We are sad to report that Terry Sanderson, GAY TIMES Magazine’s longest serving columnist, died aged 75 on 12 June 2022.
This appreciation of Terry’s life is written by his partner of 40 years, Keith Porteous Wood. They became civil partners in 2006 after being together for 25 years. As Keith said: “Love at first sight to nursing him to his last, with barely a day not spent together.”
As the HIV/AIDS epidemic was starting to take hold in 1983, GAY TIMES Magazine commissioned Terry to write a monthly feature about the media’s shameless outpourings of hatred of gay people. It was called MediaWatch, which Terry continued to write for 25 years.
Words by Keith Porteous Wood
Terry took his brief very seriously and read every newspaper over that quarter of a century. And that was quite an undertaking when none were online.
All this reading – the principal offenders were The Sun, Mail, Express and News of the World – gave him plenty of material to complain to media regulators, and often also about the media regulators. This running battle went on for decades, but gradually the homophobia largely subsided. As fellow journalist Patrick Strudwick wrote “This Man Spent 25 Years Fighting Newspapers Over Their Anti-Gay Reporting And Finally Won” but there was a bigger prize still. The media’s homophobia had stoked homophobia in the readers and legitimised it. Once the media homophobia largely disappeared, open homophobia reduced and became unacceptable.
Terry’s gay activism started long before MediaWatch. In the South Yorkshire mining village where he was born, he came out in the 1970s while fighting the local council for its refusal to allow a gay disco. He won. Also, to help alleviate gay people’s isolation and lack of positive information he set up a local CHE group and, from his tiny bedroom, a gay mail order business called Essentially Gay.
Photography by Malcolm Trahearn
A curious spin off from MediaWatch was the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge asking Terry to write a book on coming out. They accepted his script then bottled out of publishing it – he had pulled no punches about the sexual aspects. SPCK offered to get someone else to publish it, but Terry said he had fulfilled his part of the bargain and wanted the agreed writing fee. They relented and the money financed Terry’s new publishing arm, The Otherway Press. The SPCK book reappeared little altered as How to Be a Happy Homosexual, which went through numerous editions and was published in other languages, as were some of the other books he wrote. Readers of those books regularly thanked him for having transformed their lives. Sir Ian McKellen has just written “25 years ago when I was discovering the delights of coming out, Terry’s journalism and books were an eye-opener – always rational and indignant, effortlessly on the high moral ground.”
Shortly before he died, Terry reflected on the dreadful harm the churches had meted out to gay people, but then smiled at the irony of society’s growing acceptance of homosexuality now contributing to the demise of the churches. Back in the 1960s, he had thought homophobia to be unstoppable, while the power of the churches would dissipate. It was his growing realisation that the opposite was more likely that drove him into fighting for secularism.
And that was what motivated him to become a secularist and play an active role in the National Secular Society for a quarter of a century, much of it as its president. He was especially proud of having instigated the protest against Pope Benedict’s visit which stretched from Hyde Park Corner to Piccadilly Circus.
One of the last letters Terry received was from veteran gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell:
“I want you to know how much I admire and appreciate the magnificent contribution you have made over so many decades, from GAY TIMES MediaWatch monthly column for 25 years to How To be a Happy Homosexual, your superb work that transformed the National Secular Society into such an effective and influential organisation – and much more. After you are gone, your legacy will remain.”
Terry signed off his final Facebook post with “Goodbye and try to be kind to each other.” His obituary in The Times was headed “Compassionate gay rights campaigner, secularist and Dietrich devotee.”
One of his last concerns was the rights of gay people and women being seriously eroded in the US, for example with the overturning of the Roe v. Wade case that had allowed abortion in every state. He warned that religious campaigners, some heavily funded by American evangelists, are already intent on doing the same here and in mainland Europe.
He pleaded for the gay community to be vigilant and strive to keep the rights that Terry, Peter Tatchell and many others fought so hard to win.
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