The intake of new members over the year has exceeded last year’s by one third and the good news is that many of these are coming in via the website. This gives the subscription rates and a membership application form which can be printed out and used to join online. I think it’s fair to say that the website is proving as effective in attracting new members as the costly paid advertising in Gay Times was for many years in the past. There has also been a welcome increase in the number of members paying their subscriptions by standing order.
Our monthly public meetings at Conway Hall in London over the past year have been more successful than ever with very varied topics, excellent speakers and high attendances.
The programme started in September 2002 with a talk by the gay historian Rictor Norton, author of Mother Clap’s Molly House, who described the closing down of the gay brothels known as Molly Houses in the 1720s following a campaign by the Christian Brethren. This was followed in December by a talk from film critic Mansel Stimpson about the life and work of the British gay film director Anthony Asquith whose screen successes include The Importance of Being Earnest, Fanny by Gaslight, The Way to the Stars, The Winslow Boy and The Yellow Rolls Royce. In January 2003, Adnan Ali, moderator of Al-Fatiha UK, the support group for gay Muslims, talked engagingly, if controversially, about Islam and homosexuality. February’s meeting featured a talk on a Humanist topic – “Darwin and fundamentalism” – given by Mike Howgate, a lecturer at the Natural History Museum who is an authority on Darwin and the theory of evolution. This talk was officially registered as part of the worldwide Darwin Day programme of events. In March, Jo Stanley, co-author of the new book Hello Sailor talked entertainingly about the hidden history of gay life at sea. When gay men on dry land were forced to be closeted, ships were the only places where they could not only be out but also be camp. The April meeting featured another topic of great interest to Humanists – “Is Britain really a secular society?” with a talk given by GALHA member Keith Wood who is Executive Director of the National Secular Society (NSS). We achieved quite a coup in May with Commander Brian Paddick, the country’s best known and most senior openly gay police officer, talking on “Gay Rights and the Police” and this meeting drew an exceptionally large audience of 70 people. In June, author and journalist Andrew Barrow gave a fascinating talk based on his book Quentin and Philip, a memoir of his friendship with Quentin Crisp and Philip O’Connor, denizens of gay Bohemia in the 1940s and 50s. In July, Mansel Stimpson returned to give a talk on the closeted film star and author Dirk Bogarde, illustrated with video extracts from his films, including the ground-breaking Victim.
The meetings were listed in The Freethinker and Time Out.
Thanks to our chair Derek Lennard for organising and chairing the meetings, to Mike Savage for his help in publicising them and to Philip Bayliss and Terry Murphy for helping with the drinks afterwards.
We are very grateful to the General Committee of South Place Ethical Society (the owners of Conway Hall) for agreeing to freeze the hire charge of our meeting room, thereby continuing to make the meetings viable.
Our annual weekend gathering was held from Friday 4 to Monday 7 October 2002 at the Grand Hotel, Plymouth – an hotel which lives up to its name and has splendid views over the famous Hoe. Not for the first time, we realised that you don’t have to stay at a gay run hotel to get a warm welcome and (it has to be said) superior accommodation, food and service. As usual, the weekend included our AGM and we enjoyed a coach excursion to the famous Eden Project just across the Devonshire border in Cornwall. Thanks to Dean Braithwaite for organising this event for the second year running, to Clive James for organising the raffle, and to Plymouth member John Milton for acting as a guide on the tour of the town.
This was held on Saturday 9 November in the private function room of the Navajo Joe Restaurant, King Street, Covent Garden, London and the guest-of-honour/speaker was Darren Johnson, Principal Speaker of the UK Green Party and leader of the Green Group on the London Assembly. With a varied and plentiful buffet meal and a good atmosphere, this proved a very enjoyable event which hopefully will be continued in future years.
We responded to the Home Office’s white paper Protecting the Public in December 2002 and to the Government’s consultation documents Equality and Diversity: The Way Ahead (January 2003) and Equality and Diversity: Making it Happen (February 2003). Many thanks to Eric Thompson for drafting these submissions on our behalf.
No fewer than twenty-four news releases were issued during the period covered by this report, most of them devised by our media officer Terry Sanderson. These resulted in coverage in gay and Humanist publications (including Gay Times and the Pink Paper), The Daily Telegraph, The Observer and The Times, as well as lesbian and gay websites in the UK and the US. Reports also found their way into a number of US newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Albany Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Philadephia Inquirer and The San Jose Mercury News! An extensive interview with G&LH editor Andy Armitage was featured on the US GayToday website.
Numerous letters from the secretary and other GALHA members were published in the gay and Humanist press. Letters from the secretary and Andy Armitage were published in The Guardian, The Times and the Church Times. Also arising from the news releases, Terry Sanderson and Andy Armitage gave interviews on our behalf to radio stations including BBC Radio Leeds, Gloucester, Three Counties, Wales and West Midlands – not to mention the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation!
Following the Vatican’s latest onslaught on gays, a letter was written to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, regarding its privileged position at the UN. We wrote to the Committee of the European Commission formulating the new EU constitution calling on it to reject pressure from religious organisations to include reference to “God” and to keep the constitution entirely secular. We wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury requesting that he distance himself from the religious exemptions in the Government’s anti-discrimination regulations. We wrote to the BBC congratulating them on the gay kiss televised in an episode of Casualty and urging them not to bow to the bigots. We complained to the Charity Commission about the Christian Institute’s anti-gay adoption card. We are still awaiting a response from Kofi Annan. We received a response to our letter to the Archbishop from his Secretary for Public Affairs which, in effect, endorsed the religious exemptions. We received an acknowledgment from the European Commission and a very positive response from the BBC. However, our greatest success was undoubtedly our protest to the Charity Commission. Following a nine-month investigation, the Commission responded with a clear endorsement of our complaint, describing the CI adoption card as “inappropriate” and requiring its withdrawal.
We have continued our affiliations to Amnesty International and the International Humanist and Ethical Union.
Birmingham, Bromley, Cardiff, Lewisham, North-East and Sutton Humanist groups have renewed their affiliations. Thanks to all these for their continued support.
We are listed in Gay Times, Diva, ScotsGay, the BHA’s Humanist News, The Freethinker, the GaytoZ Directory, the NCVO Voluntary Agencies Directory, a MIND Mental Health Factsheet aimed at lesbians and gays, Same Sex Support Services Directory in Wales and the UK, CAB directories, Ask Hollis (the Directory of UK associations), The Guide (Norfolk), the UK AIDS Directory, the Spartacus International Gay Guide, the Yearbook of International Organizations, the IHEU Humanist Directory, and the Freethinker’s Directory.
GALHA committee member Dean Braithwaite continues to represent us on the board of Consortium, the umbrella organisation for lesbian and gay community groups nationwide. We continue to be represented at the Humanist Kindred Organisations’ Forum meetings and the LGBT organisations meetings sponsored by the Greater London Authority.
Derek Lennard represented us at South Place Ethical Society’s Annual Re-Union of Kindred Societies in September 2002 and gave the keynote address Satirising Religion – No Laughing Matter? His play Blasphemy was performed at the NSS AGM in November 2002 and in June 2003 he provided “light entertainment” at the NSS Day Conference Secularism in the Future. He spoke to South London Gay Group on Mark Twain and Religion and represented us at the launch of Jim Herrick’s new book Humanism. Terry Sanderson gave a talk about GALHA to South London Gay Group.
In April 2003 we established a facility to enable new and existing members to pay their membership subscriptions via the Internet using PayPal. This is proving particularly convenient for overseas members, who previously had to negotiate the problems of currency exchange. Access to this facility was made available through the website the following month, giving interested visitors the opportunity for the first time to sign up on the spot.
Our website continued to rise through the search engines rankings. A recent Google search showed the site in 20th place in the UK (and 193rd in the world) in a search on the word “gay”, 5th in the UK (73rd in the world) in a search on “lesbian”, and 4th in the UK (11th in the world) in a search on “humanist”.
The rate of visits to the site accelerated, with the web counter recording almost 8,000 during the year (an average of 153 a week, and 40% up on the previous year). In March 2003 the site was thoroughly tested for linkrot for the first time since it was set up, and all broken links were repaired or removed.
Use of the electronic mailing list continued to rise, with 254 messages posted during the year, a 15% increase on the previous year. A separate list was created to facilitate communication among members of the committee.
We are currently in the process of submitting an “Awards for All” application for funding GALHA’s monthly meetings at Conway Hall in London. Our first application was unsuccessful and we have taken guidance on how to better represent ourselves. In conjunction with Barry Jackson and Derek Lennard, Dean Braithwaite has been developing an overall funding strategy for GALHA which should help us in the future.
This continues to be published quarterly, edited by Andy Armitage and Dean Braithwaite with help from Mike Foxwell. It is issued free to GALHA members and complimentary copies are sent (many on a reciprocal basis) to other LGBT and Humanist organisations and publications worldwide. The publishers and editors are very grateful to all those who have made gratis contributions to the past year’s issues. They are also very grateful to Tom Flynn, editor of the US magazine Free Inquiry, for repeating a free display ad for G&LH which has resulted in a fresh influx of US subscribers.
We are grateful to Dr Stephen Moreton for researching and writing a new GALHA briefing paper on Islam and Homosexuality, a copy of which is available on our website.
Members of the committee serving during the period covered by this report are Dean Braithwaite, George Broadhead, Brett Humphreys, Barry Jackson, Derek Lennard, Roy Saich, Terry Sanderson and Mark Sperry. George Broadhead acted as secretary, Dean Braithwaite as fund raiser and weekend event organiser, Brett Humphreys as website administrator, Barry Jackson as treasurer, Derek Lennard as chairperson and London meetings organiser, Roy Saich as G&LH distributor and Terry Sanderson as campaigns coordinator and media officer. Our honorary auditor was Philip Bayliss.
George Broadhead
Secretary
September 2003