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‘Pits and perverts:’ the legacy of communist Mark Ashton
PETER FROST remembers one of The Sun’s most despicable headlines and how it was taken up as rallying call for working-class unity

It has taken three decades for the BBC and the British film industry to tell the amazing story of Mark Ashton. 

Thirty years is a long time, indeed a good few years longer than Ashton’s tragically short life — a life cut short by Aids at just 26 in 1987. 

Mark, a mercurial young Irishman, was a gay rights activist and a founder member — some would say the founding member — of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) during the epic miners’ strike of the 1980s.


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