As a teenager in the 1960s Robert Palmer explored what today is known as gender fluidity, visiting his local butcher dressed in a fur coat and a pair of white lace trousers. “Can I help you, madam?” demanded the butcher, to which Palmer replied in his best basso profundo voice: “A pound of sausages and some streaky bacon please.”
Yet beneath his camp demeanour and party-animal personality lay a ferocious work ethic and a will of steel, characteristics that he applied in his professional life in publishing, his voluntary work at St Paul’s Cathedral, where he had once been a chorister, and in his work with the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) and Gay News.
The number of gay activists was small in the 1960s and early 1970s and Palmer knew that speaking out was a risky business. Carrying a banner in a gay rights march down Park Lane meant a good chance of being spotted on the television news by his employer and losing his job, or by his neighbours and being assaulted. As his partner’s mother once put it: “I understand you’re gay dear, but why shove it down people’s throats?”
Palmer never hesitated to raise his head above the parapet. He appeared on television, spoke on the radio, wrote articles and generally threw himself into the cause of homosexual equality. He was never a great orator; his quieter strengths lay in the unflashy, behind-the-scenes work of gently lobbying sympathetic MPs and other movers and shakers. However, he took part in the early Pride marches, involving only a few hundred people.
He had a smart business mind and became involved in the CHE’s administrative, financial and media operations, serving as treasurer from 1976 to 1978 and then chairman until 1980. Yet it was never easy reconciling the different approaches of those who belonged simply to socialise and those who were there to campaign, and in 1979 three members of his national executive resigned in protest against what they called his “presidential style”.
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Although private homosexual acts between men over the age of 21 had been decriminalised by the Sexual Offences Act 1967, little changed in society’s attitudes over the next dozen years. The Gay Switchboard still took hundreds of calls a week, the CHE reported increasing numbers of attacks on gay people, the rate of prosecutions for homosexual offences was up 30 per cent compared with pre-1967 figures, and immigration officers were instructed that “abnormal sexuality” could be grounds for denying admission to the country. There were alarming incidents, including being sworn at by police officers, and fears that his phone was bugged by the security services. There was also glamour: Quentin Crisp came to dinner at his Little Venice apartment; Kenneth Williams held court at his parties; and Christopher Isherwood addressed an eager young audience in “Sermon on the Mount” style while sitting on the living-room carpet wearing red socks.
Palmer’s ownership of Gay News came after Mary Whitehouse’s successful 1977 blasphemy prosecution against the title and Denis Lemon, its publisher and owner. She had brought the case, which was heard at the Old Bailey and was the last of its kind, after Lemon published James Kirkup’s poem The Love that Dares to Speak its Name, in which a Roman centurion describes having sex with Christ after the crucifixion.
Lemon, who was fined £500 and given a nine-month suspended jail sentence that was quashed on appeal, wanted out. Palmer, who had joined in 1981 to sort out the administrative side, was introduced to readers in March 1982 as “our prettiest press baron”. However, he lacked the funds to complete the deal and agreed to pay Lemon out of future profits, of which there were few. When the magazine’s contributors and staff got wind of a sharp-suited businessman trying to make money out of a symbol of the gay community, they revolted. It all ended in rancour and acrimony, with Gay News eventually being absorbed into the rival Gay Times.
Robert Mortimer Palmer was born in Reading in 1948, the son of the Rev George Palmer, an Anglican clergyman who became canon of Christ Church, Oxford, and his wife Nora (née Saunders). Palmer never had any doubt that he was gay.
His Oxfordshire upbringing was straight out of an Anthony Trollope novel, to the extent that as the vicar’s son he had to wear a tie when visiting the corner shop. He and his older brother, Michael, who also took holy orders and who survives him, were choristers at St Paul’s.
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When his voice broke he was sent to Bradfield College, Berkshire, before taking degrees in chemistry, mathematics and philosophy at the University of Bristol and making a flamboyant revue appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe. He “tried to go heterosexual” by having an affair with a woman but “nature won out”.
As a young man Palmer was not only handsome but, like his associates, prone to dressing extravagantly in kaftans, Regency frock coats and chiffon scarves in every colour of the rainbow. He possessed great waves of dark chestnut hair, held in place with hair spray.
Alongside his gay rights work Palmer maintained a parallel existence in marketing, writing sales pitches for Andrews liver salts, and advertising. Gradually he drifted towards publishing and worked on Metropolitan, a free title in west London, which in turn led to his well intentioned but disastrous foray into Gay News. In 1976 he met Alan Clark at a CHE meeting and in 2007 they entered into a civil partnership. “I took one look and thought. ‘I’m having that.’ And I did,” recalled Clark, a ghostwriter, who survives him.
After the Gay News episode Palmer fled to Spain where he edited the Marbella Times and published Mediterranean Life, the inflight magazine of Gibraltar Airways. In his mid-forties he returned to Britain and advised media businesses on corporate strategy.
Scarred by the Gay News experience, Palmer remained firmly below the parapet and was little heard of again in gay rights circles. However, his legacy lives on and this year more than a million people took part in the 50th anniversary of Pride, mostly without fear of losing their job or being beaten up.
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Robert Palmer, publisher and gay rights campaigner, was born on May 21, 1948. He died from complications of Parkinson’s disease on November 8, 2022, aged 74