With this year’s Belfast Pride festival in full flow, now is the perfect time to look back at a wonderful story in the history of LGBT and labour activism which, sadly, is relatively unknown among millennials.

As the proud grandson of a Barnsley coalminer, who stood on picket lines during the miner’s strikes in the 19080s, the story of Mark Ashton is one I adore.

Ashton was one of the founding members and leader of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) – a group of lesbian and gay activists set up to raise money for coal miners in the Dulais valley, South Wales, during the pit strikes in 1984-85.

A passionate social justice campaigner of Irish descent, Ashton was driven by the parallels he saw between the fight for LGBT rights and the struggle of the UK’s coal miners. Both communities were vilified by the tabloid press, bullied and harassed by the police, and battling against an opponent of much greater power and strength; the miners fighting against Thatcher’s government, the LGBT community struggling against a dominant public opinion that was, for the most part, unapologetically homophobic.

For Ashton, it was a question of solidarity. As he explained in a home-made documentary at the time: “One community should give solidarity to another. It is really illogical to say, ‘I’m gay and I’m into defending the gay community but I don’t care about anything else’.”

LGSM would hold regular street collections in London, where all of the members lived, rattling buckets at passers-by and loudly repeating their mantra: “Lesbians and gays support the miners!”.

In ’84 they also organised the infamous ‘Pits and Perverts’ benefit concert in the Electric Ballroom, London – seizing on a homophobic headline in the Sun and making it their own. The benefit raised over £5,500, and by the end of 1984 LGSM had donated £11,000 to the Dulais valley miners, the most raised for their cause by any single fundraiser in the UK.

It wasn’t all smooth running, and not everyone in the Dulais valley wanted to accept support from a lesbian and gay activists group, but the majority of the community were grateful for their help, and a bond was forged that still holds strong today.

The solidarity certainly went both ways, with some of the miners wearing gay rights badges on their labels in support of their new friends from London.

Speaking at the Pits and Perverts concert, Dai Donovan, a striking miner from the Dulais valley and interlude between LGSM and the wider mining community in his home town, told the crowd: “You have worn our badge, Coal Not Dole, and you know what harassment means, as we do. Now we will pin your badge on us, we will support you.”

Those words held true, as busloads of Welsh miners drove to London to march in the gay Pride parade in June 1985. According to Pride, a 2014 film which told the story of LGSM, so many miners turned up that, for health and safety reasons, they had to go to the front of the march and ended up leading the entire parade.

The legacy of LGSM and the bond they formed with the mining community in Dulais valley can still be felt today. A year after the pit strikes ended, gay and lesbian rights were officially enshrined in Labour Party policy after a motion was passed at the party’s conference. Similar motions had been tabled before, but it passed on this occasion thanks, in part, to a block vote in favour from the National Union of Mineworkers.

Mark Ashton died from HIV Aids in 1987 at the age of 26. He, and all the other members of LGSM, deserve to have their story told and retold, no matter how many years pass since those fateful days in South Wales.