Chapter 25: GLF: 25 years on.

This chapter reprints the article GLF: 25 Years on, which was first published in the June 1996 issue of Pink Paper. This article marks the 25th anniversary of the first British Gay Day rally in Hyde Park, London, England. Whilst earlier homosexual rights movements in Great Britain and Europe had campaigned and lobbied for equality in law, and tolerance, Gay Liberation looked beyond narrow parliamentarianism, recognizing that questions of sexuality affect every aspect of society, from women's wages to the school curriculum, as well as opportunities for personal happiness and fulfillment. The Gay Liberation Front (GLF) movement provided the initiative behind a wide range of institutions founded by and for lesbians and gay men in the seventies, such as the national Switchboard movement, and the emergence of the modern gay press, which in turn nourished our original responses to HIV and AIDS in the early eighties. GLF always insisted that the regulation and policing of homosexuality, in public or in private, was equally of political significance. This came from direct experience. The author is convinced that much of the deeper popular impetus behind GLF related far more to the dramatic contrast between British and mainland European experience, than to the direct influence of the U.S.