20/05/2022
Human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has declined an invite to attend the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations outside Buckingham Palace. Mr Tatchell criticised the Queen’s failure to even mention LGBTQIA+ people during her seventy year reign, the longest since the first monarchs of a united England in the ninth century. The organisers of the Buckingham Palace event should perhaps have realised that Mr Tatchell would decline any invite. He was asked some thirty years ago by the bar paper “Boyz” whether he’d accept an OBE. “Certainly not”, he replied. Like other critics of the monarchy, such as the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, Mr Tatchell took the opportunity to offer a critique of the institution, with Pink News reporting that he noted that after the 1999 neo-Nazi nail bomb attacks on gay, black and Asian businesses in London, the Queen did “not visit the bomb scene or the victims in hospital”. However, it should be noted that Prince Charles did visit Old Compton Street in the heart of gay Soho after the attack. Mr Tatchell told The Guardian that he will instead be spending the Jubilee Day speaking about trans rights at 'HowTheLightGetsIn' festival in Wales. “The royals are steeped in a history of war, colonialism and slavery,” he said. Some other LGBTQIA figures are reported to have accepted an invite to attend ceremonies at Buckingham Palace, including television personality Gok Wan.
