‘A time of coming out’: Greenham lesbians reflect on UK peace camp

In its early 1980s heyday, Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp became an emblem of the global anti-nuclear movement, making headlines in Britain and beyond.

Today, some of the women who went to protest against the stationing of U.S. missiles at an airbase in southern England say the camp also helped them find the courage to come out as lesbians.

“For me it was a time of coming out, a time of finding myself, a time of safety,” Chris Drake, who lived in the camp for eight years, said before Monday’s release of “Mothers of the Revolution”, a documentary about Greenham Common.

“I’d always felt I was a lesbian, but I wasn’t brave enough to say I was a lesbian,” she said by phone. “During that time, if you came out as a lesbian, you came out and you ended up getting attacked, which happened to me a number of times.”

The documentary, directed by Briar March, was released to rent on YouTube, Sky and Apple TV and to watch with a Virgin TV subscription in Britain on Oct. 18.

Greenham Common’s protests began in August 1981, when a few dozen women, plus a handful of men and children, walked more than 100 miles (160 km) from Wales and chained themselves to the fences at the base.

While most of the women had to return home, some stayed and set up a camp, which soon became women-only. Until it was dismantled in 2000, after the old fences were finally removed, its population fluctuated from fewer than 20 to hundreds.

But although few women lived at the camp, thousands protested for shorter periods of time and the movement inspired similar protests around the world.

Actress and politician Glenda Jackson, who narrated the new documentary, describes them in the film as “ordinary women who helped end the Cold War”.

Another protester, Rebecca Johnson, recounts how Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, told her through a translator in 2004 that the Greenham women had helped make possible a 1987 nuclear disarmament treaty with the United States.

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