30/10/2025
Well known human rights activist Peter Tatchell has praised His Majesty King Charles III in becoming the first reigning British monarch to attend an LGBTQIA event. LGBTQIA Nation reports that Charles "has dedicated a memorial to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender military service members at the United Kingdom’s National Memorial Arboretum. The memorial recognizes both current LGBTQ+ members of the armed forces and those who suffered under the military’s LGBTQ+ ban." The memorial was funded by donations from the community made through the charity Fighting with Pride. The group received £350,000 (approximately $467,000) to create the memorial. After reviewing submissions, they chose one from the Abraxas Academy, a Norfolk-based collective of artists. The artists, Charlotte Howarth and Nina Bilbey, say that the “concept for the memorial symbolises the personal letters of endearment collected as evidence to convict, expel and imprison LGBTQ+ personnel during the ban, and the anxiety of living in constant fear of receiving a formal letter accusation.” Mr Tatchell had previously criticised His Majesty for not taking any stance on LGBTQIA human rights, in contrast to his successor, the Prince of Wales, William, who has made numerous positive statements in the spirit of his reformist mother, the late Diana, Princess of Wales. However, in 1999, the then Prince Charles did make a visit to Old Compton Street to visit the devastation caused by a nail bomb planted by mad racist, homophobic Neo-Nazi murderer David Copeland, who is currently rotting in prison. Charles on that occasion was praised by the gay media, with Boyz newspaper saying that he had made a "princely gesture". While homosexuality was decriminalized in the England and Wales only in 1967, the military held a ban against LGBTQ+ personnel until the year 2000. During that time, LGBTQ+ people in the military, or those suspected of being LGBTQ+, were subject to intensive investigations filled with invasive questions about their private lives. In 2023, then-prime minister Rishi Sunak and several Home Office officials publicly apologized for the ban. Sunak lamented that “many endured the most horrific sexual abuse and violence, homophobic bullying and harassment, all while bravely serving this country. He called the ban “an appalling failure of the British state.”
https://www.petertatchellfoundation.org/
