Today marks campaigner and activist Peter Tatchell’s 60th birthday. This week he will also be celebrating 45 years of his career in human rights campaigning, and 10 years since the creation of his human rights organization, the Peter Tatchell Foundation. As one of the UK’s best known LGBT rights campaigners, Tatchell has not had an easy road to recognition.
“In the 1980s and 90s, I was one of Britain’s best known LGBT rights campaigners, I was demonised by the tabloid press,” Tatchell says. “This made me a magnet for homophobes from all over the country. It was like living through a low-level civil war. There were moments when I feared that I’d be killed. I made a will.”
Tatchell has been attacked many times – he has permanent scars, impaired vision and loss of memory loss from brain damage to prove it, reports the Guardian.
However, none of these attacks have stopped him from campaigning for what he believes is right. “I receive 800 to 1,000 emails a day and reply to them all,” he says. “I typically work 12- to 16-hour-days, seven days a week. I was up until 4.30am this morning replying to urgent emails and was out of bed again at 9am. I’m constantly ill and exhausted,” he told the Guardian.
Despite this, he claims he is “just a minnow.” “My contribution is very modest, but together with many other people, I know that we are cumulatively and collectively making the world a better place.”
