>Leo Panitch has made the point that the involvement of urban gay groups
>in support of the coal miners' strike in England created a vast change
>in their (miners') attitudes towards feminism and gay rights.
I'd take that with a (kindly) pinch of salt. The morale of the miners during the strike was a lot more brittle than appeared on the surface, and their bullishness belied a fairly profound sense of isolation. In that mood they put up with a lot of condescension from middle class sympathisers without ever saying out loud what they thought of it. For them, support from lesbian and gay support groups would have been part of a surprising but welcome array of sympathisers.
Veteran gay activist Don Milligan told me a story once about having collected money for striking miners in the seventies under the auspices of a gay group (predecessor of his revolutionary gay men's caucus, one imagines). The secretary of the union was pleased to accept the cheque but less so when Milligan insisted on handing over the cash in person, and in drag. The miners took the offering in fairly good sport, but if I remember Don's account right, they welcomed him as they would have an attraction at a freak show, and if he wasn't beaten up, it was probably because he has a quick wit and a sharper tongue. Years later I read Brian Cant's fictional version of the same encounter.
Looking up at the heading for this thread, it seems strangely pertinent, rather like the instruction that Claud Cockburn insists the Communist Party issued, that the 'lower organs of the party should penetrate the backward parts of the proletariat' - but I'm pretty sure Cockburn made it up.
-- James Heartfield