Author: International Times, no. 93, 3–17 December 1970
GAY-IN Protest
Last Friday the Gay Liberation Front held a gay-in on Highbury Fields.
About 150 turned up with balloons, streamers, flares and fireworks, protesting about the treatment of gay people in Britain.
The protest was sparked off by the Louis Eakes trial in which Louis was found guilty of an act of ‘gross indecency’ with another man on Highbury Fields.
Louis is a leading Young Liberal and the police had been threatening toget him for some time. On this occasion, he’d just left his girl friend and was walking over the fields when a man approached him, asked him for a cigarette and engaged him in conversation.
Suddenly two uniformed pigs arrived. The man ran off – and the police didn’t bother to give chase.
In this case the laws and attitudes against homosexuality have allowed the pigs to frame aomeone who happens to be a heterosexual. Every day people who happen to be gay are threatened and busted under those same laws.
Source. International Times, no. 93, 3–17 December 1970
A newspaper cutting reporting on the first GLF protest, 1970 LSE -
HCA/CHESTERMAN/28. LSE https://blogsmedia.lse.ac.uk/blogs.dir/65/files/2023/02/Chesterman_28-1.jpg
From: Gillian Murphy, The Gay Liberation Front, April 25th, 2023 [At LSE] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2023/04/25/the-gay-liberation-front/
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