‘There Was a Whole World We Were Fighting For’
Since the release of Pride a decade ago, the story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners has become legendary. Now, in what’s likely to be its final year, members reflect on defeats and unexpected victories.
Photo courtesy of Kevin Franklin
Jonathan Blake has a clear memory of his first trip to Onllwyn, a village in the Neath Valley in South Wales, in October 1984.
The night before we’d got lost, so the first evening of the visit never happened. When we eventually arrived, we all crammed into Dai Donovan’s house, and then the next day we went to the Welfare [office]. As we walked in there was deathly silence, and in the pit of one’s stomach one thought: ‘Oh, fuck.’
South Wales was Britain’s most solid region during the miners’ strike; records indicate about 93 percent of miners stayed out the full year. Dai Donovan, a miner and, at that time, representative for the Neath, Dulais, and Swansea Valley Miners Support Group, speaks of a sense in the valleys that it was a necessary battle against Thatcher’s political trajectory. But by the third month, he says, ‘all the signs were that the government was escalating its actions day after day, let alone week after week,’ and it became evident that large-scale fundraising would be necessary to keep the 2,500 strikers in his area and their families sustained.
It was this growing pressure that Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), the group with which Jonathan was visiting Onllwyn, was hoping to help relieve — in part because they knew that state hostility first-hand. HIV had arrived in Britain three years earlier. Jonathan was the first man in London to be diagnosed, which in practice meant hearing at the age of 33 that palliative care would be available when the time came, likely within nine months. ‘My world just collapsed,’ he says.
On a national scale, the virus — initially termed ‘Gay-Related Immune Deficiency’, or GRID — gave the right-wing press and the state ‘what they wanted’, Jonathan continues: an excuse to vilify gay people again after the strides made in decriminalisation and gay liberation in the 1960s and ’70s. ‘It was tough,’ he says. ‘We understood the weapons of society. What the police could do to you. How they could harass you, wreck your life, if they had a mind to it.’
Dai testifies to the generosity of the lesbian and gay activists who saw this common suffering at the hands of the police and the papers as a way to build ties. ‘They didn’t say, “You’ll have to learn to deal with it like we did,”’ he emphasises. ‘They said, “We are going to stand with you.”’
Perhaps a stronger force in the creation of the bond between LGSM and the miners, however, was a shared vision of something beyond the violence of the present. ‘We deliberately had a very narrow brief [of supporting the miners], and that was absolutely the right thing to do,’ Mike Jackson, one of LGSM’s founding members, explains. ‘But of course, what underlies that is the struggle for class solidarity, for socialism. There was a whole world we were fighting for under that script, as were the miners themselves.’
Mike had founded LGSM shortly after Pride 1984 with Mark Ashton, a co-volunteer at London’s Gay Switchboard and a young Communist. In All Out! Dancing in Dulais — the short self-made documentary about LGSM’s work which inspired the 2014 feature film Pride — Mark gives a simple explanation of this world view and its unifying power: ‘It’s not just about defending the miners. It’s about defending the right to organise.’
This emphasis — not only on shared suffering, but on shared struggle — was immediately apparent to Dai when he arrived at London’s Paddington Station in September 1984 to meet LGSM members and make the ‘twinning’ of the two groups official. ‘We spent two and a half hours over a coffee chatting about — if I could put it crudely — our hatred of Thatcher and the Conservatives, and what she was turning the country into,’ Dai says. ‘It wasn’t about their sexuality. It was about our mutual political dimensions.’
There were, of course, some in the pit villages for whom sexuality was a sticking point. ‘I don’t think it was heavy opposition, but in one of the early meetings there was a discussion about the advisability of welcoming LGSM,’ Dai recalls. He wasn’t interested in giving it any airtime: ‘It would’ve been difficult for anyone to dissuade me as to why, having hosted other support groups, we shouldn’t host LGSM.’
It’s nice to imagine this socialist solidarity is what the first person to stand and break the silence by applauding the visiting LGSM members in Onllwyn that day had in mind. Whatever it was, others followed, and quickly the whole room was clapping. ‘The standing ovation changed everything for every single one of us on that visit,’ Mike says. ‘None of us expected that. Within seconds, it completely reinforced our commitment, our passion, our determination.’
Class Solidarity
The benefits — personal and political — of the solidarity between LGSM and Dulais blossomed in real time. After attempting suicide while reeling from his diagnosis in December 1982, Jonathan had been seeking out ‘displacement activities … anything that I could find to get involved with that meant that I wasn’t thinking about the virus’. He met his partner, Nigel, on a trip to Greenham Common organised by Gays for a Nuclear Future in 1983, and when LGSM started up the following year it was obvious the two of them would join it. ‘Being part of this group was just the most amazing displacement activity,’ he says.
Dai similarly describes more recent conversations with people who were growing up gay in South Wales’ mining communities at the time of the strike and who found LGSM’s visits ‘lifechanging’. ‘It offered them reassurance that they were “normal” and entitled to the same self-esteem as the other young people around them,’ he says. ‘Meeting LGSM was of inestimable importance to them and allowed them to grow up into the proud, confident members of society they are today.’
On a broader scale, LGSM galvanised the working-class contingent of London’s gay left. ‘LGSM was a great act of class solidarity within the LGBT community that had never been seen on that scale before,’ Mike says. ‘That was what, for us, was particularly thrilling about it, because the working-class section of the LGBT community suddenly had a voice, and [it wasn’t] afraid to kind of raise that voice in support of the miners.’
According to Mike, this class consciousness was vital when dealing with detractors in London’s LGBT community who might approach members shaking collection buckets outside gay venues, and ask, ‘What have the miners ever done for us?’
People would look at them and say, ‘My dad’s a miner. My uncle’s a miner, my brother’s a miner.’ That was the answer to that. What have they done for us? Well, they’ve been breadwinners for our families for generations.
Other critics who took a more patronising view of LGSM’s class politics were given even shorter shrift. Mike recalls one gay reporter penning a column in a paper to the effect of, ‘Call me liberal, middle-class, and intellectual, but I wonder whether supporting the miners will actually bear any fruit for us in return.’ Mike and Mark’s response: ‘Liberal and middle-class maybe, but intellectual?’
As personal convictions and political ties were solidified, funds also flowed. By the end of 1984, LGSM groups had been organised in ten other towns and cities across the country, along with Lesbians Against Pit Closures, the women-only group focused on organising with miners’ wives. Between bucket-shaking and several large events, most notably the Pits and Perverts Ball, London LGSM raised £22,000 for families in Dulais. The support was not able to keep the strike from losing, of course — but there were other positive outcomes Mike and his comrades hadn’t foreseen.
LGSM was there that bleak weekend in March 1985. Jonathan recalls the ‘gut-wrenching’ experience of watching the miners march back to the pits, bands playing, banners held high. Amid it all, though, the miners quickly reasserted their commitment to LGSM in turn. Mike remembers sitting in the support group meeting at which the strike’s loss was announced:
One of the miners stood up and said, ‘Well, it’s over for us, but what we should be doing now is turning to those who’ve supported us, none more so than the lesbians and gays we have with us today, and giving them the support that we know that they now need.’
Jonathan recounts of the period that followed:
It was the South Wales miners putting pressure on the NUM [National Union of Mineworkers] to use their bloc vote, and to get other unions also to use their bloc vote, that got lesbian and gay rights into the Labour Party manifesto, so that when Labour got to power, eventually we got civil partnerships.
Activists had been trying to get gay rights into the Labour manifesto for years, he says, and were always told the time was not right. The unions got it done, and the significance seems hard to overstate. ‘I remember what was happening during those early years of AIDS, when lovers were banned from their partners’ funerals, when things were just taken away from them,’ he adds. ‘With civil partnerships, that can’t be done. Suddenly gay men and lesbians had rights.’
‘Even though gay people had been arguing for gay politics in the years leading up to the strike, it was, if I may say, fractured,’ Dai explains.
The NUM was familiar with how you get an issue into the Labour Party or TUC [Trades Union Congress] manifesto, and it used that knowledge and ability to organise to further the interests of gay men and women in the country. That was the solidarity shown by the NUM at the end of the strike. Out of the destructive forces of that time, change became possible.
Class Sustenance
Those destructive forces are still raging in 2024. Jonathan compares the demonisation of gay people in the 1960s and ’70s to attacks on trans people today. Dai notes that it’s the legacy of Thatcherism that condemns former mining areas to their present decline. He still lives in the house on whose living room floor LGSM activists slept forty years ago, but says the circumstances around it now are ‘desolate’. ‘Very little industry has come in. Where young people have work it’s on casual contracts. Not even a week’s contract: day-to-day, short-term contracts, usually on minimum wage.’ Injustices from the strike year, like the Orgreave case, meanwhile, have yet to be investigated and rectified.
If we’re to confront this reality, Dai is clear that a trade union revival is vital. ‘To do something that’s lasting, as happened with the legislation backed by the NUM, you have to get involved,’ he says. Without the willingness of people both inside and outside mining villages to organise support, he points out, there was no way the strike could’ve lasted the way that it did. ‘The strike gets characterised as a battle between Scargill and Thatcher, but one person couldn’t keep 140,000 miners out for a year. It has to come from the movement. It has to come from the people involved.’
Jonathan, who refers to his still-strong ties with LGSM comrades and Dulais residents as ‘another family’, echoes Dai. In doing so he seems to sum up both the crux of the LGSM story and the key to a rejuvenated left in the twenty-first century: ‘When groups get together, they become much stronger for those bonds. That is so important — and terrifying to power.’
Mike says this year is likely to be LGSM’s last, after its fortieth-anniversary Pits and Perverts Ball in May. He’s about to turn 70. Jonathan is nearly 75 —‘amazing,’ he says; he didn’t expect to see 40. After the loss of Mark Ashton in 1987, recent years have seen more comrades pass away; many feel ready for a quieter life. The kind of solidarity practised by LGSM four decades ago is clearly as necessary as ever — as Mike says, ‘there’s unfinished business’ — but these organisers and activists have already left us a host of lessons. The responsibility for learning them, now, is ours.