50 Years on From the Founding of the Gay Liberation Front: progress made since and applicability today

Contributor(s): Dr Jacob Breslow, Angela Mason, Dr Gillian Murphy, Professor Jeffrey Weeks | The GLF was formed as an international activist movement for the liberation of LGBT people after the Stonewall Riots in New York in 1969. The event will look back at its founding and early history and examine what progress has been made since and what learnings we can apply to the challenges the LGBTQ+ community faces today.

Part of the event will include a short presentation from LSE’s archives that will be given by Dr Gillian Murphy, the Curator for Equality, Rights and Citizenship at LSE Library.

Jacob Breslow (@jlbreslow) is Assistant Professor of Sexuality and Gender at the LSE Department of Gender Studies. He is author of Ambivalent Childhoods: Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child, forthcoming with the University of Minnesota Press (2021). 

Angela Mason is Labour councillor for Cantelowes ward and Camden’s Cabinet Member for Best Start for Children and Families, a founder member of the Gay Liberation Front, and Executive Director Stonewall 1992-2002. Angela is an alumnus of LSE and was made an Honorary Fellow of the School in 2011.

Gillian Murphy is the Curator for Equality, Rights and Citizenship at LSE Library. She moved to LSE with the Women’s Library in 2013, where she had worked as an archivist for many years. Gillian promotes the Women’s Library collection and the Hall-Carpenter Archives through exhibitions, talks, blogs and workshops.

Jeffrey Weeks joined LSE as a research assistant in October 1970, and a few weeks later he got involved in GLF, taking part in the first demo in Highbury Fields in November. Involvement on the gay liberation movement changed his life. In the 1970s he was a pioneer of LGBT history, writing an account of the emergence of the movement, Coming Out. This was the first of many books on the history and sociology of LGBT life in particular and sexuality in general. 

Minouche Shafik, Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, will deliver welcoming remarks at this celebration.

Rishi Madlani (@RishiMadlani) is Head of Sustainable Finance and Just Transition for the NatWest Group and is the Global Co-Chair of their Rainbow Network, the staff network for LGBT staff and allies.