today as part of
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans History Month UK
Jackie Forster (née Jacqueline Moir Mackenzie; 6 November 1926 – 10 October 1998 was an English news reporter, actress and lesbian rights activist.
Broadcaster, editor and gay rights activist. In the 1950s, under her maiden name, Jackie Mackenzie became a television personality, appearing in programmes such as Highlight, Newsnight and Late Night Extra. Following her divorce in 1962, Jackie Forster travelled to Canada where, she met the actress Barbara Mary Todd, who remained her partner until 1975. With Todd, Forster founded the organization Sappho and its magazine, which she edited for ten years (1971-81)
Forster's father was a colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps and she spent her early years in British India. When she was six, she was sent to boarding school in Britain at Wycombe Abbey and then to St Leonards School in Fife. During the Second World War, she played lacrosse and field hockey for Scotland.
Forster became an actress and joined the Wilson Barrett repertory company in Edinburgh before moving to London in 1950. She attended the Arts Theatre Club was in various West End productions and films before developing a successful career as a TV presenter and news reporter under the name of Jacqueline MacKenzie.
In 1957 she was on a lecture tour in North America for part of the year and was in Savannah, Georgia, when she had her first lesbian affair. Despite this, she married author Peter Forster in 1958, but the marriage was over within two years as she accepted her true sexual identity. They divorced in 1962 and she went to live in Canada.
Of her early lesbian experiences, she said "I didn't see myself as being a lesbian, or her, because I didn't look as I imagined they did, and nor did she. We weren't short back and sides and natty gent's suiting. I got the image from The Well of Loneliness, like we all did. There were drug stores around the States, with these pulp books, lurid stories about lesbians who smoked cigars and had orgies with young girls. I thought, where are these women? We never met anyone we knew were lesbians. There were no other books that I found about lesbians, no films that we ever saw: nothing at all."
In 1964, Forster returned to Britain to work for Border Television; and then eventually moved in with a girlfriend and her children in London
Later on, she came out publicly in 1969 when she joined the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) and went to serve on its Executive Committee. She was in the first Gay Pride march in the UK in August 1971.
In 1972 Forster was one of the founders of Sappho, which was a social group and one of the UK's longest-running lesbian publications (Sappho magazine was published from 1972 to 1981, although the group continued to meet regularly for many more years). The Sappho group members used to meet in the Chepstow pub in Notting Hill and had speakers such as Maureen Duffy and Anna Raeburn.
After Sappho, Forster became a member of the Greater London Council's Women's Committee.
From 1992 until her death in 1998 Forster was an active member of the Lesbian Archive and Information Centre Management Committee (now part of the
Glasgow Women's Library
). In 1997 a BBC film crew came to the archive to film her for a programme about her life which was to be part of The Day That Changed My Life series. Her work has made a huge impact on shaping the archive.