Casgliadau Arlein

Badge 'Gay Pride Week 1976', worn by Mike Ashdown at London Gay Pride. Members of Cardiff Campaign for Homosexual Equality/Gay Liberation Front regularly attended London Pride from 1974. Mike Ashdown was involved with the Cardiff Campaign for Homosexual Equality throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, initially as Group Secretary, then from about 1974 to 1977 as Convenor.

The badge uses the Greek lambda letter which was used as a gay symbol before the adoption of the rainbow flag. The symbol was originally chosen by the Gay Activists Alliance of New York in 1970. The GAA was a group which broke away from the larger Gay Liberation Front at the end of 1969, only six months after it's foundation, in response to the Stonewall Riots. The lambda became associated with Gay Liberation and later recognised as an LGBT symbol, being used as such by the International Gay Rights Congress in Edinburgh, the gay rights organisation Lambda Legal, and the Lambda Literary Foundation, among others. Because of its official adoption by the GAA, the lambda became a way for the gay community to identify each other.