ABSTRACT

This chapter offers an insider account of self-organized politics in the union. The progress of lesbian and gay politics in other regions has been influenced by wider developments in the UK polity, notably devolution under the New Labour government. Lesbian and gay conferences in National and Local Government Officers' Association (NALGO) had been predominantly workshop-based, with a half-day slot for debating motions and deciding policies. The moral legitimacy of lesbian and gay people resides in their contributions to human diversity, their creative explorations of alternative modes of being, doing, loving, knowing and relating. Recent surveys of the straight British public show that the majority of people do not accord moral legitimacy to lesbian or gay people. The tensions between union business and cultural politics, or between external products and internal processes, or between surface and depth, manifest themselves at the heart of civil rights discourses in the lesbian and gay movement more generally.