Nettie Pollard
Janet (Nettie) Marian Mackenzie Pollard (6th September 1949 - 25th December 2025), known in life as Nettie Pollard, was a pioneering 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 NCCL, and her involvement with the group Feminists Against Censorship.
Early Sexual Liberation and Civil Liberties Activism
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, and 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 three year period of great activity, including demonstrations, debates, street theater, the establishment of a new gay press, and the establishment of communes.[1][2] Nettie Pollard was part of the GLF's counter psychiatry group, one of many GLF sub-groups, where the idea for "Icebreakers" came about. The London GLF set up the support group Icebreakers in the spring of 1973, with Nettie being one of around 30 "Icebreakers" who participated in a telephone helpline 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, and had similar romantic and sexual feelings to themselves.Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; refs with no name must have content
The British GLF organization had a London office at 5 Caledonian Road, which the media branch used to publish its writings including the newspaper called Come Together, which ran for 16 issues from 1970 to 1973. Notably, 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.[3]
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
- ↑ 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).
- ↑ 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.