Gavin McGregor

Some years ago, my dear friend Louise made a discovery in the attic of her south London flat. She was eager to show me what she’d found, knowing I would be intrigued, but life – and lack of a long enough ladder – had got in the way.

In January 2018, however, I went round to help clear out the loft ahead of moving house with her young son – and now, finally, we were able to retrieve and pore over her discovery.

It took a lot of rummaging and banging our heads on dusty rafters, but eventually we found two carrier bags. As we sifted through the contents, I felt a rising thrill as it became clear to me that we were looking at a small but significant archive of artifacts from a crucial period for the LGBT+ movement – an archive that must have been gathering dust, mysteriously forgotten, for decades.

Of the two bags, one contained around 130 pin badges in 108 different designs. They ranged from early Gay Pride badges going back to the 1970s, to feminist slogans to the Save the Greater London Council campaign to Ireland to anti-fascism, atheism, anarchism and much more, including a lot of irreverent humour as well as some slogans and symbols that were a mystery to me.

I immediately felt that their owner must have been someone with passion, wry humour, radical politics and intellect. But I also had a strong feeling that he or she must have had some kind of significant involvement in the struggles and campaigns represented by the badges.

Louise entrusted the collection to me to find an appropriate home and use for it, and I spent the next few days categorising the badges, photographing them and trying to figure out how to identify their former owner.

There were clues, but few. The other carrier bag contained a number of issues of ‘Gay Comix’, a handful of gay publications (an edition of the Pink Paper from June 1989 and an Irish gay magazine, Out, from 1985), a small number of pamphlets including one from a campaign against the 1984 Police Bill, a gay theatre troupe’s flyer and the first draft manuscript of a novel.

The gay press might have been kept for reasons important to the owner, but it was hard to know where to begin looking for pointers there. The manuscript seemed more directly personal, and so I began there. I searched online for the title of the novel and its author, and found that it had been published. I emailed the writer, Bill Albert, explaining the situation and hoping he might know who would have had the first draft stowed in their south London attic.

Bill replied quickly: it would have been one of two people who had run a short-lived publishing company to which he had submitted his novel. One, Russell Butler, was now living in South Africa. The other, Paud Hegarty, had died 18 years ago from an Aids-related illness at the age of 45.

I felt immediately that Paud Hegarty must be the name for which I’d been searching – not only because the archive included an Irish gay magazine and badges referencing Ireland (including the bold “Ireland: England’s Vietnam”), but because the sad news that Paud had died confirmed a strong feeling I’d had that the collection’s owner was no longer with us.

That the archive seemed to have been carefully compiled and deliberately and even lovingly kept, yet had somehow been abandoned and overlooked for so long, seemed to suggest an abrupt, unforeseen departure from the house in Catford. Whether this was the result of an eviction, a break-up or a death, I hadn’t been sure until now.

Russell was able to confirm by email that these must be Paud Hegarty’s belongings, and when Bill told me that Paud had been manager of the Gay’s the Word bookshop during parts of the 1980s and 1990s, I realised my hunch had been right: this collection belonged to a person who had had an important role in the LGBT+ struggle at a pivotal time and place, 1980s London.

As manager of Gay’s the Word, Paud Hegarty had – with the shop’s directors and its other staff and managers – run a crucial community resource, had made the bookshop available as an organising space for campaigns including Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (made famous in the movie Pride) and had courageously fought persecution by Customs & Excise in its homophobic attacks on free speech and our community.

Of course I googled Paud right away to learn more, finding news of his arrest for kissing a man in public, footage of him arguing against Aids-related employment discrimination in February 1985, his round-ups of new gay literature in the radical left press as well as many acknowledgements of his support in various authors’ and researchers’ works.

Bill Albert also pointed me to a YouTube interview with the current manager of Gay’s the Word, Jim MacSweeney, which helped to flesh out details of the time, place, people and events, and in which Jim said:

“I always think of trying to continue on Paud’s legacy. He was a great bookseller, very political, and to him it was very important that the shop both had politics and had an academic side, so you weren’t just looking at bestsellers or erotic fiction or whatever else – although they’re very important – it’s about having a real range and breadth. Paud died in 2000, and I always just remember him, and what he did for the shop and how he grew it, and it continued on.”

It was humbling to read about Paud‘s work, and even across the years I’m charmed and inspired by what I read about him. As a gay man who came of age in the 1990s, I witnessed as a young adult the lowering of the age of consent and, later, marriage equality, but I’ve always been very aware that these were results of struggles and risks taken by people of Paud‘s generation and earlier, and that – despite being a child and then teenager during the lonely chill of Section 28 and age of consent inequality – I had narrowly missed a still harder time in which courageous people took real and high-stakes risks (including genuine risks to their lives) for our rights. Spending time with Paud‘s artifacts was a moving and thought-provoking experience for me, and felt like a huge privilege.

My next step was to contact Jim MacSweeney in order to let Gay’s the Word know about what Louise had uncovered, and to seek their advice on finding a proper home for Paud Hegarty’s belongings.

When I took the collection to the Marchmont Street shop to show Jim and Uli – who runs the store with Jim – their delight was beautiful to see. Uli excitedly grabbed a camera and began snapping. Jim said of the items, “It feels like they’ve come home”.

Jim already keeps an archive in the shop’s basement, and it felt right that, instead of being tucked away and rarely seen in a sterile museum drawer, the collection should be donated to Gay’s the Word, coming full circle and coming home.

Jim and Uli are now trying to figure out how to display the badges in the shop – probably on a rotating basis, as wall space is at a premium in the cosy premises.

My only twinge of regret was that we hadn’t uncovered Paud’s belongings in time for the memorial gathering held for him at the bookshop in 2015, at which his family, friends and colleagues marked 15 years since his passing and what would have been his 60th birthday.

Somehow I felt that there was still more that could be done with these powerfully evocative objects. To browse, and to physically handle, the badges in particular, feels like a kind of time travel, and each badge seems pregnant with a hundred stories of people, places, campaigns, events, and of the feelings that people must have had on wearing them in public, perhaps with proud defiance, perhaps with brave trepidation. Seeing Jim and Uli’s reaction to them, too, and the fact that each badge immediately elicited stories and provoked memories from Jim, added to my feeling that there was much more of value that could be brought forth by Paud’s pins if they could be seen by a wider audience.

It also seemed that Paud’s collecting of these pins, pamphlets and press had been very deliberate, perhaps as personal mementos but, I strongly suspect, also with a consciousness of their importance in telling the story of a civil rights movement. The serendipity of their being found by Louise, who had the nous to recognise their significance (most others would have binned a former resident’s dusty belongings without a second thought), also seemed to demand that they be put to good use.

So this site is one way in which hopefully Paud’s pins can perform a useful role. You can browse all the badges online here, you can come to see them in person and, if they resonate for you, you are strongly encouraged and warmly welcomed to tell the stories and memories they bring forth for you. By doing so, you can help to give Paud’s collection a role in telling the history of our community, its politics and its struggle.