Beatings finally take toll on veteran rights activist

LONDON - After surviving more than 300 physical attacks, two stabbing attempts, a live bullet posted through his door and a succession of vicious beatings that have left him mildly brain-damaged, Peter Tatchell must be one of the only people in the world who could still consider himself fortunate.

"I'm lucky," he insists with the quiet nonchalance of someone discussing the weather.

"My injuries pale in comparison to the pro-democracy campaigners in Iran or the environmentalists in Russia or the political activists in Zimbabwe. If they were doing what I was doing, they would be dead."

For much of the past four decades, the 57-year-old has been fighting for what he believes is right. The Australian-born political activist has protested against human rights abuses wherever he has found them.

He has spoken out against the dictatorships in Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile and Khomeini's Iran. In 1990, he founded the influential gay rights group OutRage!, which campaigned so effectively against alleged police harassment that the number of homosexual men convicted of gross indecency in the UK fell by two-thirds in three years.

In 2001, he tried to perform a citizen's arrest on Robert Mugabe in Brussels for civil rights abuse, and was beaten unconscious by the Zimbabwean president's bodyguards.

Two years ago, Tatchell joined a gay pride march in Moscow and was attacked by right-wing thugs who punched him in the face and left him with permanently blurred vision in his right eye.

It takes a lot to make Peter Tatchell stop. But last week he announced he was standing down as the Green Party candidate in Oxford East on medical advice, because those beatings have left him with permanent symptoms of severe concussion.

His injuries were exacerbated on a canvassing trip in Devon in July, when the bus in which he was travelling was braked suddenly and Tatchell was thrown forward, hitting his head on a metal rail.

"I have problems with my memory, concentration, balance and co-ordination," he says, sitting in his small council flat in Elephant and Castle, south London, surrounded by piles of books.

One of his home-made banners depicts Pope Benedict as "the Queen of Homophobia", with fluorescent pink lips and swastika earrings.

"I'm slower, I make mistakes more easily and I don't quite have the drive that I once had. I'm now prone to a bit of depression, but it's manageable."

Two years ago, Tatchell fell over at home, hit his head against the door frame and knocked himself out, waking up some time later in a pool of his own blood - an incident he refers to with typical understatement as "a bit of a shock".

In the last week alone he says he has had "six near crashes" while cycling around London.

"I'd already sort of concluded that I'd have to stand down, but I didn't want to accept it," Tatchell says. "I felt so honoured to be accepted as their candidate that I couldn't bear to give it up. It was a very, very emotionally hard thing to do.

"It's quite hard to admit to brain damage because I've tried to hide it for a lot of the time ... I just carried on campaigning partly because I just wanted to do the job, but partly perhaps because there was a fear that this might affect my ability to continue."

As he says this, Tatchell seems close to tears. His soft Australian accent is punctuated by a slight stammer that seems to get worse when he is talking about the personal cost of his political activism.

"I am very resilient, but I also have a very fragile, sensitive underside, which most people don't see."

Does he feel resentful towards his attackers? "No. There's an element of regret in that I wish these injuries hadn't happened."

Mugabe's henchmen attacked him three times in Brussels - once in the lobby of the Hilton hotel where the president was staying, and twice on the street outside, leaving Tatchell paralysed down his left side for days.

He vividly remembers thugs in Moscow kicking him to the ground with "heavy, black boots". Afterwards, the Russian police arrested Tatchell and let his attackers go free. How can he not feel resentful? "What's the point? Bitterness is a very destructive emotion. Obviously, I think they're bastards," he says with a grin. "But I don't hold some grudge ... The best reward for me would be to change them."

He believes most instances of hatred and oppression stem from a warped sense of machismo - almost all his attackers have been men - and it is hard not to think that part of this might stem from his upbringing in Melbourne.

His parents divorced when he was four and Tatchell barely saw his father, Gordon, when he was growing up because he worked night shifts in a factory.

His mother, Mardi, later remarried and Tatchell's stepfather, Edwin, was an evangelical Christian of Prussian heritage who beat him often.

"He was a monster," says Tatchell now. "There was an element of resentment that I was the result of a previous marriage, so there was a sort of macho rivalry surrounding my father. He beat me very badly, so much so that I used to think he was an escaped Nazi war criminal."

At 17, Tatchell slept with a man and knew that he was gay. He did not tell his religiously zealous mother and stepfather for fear of upsetting them.

"I knew they wouldn't be able to cope mentally and emotionally if I simply blurted out, 'I'm gay' ... so the strategy I adopted was to drop hints. If there was a newspaper story about a gay person being beaten up, I always made a point of saying how shocking it was, that we should live and let live."

Eventually, they asked Tatchell if he was gay. "I said yes. And they thanked me for the way I approached it."

Both his biological parents are still alive (Edwin died in 2002). "They're pretty supportive, even though they still deep down believe that homosexuality is wrong. But they also think that discrimination against gay people is wrong."

Although Tatchell has temporarily abandoned any hopes of a parliamentary career, he still grapples with a phenomenal workload. His doctor has told him he should take a complete break of at least six months, but Tatchell, who works 14 hours a day, seven days a week, and ekes out a living on £8000 ($18,000) a year, largely from donations, is politely ignoring them.

He is extremely thin, living on raw vegetables and cups of tea. On a comparatively uneventful day, he goes to bed at 3am and wakes up at 9am.

"I can understand why people want a quiet, relaxed, material life, but on another level I can't understand why people just accept things the way they are. One billion people woke up this morning without clean drinking water. That is outrageous." He does, at least, admit to the occasional feeling of terror before carrying out his protests.

"There is a nervous anxiety that is partly a fear of failure and partly a fear of being arrested and beaten," he acknowledges. "There are moments when I'm shaking. Then once it's all over and I'm in the back of a police van or a cell, I just have this incredibly serene sense of relaxation and I feel total calm."

As he grapples with the complicated security locks on his front door to let me out, it strikes me that perhaps the rest of us are lucky that he cares enough to carry on fighting, whatever the cause.Observer