The Way Out

A History of Homosexuality in Modern Britain

Sebastian Buckle

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857737380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1957, there were over a thousand men in prison for 'homosexual offences'. A little over half a century later, homosexuality is an active part of the mainstream. Homosexuality has a public profile - on TV, in film and in literature and popular culture. When did today's fairly open discourse on homosexuality begin? Sebastian Buckle argues that homosexuality as a public identity began after the Second World War, on the release of the Wolfenden Report which recommended gay sex be decriminalised, and tells the story of homosexuality in the public eye. Buckle takes us through early images of homosexuality in the 1950s, the founding of the Gay Liberation Front, Section 28 and community radicalism under Margaret Thatcher's government, the AIDs crisis of the 1980s, the expanding musical and cultural influence of gay subcultures and the resulting partial acceptance into the mainstream of queer identities. The result is a complex and nuanced history of gay movements, society and the media, and a fresh look at how the struggle for acceptance and equality has been fought.

SECTION 1

GAY LIBERATION

CHAPTER 1

EARLY OPTIMISM

On 27 July 1967, after almost a decade of campaigning, the HLRS celebrated the royal assent of the Sexual Offences Act, partially decriminalising sex between consenting men in England and Wales. However, despite their success the Act was a compromise. It did not apply to Scotland or Northern Ireland; it only applied to men over the age of 21, in private, with no more than two people present; and it did not apply to those in service in the armed forces or the merchant navy. In addition, the main sponsor of the bill (and high-profile advocate of reform) Lord Arran had issued a stark warning to those he had helped emancipate:

I ask those who have, as it were, been in bondage and for whom the prison doors are now open to show their thanks by comporting themselves quietly and with dignity. This is no occasion for jubilation; certainly not for celebration. Any form of ostentatious behaviour; now or in the future any form of public flaunting, would be utterly distasteful and would, I believe, make the sponsors of the Bill regret that they have done what they have done. […] Lest the opponents of the Bill think that a new freedom, a new privileged class, has been created, let me remind them that no amount of legislation will prevent homosexuals from being the subject of dislike and derision, or at best of pity.¹

Despite this warning, the Act created an almost instant impetus to campaigners who hoped to achieve legal parity between homosexuality and heterosexuality. The on-going political debate the Act created, rather than ended as its sponsors had hoped, helped structure how homosexuality was understood in Britain during this period of post-law reform.

The early pioneers of the HLRS had been well aware that the realities of individual behaviour were secondary concerns to the perceptions of society. In a world where homosexuality was mostly hidden, innuendo, gossip, and the bigotry of newspaper editors, as well as the overarching power of the statute book, were the principle means for the general public to gather facts about homosexuality. Thus it was their job to ensure that a different view prevailed, one that would be more acceptable to the public, but most importantly to the law makers whom they were attempting to influence.

The post-war social landscape had already provided these men and women with a unique combination of circumstances that provided the space in which to pursue law reform. On 24 March 1954, Lord Montagu, his cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers, and the journalist Peter Wildeblood, had been found guilty of ‘conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons’ and were sent to prison. Montagu was sentenced to 12 months, and Pitt-Rivers and Wildeblood to 18 months each.² When they left court Wildeblood recalled a crowd of people who ‘tried to pat us on the back and told us to “keep smiling”’.³ Crucially, the trial was an example of middle- and upper-class adult men engaged in consensual sex in private, which had only come to light following a police investigation and the testimony of their working-class lovers, on the condition that they would not then face trial themselves.⁴ Following the conviction of the three men, The Sunday Times published an editorial entitled ‘Law and Hypocrisy’:

The law, it would seem, is not in accord with a large mass of public opinion. That condition always brings evil in its train: contempt for the law, inequity between one offender and another, the risk of corruption of the police […]. The case for a reform of the law as to acts committed in private between adults is very strong. The case for an authoritative enquiry into it is overwhelming. An interim report under the auspices of the Moral Welfare Council of the Church of England has recently given that case clear support.⁵

At the same time political attention was increasing. The Conservative MP Sir Robert Boothby (whose bisexuality was well-known in Westminster) and the Labour MP Desmond Donnelly had raised the issue of homosexual law reform in the Commons in December 1953, and asked for the Government to set up a Royal Commission to examine the laws surrounding homosexual offences. The then Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, had responded that the matter was under consideration, while offering his personal view that ‘homosexuals in general are exhibitionists and proselytisers’.⁶ The following year Donnelly again tried to get a commission to examine the law, and on 19 May 1954 the House of Lords held its first debate on homosexuality.⁷ On 24 August, five months after the Montagu trial had ended, the Home Secretary responded to the demands for a Royal Commission by setting up a lesser departmental committee to examine the laws surrounding both homosexuality and prostitution. Maxwell-Fyfe hoped this would enable him to better control the committee, while serving to move the issue into the long grass.⁸

In what Weeks describes as ‘a crucial moment in the evolution of liberal moral attitudes’, the Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (Wolfenden) was published in September 1957, and recommended that ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence’.⁹ In a further sign that the public were closely following these events, the report’s initial print-run of 5,000 sold out within hours and had to be reprinted, unheard of for a government report.¹⁰ A year earlier, the Church of England had pre-empted these findings in its own report ‘Sexual Offenders and Social Punishment’, which had recommended a universal age of consent of 17 for both homosexual and heterosexual couples, claiming that,

[t]he fact that certain homosexual acts committed in certain circumstances may be penalized by statute or condemned by religion and morality does not imply that the homosexual condition, per se, is immoral or culpable.¹¹

It would prove to be the cumulative weight of these two influential reports that would add to the growing calls for law reform. Indeed, the future members of the HLRS, made up of mostly well-educated heterosexual men and women, seized the opportunity the Wolfenden report provided, and used it as the basis for their future campaign. In March 1958, a letter was published in The Times from ‘33 distinguished figures’ and organised by a 29-year-old homosexual university lecturer, A. E. Dyson:¹²

The present law is clearly no longer representative of either Christian or liberal opinion in this country, and now that there are widespread doubts about both its justice and its efficacy, we believe that its continued enforcement will do more harm than good to the health of the community as a whole.¹³

Dyson had felt compelled to act because of the resurgence in chain prosecutions for homosexual offences – where prosecutors used the evidence of convicted men to charge others they had been in contact with. The signatures to this letter were then convinced by Dyson to form the Homosexual Law Reform Society as members of an honorary committee, and campaign for the implementation of the Wolfenden proposals. A smaller executive committee was also set up, chaired by the sexologist Kenneth Walker, who through his work had a similar interest in law reform.¹⁴

By aligning themselves with the recommendations of Wolfenden, they attempted to create the image of a conservative respectability surrounding homosexuality, which represented the type of man they wanted to help. In doing so, their message corresponded with that of another conservative homosexual, Peter Wildeblood, who, as well as giving evidence to the Wolfenden Committee, had written in his influential book, Against the Law, that he was not making the case for ‘the corrupters of youth, not even the effeminate creatures who love to make an exhibition of themselves’.¹⁵ Houlbrook has identified this ‘respectable’ homosexual as key to the emergence of the Sexual Offences Act, in particular the creation of a certain kind of homosexual man who was not immoral:

[T]he ‘homosexual’ was constituted through and within broader matrices of sexual difference, defined through his distances from places, practices, and people repudiated as abject, immoral, and dangerous.¹⁶

However, the Wolfenden Report also reflected a competing framework of negative sexual identities by associating homosexuality more broadly with rape and unlawful sex, and working from the premise that the law was there to protect the vulnerable from homosexual men:

We believe that it is part of the function of the law to safeguard those who need protection by reason of their youth or some mental defect, and we do not wish to see any change in the law that would weaken this protection. Men who commit offences against such persons should be treated as criminal offenders.¹⁷

And it would be its association with paedophilia that would endure:

[T]here are two recognisably different categories among adult male homosexuals. There are those who seek as partners other adult males, and there are paedophiliacs, that is to say men who seek as partners boys who have not reached puberty.¹⁸

This would remain a key argument in future debates – particularly on the age of consent, and section 28 – where the protection of children was considered paramount. The safeguards the report put in place, however, including an unequal age of consent and privacy constraints, ensured that if the Government acted on its recommendations, it would only ever be emancipating the ‘homosexual’ and the respectable identity that represented, including discretion and middle-class values, and not all men who engaged in homosexual acts more generally:

It has to be borne in mind that there are many homosexuals whose behaviour never comes to the notice of the police or the courts, and it is probable that the police and the courts see only the worst cases; the more anti-social type of person is more likely to attract the attention of the police than the discreet person with a well-developed social sense.¹⁹

This debate over the respectable and unrespectable homosexual would continue throughout future parliamentary debates on law reform. The respectable, middle-class, and private homosexual man did not need to be criminalised since his sexual behaviour was always in private with men of his own age, while the unrespectable homosexual could be characterised by his public identity, disrespect for the law, and in some cases paedophilia.

The HLRS spent the next ten years building up a case for reform. It began its lobbying campaign by sending out its pamphlet ‘Homosexuals and the law’ to every MP. This coincided with the distribution of Wildeblood’s Against the Law and Dr Eustace Chesser’s Live and let live, which led to ‘a parliamentary outcry by opponents of reform that the Commons was being subjected to the attentions of a “rich and powerful lobby of perverts”’.²⁰ Despite these set-backs, the society’s secretary Anthony Grey – himself homosexual – continued campaigning around the country with a series of debates and lectures, ensuring the reform movement was kept alive.²¹ He visited the Dutch COC (Cultuur en Ontspanningscentrum, or Centre for Culture and Leisure), building up a relationship between them, the Albany Trust – the counselling wing of the HLRS – and also the French organisation Arcadie, who shared his ideas about discreetness and respectability. During this time the HLRS also built up relationships with sympathetic members of the Lords and the Commons. No political party had an official policy on homosexuality, despite the views of individual politicians, so instead legal change would be through a free vote. As a result, on 12 May 1965, the hereditary peer Lord Arran introduced a one-clause Sexual Offences Bill: ‘A homosexual act in private shall not be an offence provided that the parties consent thereto and have attained the age of 21 years.’²² Arran later claimed that his reasons for getting involved with homosexual law reform were complex:

Exhibitionism? Because I went to Eton and I knew what it was all about? A hatred of injustice…? I do not know my own motives anymore. Most probably my – or Parliament’s – liberation of the male homosexual here and elsewhere derives from my unhappiness at that time over a purely domestic matter (nothing to do with homosexuality). I have known more than one man in his distress turn to matters which give him a new anxiety.²³

Abse, however, suggested that Arran’s involvement owed more to the alleged homosexuality of his own brother:

I met a man who for many years had been the lover of Arran’s older brother: then it was all clear. This older brother, who over many years had received psychiatric aid, died tragically only a matter of days after becoming Earl. Arran succeeded to the title: it must have brought him much guilt. But it brought him, too, the opportunity to make a massive and brave act of reparation.²⁴

Arran’s bill passed its second reading by a margin of 94 to 49, with members of the House of Lords making repeated claims that they wanted the public to see the Lords as a reforming chamber. At the same time the Labour MP, Leo Abse, in the House of Commons, was attempting to garner support to introduce a similar change in the law. In May, under the ten-minute rule, which gives the House an opportunity to debate the proposed introduction of a bill, Abse encouraged MPs to support some measure of homosexual law reform. Unlike the Lords, however, his motion failed with a final vote of 159 to 178.²⁵ The following year in February, however, the Conservative MP Humphry Berkeley (another whose homosexuality was well-known in Westminster) introduced Arran’s completed bill to the Commons. Berkeley had won the opportunity to do this on the private member’s ballot. Directing his argument against those who said that the public were not yet in favour of reform and the time was not right, Berkeley claimed that a Gallup poll and a National Opinion poll both showed that 63 per cent supported a change in the law along Wolfenden recommendations.²⁶ The bill passed its second reading by 179 to 99, and was committed to a standing committee. The following month, however, the Prime Minster, Harold Wilson, called a general election in an effort to shore up his majority of four in the Commons, and all incomplete bills were lost.

Unsure when the next ballot would take place for the introduction of a Private Member’s Bill, or even if the successful MP would be willing to support homosexual law reform, Lord Arran reintroduced his bill after the election to ensure that the reform agenda was kept alive. It again pass...