The Ways Of Wendyl

Wendyl Harris is one of the foremost and best-known LGBT activists and campaigners in London and the UK. Alongside Peter Tatchell, she was an instrumental force behind the gay rights group OutRage! and has been lobbying for LGBT rights for over twenty-five years. QX caught up with her to find out more about her life, her reasons and her views. 

 


You’re always aware that somewhere along the line people have fought before for you, and then you come out into an environment where the struggle continues,’ muses Wendyl Harris over coffee at Ray’s Jazz Café on Charing Cross Road. ‘I was coming out just as HIV hit in, and that’s a whole huge story of its own. It was inconceivable that as communities we wouldn’t all fight against the system of what was going on.’

Wendyl is an approachable, warm character to speak with in person. Whilst she has a lot of strong opinions and is certainly not afraid to voice them, her views are also concise and considered. She peppers her polemic with frequent laughter and jokes as she waxes lyrical, and frequently what is revealed as the foundation of these opinions is that she cares fiercely about the LGBT community(ies) and all its members.

Why else would you devote yourself so altruistically and doggedly to the LGBT cause over three decades of activism? At 52, Wendyl has been involved with many of the major steps forward for LGBT rights in this country within the last three decades, including the contentious age of consent battle (to lower the age of consent for gay males from 21 to an equal 16) in 1994. ‘We had all these organisations out there, every organisation you could think of, working together, focussing on the campaign for lowering the age of consent from 21, and we all agreed on a policy of 16 or nothing, because a compromise would be worse.

‘If you’re going to discriminate against us you might as well leave it as it is. So that was the big push and the only people who wouldn’t work with us were Stonewall. They wouldn’t work with the other campaigners and then they were actively campaigning for a compromise… It was a cold February, there must have been a thousand of us or more outside the Houses of Parliament, a candlelit vigil, we’d been freezing for hours, and Angela Mason from Stonewall comes out saying ‘we’ve won! It’s eighteen!’ She almost got strung up on a lamppost.’

It is clear that Wendyl is not delivering these words to be controversial for the sake of it, or to deliberately antagonise Stonewall, but from a deep sense of hurt and disappointment held in memory. Equality and fairness shape her world ethos, an ethos inspired in her by her single parent father. ‘I grew up hearing stories about how as a young man he fought in the Battle of Cable Street,’ she tells me. ‘And in the 60s, growing up as a young child in the States, you’d see a lot of stuff about the civil rights movement and my father was trying to teach me about positive attitudes, freedom of expression and equality for everybody.’

Did he extend those values towards gay people? She considers. ‘He did, but I don’t think it really occurred to him until things became publicised on the news so I remembered very clearly the Stonewall Riots from the news reporting, and that’s where he sort of extended it then. But at the time I was still very young, so with your parents you just yawn and go ‘yeah, whatever.’’

She gained her first experience of protesting shortly after though, one long, hot summer in the 1970s when she and a group of fellow pupils staged a playground protest at her school against not getting half-days like the other local schools. ‘We were just asking for the same treatment as everyone else!’ Undeterred by her subsequent expulsion, the art of questioning the status quo and mistrusting establishment authority stayed with her and aided the formation of leading gay rights protest group OutRage! in the early 90s.

‘It was a sense of growing outrage amongst the community where people were just muttering away ‘well, what’s next?’’ she states. ‘There was an increase in police entrapment – cottaging, easy convictions -, we had a serial murder going around, Colin Ireland, and because of the way the police were treating us and increased abuse from the general society on account of HIV and AIDS, it meant that at first they were doing very little.

‘People forget that when you have the very much conservative gay attitude that we have now: ‘why do they have to be so loud and troublesome, those screaming queers?!’ They forget that it’s an OutRage! action in 1991 or 1992 where we tried to register for marriage in certificates in Westminster that began fighting for marriage equality.’

Along the subject of marriage equality, Wendyl gives me the closing line of her interview, and a reason why she’s still fighting the struggle in 2014: ‘We’re not making enough of a sense of the areas that matter: the same-sex marriage act is worth nothing as long as our kids are still killing themselves, and we’re still getting kicked in the teeth in the street.’

 

• To read the full ‘In Conversation With’ interview with Wendyl Harris, visit: qxmagazine.kinsta.cloud/blog-event/in-conversation-with-wendyl-harris/

www.outrage.org.uk

 

On gay marriage: ‘I get irritated that people keep talking about this as marriage equality, because it’s not, it’s the same-sex marriage act, because it’s separate legislation which has been set up specifically for us and it’s not full equality because there are still some loopholes and still some issues.’

 

On racism and LGBT: ‘I don’t really expect to see the kinds of divisions we have in terms of racism in this day and age within the queer communities and yet it’s still there. In fact, I think it’s worse. I look back on my past and seem to remember a slightly better cultural mix.’

 

On the gay community of London:I would like to think that we could use the generic term [‘gay community’] because we were one community and we stood together and supported each other but it’s quite sad really in 2014 to see the divisions between lesbians and gay men are just as bad as they ever were in some areas and the divisions between the LG and the BT.’

 

On gender identity:The lack of education that exists just amongst our own communities about different types of gender identity is quite disturbing. What’s the excuse? I don’t understand. I’m 52, if I can get a grasp of it, I expect the younger generations to be able to do it, it’s not hard.’

 

On the EDL:The EDL is profiting from recruiting – they have a LGBT branch! Because they understand the principle, the age-old principle that’s been going on by governments for centuries to set people against one another.’

 

On Stonewall:I think that any and all groups that are doing some sort of organising work matter and have their place. I would probably say on a very personal level I don’t feel that all of those groups are necessarily going about it in the best possible way.’

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