EditAntony Grey
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Antony Grey. Born in 1928. British gay activist.
Antony Grey is the pseudonym taken by A. E. G. Wright who felt unable to campaign under his own name in the 1950s.
He took a history degree at Cambridge University and left in 1948 aged 20. He took a job as a journalist with a provincial newspaper. When this job came to an end he moved to London in 1949 and was employed in the Secretary's Department of the British Iron and Steel Federation where he worked for 12 years. The job provided him with experience of parliamentary lobbying.
At the same time he read for the Bar. In 1958 he responded to advertisements in the classified columns placed by Homosexual Law Reform Society, (HLRS) and he had his first meeting with the founder Tony Dyson. He later became the treasurer to the society.
He took a new job in public relations. However in 1962 the Albany Trust/HLRS began to employ him on a part-time basis. At the same time the British Iron and Steel Federation also employed him part-time so that he could co-author a book for them. He supplemented his income by taking up David Astor's offer of a Saturday job as sub-editor for the
Observer which he undertook for several years.
He was Secretary of the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS) and the
Albany Trust from 1962 to 1970. He took the Albany Trust/HLRS through the stormy period during the campaigns which led to the
Sexual Offences Act 1967.
He left the Albany Trust/HLRS in 1970 having felt the need for a change but he returned on ocassions to help out in times of crisis. He was invited to become the first chair of the National Federation of Homophile Organisations (NFHO).
Groups in the Federation included
CHE and
SMG, but these groups led to the demise of the Federation two years later by leaving it because they thought it too bureaucratic.
After 1967 and after
Stonewall Antony Grey has been portrayed by the more recent radical campaigning groups as a reformist and somewhat conservative. He went to the early Gay Liberation Front meetings but according to
Jeffrey Weeks in Coming Out, (1977), page 190, he was widely distrusted and soon withdrew from the GLF.
Antony Grey says in Quest for Justice, page 179, that he started going to GLF meetings after he had left the Albany Trust in 1970 and that he enjoyed the meetings but that he he felt that he had to stop attending when he resumed an official post with the Albany Trust/HLRS.
He was awarded the 1998 Pink Paper Lifetime Achievement Award.
A History of the British Steel Industry under the name
A. E. G. Wright with
J. C. Carr and
Walter Taplin, 1962, published by Blackwell.
Quest for Justice: Towards Homosexual Emancipation, 1992, published by Sinclair-Stevenson, 304 pages, ISBN 1 85619 136 2 (hardback)/1 85619 155 9 (paperback).
Blurb: Quest for Justice is the inside story of the battle for the
Wolfenden reforms, told by one of its main protagonists. Antony Grey was Secretary of the Homosexual Law Reform Society during much of the campaign and for some time afterwards. Here, besides giving his personal account of the reform campaign, he comments on the subsequent course of the development movement for gay rights, and his own not always entirely harmonious relations with it.
He also describes the rising power of the moral majority backlash, and its bitter attacks upon the liberalisers whom it miscalled permissive. Whilst expressing disappointment at the slow progress of human sexual rights during recent years, and a sense of ever greater urgency, with the advent of AIDS, for the widespread acceptance of much more frank and realistic attitudes. Antony Grey concludes on a hopeful note, foreseeing a sexually saner twenty-first century in which updated moral, social and legal attitudes will combine to promote, rather than hinder, human happiness.
Speaking Out : Writings on Sex, Law, Politics, and Society 1954-1995, 1997, published by Cassell, 320 pages, ISBN 0304333409 (hardcover)/0304333441 (paperback).
Synopsis: For over 40 years, Antony Grey has been a leading campaigner, not only for gay rights, but also for better laws about, and more sensible attitudes towards, sex generally. As Secretary of the Homosexual Law Reform Society during the 1960s, Director of the Albany Trust in the 1970s, and later as a freelance writer and counsellor, he has worked publicly and consistently for individual sexual emancipation and collective common sense.