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Stonewall was founded in 1989 by a small group of women and men who had been active in the struggle against Section 28 of the Local Government Act.
Stonewall is today renowned for its campaigning and lobbying. Some major successes include helping achieve the equalisation of the age of consent, lifting the ban on lesbians and gay men serving in the military, securing legislation allowing same-sex couples to adopt and the repeal of Section 28. More recently Stonewall has helped secure civil partnerships and ensured the recent Equality Act protected lesbians and gay men in terms of goods and services.
Where does the name Stonewall originate?
It was chosen by our founders and remembers a 1969 riot in New York when people finally got tired of the police raiding the Stonewall Bar. Rioting continued for three nights. It’s often regarded as the start of the gay equality movement.
How long have you been involved with Stonewall and what’s your background?
I’ve been at Stonewall since early 2003 (although it feels like yesterday!) Before that I was Assistant Editor at The Observer.
The BBC has come in for much criticism regarding the on air visibility of lgbt people. Stonewall was involved in highlighting some concerns...
Our Tuned Out report last year found that gay people were almost invisible in BBC prime-time programmes. Just six minutes out of 168 hours of BBC1 and BBC2 programming showed lesbian and gay people in a positive way. There was five times as much innuendo and unpleasantness.
We’ve repeatedly expressed our concerns that DJs such as Radio 1’s Chris Moyles think that sneering at gay people is acceptable. The BBC receives almost £200million a year from lesbian and gay licence-payers and we think it’s unsustainable that a programme, such as Moyles’s, on a radio station targeted at young people, should be peddling homophobia. We were delighted that at our Education for All conference on July 5th, Kevin Brennan, the new Children’s Minister, said that broadcasters should now be treating these issues as seriously as they do racism.
Stonewall has an excellent Diversity Champions programme: what is this and how does it benefit the lgbt workforce?
Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme was designed to help major employers share good practice around lesbian and gay issues and support both existing and potential staff. The programme now has 300 members - from the Royal Navy to most government departments and from IBM to Barclays - who employ just over four million people between them.
We’ve always regarded staff networks as one of the best ways that support can be given and it’s usually those networks that are the most effective champions of our work internally. We encourage employers to engage in our annual benchmarking exercise, the Workplace Equality Index, particularly so that they can remind themselves that other employers are improving all the time. You can’t just go on doing what you were doing ten years ago if you want to be perceived to be a gay-friendly employer
Given that Stonewall is based in the south how do you ensure you are active in other parts of the UK?
As an organisation that specialises in strategic interventions, we have no choice but to be based close to the parliaments in Westminster, Edinburgh and Cardiff and to the hubs of most government departments in those cities. However, our active individual supporter base of some 10,000 people is spread across Britain, as are the organisations we engage both through the Diversity Champions programme and our Education for All campaign. We often hold events away from London, Edinburgh and Cardiff (in Manchester, Brighton, Liverpool, Inverness and Bangor, for example, in the last three months) in order to engage with networks that might not come to events in the three capital cities.
If you had to choose one campaign and lobbying sucess in Stonewall’s history, what would it be?
I think one of the highlights of Stonewall’s history is the new ‘goods and services’ protections which were finally introduced in April. The reason? That they’ll wrap around the lives of millions of lesbian and gay people in areas as wide-ranging as social services, housing, criminal justice and healthcare. We faced an incredibly strong lobby against the protections, ranging from the churches to - disgracefully in my view - senior civil servants.
What are some of Stonewall’s current and future campaigns?
Our Education for All programme, launched in 2005, still has a huge amount of work to do. Our School Report, published in June this year, showed that 150,000 lesbian and gay pupils in secondary schools are being bullied just for being gay. Perhaps most shocking was that almost one in three of the 1,145 pupils surveyed said that it was adults in their schools who are doing the bullying.
On the parliamentary front, we’re still campaigning for an offence of incitement to homophobic hatred to match the existing protections around race. And we want the duty on public bodies to promote equality to be extended to include sexual orientation too.
Finally, if any of our readers wish to support Stonewall, what can they do on a practical level and how do they contact you?
We don’t receive public funding so donations from individual supporters are the key to our effectiveness, and also our independence. Just visit our website and there are details of how you can help. Every single pound makes a difference to what we can do to support equality.
Web: www.stonewall.org.uk
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