Peter Tatchell: The Missing Years.
A movie about Peter Tatchell ignores his decades-long obsession with paedophilia. Is this why it also erases a key period in his life? I've discovered what Tatchell did during his missing years.
I may have finally solved a mystery about Peter Tatchell; one that’s been bugging me for ages. The answer emerged after I watched the Netflix film about him.
When I finally forced myself to watch it last week I quickly realised why I’d been so reluctant.
‘Hating Peter Tatchell’ is as objective about its protagonist as the New Testament is about Jesus Christ. Swap the Sermon on the Mount for the Bermondsey by-election of 1983 and you get a sense of its reverential tone. In this latterday gospel Pontius Pilate is played by the Labour leader Michael Foot who washed his hands of a self-sacrificing Saviour.
You know who.
Talking of religion, the film sheds light, unwittingly, on the strangely messianic rhetoric of Tatchell. His dad, it turns out, was a pentecostal preacher. Those hectoring, self-righteous and angry denunciations we’ve come to despise are, it seems, a family tradition. Not that anyone in the film is ever as rude as to point that out.
Nor is the possibility ever raised that Tatchell, who was beaten by his homophobic step-father, might unconsciously have internalised that contempt. Could that be why Tatchell never seems more alive than when placing himself in physical danger and being beaten up by homophobes?
I’m rushing on. Before we get to the mystery the film helped me solve, let’s prepare the ground. To understand why the answer to that mystery is so important we need to return to an infamous letter, a certain anthropologist and a child-abusing tribe.
Naturally, none of these were mentioned in the Netflix movie. There was something else that was notably absent in the film. Something that forced me to go on a journey…. deep into the shadow-filled maze that is the story Tatchell tells about himself.
It was there I made a discovery that chilled my blood.
‘Hating Peter Tatchell’ has a stellar cast of A-list gays. Elton John and David Furnish produced the Neflix bio-pic and Ian McKellen conducts the central interview of its star: Tatchell. The interview is intercut with testimonials from among others Stephen Fry, the ex Labour Minister Chris Smith and Tom Robinson, famous for his 1978 hit ‘Glad to Be Gay’.
The first thing that quickly becomes apparent is the film-makers did not exactly torment their fact checkers. If they had any. So…. Tatchell tells the story of the first Pride march and says it happened “a few months after” the Stonewall riots. It didn’t.
The whole point of the Christopher St Parade in 1970 (which was retrospectively described as the first Pride) was that it was held on the first anniversary of the Riots. A year after Stonewall not “a few months”. It’s a detail but you’d think Tatchell who presents himself as a witness to the past might have known something so basic. And if he didn’t, why was it not corrected by the people making the film?
Then again this is a show that keeps referring to the LGBT community when describing events that happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the term hadn’t been invented. We are, in other words, in a zone where facts are considered negotiable.
Robinson, for example, calls himself ‘queer’ in the film, a reference which doesn’t seem to be ironic, despite the fact his song made a hoo hah about British homophobic cops calling gay men…. queer. It’s par for the film’s revisionist course.
Tatchell himself makes a great deal of his trip to East Germany in 1973 to a gathering of the global Communist Left. In East Berlin, he tells us, he was arrested after distributing gay rights leaflets to delegates.
What he and the film fail to tell the audience is that he was the official delegate from Britain’s Gay Liberation Front. Nor do they tell us that Article 175 which criminalised homosexual acts was abolished in East Germany five years before his visit in 1968. Indeed when East Germany was founded it immediately reverted to the milder version of Article 175 in force during the lackadaisical Weimar Republic. West Germany stuck with the Nazi version that criminalised even a kiss or a “lustful glance”.
It’s just one of countless examples where Tatchell can’t stop tweaking the truth in order to magnify his role.
There is a puzzle about this film though. It’s to do with a curious gap.
The movie plods methodically through Tatchell’s life almost year by year from his birth in 1952 in Melbourne to the present day. In 1971, it recounts, he came to London to avoid national service in Australia. We then hear about the Gay Liberation Front being founded in London later that year, the first UK Pride march in 1972, and his East German faux-heroism in 1973. Then there’s a screeching jump and we are in 1980 with Tatchell joining the Labour Party to begin his journey to become the openly gay candidate for the Bermondsey by-election. What happened between 1973 and 1980, I wondered. What could Tatchell have done in those missing years?
There lies a story.
I had decided to watch ‘Hating Peter Tatchell’ in the hope it might shed light on another mystery about Tatchell, a much bigger one than those few missing years. The mystery concerned Tatchell’s strangely intense interest in Papua New Guinea and his very specific interest in the sexual behaviour of some of its people. Let me explain.
Over the last couple of years I’ve written a lot about Tatchell and his various apologia for paedophilia, not least his notorious 1997 letter to the Guardian in which he cited the work of the anthropologist Gilbert Herdt.
You may remember it’s in this letter that Tatchell offers Herdt as an example of the “distinguished psychologists and anthropologists” he claims “document examples of societies where inter-generational sex is considered normal, beneficial and enjoyable by old and young alike.”
In his letter Tatchell said that Herdt “points to the Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea where all boys have sex with older warriors”.
It was when I read Julie Bindel’s brief description of the initiation rituals of the Sambia in an article first published in 2018 that I decided to dig out Herdt’s scientific papers and books and read them for myself.
It’s only when you see the photographs with which Herdt illustrated his work, which he took himself, that you really get a sense of the depravity of the practices he spent a decade studying. I used some of those images in a thread last year.
This is a photograph of two boys being kidnapped and taken into the jungle where they will be beaten, whipped and then taught how to fellate adult men.
Tatchell in his 1997 letter said the “boys grow up to be happy, well-adjusted husbands and fathers”. Yet Herdt emphasises that Sambia culture was a violently misogynistic one in which women were constantly beaten and it was taboo for men and women to show public affection. Well-adjusted?
After reading Herdt I widened my search about Tatchell. Last year I went back to an article in Gript, the Irish site, published in 2020 which I had merely skim read at the time and began to join the dots.
Gript revealed that Herdt had been interviewed by Paidika, a pro-paedophilia magazine and in that interview offered advice about the best way to “normalise” child abuse. They also pointed out the book ‘Dares to Speak’ which Tatchell was defending in his 1997 letter was largely made up of essays that previously appeared in Paidika.
It’s hard to believe the men who openly published this magazine included eminent academics, theologians and an elected Dutch politician and hardly any of them felt the need for a pseudonym. Gript gave a flavour of some of the articles, that included,
“On seeing a Beautiful Boy at Play”; “The Irresistible Beauty of Boys” and “The World is Bursting with Adults, so I’m always Glad to See a Little Girl.”
Tatchell has always claimed he didn’t know Herdt had been interviewed about paedophilia in a pro-paedophilia magazine just three years before ‘Dares to Speak’ was published. It’s a claim that stretches credulity. As all his excuses do.
He claims, for example, that when he wrote an essay in 1986 for PIE Deputy Chairman Warren Middleton’s book ‘Betrayal of Youth’ he didn’t know the book was pro-paedophile. Yet his own essay in the book says,
“Certainly in the realm of sexual ages of consent we need to ask whether the law has any legitimate role to play in criminalising consenting, victimless sexual activity”.
Tatchell then argues that rather than specific legal protection from sex with adults, children actually need protecting from the guilt and anxiety …
“which are so often stirred up by sexual encounters outside the age of consent precisely because they are illicit and regarded as shameful.”
In other words the reaction to the crime is the problem not the crime.
Try that with any other crime. Like burglary or assault.
The references at the end of the essay by Tatchell include the book Birthright, in which Richard Farson argues children of whatever age should be allowed to “conduct their sexual lives with no more restrictions than adults’.
What could possibly go wrong?
If Tatchell had retired into obscurity then perhaps his lies and obfuscations would not matter so much. There are plenty of old paedophile-defenders who have never been held to account. Take ….Professor Kenneth Plummer, one of Britain’s most influential sociologists. He was a member of PIE and passionately defended paedophilia. He’s now dead though and while his sickening obituary in the Guardian in 2022 should have recognised his …..err…..chequered record…..there are probably more urgent fish to fry.
By contrast, Tatchell is alive and well and continues to try to influence our political and cultural life. He’s never off the box and even runs a campaign in which Chief Constables apologise to the LGBT+ community …..through their self-appointed representative, Saint Peter of Tatchell.
Then there’s that Netflix movie, complete with McKellen et al.
That’s why it matters what motivates Tatchell and what his agenda really is. That’s the reason I drilled down last year into the work of Gilbert Herdt. Among other things, I discovered Robert Stoller, who invented the term ‘gender identity’, was Herdt’s academic supervisor. In 1979 Stoller was so…….fascinated….. by Herdt’s research he flew 7000 miles to Papau New Guinea to see the Sambia for himself. Talk about keen….
Stoller then wrote a chapter in his book Perversion that examined ‘Kiddie-Porn’ and how it sexually excited men. What a strange coincidence….
If you’ve read other articles by me you probably remember all this. If not you’re now up to speed. It’s time to grab a torch and carefully tread a little further into the fetid cave of Peter Tatchell’s imagination.
Herdt isn’t the only anthropologist that Tatchell has quoted to try to justify his own views. He also frequently cites the work of Frank Beach and Clellan Ford who together published a study of the sexual behaviour of so-called primitive societies and reported that many tribes were accepting of homosexual activity. Here’s one reference to their work on the site of the Peter Tatchell Foundation.
I was so disgusted by Tatchell at the end of last year I couldn’t face looking at him in any more detail. I also assumed the reason he no longer talked about Gilbert Herdt and instead cited Frank Beach and Clellan Ford was that their work was all above board. Last week I decided it was time to double-check.
Just to make sure.
There had always been something about Tatchell’s references to their work that struck me as ….a little curious. Their landmark book Patterns of Sexual Behaviour, first published in 1952 and then republished in a new edition in 1965, describes 76 “primitive” societies all across the world. 49 of them, they reported, considered homosexual behaviour more or less ticketyboo.
The thing I found curious was Tatchell only ever cites two of these 49 tribes. And both are in Papua New Guinea. Here he is on his Foundation’s website citing those two tribes: the Sambia and the Keraki.
And here he is doing the same in his Ted Lecture. He acknowledges that Beach and Ford, of whom he says “I’m a great fan”, describe 49 tribes who are relaxed about homosexuality. Then he pivots to discuss only the Keraki and the Sambia.
Curious, no?
Tatchell uses these two tribes to try to back his argument that sexuality is not fixed. Everyone has the potential to be bisexual, apparently.
‘The future is bisexual. Get over it’, his headline crows.
An obvious question is why Tatchell has never, to my knowledge, talked about any of the other 49 tribes that Beach and Ford said were also accepting of homosexuality or bisexuality. Wouldn’t they be worth mentioning occasionally as well as his old stalwarts, the Sambia and the Keraki?
The other problem, a rather more serious one, is we already know one of those tribes is, to say the least, problematic. The Sambia are no one’s idea of a model of sexual mores. No one except Peter Tatchell that is.
The men of the Sambia can only be considered “bisexual” if you think that men who hate women and rape boys are…. bisexual. I suppose on one level it might be argued these men are technically or theoretically a subset of bisexuality -by a stretch- but they’d hardly be anyone’s go to choice to define the category. Anyone except you know who, that is.
There’s yet another problem with Tatchell’s references to the Sambia. I’ve now read Beach and Ford’s Patterns of Sexual Behaviour from cover to cover, including its maps, index and glossary looking for any reference to the Simbari, the real name of the tribe for which Herdt invented the pseudonym Sambia. Guess what? Contrary to Tatchell’s endless references to them, Beach and Ford never mention the Sambia. Not once.
When you think about it this makes sense. Beach and Ford’s work was based- as Tatchell himself says in his Ted lecture- on anthropological research conducted between 1920 and 1950. Herdt’s claim to fame (or notoriety) is that he was the first researcher ever to study the sexual behaviour of the Sambia (Simbari). The Sambia are located deep in the remote Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea which wasn’t easily accessible until Herdt started his work. Beach and Ford could not possibly have referred to a study that hadn’t yet happened when they published their book. So why does Tatchell repeatedly claim they did?
The only explanation for this misappropriation I can think of is that Tatchell is so determined to keep using the Sambia as an example of “sexual fluidity” he is prepared falsely to claim Beach and Ford mention them. In some cases the only tribe he cites from the work of Beach and Ford are the Sambia. A tribe they never mention.
I assume by the time Tatchell published this article above in 2014 he realised citing the paedophilia apologist Gilbert Herdt who really did study the Sambia would be a rather large red flag. Note though how Tatchell continues to claim that among the Sambia “all young men entered into a same-sex relationship with an unmarried male warrior”. At the risk of repetition this is entirely untrue. Boys as young as ten were kidnapped, beaten and sexually abused by adult men.
What then about the other tribe Tatchell keeps referring to….. the Keraki?
Ford and Beach did indeed describe the sexual behaviour of this tribe. To do this they drew from the landmark study of the Keraki by the eminent Australian anthropologist, Francis Edgar Williams.
Published in 1936, his Papuans of the Trans-Fly is a detailed study of every aspect of the behaviour of this tribe who inhabit the Trans-Fly, a coastal region in the south west of Papua New Guinea.
Williams’ work is a mindnumbingly exhaustive account of everything about the Keraki from head-hunting etiquette to cooking utensils and diet. He devotes comparatively little space to sexual behaviour but what he does is jaw-dropping. If you thought the Sambia were bad….
The practices Williams describes, like those among the Sambia, have now been stamped out. Thankfully. I’ll talk about them in the present tense though, because that was how Tatchell read about them and how he talked about them.
The society of the Keraki, as revealed by Williams, is only marginally less violent and misogynistic than that of the Sambia. How Tatchell could even entertain the idea these people are some kind of sexual example is beyond belief.
For one thing, girls among the Keraki are married off at the age of ten. Williams doesn’t describe the sexuality of girls or women so Tatchell can’t be talking about their bisexuality. What Williams does describe, and what is then quoted by Beach and Ford, as “homosexuality” is the universal sodomising of prepubescent and barely pubescent boys.
Just as the Sambia believe that boys have to fellate adult males as much as possible in order to become men, the Keraki believe that boys can only grow into manhood by being raped as much as possible. Anally.
“For a long time the existence of sodomy was concealed from me”, writes Williams, “but latterly, once I had won the confidence or a few informants in the matter it was admitted on every hand. It is actually regarded as essential to the growing boy to be sodomised. More than one informant being asked if he had ever been subjected to the unnatural practice, answered, ‘Why yes! Otherwise how should I have grown?'“
When they show early signs of pubescence, or sometimes before, boys are taken to the waramongo, or men’s ritual centre, and used by adult men and initiated youths. Williams says they are then made “available” not only for the men of their own village but any visitors to it. Although Beach and Ford don’t devote as much space as Williams to the Keraki everything I’ve mentioned so far is in their work too. Tatchell who says he’s a fan of their work would therefore have read all this.
Here’s Beach and Ford on the boys’ use by any man who wants them.
“That night begins a period of nearly a year during which the boys play a passive role in sodomy with older men. During this time they may not even be seen by women but are constantly at the service of older men, who may be fellow villagers or visitors who wish to have anal intercourse with the initiates”
I mean….what on earth can one say about this?
Whatever it is it could not possibly be that this tribe provides useful clues to the future of human sexuality. Yet…..this is the only tribe out of the 49 that Beach and Ford did describe that Peter Tatchell has chosen for years to hold up as an exemplar.
He argues the Keraki -along with the Sambia- prove that males can have happy homosexual relationships when they are young and then go on to have ….happy, fulfilling heterosexual relationships. Yet these tribes prove nothing of the sort. They prove that if a society encourages the rape of children, these children may come to believe this is normal and then when they grow up rape children themselves.
I am at a loss to comprehend what makes Peter Tatchell tick…or what is driving him, but I fear this dark, empty vision of abuse and sexual exploitation may represent his moral core.
In one of his most horrifying lines Francis Edgar Williams reports how,
“cases of what appears to be prolapsus ani [prolapsed rectum] have been described to me in awed breath.”
Williams also relates how he himself saw one boy die of infection as a result.
Having read about the Keraki I knew what I suspected about Tatchell. There was though one remaining doubt that gnawed at my certainty.
Perhaps, I rationalised, it was just some kind of random tic that made Tatchell bang on about Papua New Guinea. He was from Australia after all. Maybe for him Papua New Guinea had always been a byword for exotic. It didn’t explain why he only mentioned the Keraki and Sambia out of 49 tribes, nor why he claimed the Sambia had been described by Beach and Ford when he must have know they weren’t. But it’s not as if he was so committed to the child-abusing tribes of Papua New Guinea he did what Robert Stoller did and actually went there.
Perhaps, despite all the evidence staring me in the face…Papua New Guinea was to Tatchell a kind of imaginary, otherworldly landscape and his interest in its people was purely theoretical. Mmm, unlikely I know.
That’s why I finally decided to watch the Netflix movie. Perhaps it could help me dispel that little gnawing doubt. And that’s where the puzzle confronted me: those missing years between 1973 and 1980.
I looked online and in Tatchell’s own papers he donated to the Labour History Archive it states that between 1974 and 1977 he “worked freelance in design and display whilst studying for a BSc in Sociology at the Polytechnic of North London” and then “after he graduated in 1977, Tatchell became a social worker with the North Lambeth housing agency in Waterloo.”
Phew. This suggested the reason the movie didn’t mention those missing years was that nothing much had happened. Everything was a bit mundane. I was just about to dismiss the “missing years puzzle” as a silly invention of my hyperactive suspicion when I came across an article in the Guardian written by Tatchell which covered the period in question.
These years now sounded far from mundane as Tatchell recollected,
“My 20s, which spanned 1972-82, were a decade of escape to freedom, to experience things beyond my limited background and to forge my own identity and life. They were challenging, often anxiety-provoking, years – but also exciting and transformative.”
The headline itself was a conversation-stopper. The decade the movie ignored included…. “sleeping in cemeteries”?!
The article went on,
“I hitchhiked around Morocco, east Africa and the south Pacific islands; mostly sleeping rough in trees and cemeteries, and on roadside verges and beaches. I was poor. It was tough. I often didn’t eat well and got dysentery in the Sahara, which nearly killed me. I had two other narrow escapes: falling when climbing cliffs in Hawaii and being dragged out to sea while surfing in the Solomon Islands.”
Tatchell expanded on this astonishing story in an account on, of all places, the website ‘This Is Money’ in which he reported,
“I lived on the beach and ate wild fruit and fish from the sea.”
Surely this action packed journey, which Tatchell himself claimed was “transformative”, would have made a brilliant moment in the movie? It would certainly have offered a fresh perspective on Tatchell who seems today such a quintessential city dweller. It now struck me as doubly strange these years were ignored.
Then as I wandered through the archives of the Peter Tatchell Foundation I came across this little marvel from the man himself,
“In 1977, while I was trekking in the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea, word spread of the presence of a “white man” wandering in the mountains.”
Err….wait a minute.
Written in 2020, this brief account by Tatchell of a visit to Papua New Guinea in 1977 is a passing reference in an article about human rights which focuses on the oppression of the Western half of the island (West Papua) by Indonesia.
This account of a visit to Papua New Guinea suddenly clarified everything about Tatchell for me. All residual doubt vanished. Tatchell’s obsession with the country was no longer some abstract fancy, no theoretical illusion. It was concrete. He had cared enough about the country to travel there. His interest in its tribes was so passionately keen he was willing to trek hundreds of miles deep into a malarious and dangerously remote region of the country to witness for himself how the locals …..lived their lives.
There is, of course, absolutely no proof that Tatchell was drawn to Papua New Guinea by anything other than youthful curiosity. There is no evidence of malevolent intent on his part either. Like so many things about Tatchell’s biography this latest twist could….of course….. be yet another startling coincidence.
However, let me dwell for a moment on just how extraordinary a coincidence this really is.
Peter Tatchell has since 1997 publicly celebrated the Sambia tribe of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea as a model of human sexual behaviour.
The research into this tribe was conducted by the paedophile-defender Gilbert Herdt between 1974 and 1980. He described a culture of violent child abuse.
Tatchell so admired the Sambia of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea that when Gilbert Herdt was exposed as a defender of paedophilia, he claimed other anthropologists had described their behaviour, when they hadn’t. He then continued to cite this child-abusing tribe as a moral example.
The only other tribe Peter Tatchell has cited as an example of human sexual behaviour was another tribe from Papua New Guinea: the Keraki who rape boys anally to the point that some are physically injured.
Tatchell cites this tribe despite the fact his favourite anthropologists …who described this tribe…. also described another 48 tribes who equally accepted homosexual behaviour but didn’t rape children.
As with the Sambia, Tatchell describes the rape of young boys by the Keraki as consensual when it’s the very opposite.
By an almost miraculous coincidence….one for the ages….Peter Tatchell was so fascinated by the Eastern Highlands where the child-abusing Sambia live…he went hiking there in 1977.
It’s only when this …..extraordinary conjunction of coincidences ….is laid out that it makes sense of that puzzle in the Netflix movie: the erasure of the years between 1974 and 1980. Could Tatchell really tell the public he’d travelled the world, sleeping in trees and…err…cemeteries, without also mentioning he’d been to Papua New Guinea? Even if he didn’t the suggestion he went exploring in “developing” nations would surely have risked tongues wagging and led to questions. Questions that might have led to the discoveries I made.
Better then to pull a veil over the whole notion of a youthful Tatchell, an adventurous hiker so desperate to see the world he slept in trees and cemeteries. And travelled deep into Papua New Guinea to the region where Gilbert Herdt at that very moment was studying the child-abusing warriors of the Sambia.
Nothing can reveal with certainty what Peter Tatchell’s agenda really is. We can’t see inside the man’s mind. Thankfully. But I think we all have a pretty good idea what the evidence points to. We know he has carefully covered his tracks for more than two decades and is willing to tell the most barefaced lies to try to deny what he clearly wrote in black and white.
The fact he has endlessly celebrated two child-raping tribes is revealing. To say the least. That he felt the need to travel to the country they both call home is the final straw for me.
I have to be careful legally what I say, of course, but the truth is I no longer have a scintilla of doubt. Tatchell is nothing less than a monster.
Bravo! What a brilliant piece of investigative journalism. And well done for watching the Netflix film so we don’t have to. Those fawning fanboys must have some inkling of the dark core of the man, most people who have any interest in politics know about PIE and that letter to the Guardian. So what does that imply?
What this article indirectly illustrates is that PIE and other groups trying to normalise paedophilia, never went away. Now they just cloak themselves in glitter and rainbows.
Well done Malcolm - what a marathon but well worthwhile. Utterly nauseating and not the least bit surprising. Can you forward to the BBC and the police so they stop presenting him as our leader. Appalling