For 40 years, I earned no pay working for human rights: Peter Tatchell
Controversial human rights campaigner PETER TATCHELL has spent most of his life struggling to make ends meet while living with death threats and violence as a result of his work. The Australian who ‘outed’ homosexual bishops and politicians in the 1990s, tells Donna Ferguson that he lived on £6,000 a year for decades.
What did your parents teach you about money?
To always save for a rainy day. I grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and my family was very poor. My mother had acute life-threatening asthma attacks, so a lot of the family income went on doctors and medical bills. I remember coming home from school… and finding there wasn’t much food. From the age of seven, I did odd jobs to earn pocket money. I came to England in 1971, when I was 19, because I was opposed to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War and the draft. If I’d stayed in Australia and refused to register for conscription, I would have faced two years imprisonment.
Have you ever struggled to make ends meet?
Yes. For almost 40 years, I worked unpaid for human rights. For most of my adult life, I earned an average of about £6,000 a year doing bits of parttime freelance research and journalism alongside unpaid human rights work. I couldn’t afford to turn on the central heating. I’d wear three sweaters, two pairs of trousers and a woolly hat indoors, to keep warm. I always tried to buy reduced-price food and rarely had money to eat out, go to the cinema or the theatre. I was driven by my passion for my campaigning and the many successes I helped to secure. [In the UK] this included helping to end the psychiatric profession’s designation of homosexuality as an illness and police harassment of the LGBT+ community, collaborating with others to secure government funding for the fight against HIV and AIDS
The best financial year of your life?
In 2020, I moved in with my partner, a graphic designer, and for the first time in about three decades, I started sharing my living costs. We each almost halved our individual outlay. For police security reasons, I have to be extremely secretive about where we live and who my partner is, because I’m under constant death threats and plots to kill me, and he’s at risk as well. I’ve been subjected to more than 300 violent assaults, plus there have been 50 attacks on my home: mostly bottles and bricks through the windows, but also three arson attempts and even a bullet through the letterbox.
What is the most expensive thing you bought for fun?
An around-the-world air ticket for £1,080 in 1977, when I was 25. It enabled me to travel 29,000 miles on any airline to any country. I left with £800 in my pocket and had £3 left when I landed back at Heathrow. I did a few odd jobs but I never paid for a single night’s accommodation. I ended up sleeping in trees, on beaches, in cemeteries, bus stations and churchyards. Sometimes I lived on the beach and ate wild fruit and fish from the sea. It reinforced my resourcefulness and resilience, which I had developed during my childhood. With my mother being so sick… I had to bring up my… siblings. I was effectively their surrogate mother.