Andrew Lumsden, who has died aged 82, was a leading light of the London Gay Liberation Front (GLF) when it started up in 1970, co-founded the fortnightly Gay News in 1971 and the following year helped organise the first Gay Pride march, out of which came the global phenomenon known simply as Pride. He set the tone for a community.
GLF was a large, anarchic group with no register of members and few rules, and a manifesto that called for changes to the law, professional psychiatry and public attitudes, and “absolute freedom for all”, which met at the London School of Economics. Andrew was in the counter-psychiatry group, which objected to homosexuality being treated as a sickness or immaturity with “cures” such as electric shock therapy. He was appreciated for his charm and wit, and was swiftly elected to the GLF steering committee, though rather than functioning from the top down, GLF worked on the basis of people making suggestions and seeing if others liked them.
At the time he worked as an oil business reporter with the Times. When he offered a piece about GLF to his paper, it was rejected by the editor, William Rees-Mogg, so Andrew sent it to the Daily Mirror, whose editor also turned it down. Finally, Andrew approached the Spectator magazine, which published the piece and promoted it on its cover. This was a breakthrough in the straight media, which more usually reported on homosexuality as a crime, an illness or a joke.
This convinced Andrew of the need for the LGBTQ+ community to have its own regular, reliable journal, which would reach people outside London, and those unable to attend social or political groups. Another GLF member, Denis Lemon, responded to his suggestion, so they assembled a collective to launch the fortnightly Gay News. The paper swiftly became the main organ of communication and debate in the community, and soon reached a circulation of 19,000, even though the main distributors such as WH Smith refused to handle it.
Although the GLF disbanded in 1973, those who had been involved created new political groups, interest groups, publishers, and other commercial and non-commercial enterprises. Andrew told Dan Glass, the author of Queer Footprints (2023): “GLF was a dandelion … seeds blew everywhere.”
Born in Herne Hill, south London, to Renée (nee Cosbab), a secretary, and James Lumsden, a public relations director, Andrew went as a boarder to Furzedown preparatory school in Littlehampton, and Lancing college, both in West Sussex, before studying English at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Back in London, he lived in a commune in Notting Hill and became an assistant on BBC TV’s Fanny Cradock cookery programmes, before going into journalism with Management Today and the Times.
The Times insisted staff wear suits and ties, but Andrew took his GLF influence to the office by wearing a shoulder bag, beads and painted fingernails. He told Lisa Power for her book No Bath But Plenty of Bubbles (1995): “I remember the chairman of Shell saying to me ‘Where do you get your nail varnish?’”
Andrew liked drag, although he told Power: “There was an obstacle, and that was that I don’t have any ability for drag at all. Absolutely no clothes sense! That made me a singularly awful representative of that sort of look.” He joined “actions”, and one targeted the Champion pub in Notting Hill in the summer of 1972 because, although it was a gay pub, it refused to serve men in drag. The landlord called the police, one of whom punched Andrew in the face. There were several arrests and the subsequent trial at Marylebone magistrates court “was just a haze of frocks and hats and blowing soap bubbles”, said Andrew. He conducted his own defence, intelligently exposed the landlord’s provocative behaviour, and received a small fine for disorderly conduct.
Andrew was an organiser of the first Pride march in London in 1972, inspired by events in New York including the Stonewall uprising, and with several hundred people taking part. Pride is still celebrated close to the anniversary of Stonewall, but now by millions of people worldwide. On the 50th anniversary, Andrew was one of those who organised a Radical Roots of Pride march in London to celebrate Pride’s origins.
Andrew wrote for Petroleum Economist before returning to Gay News as news editor in 1981, and then for a year as editor. The paper had survived prosecutions for obscenity and blasphemous libel, but finally closed when a new owner was unable to support its finances; Andrew and Gillian Hanscombe told its story in Title Fight: The Battle for Gay News (1983).
The following year he became a trustee of the Defend Gay’s the Word fund that was set up to help Gay’s the Word bookshop in Bloomsbury defeat the seizure of thousands of books and around 100 charges brought by UK Customs and Excise for importing “indecent” material. He also became news editor of the New Statesman, where he was the first journalist on a straight publication to come out to his readers.
After leaving the New Statesman in 1987, Andrew became a guide with Trafalgar Tours, taking tourists round the British Isles in the summer months to fund his passions for drawing and researching the life of Edward II. From 2016 he was a guide for Queer Tours of London and devoted time to radical groups, including a revived GLF with younger members.
On his website he wrote about subjects including Henry Labouchère, the politician who proposed the 1885 law first banning “gross indecency” between men. He spent his final days preparing a shooting script for a film about the gay Dutch resistance fighter Bob Angelo.
Andrew is survived by his partner of 17 years, Stephen Clissold, and by his brother, Quentin. Another brother, David, predeceased him.
• Andrew Lumsden, activist, journalist and writer, born 5 August 1941; died 1 November 2023
