When Peter was hetrosexual and a Maoist

Great bit of 1968 nostalgia from Peter Tatchell...with all sorts of new sides to the man! Well I don;t think he was really ever a Maoist.....read on though

The Black Panthers and me

May 1968: Perhaps I wasn't your average head prefect, organising a
school 'Be kind to Mao month', but that was the year that was

By Peter Tatchell

The Guardian – Comment Is Free – 14 May 2008

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/peter_tatchell/2008/05/the_black_panthers_and_me.html

In 1968 I was a 16 year old student at Mount Waverley High School, in
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. My home state was, in those days,
Victoria by name and Victorian by nature. The federal government was
also ruled by a suffocating, authoritarian right-wing government.
Abortion and homosexuality were totally illegal. Plays, books and
films were subject to ruthless censorship. Protests were heavily
repressed and it was a crime in the city of Melbourne to hand out
political leaflets in the street. Anyone with even vaguely liberal
views was denounced as a communist, which carried serious social
stigma and potential career derailment in sensitive professions. The
Victorian state premier, Henry Bolte, was Franco lite.

At school, we'd already won the right to elect a Student's
Representative Council and, through the SRC and a progressive
headmaster, secured reforms in the school administration. Instead of
prefects being appointed by the teaching staff, as was the norm in
many schools, ours were elected by all the pupils. Despite my
left-wing politics and suspected gayness, I was voted head prefect in
1968.

Other pupils teased me about being gay, with playful taunts of
"poofter Pete" and "Peter pansy". They joked that I had the "best
looking legs in the schools." Lots of the girls were jealous. But
despite these jibes, I was nearly everyone's best friend. I laughed
off the teasing because I was, at the time, secure in my
heterosexuality and genuinely had my sights on girls, marriage and
family life. My homosexuality only dawned on me a year later, after I
left school.

My election as head prefect was in some ways quite surprising because
much of Australia was, at the time, viciously homophobic, gripped by
McCarthyite-style anti-communist witch-hunts and by gung-ho
pro-Americanism. Australia had the draft and young Aussies were being
conscripted to fight alongside the US, in a murderous war against the
people of Vietnam; justified in the name of 'saving the Vietnamese
from communism.' We were the poodles of the US in Vietnam, in the much
the same way that the UK acts as Washington's flunkey in Iraq today.

On American independence day, 4 July 1968, in protest at the war, I
made a US flag and organised its symbolic burning in the school yard.
Later, I went on my first protest march: to the US Consulate. To my
shock and horror, we were charged and beaten by truncheon-wielding
police on horse-back. What happened to democracy and the right to
protest, I asked naively.

At around the same time, I helped organise and fundraise for a
scholarship scheme to enable children from poor Aboriginal families to
stay on at school. We coordinated pupils from many different schools
to stage a sponsored Long Walk along Melbourne's beaches. It raised a
huge sum of money. This Aboriginal rights activism, together with my
opposition to the draft and the Vietnam War got me into hot water.
By 1968 our progressive headmaster had been replaced by a right-wing
old fogey. He summonsed me to his office and warned me about my
"subversive activities," demanding to know if I had any connections
with "the communists" who, he said, were "manipulating" young people
like me to overthrow Australian democracy.

The May '68 rebellion in Paris was inspirational. Students, none much
older than me, had taken over the city. The mighty French state was
under siege. We read about the outpouring of school and university
newspapers in Paris. This prompted some of us to produce an
underground student magazine. Apart from school gossip and local
issues, it also poked fun at the ultra right-wing Australian Prime
Minister and the State Premier. When draft copies of the magazine were
discovered by teaching staff, all hell broker loose. I had to use all
my persuasive power to make sure the headmaster did not proceed with
expulsions. The deal was that we had to fold the magazine. Although we
had managed only a partial circulation of the draft copies, we agreed
and later went on to successfully complete our exams and fight another
day.

Paris was far away in what we saw as 'Old Europe.' Closer to Australia
and more influential were the Red Guards and Cultural Revolution in
China. Despite their dogmatism and terrible excesses, which we were
not aware of at the time, they made legitimate demands like "question
authority" and "it is right to rebel." This had great appeal for those
of us who rejected the stifling conformism and authoritarianism of the
long years of unbroken conservative rule Down Under. In response to
the Australian media's deranged and often racist anti-Chinese
propaganda, a few of us organised a "Be Kind To Mao Month," where we
promoted the "good" aspects of the Red Guards rebellion against what
we saw as the privileged, arrogant and authoritarian communist elite
in Beijing.

I remember being engrossed by the nightly TV news footage of the
communist Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which even if only briefly
shattered the proclaimed supremacy and invincibility of the mightiest
military superpower in history. The communists weren't angels, but nor
were they devils, as was claimed by the US and Australian governments.
Their demand for the right to self-determination, free from US diktat,
was a just cause. Even at 16, I realised that Tet was an historic
event – a major challenge to the global hegemony that the US imposed
on the rest of world post-1945.

1968 was also the year of the joyous TV images of the Prague Spring. I
was so excited by the prospect of a democratic, libertarian communism
under Alexander Dubcek. Soviet-style 'barbed wire socialism' was an
inhuman betrayal of the communist ideal of a compassionate, classless
society. It discredited socialism worldwide. I wanted to see it come
crashing down, in Czechoslovakia and in the USSR itself. Seeing this
peaceful, democratic, people-power revolution crushed by Soviet tanks
was heart-breaking.

The assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were
tragedies and crimes that pushed me towards more militant,
revolutionary politics, arousing my sympathy for the Black Panthers
and the Students for a Democratic Society.

I had not long joined my local Waverley Amateur Athletic Club, and
began running competitively 5,000 and 10,000 metres and cross country.
By sheer coincidence, and to my delight, the club's mascot was a black
panther. We wore it on our running vests. When I pointed this out, at
a time when the Black Panthers were branded enemies of the state by
FBI boss J Edgar Hoover, one of our athletics bosses suddenly
announced that the mascot wasn't a panther after all. It was a jaguar.
He didn't fool me. It was a panther and I was running for Huey Newton
and Bobby Seale.

Note: This is a slightly expanded version of the article that appears
on The Guardian website. For the edited online version click here:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/peter_tatchell/2008/05/the_black_panthers_and_me.html

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