Bev Jackson - From Gay Liberation to the Capture of Pride

This is a bonus episode - an extended, in-depth conversation with Bev Jackson, one of the founding members of the UK Gay Liberation Front, a co-founder of LGB Alliance, and a woman who has watched the gay rights movement from its birth to its current, deeply troubling incarnation.

I wanted this conversation in the series because you cannot understand what has happened to Pride, in Surrey or anywhere else, without understanding its political roots, its moral failures, and the repeated refusal to confront abuse when it appears in progressive clothing.

Bev takes us right back to the early 1970s: what Gay Liberation actually meant, how it differed from women’s liberation, and why lesbians were so often sidelined even at the moment of supposed radical change. She talks candidly about the misogyny inside early gay politics, the naïvety many of us had, and the belief - later proven disastrously wrong - that “progress” inevitably meant moral improvement.

We then move into territory that many organisations still refuse to touch:

the overlap between sexual libertarian ideology and the systematic erosion of child safeguarding.

Bev explains how, in the 1970s and 80s, paedophile advocacy groups deliberately embedded themselves in gay rights organisations under the banner of “liberation”, and how that history has been quietly buried rather than reckoned with. She traces a direct line from those years to the present - to Pride committees, lobbying organisations, and charities that treat safeguarding as an inconvenience and whistleblowers as enemies.

We talk in detail about:

• How Pride shifted from a political protest to a brand-managed spectacle
  
  

• The deliberate collapse of boundaries between adult sexuality and children
  
  

• Why “inclusion” has come to mean silencing lesbians and gay men
  
  

• Stonewall’s role in training institutions to ignore the law
  
  

• The catastrophic impact of gender ideology on child safeguarding
  
  

• Why lesbians who raise concerns are smeared, expelled, or punished
  
  

• How figures like Stephen Ireland were shielded by ideology, not ignorance
  
  

This episode also addresses something rarely said out loud: that the language of “kindness”, “allyship”, and “protecting kids” is now routinely used to mask risk, not reduce it.

Bev does not speak as an outsider. She speaks as someone who was there at the beginning and who refuses to lie about where we have ended up.

If you care about gay rights, women’s rights, or the safety of children, this conversation matters. It is not comfortable listening. It is not meant to be.

Content warning:

This episode contains discussion of child sexual abuse, paedophile advocacy, and safeguarding failures. Listener discretion advised.

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This is a bonus episode featuring an extended interview.