Nettie Pollard
Janet (Nettie) Marian Mackenzie Pollard (6th September 1949 - 25th December 2025), known in life as Nettie Pollard, was a pioneering British lesbian activist and civil rights campaigner. She is known primarily for her early involvement with the UK branch of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF, founded in 1970), her work with the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL, later Liberty), and her involvement with the group Feminists Against Censorship.
Early Life
Named Janet, but always known as Nettie, she was the daughter of committed Communist parents Jack and Ursula, a civil servant and feminist. Nettie was a vegetarian from infancy, and lost her sense of smell after being hit by a trolleybus. She followed Jack into King Alfred School, a progressive establishment in the London suburb of Golders Green.[1] In an interview with the London School of Economics (LSE), Nettie described feeling "out of place" as an adolescent. She felt she did not "fit in," partly because of her underhung jaw, of which a dentist reportedly told her: "we can break your jaw and push it back; otherwise, how else are you going to get a boy?"
In 1971, when Nettie was 21, she heard about the GLF. Her father Jack read about the GLF in a newspaper, and asked Nettie "this looks exciting, shall we go?" The pair went together to Covent Garden, where Nettie was stunned to discover people talking of revolution and non-monogamy.
Early Sexual Liberation and the GLF
The first meeting of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) took place on 13 October 1970, in a basement classroom at the London School of Economics. It was instigated by Aubrey Walters and Bob Mellors, who had been influenced by the development of the GLF in the USA following the Stonewall Riots. It was the beginning of a 3 year period of great activity, including demonstrations, debates, street theater, the establishment of a new gay press, and the establishment of communes.[2][3] As described in an obituary for Nettie by Peter Scott-Presland, Nettie "threw herself into the counter-psychiatry group, which campaigned against the idea that homosexuality was a disease. Out of this group came the radical self-help group Icebreakers, of which she was a founder member. Rejecting “objectivity” in counselling, Icebreakers offered instead the positive role model of out and proud homosexuals."[4]
The counter psychiatry group had started in 1970, and included Jeffrey Weeks and Mary McIntosh as members. The group had published the pamphlet Psychiatry and the Homosexual: A brief analysis of oppression (1973), written by 6 gay men, before Nettie joined the group.[5] It was in this group that Andrew Hodges first wrote about Alan Turing - then an unknown figure - which would eventually snowball and culminate in Turing become a revered homosexual icon (despite him likely being an MAP / boylover)[6]...
Nettie participated in "kiss-ins" - a variation of sit-ins used to protest the fact that kissing in public was illegal for gays during this time. She also participated in more traditional sit-ins where, for example, a bar or restaurant had refused to serve homosexuals or people in drag.
The London GLF set up the support group "Icebreakers" in the spring of 1973, with Nettie being a founding member. She was 1 of around 30 'icebreakers', who would participate in telephone helplines that people could call anonymously. Nettie described the rationale for Icebreakers as stemming from the fact that "in those days, almost no one was out." Most people were too afraid of being outed to simply walk into an in-person meeting, but might become comfortable enough to do so if they already knew of people there who were sympathetic, understood their concerns, or had similar romantic and sexual feelings to themselves.[7]
Notably, the British GLF organization had a London office at 5 Caledonian Road, which the media branch used to publish its writings. This included their official newspaper Come Together, which ran for 16 issues from 1970 to 1973. This same address was used by the longstanding pacifist magazine Peace News, at one time edited by Roger Moody, who was a friend of Nettie's until his death.[8] The GLF also had a Youth group for under 21s - then the male homosexual age of consent - which included members from age 12 and up. The youth group created a "Youth edition" of Come Together, which criticized age of consent laws.
Civil Liberties Activism and the NCCL
After leaving Icebreakers, Nettie joined the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), initially as a receptionist. She had put her GLF experience on her job application and, as a result, landed the embryonic Gay Rights brief. According to Peter Scott-Presland, she transformed it. The NCCL's Lesbian and Gay Committee published the first detailed reports on discrimination in employment, policing and censorship between 1976 and 1979.
Presland wrote that, "In the wake of partial decriminalization of sex between men, there was much discussion about the anomalies which remained. In April 1976, NCCL adopted proposals for an age of consent of 14, which it submitted to the Criminal Law Revision Commission. When NCCL disavowed this several years later, Nettie became something of a scapegoat and was doorstepped viciously as an alleged paedophile apologist at home by the News of the World while her partner was dying of cancer upstairs."[9]
PIE, CHE, and Youth Rights
Feminists Against Censorship and Later Years
In the 1990s, Nettie began to focus on defending the civil liberties of sex workers, porn viewers / producers, and arguing against pornography's criminalization more broadly. She joined Feminists Against Censorship and was prominent in the 1990s Spanner defense campaign, where gay S/M practitioners were prosecuted for consensual sex in a witch-hunt reminiscent of the 1950s. She joined the Campaign for Homosexual Equality’s executive committee in 2009, and campaigned for LGBT+ migrants and asylum seekers, including personally organizing finance and defense for several people whose chances of asylum were written off by others.
External Links
- Nettie Pollard and Michael Parkes on Icebreakers and GLF (Video interview published on Youtube by LSE Library, Jul 19, 2024)
- Interview with Nettie Pollard (audio only, transcript available) conducted between 2023-2025 as part of LSE University's GLF Collections - an open-access online repository of documents and oral interviews with GLF activists.
References
- ↑ Information freely adapted from an obituary by Peter Scott-Presland, Remembering Nettie Pollard: pioneering lesbian activist and civil rights campaigner (Attitude, 2 March 2026).
- ↑ An account of the GLF entitled No bath but plenty of bubbles: an oral history of the Gay Liberation Front, 1970-1973 was written by Lisa Power.
- ↑ See also, Aubrey Walter, Come Together: The Years of Gay Liberation 1970–73 (1980).
- ↑ Op. cit.
- ↑ The document can be read on Scribd.
- ↑ Alan Turing Documentary Excerpts (Freespeechtube).
- ↑ Nettie Pollard and Michael Parkes on Icebreakers and GLF (Video interview published on Youtube by LSE Library, Jul 19, 2024).
- ↑ Of important historical note, Roger Moody was a British socialist and anti-war activist who has been described as the first person to openly declare himself a "paedophile" in print.
- ↑ Presland obituary. Op. cit.