Episode 1 - Ted Brown with Abi McIntosh

Black and Gay, Back in the Day

Season 1 Episode 1 - “Ted Brown with Abi McIntosh”

Date: 04.10.2022

Season: 1

Episode: 1

Presenters: Marc Thompson

Contributors: Ted Brown, Abi McIntosh

Producers: Shivani Dave, Tash Walker

Music: Kemi Oyolede

Artwork: Amaroun

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[Music]

MT: ‘Welcome to Black and Gay, Back in the Day’. We’re bringing to life the archive of images of Black, LGBTQ+ life in Britain from the 1970s to the early ‘00s. I’m Marc Thompson, I’m an activist and health promotion specialist, and I’ve built this archive with the journalist and writer Jason Okundaye.

[Camera shutter]

MT: A Black and white photo shows a man with short hair and look of determination on his face, glancing towards a camera over his shoulder. His leather jacket and flared jeans are a staple look for the 1970s, a keychain is clipped onto the belt loop of his jeans and tucked into his back pocket. The man who we know to be Ted Brown, a gay liberation front activist and journalist, is straggling a bicycle. He has a copy of the paper he writes for clipped to the Black of the bike. The image on the front page is difficult to make out, but in bold letters the words read ‘Gay News’. Ted and the bike are on a quiet street, a few pedestrians are going about their lives behind him, it looks cold and everyone is in a big coat. 

[Music]

MT: to have a closer look at what the media landscape looked like for Black LGBTQIA+ people at this time. I asked the writer, producer and former Pink News journalist Abi McIntosh to dig into it.

[Music]

AM: So I've got a picture of Ted here, he’s got a really really nice smile and he’s got a really, really friendly face and I really like his outfit. I love the cut of his jeans and he’s got his keys on a tool belt which is still very much in fashion now. I’ve not actually heard of Gay News before but I know the Bishopsgate Institute has lots of gay archives so it might be a good place to go and see if I can find a copy of Gay News…

[Music]

AM: So, I’m here at the Bishopsgate Institute institute. I think there’s a concert going on but we’re gonna go and look at the Gay News archives and see if I can find the newspaper that Ted has in the picture. So, we’re just walking along the corridor and there’s lots of posters and pictures documenting various times; the campaign for homosexual equality and posters for Switchboard and one for Stonewall, the UK Lover archives, oh I think this must be the library. 

[Footsteps on wooden floorboards]

AM: So, we’re in the basement of the Bishopsgate Institute and we’re going to go and look at the archive of the Gay Newspaper. So, here’s loads and loads of big, Black bound A3 folders starting with January of 1973. So let’s start with the first one which is January 1973.

[Pages opening]

AM: I actually haven’t seen that many newspapers from, I guess, the 70s. I've seen old copies of Diva and Curve magazine but I’ve never seen a uk gay newspaper before in person. There are pictures of men kissing on the front cover. I wonder where you’d get a copy of this from and how people, how straight people, thought looking at this. Oh my god! So it’s pieces relating to the politics of kissing, ‘When a gay kiss costs £20. in Marylebone Court recently, 61-year-old grocer Ralph Thompson of Wembley and his 40-year-old friend Thomas White were each fined £20 for sharing a goodnight kiss’. That makes me think of the kiss on the bus, the lesbian couple that got attacked, and actually, I don’t ever do a goodnight kiss now because of that. I’d rather take the 20 pound fine though then homophobia! [Laughs] Marylebone Court, that's near where my high school was. Marylebone is not an area I would kiss in, even now. 

[Pages turning]

AM: Even looking at this magazine, like it’s supposed to be for men and women and it’s mainly about men and there aren’t that many articles about lesbians. And the one that I found is about the oppression of lesbians. One thing I’ve noticed flicking through this is it is very white and I wonder what Ted made of that at the time. I think that unfortunately this is still the case in the media and in LGBT media, it’s very white and very male and if there’s anything to do with lesbians or queer women they are white women. Like people say it all the time but I do feel like we are less political than we used to be, and I wonder why that is or if Ted thinks there’s a difference at all…so that will be really interesting. 

[Street sounds]

AM: I’m approaching Housmans Bookshop, I’ve never actually been here before but it’s just round the corner from Kings Cross station. I'm really excited to meet Ted here at Housmans which holds so much queer history.

[Background chatter]

AM: It’s so weird to see so many queer books in one place and not hidden in the back. There's a lot of political and LGBTQ+ books here; got the autobiography of Malcolm X, Queer London: A guide to the city’s LGBTQ+ past and present, this I have read and it has some of my favourite places in it. I feel like I could spend a few hours here just going through everything, there’s so much to look at. 

[Door opening]

AM: Hey!

TB: Hi, hello.

AM: Nice to meet you, I’m really looking forward to meeting you.

AM: We’re in the basement of Housmans, which is round the corner from Kings Cross. You can hear trains going by, there’s people awaking around. Has it always been like this?

TB: Well as far as I know, yes, well, in fact, it was even busier in those days because that was the beginning of many of the women’s movements, the lesbian and gay movement, um, Black civil rights movement were beginning to become active and Housmans was the centre for all that activity and was pivotal. 

AM: So I've got a picture here that’s of you.

TB: Oh! I was a writer on the first ever gay newspaper in Britain, Gay News, and that’s me in Normand Place, I think, it is where Gay News was regionally published. 

AM: Do you remember that photo being taken?

TB: Yes, I do. I don’t remember who took it. And I think that was the first copy of Gay News ever published on the back of my bicycle and I have two pictures there.

AM: I really like your outfit, those jeans are great.

TB: Yes!

AM: I would love to get a sense of what it was like to be a young, gay person knowing that being gay was illegal, like having sex, because you were 19 or 20 when you joined?

TB: Yes it was very scary, and luckily for me because I was American and my mother had been involved in the civil rights movement in America and I had been at the great march on Washington when Martin Luther King gave his speech, his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, I was feeling very sad and lonely when I was 15, I told my mother that ‘Mum, I think I’m becoming homosexual’, that’s the only term that I knew in those days, I didn’t know any other gay people and I didn’t know the term ‘gay’. But just by chance she had actually been at one of the meetings where a man called Bayard Rustin had spoken and said in 1963, I think, that one day homosexual people would be fighting for their rights the same as Black people were fighting for their rights. But when I told her, she cried on my shoulder and I cried on her shoulder, because she told me, ‘you’re going to spend your life dealing with both the racism and the hostility people have towards homosexuals’.

AM: It’s really nice to hear your Mum was so supportive of it at the time because obviously, people think that Black people are inherently homophobic so it’s nice to have a positive story. I came out when I was maybe 17, I think I realised very young and my Mum actually read my diary and then spoke to me about it. It didn’t actually go very well, she’s quite religious, so that’s why it's nice to hear your Mum. Your Mum’s Jamaican? 

TB: Yes.

AM: My mum’s Jamaican as well as so it’s nice to hear a positive story from a Jamaican parent.

TB: Yeah.

[Music]

TB: Yeah, the difference now is for many people coming out as lesbian, gay or trans is it’s a public issue, and people know that there are lesbians, gays and trans people who are asserting their rights but, in 1965, that wasn’t so. The only way that homosexuality was discussed was as a mental illness, a perversion or immoral, if it was mentioned at all. So as said, I was very lucky to have a mother who wouldn’t condemn me for doing something that was not malicious or vindictive, and who had fortunately heard the speeches by Bayard Rustin.

AM: So, I went to Bishopsgate Institute where they’ve got loads of the Gay News archive and I went through some of the newspapers and I’ve got one here, it’s from August the 6th 1981.

TB: Right. 

AM: And on the front it says ‘keep Britain Straight: Guards Against Gays.’ 

TB: Is it somebody crushing the pink triangle? Oh lord!

AM: Do you want to have a look?

TB: Yep.

AM: Do you remember that?

TB: Ugh!

AM: It’s from a long time ago. 

TB: I don’t remember this particular issue, but then my memory isn’t all that good! There are only some things that I remember, but I might have written in it. I did try to write, most of my writing was trying to make sure they’d introduce more women into it, because it was so totally male.

AM: That's one of the things I noticed when I was flicking through. 

TB: Yes. 

AM: That lots of it was very white and very male, very little women and if there were women they were movie stars.

TB: And trying to get female and non-white or people of colour representation in the magazine.

AM: What was it like working for a gay newspaper? 

TB: Er, let’s say many of the people were very well-meaning, which means that I sometimes felt patronised but I could also understand where they were coming from. When we came to this country in 1959, my mother traipsed all around London and was confronted with signs saying ‘no Blacks, no Irish and no dogs’ and that was perfectly legal in those days and it took a long time before that kind of prejudice was overcome. 

AM: So I want to talk about how you formed a group for Black and gay lesbian people?

TB: Yes, called BlackAMH, Black Lesbians and Gays Against Media Homophobia, and that was formed around two particular issues. The first one was the hostility targeted at the Black footballer, Justin Fashanu, who came out in 1989-90 and the major Black newspaper, The Voice, had headlines saying how he had brought shame on the Black community and how his brother had deserted him, so we joined an organisation, we formed an organisation, Black Lesbians and Gays Against Media Homophobia, and mounted a boycott of The Voice newspaper to the point that they actually had to apologise and gave us a right of reply. So we had two pages in the newspaper in which we wrote and explained why their contempt against gay people was wrong and why we deserve to be treated as well as everybody else in the community. 

[Music]

TB: But we continued, there was a much more severe case I think a few years later when an artist call Buju Banton released a song called ‘Boom Bye Bye’ which they sang about encouraging people to kill lesbians and gays by shooting us with machine guns and burning tyres around our necks. Now Buju Banton was being touted as the biggest thing since Bob Marley and he was due to appear on the Ed Sullivan show in the United States. His record was being played on the BBC, but that was because they didn’t understand the Patois of the song so me and my colleagues translated the song to the BBC which stopped playing it and he was supposed to appear at a festival called WOMAD and when we explained the lyrics of ‘Boom Bye Bye’ to the organisers, they told him that he could appear on the stage but he shouldn’t sing that song and he refused and he said he was going to sing that song and so he was banned. I appeared on the programme ‘The Word’ where this was discussed and Shabba Ranks answered ‘if you contradict the laws of god you deserve crucifixion’ (laughs) there was turmoil in the studio and I was seen saying ‘we’re not going to put up with this kind of insults and threats anymore from artist like Buju Banton’. He virtually lost his career as a result of us publicising the hostility and hatred expressed in that record.

AM: What was your motivation, or your driving force to be so, to take such a stand instead of…There’s plenty of gay people who aren’t activists.

TB: Well it’s a continuation of human rights, as I said, because my family and my mother had been involved in the civil rights movements, I just felt this was unfair.

[Music]

TB: One of the things I tried to do when I joined the Gay Liberation Front was to point out to the community that it was a diverse community, there weren’t just white men involved in the gay fight, there were Black people and Chinese people and Asian people, it was an issue for women, it was an issue for people who didn’t accept the traditional male/female roles in society. One of the things that became prominent in the Gay Liberation Front movement at the beginning was the pink triangle, now the pink triangle was something that gay men had been forced to wear in the concentration camps by the Nazis before they were put in gas chambers alongside Jews that were being killed. But the Gay Liberation Front adopted the pink triangle as a symbol of pride. I later had another badge designed that included the pink triangle but also Black triangles and white triangles to try and imply and to assert the multiracial aspect of gay rights. And I have it here now to show you.

AM: It reminds me of the ‘More Colour, More Pride’ flag that has the brown stripe. How did you feel wearing these bags? 

TB: Oh, I was very proud about wearing it because the majority of people assume that being lesbian or gay was something that we felt ashamed of and it was a wonderful experience being on the first pride march to know that we were amongst people, other lesbians and gays who were gong to fight for our rights and who were proud of who we were. 

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AM: So do you think there has been a change in the way Black gay people are represented in the media. Do you think there’s more of us, do you think it’s the same? 

TB: It definitely has become an issue, for example, the rainbow flag now automatically includes non-white people, people of colour, it also includes trans people, these issues are now being taken seriously and we are being recognised as a part of the community.  When we were first demonstrating in 1970, we had no way of knowing whether there would be civil partnerships for example, legal rights to work without being attacked for being lesbian or gay, that theres were the public celebrities who were openly lesbian or gay, those aren’t achievements that should be undervalued, it took a long time to overcome centuries of prejudice to achieve what is now a better situation for lesbians, gays and people of colour.

AM: You mentioned that, you wanted to make it clear that not everyone who’s gay or a lesbian is white, what kind of experience did you have?

TB: The worst experience I ever had was going on a date with a white man who I’d spoken to for about an hour, and I thought we were getting on well, and we went to a restaurant and he literally tried to show me how to use a knife and fork. 

AM: Woah!

TB: [laughs] And it just showed how primitive their attitude to Black people was, you know, or, in fact, he was very surprised that he asked me, how did I learn to speak English so well. 

[Both laugh]

TB: He just, but actually that was better than some of the things that had happened to my mother in the early days in America.

AM: So when I came out, the first thing I did was find TV shows with lesbians in, but you came out and joined the GLF, do you think that young people today are less political? 

TB: Yes, I mean, I think many people take some of the advantages that we have today for granted. And although actually I think that that’s an advantage because it is good that, say, young women today don’t have to go through what my mother did for example, the danger with taking these things for granted is that you don’t appreciate the, your achievements, and there are people waiting to take those away, and I think many of us need to be more conscious and politically active in order to keep what we have and to move forward. 

[Music]

MT: Hi Abi!

AM: Hiya!

MT: How’re you doing?

AM: Yeah, good.

MT: Good, so I hear you went to see uncle Ted. 

AM: I did! I went round to meet Ted, it was so nice! 

MT: Yeah how did it go, how was it?

AM: It was really good, it was really interesting to chat to him. I really cherish any time I get to speak to older, LGBT people, particularly Black ones. 

MT: So, you started off by reflecting on the picture from the account which is Ted on his bike delivering gay news back in the early 70s. How was that to reflect on the picture with ted then?

AM: Yeah, it was great. He’s wearing really nice jeans! Yeah it was a good starting point to talk about the work he was doing for Gay News at the time and what went on to be Gay Times. 

MT: Were there any particular things from that part of the story around Gay News and Ted’s role that surprised you or was completely out of the blue?

AM: I think one of the things he said that really stuck with me is how he was fighting to include more Black people, women particularly, in Gay News. That’s one of the things I noticed when I went to Bishhopsgate and that some newspapers didn’t have any Black people at all in them and if there were they were, I don’t know, celebrities like Eartha Kitt. And it’s a shame that that is basically what I still think the media is like now, it’s very white, male focused. 

MT: And did Ted talk to you about the challenges that he faced and how he overcame them to get that representation in the press?

AM: Yeah, he showed me his badges he made with the pink triangle and he has a triangle with Black and white mini triangles inside which really reminded me of the ‘More Colour, More Pride’ flag. And it’s really nice to see that he was fighting for that but also sad that he’s talking me through some of the stuff that he went through, and basically trying to, I guess, humanise Black people for gay people, gay white people didn’t really understand the struggle of being Black and gay. And actually, what I really enjoyed was talking to him about the Black community embracing the gay community, particularly in Brixton which I hadn’t really heard many stories about. You always hear that Black people are really homophobic and it was really nice to actually hear that he has really good stories of gay people and Black people working together. and also he talked to me about coming out to his mum, and she is Jamaican and my mum is Jamaican, and I didn’t have a positive experience with mum but it was really nice to hear someone who is Jamaican have a really nice experience coming out. So yeah, I really liked to hear that. 

MT: Why do you think it's important that we hear those stories which are positive about acceptance in our community?

AM: I think because there aren’t that many Black gay people like in the media that you can see. The stories that you hear of being Black and gay are always negative and certainly when I came out, from what I’ve heard from the media about Jamaica, being gay there isn’t ok and I just thought that I’d have to pick a side. So it’s so nice to have a positive story about coming out because I am back and I am gay so yeah, this is who I am, so it nice to have stories that have that. 

MT: So you said there about picking a side, or feeling like you have to pick a side, and I think many of us who are people of colour and we’re queer and we’re sometimes faced with that. Tell me a little bit now about what that looks like and feels like and then how you resolve that. 

AM:- So yeah, I think for example with me coming out, you know, you’d go to Soho and places in Soho are white. There are no Black spaces in Soho, so you think ‘ok well this is the music I, if I wanna go gay clubbing, this is the music I have to listen to’. And if I wanna go, well I felt growing up that if I was going to a Black club or I was talking to ted about Buju Banton and murder music, and that’s the kind of music I heard at clubs, and realising the thing is well I actually thought about the lyrics that I heard when I realised I was a lesbian and I was like ‘Wow this is the music that I think, this series of words that the Black community or Jamaican people, this is what they think is ok. I really struggled, I love reggae, I love dance hall, I really struggled with having to maybe lose that part of my culture like being around that kind music with my family and at hall parties, that’s what it reminds me of. And obviously now like Black people are more visible as gay people and there are Black spaces where they play dancehall and reggae and it’s so nice that I didn’t have to lose that part of me to be a lesbian. 

MT: Let’s just unpick that little bit about the bashment dancehall murder music thing because I remember when Ted and a number of other Black queer people were fighting against that and pushing through a ban on their music and there was a conflict in our community about that, some people were like ‘I love this music and the lyrics don’t really hurt me, I just want to dance and enjoy myself’. Today, we’ve got spaces like Queer Bruk and places which celebrate dancehall and bashment culture. Do you think that music has a place today, can we enjoy it? Or should it be wiped out and put aside like Ted was fighting for? 

AM: I think I can get where obviously Buju Banton coming on the BBC and saying that is one thing, and I can understand like that is not ok but I think going to Queer Bruk and being around other Black people who have grown up with music that sounds like that. I think it's really nice to be in a space where you can feel like you can reclaim that. And obviously I prefer not to listen to music with that kind of lyrics, but the sound reminds me of growing up, it reminds me of all the people I love the most, my family, my grandparents, being in Jamaica, and it's nice to have the spaces to listen to that in a safe way, knowing that the people who are singing the lyrics around me don’t actually believe that. One of the things me and Ted did discuss is the lack of Black women in the media and in spaces, and I do think that is still an issue today. I think that queer women, queer Black women are missing from a lot of conversations or there’s that movie that Ted was talking about, Boys in the Band, there isn’t a lesbian in that. And when there are lesbian stories they’re often white and American focused.

MT: I think you’re right. I think that does continue because we see women excluded from media across the board, I think there are some really high profile Black queer women who have made a huge change and are really present, our Lady Phil’s and our Munroe Bergdorf’s are really really out there and I’m just really keen that we continue to develop the next generation to enable them to flourish. And I think that in media representation, that’s what I wanted to ask you, as a Black, queer journalist, how are you making a difference and making a change around that representation, what are the challenges that you face?

AM: I think that one of the big challenges is making people believe that people care about these stories, that’s really, really hard and I’m really keen on pitching positive stories. I think I’ve seen enough negative stuff, when I was growing up I didn’t see a positive happy future for myself a Black queer woman and that’s definitely why I want to send positive voices. And there are amazing women doing amazing things, and that is why I want to profile them basically. 

MT: Yeah, and how’s that going?

AM: [Laughs] I think that I’ve been lucky that I’ve been given the opportunity to meet a lot of people and bring with me people that I’ve really think are interesting so I’ve worked on a documentary recently and made sure that I brought Black voices to that documentary. And it’s a challenge and it's hard but that is what I’m really passionate about so I will really make sure that I tell Black queer stories.

MT: Yeah, and Ted was also quite heavily involved in the Lesbians and Gays Against Media Homophobia and was tackling and challenging The Voice newspaper. What were your reflections on Britain’s only Black newspaper being so virulently homophobic at the time?

AM: I actually only found out about that story a few years ago, and The Voice was a newspaper that I grew up with in my house, mum mum reads it, my dad reads it, quite a few of my family read it. And I find it really disappointing that the only Black newspaper, the biggest BNP in the UK, would have such a horrible viewpoint on being gay and such a vocal viewpoint and having, holding such a big position being circulated across the UK and being read by so many Black people, I’m really disappointed by that. But I think, since, The Voice has changed a lot and they do tell a lot more stories, they have a lot more women on the team and I’ve read loads of positive things from the voice.

MT: I mean they featured me last year, talking about Black gay love, so I mean that’s…

AM: I couldn’t believe that!

[Both laugh]

MT: That’s a huge leap! So Abi, tell me after speaking to Ted, how has that impacted what you might do in your work in the media in the future?

AM: i think it's just given me more of a reason to use my voice more, I think there are definitely more ways that I can be more vocal about my experience, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the loudest voice in the room but I think anything I do now I’m going to try and put Black queer woman at the front of it and it's just, Ted, his work, was done so long ago and some of the issues that he was facing I’m still facing now, but it doesn’t mean it’s not important to try and fight those things anyway. Any new generation thinks they are the first to do stuff and I think making sure we know our history is really important and I’d love to know that people know the work of Ted and what you’ve done.

MT: I’m always gonna say, there’s no need to invent the wheel, you just need to put new spokes and pump up the tyres!

AM: exactly

[Music]

MT: I’ve been your host, Marc Thompson, reporting this episode was Abi McIntosh. You can find the picture we've discussed in today's episode and all the images talked about throughout this podcast on Instagram, @BlackAndGayBackInTheDay. And drop us a message if you have something you want to submit to the archive, a link will be available in the show notes. 

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