W11 in the 70s.  Chapter 8: Bob Mellors
 
Bob Mellors with Aubrey Walter started Gay Liberation Front. I knew Bob Mellors well, He was genuine and stood up for what he believed. He was far-reaching too and always questioned fixed dogma. He became friendly with Bobby MacKenzie but I only discovered this fact in the last few months. What I do know is that when I lost touch with Bobby, Bob Mellors visited me often and talked about gender in great detail. He told me that his ideas had evolved so that he was now more influenced by the criteria of gender, and that he was writing a book on Charlotte Bach who had influenced him greatly. This must have been a big shift for Bob Mellors. He was very excited about these ideas whenever he came to visit. Towards the later part of the Gay Liberation Front movement there were angry disagreements when many gay men sided with Socialist and Marxist principles. Others saw this as a cop-out and rebelled. A gay men’s commune was formed in W11 where men wore only women’s clothes and aligned themselves with the radical feminist women’s movement in support of the effeminate homosexual and drag queen. But also there were other gay men who went further. Bob Mellors was one of them, and aligned himself with the feminine and woman. This was because he saw the effeminate man and drag queen as victims of the patriarchal system, and to condone this was reactionary and could not change the inequality of gender definitions in society. I have heard men from Gay Liberation Front say that Bob Mellors got lost in his later ideas. I disagree. To say such a thing is not fair to someone whose mind was always sharp and questioned fixed criteria. You could say that he moved from the gay masculine to the feminine. One could also say that he formed a bridge from the gay to the transgender, for there were many men who did not really fit into the gay politics of that time, but there was no alternative political movement for them then. Transgender politics as it is now in 2006 did not exist.

Bob Mellors did not survive. He died in Poland. He was kind and thoughtful, a friend whom I respected greatly.  London W11 in the 70s. 9. Rachel Pollack
Picture: a photo of Bob Mellors which I took.
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