Veteran gay rights activist is soon to celebrate 50 years campaigning for equality. But now he is caught up in a row over ‘no-platforming’

The emails from the officer of the National Union of Students were unequivocal. Fran Cowling, the union’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) representative, said that she would not share a stage with a man whom she regarded as having been racist and “transphobic”.

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That the man in question is Peter Tatchell – one of the country’s best-known gay rights campaigners, who next year celebrates his 50th year as an activist – is perhaps a mark of how fractured the debate on free speech and sexual politics has become.

In the emails, sent to the organisers of a talk at Canterbury Christ Church University on Monday on the topic of “re-radicalising queers”, Cowling refuses an invitation to speak unless Tatchell, who has also been invited, does not attend. In the emails she cites Tatchell’s signing of an open letter in the Observer last year in support of free speech and against the growing trend of universities to “no-platform” people, such as Germaine Greer, for holding views with which they disagree.

Cowling claims the letter supports the incitement of violence against transgender people. She also made an allegation against him of racism or of using racist language. Tatchell told the Observer that the incident was yet another example of “a witch-hunting, accusatory atmosphere” symptomatic of a decline in “open debate on some university campuses”.

One of the founding members of direct action group OutRage!, which caused a storm in the 1990s by outing establishment figures it claimed were homophobic in public and homosexual in private, Tatchell is used to being in the establishment firing line. But the original radical queer is now finding himself having to think long and hard about free speech.

Fran Cowling, the NUS’s LGBT representative.

In the recent furore over the Belfast bakery that refused to decorate a cake with a gay rights slogan, he stunned many by supporting the firm’s right to reject the customer’s order. Ashers bakery is appealing against a court decision that ruled it had discriminated against the customer by refusing to make a cake with the slogan “Support Same-Sex Marriage” because it went against their beliefs as Christians.

“If the Ashers verdict stands, it would mean a gay baker could be made to make cakes saying ‘I’m against gay marriage’,” said Tatchell. “A Muslim printer would have to publish the cartoons of Muhammad or a Jewish printer publish books of a Holocaust denier. So, much as I disagree with Ashers’ right to be homophobic, and I have spoken out against their anti-gay discrimination, they shouldn’t be forced to aid a political message they don’t agree with. I think it’s important to err on the side of freedom of expression and religion.

“It is difficult for me to take this decision, especially given the incredible levels of homophobia in sections of the Northern Irish community.”

But he insists his change of heart – he initially condemned Ashers – does not mean he has mellowed. In the past he has thrown himself in front of ministerial cavalcades, stopping the official cars of both John Major and Tony Blair with his placards, despite the best efforts of security officers, and pulled out banners of dissent under the noses of visiting dictators. He has helped track down a Nazi war criminal, has been arrested around 300 times and had about 50 objects smash his flat windows. He has also received such vicious beatings from the thugs of Presidents Robert Mugabe and Vladimir Putin that he has suffered lasting brain injuries.

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Yet even he has to acknowledge that, at 64, he is on the verge of becoming a national treasure as opposed to a militant irritant. His council flat in south London has a blue plaque marking his residency put up by the local council, and last week a woman stopped him at Elephant and Castle to tell him she was proud to meet him – a far cry from the hostility of the haters and homophobes who still make their views known.

Now the threats come by email rather than via beatings. “After 20 years of smashed windows and even a bullet through the front door, nowadays assaults or attempted assaults by strangers are quite rare,” he says. “People who recognise me in the street are overwhelmingly supportive. The elderly woman said she had followed me for years and those kinds of kind gestures are a new thing.

“Of course we’ve really made progress … It’s all about the drip-drip effect of protest. The state is too powerful to reform overnight but, by a long cumulative process, change is made.”

But sometimes, he says, it is alarming how complacent the younger generation are. Half of all young LGBT people still report they are bullied at school and a third are victims of hate crime, he says, adding that it is useful to remember that anti-gay laws were only repealed in 2003.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Daniel McArthur, right, managing director of Ashers Bakery, which is at the heart of the ‘gay marriage cake’ row, and his wife Amy. Photograph: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

Australian-born, the son of evangelical working-class Protestants – “small-c conservatives” – Tatchell left school at 16 and Australia at 19, avoiding prison for refusing to register for the Vietnam war draft. In London he was “astonished how acquiescent” British society was. “I was horrified how passive people were,” he said.

The evidence given to him about the sexuality of certain politicians and church figures during OutRage!’s campaign will go with him to the grave, he says. “That’s not what it’s about. We saw outing as a form of queer self-defence, leverage against public figures who were abusing their power to inflict harm on others – LGBT people. I draw the line at menaces or harassment.”

He says that the OutRage! protests were full of fun and wit, and that he always tried to “do politics in a fun way”, in order to break through the hostility of critics.

Cowling’s stance is disappointing to Tatchell. “I’m prepared to share a platform with people I profoundly disagree with, precisely in order to challenge and expose them,” he says.

He says that today’s campaigning is clearly “much more rapid” but that, while online petitions are great, they’re not enough. He says direct action is still a hugely effective form of protest, although he now finds participating “harder and harder”.

“I feel guilty that I haven’t done any for four years,” he says. The last, he recalls, was an ambush of the Indonesian president. Tatchell lay in wait at Westminster Abbey and unfurled the flag of breakaway West Papua in front of his limousine.

“When I was wrestled to the floor by the police, they were putting their hands over my mouth,” he says. “The most offensive thing was certainly our police thinking it was lawful to stop up my mouth. That should be an offence to everyone.”

The NUS told the Observer that Tatchell had not been “no-platformed” by the union as a whole, and that it was up to Cowling to make her own choices with regard to the event.