Allan Horsfall

Allan Horsfall is a veteran campaigner and a part of our collective history. In 1964 he co-founded the North-West Homosexual Law Reform Committee with Colin Harvey which later became the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE).

Allan spoke at the pre-launch of LGBT History Month 2007 at the TUC headquarters in London on 20 November 2006. You can view his full intervention in two parts by clicking the arrow on the images below (click on the YouTube logo at the bottom right corner of the images to view the clips full size).



Speaking for about 15 min, Allan told the audience how, at the publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957 (fifty years ago this year), he decided to start challenging the Labour Party's prejudices against doing anything about gay rights because Labour MPs at the time thought the working class (their supporters) were homophobic at heart. This was not his experience.

He also explained how he found that the (limited) decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 (forty years ago this year) sometimes actually made things worse for gay men with the police showing their displeasure at the new law by making more arrests than before it happen. Regardless, Allan Horsfall took the (for us) bold step to use his personal address to run the campaign. Surprisingly (again, from our perspective), there was no backlash from his local community, although his address was "outed" in the papers.

In his view, the current homophobia rampant in working class minds at the moment is all the doing of the press and particularly the tabloids.

Allan Horsfall has his own website: The Gay Monitor.