (GHG) now called the Gay and Lesbian
Humanist Association (GALHA).
“Antony
joined GHG in October 1979 shortly after it
was founded and remained a staunch supporter
until the controversy over an article
published in the Autumn 2005 issue of Gay
& Lesbian Humanist magazine to which he
was a contributor. This article was
perceived by some as racist, but Antony
disagreed and sadly resigned his GALHA
membership. He was always a staunch defender
of freedom of expression and against what he
considered political correctness.”
Indeed,
Grey wrote a fascinating article, “Fight for
free speech”, on
the subject of freedom of expression for
G&LH when it was relaunched as an
online publication in late 2008. Here is the
standfirst, to give you a taste, and you can
click on the link above to get to the
article itself:
We live in
sombre times. On the pretext of protecting
us from terrorism, an obviously frightened
and increasingly authoritarian UK government
is steadily stripping away traditional
safeguards of individual liberty and freedom
of expression, which at least the older
among us had hitherto taken for granted as
part of the weft and warp of Britishness.
Antony Grey
was one of the true, and largely unsung,
heroes of the modern gay rights movement.
His contribution, often at great personal
risk, to the relative freedom we enjoy today
in Britain deserves to be far more widely
known. He will be sadly missed by all those
who value freedom and equality.
– Mike Foxwell
Editor
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