Sharley McLean

Sharley McLean, 1923–2013, was a long-standing gay rights campaigner.

She was born Lotte Reyersbach in Germany in 1923. Her socialist father and Jewish mother both died in the Holocaust, but she managed to escape Britain in 1939, in one of the last transports of children allowed to leave Germany before the Nazis closed the borders. Her gay uncle, Kurt Bach, a left-wing activist, was arrested by the Gestapo in a gay bar in Berlin in 1937, and died wearing the pink triangle in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

During the war Sharley worked as a nurse at Lewisham hospital, but suffered abuse for her German nationality; she was able to fit in better when she acquired a British surname by marriage. At the time of her marriage she had feelings for other women, but had no name for this.

"When Lewisham Hospital was bombed, we all shared rooms and even beds because the rooms were so small. We were together; we cuddled each other without giving it a second thought. I think we were naive sexually. One staff nurse would say there were two ward sisters who were 'homosexual ladies'. They used to tell people they weren't married because their boyfriends were killed in the First World War. I remember we used to look at them with curiosity. Ridiculous when you think how naive one was."

She realised later that some of the women she worked with wer lesbians. When one of them told her: "You're one of us, you know," she interpreted this as meaning she could pass for British, and took it as a huge compliment. She carried on working in the NHS until she retired, and became involved with the Terrence Higgins Trust in the 1980s.

Sharley was also a long-time activist in the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE).