Mad Granny in the attic

The Gay Liberation Front is the mad granny in the attic to every major LGBT activist development since the 1970s in the UK. Without her blood, few of our current venerable organisations would exist. We don't talk about her much, a lot of her descendants feel vaguely embarrassed by her, but there are some bloody good stories to tell of her mad youth and she has a lot of children to feel proud of.

GLF was born in New York on June 27th 1969 and brought to London the following October by Bob Mellors and Aubrey Walters. It wasn't the first gay organisation in Britain. Others, such as the Homosexual Law Reform Society, had achieved partial decriminalisation for gay men and Arena 3 discreetly supported gay women. But the Gay Liberation Front wasn't, like them, reformist. GLF was revolutionary, part of the late 60s flowering of the counter-culture, full of students, hippies, artists and activists. It was born of a riot against a police raid on a bar, the Stonewall Inn. In London, its weekly meetings were the riot, the place to be for anyone lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender who wanted to change the world and change their lives. GLF organised the first and the best gay demonstrations; they invented gay nuns, Gay Days, gay communes; they made demands instead of requests; and they improvised the first London Gay Pride, marching along Oxford Street in radical drag with the police running after them in confusion.

GLF signalled the start of the end of shame for being gay. People from GLF went on to found the first gay newspaper, Gay Times. Pride descends in a direct line, of course. It may hold fancy high-ticket receptions in the Paramount these days for the New Tories, but Pride was born out of anarchy and anger and, well, pride.

GLF were the first to understand the central importance of schools sex education, to demand the right to show affection in public and to claim equality before the law. But the most important thing about GLF was that equality wasn't enough. Their aim was not to imitate anyone else's lifestyle, but to discover their own. In a 21st Century of civil partnerships, gays in the government and Equality as an industry, GLF still has relevant questions to ask. "Equal? Equal to what?"

There are two things that money can't buy in the Pink Pound consumerism of the 21st Century; ideals and self-respect. GLF had both in spades, and modern LGBT people, immersed in reformism and respectability, have much that we could learn from its wild, brief flowering forty years ago. This year, we celebrate our mad granny, who bequeathed us so much. It's a heritage worth exploring and the GLF Manifesto demands still remain relevant.