My partner, Terry Sanderson, who has died aged 75, was an early gay rights activist. He was devoted to fighting injustice, and much of his working life was spent helping adults with learning disabilities, initially in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, and then in Ealing, west London, where we later settled.
The youngest son of a miner, Sandy, and his wife, Margaret (nee Goodgrove), a farmworker, Terry was born into grinding poverty in the mining village of Maltby in South Yorkshire, where he went to Maltby secondary modern school, leaving without any qualifications.
In the 1970s, when the local council refused to allow a gay disco that Terry hoped to organise on local authority premises, he challenged the decision in the local paper. By doing so, he came out to both the village and his family, who were supportive of him and, later, of us both.
He went on to form a local branch of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) and from his bedroom also established, in 1974, Essentially Gay, a mail-order company to help those who were closeted and isolated further afield. It ran until 1984.
We met in 1981 during a CHE social weekend. Our binding passion was gay rights, and seeking to combat what we saw as the biggest obstacle to emancipation: religious privilege and harmful doctrine – hence our commitment to secularism.
Terry’s greatest talents lay in his journalism and writing. The portfolio of gay self-help books he wrote transformed the lives of many. Most popular was How to Be a Happy Homosexual (1986), which went through numerous editions and translations.
Apart from three years in the early 80s working as an agony aunt for Claire Rayner at Women’s Own, from 1970 to 2004 Terry worked as a disability support worker or similar, refusing numerous offers of promotion due to his determination to stay close to the service users. He worked at Beechcroft (attached to Rotherham hospital) for more than 10 years, then, when he moved to London to live with me, at Friern (mental) hospital for two years. Finally, he worked at Cowgate day centre, run by Ealing council, for more than a decade, before retiring at the age of 57 in 2004.
From 1983 to 2007, Terry read every newspaper in order to compile the monthly Mediawatch column for Gay Times, highlighting media homophobia. He complained frequently to the media regulators, contributing in no small part to the much more tolerant attitude that we now witness.
Terry and I worked together at the National Secular Society from 1996 to 2020. He helped build membership through the popular weekly Newsline, which he founded, as well as volunteering for the society. Eleven of his 20-plus years with the NSS were as president.
Unassuming yet popular, Terry was a compassionate fighter for justice. His last post on Facebook, announcing his imminent demise from cancer, concluded: “Be kind to each other.”
Terry is survived by me and by his brother Albert.
