The Right Honorable the Lord Etherton GBE KC PC

Lord Etherton was Master of the Rolls from 2016 to 2021, prior to which he was Chancellor of the High Court from 2013, making him the most senior openly gay judge in British history.

A statement issued by the Cabinet Office when Terence was awarded the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) recorded that:

​“In May 2022, he was appointed as the chair of the independent review into the impact of the historic ban on LGBT military personnel and veterans, which was published in July 2023. In writing his report, he personally read every testimony provided to the Review, over 1,400 pieces, some of considerable length. He met with veterans and charities throughout the UK, attended Prides throughout Britain, and met a range of ministers, other parliamentarians and military officers from the UK and abroad. He dedicated 15 months of his life, without pay or reward, to write and deliver the historic, ground-breaking report and the recommendations, which were fully accepted by the Government, are now being implemented in full. His work unveiled a culture of homophobia, bullying, blackmail, sexual assault, abusive investigations into sexual orientation and disgraceful medical examinations resulting in appalling consequences in terms of mental health and wellbeing, homelessness, employment, personal relationships and financial hardship. His commitment to the truth has helped draw a line under this unjust aspect of the history of the UK’s armed forces that persisted prior to 2000 but whose damaging consequences are still experienced by many LGBT veterans today."  

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In his valedictory speech upon retirement from the judiciary, Terence spoke of the discrimination he faced as Britain’s first openly gay senior judge, saying he hoped his decision to live a ‘totally open and honest life as a gay man in a court setting’ would inspire others to do the same. The Law Society Gazette reported:

“There was an ‘unwritten rule’ in the judiciary until the 1990s that gay men would not be appointed to the bench, purportedly because they would be vulnerable to blackmail. Etherton – who married his partner in 2014 – is the first ever master of the rolls to have a husband.

​I hope that I have kept my promise to myself and have been, if at all possible, a role model. Because my experience is that role models have a greater impact than anything else.”

Richard Wagenlander

Richard Wagenlander grew up in Munich and Singapore, and is of German and Malaysian Indian descent. In 2018, he moved to the United Kingdom to study law at Somerville College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first-class degree and was awarded Oxford’s Human Rights Law Prize. He then studied for his Master of Law at Corpus, specialising in international investment law and international human rights law.

Currently working as a legal consultant and researcher, Richard focuses on public international law, human rights law, international investment law, and general commercial law. His interest in LGBTQ+ rights began while working with the late Jonathan Cooper OBE on human rights cases. He was later commissioned by the Ozanne Foundation to draft the Cooper Report, which outlines a legal framework for banning conversion therapy. Richard further developed this interest during his time at the Human Dignity Trust, a charity engaged in strategic human rights litigation aimed at decriminalising LGBT+ relations and identities globally.

​He has delivered seminars and talks on LGBT+ rights at various institutions, and has published in this area. Richard is also a member of the Research to Policy Advisory Group on LGBT+ rights issues in the UK, established by King’s College London and the House of Lords. 

Most recently, Richard became a trustee of Lavender Common, a new NGO dedicated to LGBT+ rights and litigation in Europe. He continues to advise members of both Houses of Parliament on LGBT+ rights issues and international law and works pro-bono with NGOs pursuing the advancement of LGBT+ rights.

Daniel Gerring

Daniel Gerring is a lawyer, charity sector leader and internationally recognised figure in EDI. 

 He helped found and now chairs the charity Refugees at Home, which has provided over 600,000 nights of free accommodation to refugees and asylum seekers and he sits on a number of other non-profit boards.

 Daniel has been ranked in the top 15 in OUTstanding's top 100 LGBT+ Executives List worldwide (published by the Financial Times) and has been named Mentor of the Year at the British Legal Awards. 

He is honoured to be a Leadership Fellow at Windsor Castle and to be a member of the Network Group for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global LGBT+ Rights. 

Professionally, Daniel is a senior equity partner at City law firm Travers Smith, specialising in advice to pension funds. He is a founding member of Travers' DEI board, its Senior LGBT+ Champion and founded the firm's award-winning CSR programme.  In 2023 he worked with the UK Pensions Regulator to produce the first regulatory EDI guidance for the UK’s £3,000,000,000,000 pensions industry. 

 Daniel is a champion of working mothers and fathers, drawing on his own experience of balancing his professional work with being dad to his 2-year-old son. 

 He has proactively supported the University’s LGBTQ@Cam programme, including securing its first corporate support - in the form of the Travers Smith lgbtQ@cam Doctoral Bursary.

Christopher Isherwood

The story of Christopher Isherwood's life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood—the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man—was born an heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his long-term partner Don Bachardy painted his death portrait.

As Peter Martland and Miles Pattenden wrote in Corpus Lives, "Isherwood was acknowledged as one of the leading literary figures of the twentieth century, successful both as a novelist and diarist and, through his unashamed portrayal of homosexual culture in oppressive societies an icon of the gay rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. If his time at Corpus was undistinguished, he has become one of the College's most celebrated alumni."

Isherwood matriculated in 1923 to read History, but he failed to complete his degree. As Eliza Houghton-Shaw noted, "Isherwood would almost certainly have viewed this exhibition with surprise and contempt. It celebrates 100 years since he attended Corpus Christi as an undergraduate: more specifically, in Lent term of 1924, he was completing the first year of his history degree. By the following year, he had decided he had enough, and in his Part I exams he wrote only joke answers in order to ensure he was thrown out before his third year."

He chose Corpus because his great friend from Repton School, Edward Upward (m.1922), preceded him by one year. Together they created a collection of satirical stories in a shared fantasy setting of 'Mortmere' to mock the upper-class characters they encountered at Cambridge. Upward completed his degree and went on to become a novelist and short story writer. He and Isherwood remained close all their lives, and were part of a group of writers which included friends and collaborators W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender amongst others.

Isherwood, a biography by Peter Parker, includes the following:

​Throughout his life, but particularly in the wake of the new sexual liberation of the 1960s and 1970s, Isherwood drew up battle-lines across the sexual divide, glaring balefully across the chasm that separated him from the heterosexual majority. Most of Isherwood's closest friends were homosexual, and such alliances drew strength from the knowledge that Christopher and his kind were beyond society's - and, for much of his life, the laws - pale…

Andrew Lumsden

 Was born on 5 August 1941 in Herne Hill, London and educated at Furzedown Preparatory School and Lancing College before coming up to Corpus to study English. After graduation, he lived in a commune in Notting Hill and became an assistant on BBC TV’s Fanny Cradock cookery programmes, before going into journalism working for numerous publications, including The Times, New Statesman and Management Today. However, it is for his activism that he is most widely remembered.

From the early 1970s Andrew was a prominent member of the Gay Liberation Front, co-founding the fortnightly Gay News in 1971. After he left Gay News Andrew wrote for Petroleum Economist but returned as news editor in 1981, and then for a year as editor. The paper had survived prosecutions for obscenity and blasphemous libel, but finally closed when a new owner was unable to support its finances; Andrew and Gillian Hanscombe told its story in Title Fight: The Battle for Gay News (1983).

Andrew helped to organise London’s first Gay Pride march in London. This took place on 1 July 1972 to coincide with the nearest Saturday to the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City. That first Pride march attracted approximately 200 participants, whereas today London Pride is thought to attract over one million visitors each year. In 2019 on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Andrew published Rainbow Planet, a book that was written as an “Open Letter from Gay Liberation Front for Pride in London” and was given out for free at the London Pride march. Andrew had helped set up Gay News to give the LGBTQ+ community its own publication with a national reach that included articles the mainstream media were unwilling to publish; at its height it had a circulation of almost 20,000. In his later years, Andrew worked for Queer Tours of London as well as writing on Henry Labouchere, the MP remembered for his part in Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which made "gross indecency" a crime in Britain. This law was often used to prosecute homosexual men when sodomy itself could not be proven and under which both Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing were convicted. His first essay on Labouchere entitled, “We are born” was published online in 2022 and was intended to be the first of four, but unfortunately Andrew’s untimely death aged 82 on 31 October 2023 appears to have prevented this.