Antony Grey

From Philosopedia

Grey, Antony [A pseudonym of Anthony Edgar Gartside Wright] (6 October 1927 - 20 April 2010)

Grey, a rationalist, is author of Quest for Justice: Towards Homosexual Emancipation and Speaking of Sex (1992).

In 1958, Grey starting voluntary work for the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS). He became the Society's Honorary Treasurer in 1960 and its Secretary by the end of 1962. At this time also he became Secretary of the Albany Trust.

Grey campaigned tirelessly for the law reforms advocated by the Wolfenden Report (1957), writing many articles, making numerous speeches to interested groups, lobbying MPs, and organising action to promote the passage of the (Arran/Abse) Sexual Offences Bill through Parliament until it became law in 1967.

In 1970 he became Secretary of the Sexual Law Reform Society - successor to the HLRS - and was Director of the Albany Trust from 1971 to 1977. Following his retirement from the Albany Trust in 1977, he was involved in counselling and training work and was for some years a member of the executive committee of the British Association for Counselling.

In 1998 Antony Grey was awarded the Pink Paper Lifetime Achievement Award. Upon being presented with the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association’s 1998 Pink Paper Lifetime Achievement Award, Grey remarked that he was gratified by the award, not just for himself but because it recognized the courage and dedication of the staff and volunteers who worked with him at the Homosexual Law Reform Society and the Albany Trust. However, he expressed disappointment that thirty years on from the 1967 law reform “we are still so far from achieving the equality of esteem and full social acceptance that is our due in the modern world.”

(Grey's papers have been listed by the London School of Economics and Political Science as part of the 1967 & All That project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, which marked the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.)

“Coming out about one’s orientation . . . must now be regarded as a positive duty,” he has written, “and those who remain in the closet should be left in no doubt that their self-serving hypocrisy is letting every other gay person down.”

Grey died of leukemia. Eric Thompson had been his partner for 50 years.

{Gay & Lesbian Humanist, Spring, 1998 and Winter 1998; New Humanist, August 1997; TRI}