Picketing Jill Knights office
1998
“People involved in the Lesbian and Gay Community Centre Aston also became involved with the Anti Section 28 campaign for lesbian and gay rights. It has been said that the Birmingham LGB community was three people and a set of mirrors and it certainly felt like that at times! You’d go to a Centre meeting and it would be the same people you’d seen at Switchboard, or Friend. I remember being in a large group of about 50 picketing Dame Jill Knight’s office in Five Ways (Edgbaston MP and author of Section 28) in 1987-88, and opposite her office a group of workers put pages of the Sun in the windows. She told the paper that her constituents were terrified of coming to see her because she was barricaded in the building by these militant homosexuals – how right she was. A couple of chants, a couple of banners and slogans like ‘Get your Clause out of our lives’”.
Contributed by: Lyn David Thomas, 47