LGBT+ group dumps manure and cockroaches at red carpet property event
A group of LGBT+ activists have dropped off manure and cockroaches at an awards ceremony for the property industry.
The Sexual Avengers, which earlier this year posted a ‘Queer Heritage’ blue plaque at the House of Lords, dumped the manure at the annual Property Awards.
The event took place this week at the Grosvenor House hotel on Park Lane in London.
Members of the group said they targeted the event in order to push for genuinely affordable homes, rent controls and help for LGBT+ homeless people.
They criticised “the gentrification of London and the displacement of its diverse communities”.
A spokesperson for Sexual Avengers has said: “We are at the mercy of the housing market, where landlords and letting-agents condemn us to live in unsafe flats among filth and vermin.
“Property developers have grown rich by building multi-million pound housing projects, gentrifying working-class, multicultural areas and driving impoverished queer people away from support networks and into the street.”
Tickets to the event on Park Lane cost hundreds of pounds while a table could cost as much as £3,030.
Speaking to the Gay UK, one activist Stacey Jones said: “My partner died of cancer last April, and they wanted to kick me out in May. They couldn’t understand how I could be in a relationship with a woman when I had a child. I’d just lost my partner and had to sit there and justify my sexuality. Why did I deserve the house where we lived, where I cared for her and where she died?
“Property developers need to build for need not greed. I’ve been homeless twice, and I’d be on the streets now if it wasn’t for [gay rights charity] Stonewall. The number of empty properties and the number of people on the streets – it’s madness.”
The “Sexual Avengers” planted a plaque on the House of Lords in February to commemorate a lesbian protest.
The group of activist planted blue plaques on a string of London landmarks with LGBT history, in a bid to “turn the city’s public spaces into a living museum of radical queer history”
Among the most daring stunts was placing a plaque on the House of Lords outside Parliament, to commemorate a famous protest.
Lesbian activists famously abseiled into the Lords in 1988 to protest the Tory-backed Section 28, which banned the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools.
It reads: “Queer heritage: Protesting against Section 28 that discriminated against homosexuality, lesbians abseiled into the House of Lords, 2 February 1988.”
