Terry Sanderson (writer)

Terry Sanderson
Born	Terence Arthur Sanderson (1946-11-16)16 November 1946 Maltby, South Yorkshire, England
Died	12 June 2022(2022-06-12) (aged 75)
Nationality	British
Occupation(s)	Secularist, gay rights activist, author, journalist
Partner	Keith Porteous Wood
Website	gtmediawatch.org

Terence Arthur Sanderson^[1] (16 November 1946 – 12 June 2022) was a leading British secularist and gay rights activist, author, and journalist. He served as president of the National Secular Society from 2006 to 2017 and was a long-standing columnist for Gay Times.

In 1946, Sanderson was born to a poor mining family in the South Yorkshire village of Maltby.^[2][3] He came out as gay after starting work in Rotherham at the age of seventeen. His parents found out after reading an interview with Sanderson in a local newspaper, concerning his booking a venue for a meeting of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality.^[4] Moving to London in the early 1970s, Sanderson worked as a disability support worker or other similar jobs,^[3] and on the Woman's Own.^[3]

Sanderson began campaigning for equality for gay people in 1969. His MediaWatch columns for Gay Times have been a feature since 1982, and were described as "probably the most informative record of the extent of press homophobia in the UK in the 1980s".^[5] In 1986, after experiencing problems with a Christian-owned publisher, Sanderson established The Other Way Press as a specifically gay-themed publishing house. Sanderson was elected President of the National Secular Society in 2006, having previously served as a vice-president for a number of years. He helped organize protests during the state visit by Pope Benedict XVI to the United Kingdom.^[6]

Sanderson was in a relationship with Keith Porteous Wood, the current president of the National Secular Society. They had been together for over two decades before the recognition of same-sex relationships by the state, and they entered into a civil partnership in 2006.^[7] In 2015 his autobiography The Adventures of a Happy Homosexual was published and then revised with a new epilogue in 2021 as The Reluctant Gay Activist following his diagnosis and treatment for bladder cancer.^[8] His cancer returned in 2022 and he died at his home in London on 12 June that year, aged 75.^[9][1][10]

• How to be a Happy Homosexual (1986) London: The Other Way Press, ISBN 0-948982-00-4, (5th ed, 1999)
• The Potts Correspondence and Other Gay Humour (1987) London: The Other Way Press, ISBN 0-948982-01-2
• "Gays and the Press" (1989), in Shepherd, Simon and Wallis, Mick, Coming on strong: gay politics and culture London: Routledge; Chapter 13, pp. 231–241,ISBN 0-04-445352-3
• Making Gay Relationships Work (1990) London: The Other Way Press, ISBN 0-948982-02-0
• Stranger in the Family: how to cope if your child is gay (1991) London: The Other Way Press, ISBN 0-948982-03-9, (2nd ed, 1996)
• Mediawatch: treatment of male and female homosexuality in the British media (1995) London: Continuum International Publishing, ISBN 978-0-304-33186-4
• The Potts Papers (1996) London: The Other Way Press, ISBN 0-948982-09-8
• Assertively Gay: how to build gay self-esteem (1997) 2nd revised edition, London: The Other Way Press, ISBN 978-0-948982-10-1
• The Gay Man's Kama Sutra (2003) London: Carlton Books, ISBN 978-1-84222-794-7
• The Adventures of a Happy Homosexual: Memoirs of an Unlikely Activist (2015) The Otherway Press ISBN 978-1786102331
• The Reluctant Gay Activist (2021) Independently published, ISBN 979-8452007791

• Sanderson's "Mediawatch" site
• The Other Way Press
• Interview with Terry Sanderson, President of the National Secular Society Dogma Free America podcast
• Profile of Terry Sanderson The Guardian, 26 May 2010
• How to be happy Archived 3 March 2016 at the Wayback Machineanamariarivera, 26 June 2013
• This Man Spent 25 Years Fighting Newspapers Over Their Homophobic Reporting And Finally Won