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 in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.[1]
During the war Sharley worked as a nurse at Lewisham hospital. 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).
