I moved to London in September 1984 and began attending London LGSM meetings at a pub called the Fallen Angel in Islington. Occasionally we joined picket lines at London power stations in an attempt to stop the delivery of highly dangerous aviation fuel that was being used in the absence of coal.

On a picket trying to prevent delivery of fuel to East Neasden power station in London. (I’m second from the right)

But the greater majority of my activity was rattling a collection bucket on the pavement outside Gays the Word bookshop in Bloomsbury.

Collecting outside Gay’s the Word bookshop. Photo courtesy of Jim McSweeney, GTW.

We played a cat and mouse game with the police. The bookshop manager was quite insistent that we had the right to stand on the footpath. The police, of course, weren’t really interested in the niceties of the law. To them we were simply a bunch of perverts collecting money for a bunch of dangerous subversives. Therefore any form of intervention was justified – legal or otherwise.

They’d threaten to arrest us and we’d all step inside the shop and wait till they left. Then we’d return to our spot and our activities until the next visit. And so it went for the remainder of the strike.

Of course it wasn’t just the police who abused us – we got that from our own ‘community’ as well.  I can’t remember getting any stick from lesbians but I certainly remembered a few queens who either felt we were being naive in supporting working class homophobes or who simply looked down on working class people in general.

In December 1984, LGSM supplemented our fundraising activities with a benefit concert at the Electric Ballroom in Camden. Headlined by Bronski Beat, the Pits and Perverts gig raised £5,650 for the mining community in Dulais, South Wales.

The reason LGSM supported specific communities was because the Thatcher government had sequestered the funds of the National Union of Mineworkers. This meant that any funds donated directly to the NUM would simply be inaccessible. In consequence, support groups – LGBT or otherwise – were encouraged to ‘adopt’ specific communities and work directly with them.

I never got to visit any of the communities we supported: coming from a mining village myself I already knew what hardships they were going through and felt my time was better spent rattling a bucket in London.

By the end of the strike LGSM had raised more than £20,000 through a range of activities including collections, jumble sales and benefit gigs. As well as the gig at the Electric Ballroom in London, another LGSM benefit was held at the Hacienda in Manchester (see below).