Craig Johnston
(1951 - living) Australia
Activist
He joined the Australian Labor Party at the age of 17, participated in the anti-war movement and student activism, and was a communist within four years. As a gay liberationist, he retained his radical perspective, working to mantain the links between the various social movements of the time.
In the late 1970s, he was among the first to detect a sea change among gay men, in particular, which made building a gay community a viable strategy for activists. The shift from "oppression" to "discrimination", from "liberation" to "rights", from "movement" to "community" was put into practice most notably and with some success in the New South Wales law reform campaign of 1981-84.
Johnston's primary work during the mid-1980s was as a Labor and then independent green member of the Sidney City Council. In the 1990s, he has mantained a watching brief on the community that he did so much to construct with articles on leather pride, drugs, the gay press, the gay dollar, the disadvantaged and the queer.
Excerpts from: Aldrich R. & Wotherspoon G., Who's Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History, from WWII to Present Day, Routledge, London, 2001
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