I was still a member of the Labour Party when I moved to Nottingham in 1980. It seemed like a good idea at the time!

But any hopes of political activity were soon washed away by the mind-numbing blandness of local Party meetings. The central agenda item always seemed to be a request to buy and/or sell raffle tickets. Proceedings were rarely sullied with talk of politics or policies.

And so it was that when a flyer for a meeting of the Labour Campaign for Gay Rights was read out (under ‘Correspondence’), the Chair cast a cursory glance around the room asking, rhetorically, “No one wants to go to that do they?”. Then it was quickly back to the safe realm of raffle tickets.

To the Labour Party, both locally and nationally, ‘gay rights’ was a vote-loser (the yardstick by which the Party seemed to measure all its commitments). The public explanation was that it was an irrelevant, middle-class issue – so clearly not something for a Party so focused on the interests of working people.

In 1982, Party leader Michael Foot went out of his way to publicly denounce the selection of Peter Tatchell as Labour candidate for Bermondsey. Rumour had it that Tatchell might be gay. Foot (supposedly a ‘Left-wing’ Labour leader) felt moved to declare in Parliament that “Peter Tatchell will never be a Labour candidate.”

Unsurprisingly, Tatchell lost the election (to a Liberal Democrat candidate who decided not to be upfront about his own sexuality until much, much later). To his absolute credit, Tatchell moved on from this appalling experience to become a leading figure on the human rights stage. Most recently this has seen the creation of the Peter Tatchell Foundation.

And it’s hard not to notice that, as his involvement with the Labour Party diminished, his profile (and successes) increased.

For those other gay and lesbian activists at work within the Party in the 80’s, Michael Foot’s shameful behaviour was merely further evidence of how out of touch the Party had become. As late as 1985, the Labour Party National Executive formally opposed a gay rights motion at National Conference. But it went to a card vote and this time they lost.

And the reason they lost was because the gay and lesbian movement had been steadily building support amongst Party members and trade unionists. It had taken a number of years but, finally, the strategy was paying off.

Central to the awareness raising was the Labour Campaign for Gay Rights (later to become the Labour Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights).

LCGR/LCLGR had started life as the Gay Labour Caucus in the 70’s and had organised fringe meetings at Labour Party gatherings every year thereafter. That, in itself, helped to educate the broader Party membership about LGBT issues.

But there was a more recent event that significantly influenced the size of the trade union vote at Party conference – the 1984/85 national Miner’s Strike.

It was a bitter and prolonged dispute during which the Labour leadership did its best to sit on the fence in case they lost votes. But lesbians and gays from a range of political parties set up groups around the country under the banner of ‘Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners’.

I shall write about LGSM in more detail in a later post but, suffice it to say at this point, that members raised several thousand pounds in support of beleaguered mining communities.

When the miners saw their chance to support us at the Labour Party conference they took it and helped push the Party down a long and begrudging road to gay rights. It was, indeed, an historic moment on so many levels.