Mike Marqusee, an author who combined a passion for sport with an equally strong devotion to equality, died on 13th January in St Joseph\u2019s Hospice in Hackney.<\/p>\n
Born in the USA, Mike came to the UK to go to university \u2013 and stayed. During the 1980s he lived in Haringey. Then a member of the Labour Party, he threw himself into two causes in particular: fighting the cuts which the (Labour) Council was making and the \u201cPositive Images\u201d campaign, which sought to present \u201cpositive images\u201d of lesbian and gay people and lifestyles in order to counter the homophobia then prevalent in the UK. The former led to a 1,000-strong lobby of the Council (the Labour Party responded by calling the police and locking the demonstrators out of the Town Hall) and the latter led to Margaret Thatcher\u2019s infamous \u201cClause 28\u201d which made it unlawful for public bodies such as schools to \u201cpromote\u201d lesbian and gay sexuality.<\/p>\n
Mike left Haringey to live with his soul-mate and the love of his life, barrister Liz Davies. \u00a0They had a slightly unconventional relationship in that Mike, having finally set down a home base, was prone to wandering off \u2013 often spending several months of the year in India to follow the cricket and to write for The Nation.<\/p>\n
The 1990s saw Mike publish two books on cricket. There was the first edition of Anyone But England: Cricket and the National Malaise<\/em> which explored the relationship between England\u2019s national summer sport and the English national identify. It went on to have two later editions. The decade also produced War Minus the Shooting: A Journey Through South Asia During Cricket\u2019s World Cup<\/em> \u2013 another exploration of the relationship between cricket and the politics of a people who revere the game, almost by way of balance.<\/p>\n Mike\u2019s other sporting work was Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties<\/em>. He was an activist as well as an author, though \u2013 finding time to be a key part of setting up Hit Racism for Six, a campaign to stop racism in cricket which inspired others to speak out and organise against racism in football too. He wrote If I Am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew<\/em> and was very active in setting up the Stop the War Coalition to campaign against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n In 2007 he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma \u2013 a bone marrow cancer \u2013 and his life took a different turn as he worked out how to live with the disease. When he had, he wrote about that too: the personal was, again, political.<\/p>\n Mike was no saint. He could be wrong, the tree he barked up wasn\u2019t always the right one \u2013 and he was arguably far too liberal in his use of the semi colon. But there was always time in his life to side with the oppressed against the undeservedly powerful, to fight for equality and to enjoy cricket. It was a short but valuable innings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mike Marqusee, an author who combined a passion for sport with an equally strong devotion to equality, died on 13th January in St Joseph\u2019s Hospice in Hackney. Born in the USA, Mike came to the UK to go to university \u2013 and stayed. During the 1980s he lived in Haringey. Then a member of the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3794,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n