Bob Mellors

On 14 October 1970 the first UK meeting of the Gay Liberation Front was held in an LSE classroom. The room was booked by Bob Mellors (1949-1996), a second year Sociology student. 

 In January 1970 Bob applied to the Goldsmith’s Company’s Vacation Travel Grant scheme requesting £90 for flights and expenses to spend his summer vacation in the United States

 where he intended to settle in one of the big cities and find work. Bob spent the summer of 1970 in the USA where he became involved in the New York Gay Liberation Front (GLF). In September he met Aubrey Walter, who had also been travelling in the States, at the Revolutionary Peoples’ Constitutional Conference in Philadelphia sponsored by the Black Panther Movement. On their return to the UK Aubrey Walter recalled: “I came back to the UK and it all seemed flat. Bob had gone back to college at the LSE and we spoke on the phone. Bob booked a room and we held a meeting.” 

Estimates of attendance at the first meeting ranged from nine to nineteen. From November the numbers attending increased until April 1971 when the largest space available at LSE could no longer provide standing room. For the next two years Bob combined his involvement in GLF with studying for his Sociology degree. In GLF he was a member of the media group which produced the GLF newspaper Come Together and in 1971 drew up the GLF Manifesto. 

He later moved to Poland and was murdered in 1996 during a burglary in his flat. The unpublished biography and working papers are deposited in LSE Library. At the unveiling of a commemorative pink triangle at LSE to mark the 20th anniversary of GLF Bob, commenting on the impact of the GLF, quoted Mao Tse Tung: “A tiny spark can cause a prairie fire”. 

Though its time as a political collective was short, the impact of GLF, through newspapers, pamphlets, phone lines, discos, demonstrations, communes, street theatre and marches, lasted long after it stopped organising in late 1973. Generations of LGBTQ+ people in the UK would come to understand their oppression by society through the work of GLF.