‘Hating Peter Tatchell’ is a new netflix film about the Australian-born LGBTQ+ and human rights activist, who over half a century has charged headlong into battle without regard for his safety, protesting against homophobia, apartheid and the death penalty. He says: ‘I’ve been violently assaulted over 300 times, had 50 attacks on my flat, been the victim of half a dozen murder plots and received tens of thousands of hate messages and death threats over the last five decades, mostly from homophobes and far-right extremists.’
Odd examples of his protests: 2003 ambush of Tony Blair’s motorcade in protest at the Iraq war; a bid for an arrest warrant for Henry Kissinger over the indiscriminate bombing of Cambodia in the 1970s; an exposé of the Nazi war criminal Dr Carl Værnet; confronting Hans Eysenck over his advocacy of electric shock aversion therapy to “cure” gay people; his efforts to persuade world health chiefs to stop the persecution HIV/Aids sufferers; and the outing of bishops who colluded with an anti-LGBTQ+ church despite their own homosexuality. He has spoken out against the dictatorships in Franco’s Spain, Pinochet’s Chile and Khomeini’s Iran and his attempted citizen’s arrest in 2001 of Robert Mugabe on charges of torture, saw him beaten unconscious by two bodyguards and left with brain damage. At an appearance at a gay pride march in Moscow recently he was punched by rightwing thugs which left him with permanently blurred vision in his right eye.
He considers himself lucky in comparison to pro-democracy campaigners in Iran, environmentalists in Russia or political activists in Zimbabwe. “If I was doing what they are doing, I’d be dead.”
He was born 25 January 1952 at 2.30am Melbourne, Australia, with his parents splitting when he was four. His mother remarried and his stepfather, an evangelical Christian of Prussian heritage beat him regularly. “He was a monster – I used to think he was an escaped Nazi war criminal.”
I was intrigued to see what astrologically drove his obsessive need to fly into danger and indulge in David and Goliath battles with the forces of darkness.
Two things stand out from his chart. One unsurprisingly is a marked Uranus in a Cardinal Grand Cross. It sits in opposition to Mercury square Saturn opposition Jupiter which gives him a yen to become a cloaked crusader in pursuit of social justice. It makes for an impatient, overly restless temperament who revels in causing disruption, a freedom fighter and innovator. Well handled it points to an individual who is a light-bearer for enlightened causes who has a good deal to offer.
The other is his Aquarius Sun square Mars in vengeful Scorpio, which would make him combative, always spoiling for a fight and likely to attract strong responses.
He also has an opinionated Pluto in the 9th giving him entrenched beliefs.
Certainly not designed for a quiet life.
His raison d’etre for allowing the film to be made was to show people that one person could make a difference. Which he undoubtedly has though at a considerable cost to his health. Some years back he managed to get himself tied in a knot over the age of consent since he argued many people under 16 started their sex lives without damage, some as young as nine! But it brought the wrath of the lobby against child abuse down on his head and blotted his copybook.