The catalogue of the archive of human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell (b.1952) is now available.
Tatchell is best known for his LGBTQ rights advocacy. He was born in Melbourne, Australia, and emigrated to London in 1972, where he quickly became involved with the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). In 1973 he was the GLF’s delegate to the World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin, where he distributed leaflets in support of gay liberation inside the German Democratic Republic. In 1986 Tatchell published a pioneering self-help book, AIDS: A Guide to Survival [find in the SOLO catalogue] and was a founding member of the UK AIDS Vigil Organisation and the UK chapter of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).
In May 1990, Tatchell was one of the founding members of the campaign group OutRage! (founded in reaction to the homophobic murder of actor Michael Boothe). OutRage! became well-known for their non-violent, direct-action protests opposing discrimination against gays and lesbians in the United Kingdom. Activists were frequently arrested and prosecuted for their protests, with Tatchell notably fined under the obscure Ecclesiastical Courts Jurisdiction Act (1860) for interrupting the Archbishop of Canterbury during his 1997 Easter sermon. Tatchell also made multiple attempts to arrest Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, for human rights violations.
In 2011, OutRage! ceased operations and Tatchell founded The Peter Tatchell Foundation, a non-profit whose work seeks to promote and protect human rights in the UK and internationally.
In addition to his campaign work, Tatchell fought a number of parliamentary campaigns. In 1983 he ran as the Labour Party’s candidate in the Bermondsey constituency by-election, in 2000 he was an independent candidate for the Greater London Assembly, and in 2007 he was the Green Party’s candidate for Oxford East.
The archive mainly comprises Tatchell’s working papers for his protest and political campaigns, including research materials and protest ephemera (including a set of photographs of OutRage! protests by Steve Mayes), as well as papers relating to Tatchell’s journalism and travel writing. The catalogue is a first edition and additional protest ephemera and objects will be added following conservation work.