Welsh activist and historian Jeffrey Weeks was BOTD in 1945. Born in Rhondda, Tonypandy, the son of a coal miner, he was the first person in his family to go to university, studying at University College London. He joined the Gay Liberation Front in 1970, and later co-founded Gay Left, a Marxist collective for gay men, focusing on the links between sexual and political oppression. His first publication, Ideas of Gay Liberation was published in 1972 in Gay News, Britain’s first gay newspaper. In 1977, he published Socialism and the New Life, co-authored with Shelia Rowbotham, a study of Victorian sexologists and gay activists Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, followed by Coming Out, a history of homosexual politics in Britain from the 19th century to the 1970s. A milestone in gay history and sociology, it is credited with jump-starting academic interest in gay and lesbian history. Weeks lectured in history and sexuality at London South Bank University and was director of the Director of the Social Policy and Urban Regeneration Research Institute. His other books include Sex Politics and Society, a study of the social regulation of sexuality; Between the Acts: Lives of Homosexual Men 1885 – 1967, and The World We Have Won: the Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life. Weeks lives in London with his long-term partner Mark McNestry, entering into a civil partnership in 2006.