We had a lot of basketball courts.” He was also aware of the cultural legacy being built around him. “I remember a lot of games we used to play, I remember loving the streets. They told my sister that she wasn’t wanted by our mother.”ĭespite this parental animosity, Brown describes a happy life in Harlem, surrounded by other Black children. “I’ve met my sister since, recently, and she explained how they would actually hide her in the laundry in their home and say she wasn’t there. The divorce courts had given his parents shared custody of his sister, but his father would stop his mother from picking her up at weekends. When she was released, Brown and his mother moved to Harlem, where he attended the Catholic Our Lady of Victory school – the only place where he could meet up with Jewel. “Some people say that explains a lot,” he laughs. He then called the hospital, says Brown, telling them: “This woman is crazy.” Walker was detained in Pilgrim State hospital in Brentwood, New York, where Brown was born on 1 February 1950. One day he invited Walker to the new home he was sharing with an American girlfriend and gave her a cup of coffee, which he had laced with drugs. When Dorothy Walker was pregnant with Brown in 1949, his father was determined to keep her away from Brown’s older sister, Jewel.
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By the time he was born his parents were no longer together and their relationship was frighteningly turbulent. Many of these groups marched alongside the GLF at the 1972 Pride demonstration.īrown, 71, was born in New York to Jamaican parents – his mother was a pharmacist and his father a garage attendant. The GLF was also joined by “people who had been involved in the miners’ strikes and the Angry Brigade, and had been closeted in those campaigns”, says Brown. “One of the very first GLF marches,” says Brown, “was held in Notting Hill Gate, and run by people from the Mangrove” – the Caribbean restaurant on All Saints Road, Notting Hill, which became a hub of Black organising activity, and was the subject of a recent film by the director Steve McQueen. And all of its demonstrations were coalitions with other liberation groups. In fact, the UK branch of the GLF was formed after the LSE students Aubrey Walter and Bob Mellors met at a September 1970 conference in Philadelphia facilitated by the Black Panther Movement. This nascent gay liberation movement was intrinsically intertwined with the civil rights movement for racial justice, Brown says. And we managed to campaign and get an appeal and get it reduced to something like three years.” “There was one man who was 21 and his boyfriend was 19, and he got a 14-year sentence. At the time some men were paying a heavy price for this law. The following year “our youth group marched against the unequal age of consent laws”, says Brown. Eakes had been arrested for cruising following a “pretty police” sting – where police officers posed as would-be sex partners. In 1970, Brown was at Highbury Fields, north London, to protest against the arrest of Louis Eakes, the chairman of the Young Liberals.
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This was not the GLF’s first march for gay rights. It was only five years after 1967, the Summer of Love and the peak of the hippy movement.”
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He was one of the few Black people in the first Pride march, and remembers it being composed of “mostly young people, mostly white, inevitably, and mostly hippies. His work with the GLF, his efforts to improve the treatment and representation of LGBT people in the media, and his battle against abusive policing make him a key figure in both British civil rights history and LGBT history. “The basic principle of the GLF was that one should come out to show people who we actually are,” says Brown. Organised by the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), the London march followed the Stonewall uprising and first Pride parade in the US. “I felt that we were continuing the legacy of the civil rights march.” That day he took photographs of buoyant butch lesbians and men in drag, crowding around the Trafalgar Square lions and fountains, draping them with banners and demanding liberation for all. Half a century later, his memories of the day are euphoric.
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He was at the event he had helped to organise, the UK’s first official Gay Pride, in which more than 2,000 people marched through the capital before holding a mass kiss-in. Ted Brown: the man who held a mass kiss-in and made historyįorty nine years ago today (on 1 July 1972) Ted Brown walked through central London, stopped at Trafalgar Square for a kiss – and made history. Ted Brown (left) with his partner Noel and human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell (right) at the first Pride march in London, 1972