Our Story

There are multiple predecessors to GLADD, organisations that have over time been chameleons responding to need, pressure and circumstance, but with consistent core values. Our history begins with the Gay Medics and Dentals Society founded by Martin Hamilton-Farrell at the University of London Union in 1975. It was a brave step. Gay and lesbian politics in the 1970s were a conflict of radicals and moderates, differing expressions of culture and complex political affiliations. Martin expected hostility and prejudice when he applied for Union funding but the society was approved with a start-up grant of £250 surprisingly easily, perhaps because the committee was exhausted at the end of a difficult meeting.

The society was characterised by a juxtaposition of open campaigning and secret membership. It participated under its own banner in gay rights marches and ran a poster and leaflet campaign in medical schools with the message ‘you are not alone’. The posters were regularly defaced or destroyed. Robert George fondly recalls members ‘zapping’ hostile medical and related organisations by attending meetings and declaring their sexuality. Questionnaires and then information packs were sent to consultants in Psychiatry, Obstetrics & Gynaecology and Sexual Health, testing and informing their understanding of homosexuality. A pamphlet detailing counselling facilities for homosexual people in distress was distributed to many GPs and hospital doctors across London. In contrast, correspondence was through a student union post box and the list of around 150 members was kept confidential. Many were not yet out and others feared their involvement would prove career-limiting. There was opposition, including from the Gay Liberation Front who shunned the medics as being elitist, but Martin and his colleagues found it exciting, conspiratorial and ‘totally worth it’. Sadly, there was no natural successor to run the society after Martin graduated and, under the pressure of house officer rotas, the society was closed in 1977 and membership list destroyed.

Although the GMA had and welcomed female members it was seen as male dominated. Consequently Susan Bewley co-founded Women In Medicine in the early 1980s as a radical counterpart to the Medical Women’s Federation, and many gravitated there. This was a time when rape was legal within marriage and lesbians automatically lost custody of their children.

In 1985 when Catherine Meads found she could not reconcile being a doctor and a lesbian, she temporarily left medicine to lead the Lincoln Gay Group and Switchboard. The local public health department refused to act over the HIV/AIDS crisis so the group stepped in, distributed leaflets, and ran phone-ins for isolated people desperate to talk. Their activities were often challenged; on organising a ‘How To Be A Happy Homosexual’ stall at the Lincoln Cares Exhibition, the local authority threatened to pull funding unless they were evicted. With the help of the cathedral, Catherine prevailed only to have the stall wrecked by a fundamentalist Christian group.

GLADD formed in 1994 and was formally constituted in 1995. It was a new organisation but many founding members had participated in the earlier groups and GMA funds were transferred in. There was a desire for a fresher and more inclusive approach, reflected in the name including lesbians and dentists, and the appointment of Susan Bewley and David Harvey as co-chairs. The declared intent was to make news at the front of the BMJ rather than advertise in the back, something we are proud to continue to this day. Meetings followed the pattern of lectures and a buffet, although there were still parties. Jolyon Oxley remembers Professor Sir Graeme Catto, then president of the GMC, attending one such meeting when the GMC accepted GLADD’s guidelines on equality & diversity in the workplace. In 2020 GLADD’s name was broadened to LGBTQ+ doctors and dentists, and the contributions of David Harvey & Peter King have been memorialised in our annual prize & lecture.