tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/wolfenden-report-40973/articlesWolfenden report – The Conversation2017-12-20T14:36:32Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/894222017-12-20T14:36:32Z2017-12-20T14:36:32ZBuggery, bribery and a committee: the story of how gay sex was decriminalised in Britain – podcast<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199970/original/file-20171219-4980-1ujgoan.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">shutterstock</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Gay men should show their thanks by “comporting themselves quietly and with dignity”. So said Lord Arran, the man who shepherded the landmark law that partially decriminalised sex between men through parliament in 1967. It was a long time in coming and left a lot to be desired for gay men.</p>
<p>Listen to the fascinating in-depth story of how the 1967 Sexual Offences Act came to pass and the legacy it had. It is written by Chris Ashford and read by Andrew Naughtie.</p>
<p>You can read the text version of the article <a href="https://theconversation.com/buggery-bribery-and-a-committee-the-story-of-how-gay-sex-was-decriminalised-in-britain-79597">here</a>. And click <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/sexual-offences-act-1967-40972">here</a> to read more articles in our series, which marked the anniversary of the act earlier this year.</p>
<iframe src="https://player.acast.com/5e29c8205aa745a456af58c8/episodes/5e29c8365aa745a456af58d5?theme=default&cover=1&latest=1" frameborder="0" width="100%" height="110px" allow="autoplay"></iframe>
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<p><em>The music in this episode is <a href="http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rosevere/Music_for_Podcasts_4/Lee_Rosevere_-_Music_for_Podcasts_4_-_06_Night_Caves">Night Caves</a>, by Lee Rosevere from the Free Music Archive. A big thanks to City University London’s Department of Journalism for letting us use their studios to record this podcast.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/89422/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Ashford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Listen to the fascinating in-depth story of the decriminalisation of gay sex in Britain.Chris Ashford, Professor of Law and Society, Northumbria University, NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/747852017-07-26T21:38:19Z2017-07-26T21:38:19ZAgainst The Law review: a fitting tribute to gay men whose persecution in 1950s paved way for new rights<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179483/original/file-20170724-24368-vc9uak.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A dangerous romance in the 1950s. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC Pictures</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The journalist Peter Wildeblood may not be a household name in Britain today, but he was in 1954. Along with the wealthy Lord Montagu and Michael Pitt-Rivers, Wildeblood was sent to prison for homosexual offences in a case that shocked Britain. His case is the subject of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p057nmkt">Against The Law</a>, a film premiered at the BFI Flare film festival and aired on BBC2 to mark the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality. </p>
<p>The post-war period saw a major upswing in the number of such cases coming before the courts in the UK and the US. This was not because men were having more sex with other men, but because the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic were acting with increased vigour to catch them. In 1948, the American biologist Alfred Kinsey and his team of scientists had published <a href="http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?isbn=0253334128">Sexual Behavior in the Human Male</a>, with its shock findings that same-sex incidents were widespread across the population.</p>
<p>Panic reactions, including attempts to identify secret homosexuals hiding in the closet, were <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/picturing-the-closet-9780190205638?cc=gb&lang=en&">spurred</a> by fears that the Soviet Union was using information about private lives to blackmail individuals into spying for them.</p>
<h2>Speaking out</h2>
<p>Wildeblood’s importance in reforming the strict laws in the UK lay not so much in his conviction but in his subsequent publication of <a href="https://www.orionbooks.co.uk/books/detail.page?isbn=9781780225418">Against The Law</a> in 1955. In this pioneering book, he openly advocated legal reform from the position of an avowedly gay man or, to use the language of the time, “a homosexual”.</p>
<p>The BBC film telling Wildeblood’s story – part dramatisation, part documentary – was produced in associated with the Wellcome Trust, which advised on the medical treatments for homosexuality on offer at the time, such as <a href="http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9780719095887/">hormone and aversion therapies</a> involving the administration of emetics and electric shocks.</p>
<p>Wildeblood was the only openly homosexual man to agree to give testimony to the committee, chaired by Lord Wolfenden, that was established in the wake of the trial. The resulting <a href="http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item107413.html">report</a>, published in 1957, laid the groundwork for the eventual (partial) decriminalisation of male homosexual sex brought about in England by the passing of the <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1967/60/pdfs/ukpga_19670060_en.pdf">Sexual Offences Act</a> in July 1967. </p>
<p>When Wildeblood, played by Daniel Mays in the film, attests in court to being homosexual, he is not admitting that he has broken the law. Sexual acts such as “buggery” were illegal, but simply being a “sexual deviant” <a href="https://theconversation.com/buggery-bribery-and-a-committee-the-story-of-how-gay-sex-was-decriminalised-in-britain-79597#comment_1350236">was not</a>. Yet, whether they were celibate or not, gay men were loathed by a considerable proportion of the population and by the police who were paid to hunt them down. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179482/original/file-20170724-21564-z6ohqj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179482/original/file-20170724-21564-z6ohqj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179482/original/file-20170724-21564-z6ohqj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179482/original/file-20170724-21564-z6ohqj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179482/original/file-20170724-21564-z6ohqj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179482/original/file-20170724-21564-z6ohqj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179482/original/file-20170724-21564-z6ohqj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Peter Wildebood was sentenced to 18 months in prison.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC Pictures</span></span>
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<p>When Wildeblood’s former lover agrees to turn “Queen’s evidence” in return for immunity from prosecution, viewers are invited to think of the line “each man kills the thing he loves” from Oscar Wilde’s poem <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/ballad-reading-gaol">The Ballad of Reading Gaol</a>. The ghostly presence of Wilde and his own <a href="http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item107514.html">trials</a> in 1895 haunt this production, implying that little had changed over the intervening 60 years. </p>
<h2>Insecurity leads to clampdown</h2>
<p>But interwar Britain had in fact witnessed several years of much more openly queer life, even if it had not seen a relaxation of the criminal law. World War II then brought all manner of opportunities for queer sex, even if not sustained love, in the blackout. As the writer and sometime sex-worker <a href="https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780006540441/the-naked-civil-servant">Quentin Crisp</a> said of the behaviour of American service personnel stationed in London: “Never in the history of sex was so much offered to so many by so few.”</p>
<p>What had changed, by the 1950s, was that the British establishment was far less secure than it had been. There was a real fear of the spread of communism across Europe, and the end of the British Empire was widely understood to be inevitable once India was given its independence in 1947. New methods of social control were introduced in the 1950s: the police manufactured evidence, intimidated witnesses, entrapped homosexual men, and ensured that careers and relationships were ruined.</p>
<p>The film’s dramatic reconstruction of events during the 1950s is intercut with testimony from men who lived through the time. Some of them enjoyed playing cat and mouse with the authorities. But others admit to years of shame and terror at the thought that their desires might become public.</p>
<p>Wildeblood was not a gay liberationist in the mould of the civil rights campaigners of the 1970s. What he wanted was the right to live a respectable private life and, to some extent, the 1967 law provided that opportunity. It was no proud exercise in identity affirmation, but rather the application of discretion to what was felt to be a pressing social problem. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, the BBC’s film, with its sexy scenes and celebratory tributes to men who endured years of bullying and intimidation, makes it clear that it was the establishment that was in retreat as British imperial power fell apart in the face of the rising demands of people across the former empire for independence, respect and self-determination.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74785/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dominic Janes has in the past received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. </span></em></p>The story of the trial of Peter Wildeblood.Dominic Janes, Professor of Modern History, Keele UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/797052017-07-25T09:11:26Z2017-07-25T09:11:26ZOn sexuality, the law still caters to the norms of public disgust<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179445/original/file-20170724-10327-x6bot3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Marching for pride, London, 1974.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A%22We_Are_Nature's_Children_Too%22_-_Gay_Pride_March%2C_(1974)_(7408285244).jpg">LSE Library via Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>We tend to assume that law is objective and disembodied, but the story of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/buggery-bribery-and-a-committee-the-story-of-how-gay-sex-was-decriminalised-in-britain-79597">decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK</a> shows that, like the people who create it, it is in fact an emotional creature, animated by visceral human feelings – and as far as sexuality is concerned, the chief emotion at work is often disgust. </p>
<p>You don’t have to look very hard to see how much it was disgust, not a concern for morality or justice, that shaped the laws governing homosexual activity. In fact, in the UK, homosexuality was long deemed so perverse that to even speak of it in public would stain your character.</p>
<p>Criminal punishments for homosexual activity, which included the death penalty, thrived on disgust for centuries. Introduced by Henry VIII in 1533, the Buggery Act 1533 criminalised the “abominable vice” of anal sex between men. In his <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Rww0AQAAMAAJ&pg=PP284&lpg=PP284&dq=%E2%80%9Coffence+of+so+dark+a+nature%E2%80%9D+blackstone&source=bl&ots=NsxJd2wEo1&sig=U9s1YAvuYcUPVYE5Vp5ACG9IbUY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiT-uPZ7qHVAhUqJcAKHVOwAIkQ6AEINDAC#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9Coffence%20of%20so%20dark%20a%20nature%E2%80%9D%20blackstone&f=false">commentaries</a> on the common law of England published in 1765, jurist William Blackstone described buggery as an “offence of so dark a nature” that “the very mention of [it] is a disgrace to human nature”. <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2008/12/17/alien-legacy/origins-sodomy-laws-british-colonialism">Colonial statutes</a> (which are still in effect in a number of Commonwealth countries today) referred to sex between men as an “act against the order of nature”. </p>
<p>In 1895, writer Oscar Wilde was put on trial for “gross indecency”, a statutory offence <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-criminal-law-amendment-act-1885">introduced in 1885</a> to punish individuals who engaged in same-sex relationships, without having to prove they had anal sex. In sentencing Wilde for gross indecency, <a href="http://www.mr-oscar-wilde.de/words/trials/justice_wills.htm">Justice Wills</a> noted:</p>
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<p>The crime of which you have been convicted is so bad that one has to put stern restraint upon one’s self to prevent one’s self from describing, in language which I would rather not use, the sentiments which must rise in the breast of every man of honour who has heard the details of these two horrible trials.</p>
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<p>Disgust, again, was the animating principle. In writing about the Wilde trial, philosopher and legal scholar <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7697.html">Martha Nussbaum</a> observes that disgust was not simply an excess or unintended consequence of prosecuting sexual offences; it was central to it. Criminal penalties were contingent on the extent to which the person, and the activity they engaged in, could elicit public disgust.</p>
<h2>Dealing with disgust</h2>
<p>Unsurprisingly, then, the process of decriminalising homosexuality that began in the mid-20th century involved rethinking and redirecting disgust in the law. Following the convictions of famous British citizens such as <a href="http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2015/08/24/heartbreaking-alan-turing-letters-reveal-turmoil-over-gay-cure-treatment/">Alan Turing</a> and <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11834758/Lord-Montagu-of-Beaulieu-obituary.html">Lord Montagu</a>, the UK government commissioned Sir John Wolfenden in 1954 to head up an inquiry to consider the appropriateness of criminalising homosexuality and the treatment of those who were convicted as a result.</p>
<p>In its powerful and widely celebrated <a href="http://www.humandignitytrust.org/uploaded/Library/Other_Reports_and_Analysis/Wolfenden_Report_1957.pdf">report</a>, the Wolfenden Committee noted that revulsion towards homosexuals was an insufficient basis to criminalise their behaviour, since it breached their right to privacy: “Moral conviction or instinctive feeling, however strong, is not a valid basis for overriding the individual’s privacy.”</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/175244/original/file-20170622-12049-1gsswcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/175244/original/file-20170622-12049-1gsswcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/175244/original/file-20170622-12049-1gsswcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/175244/original/file-20170622-12049-1gsswcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/175244/original/file-20170622-12049-1gsswcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/175244/original/file-20170622-12049-1gsswcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/175244/original/file-20170622-12049-1gsswcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Offended? The LGBT Centre in New York.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>On paper, this was a breakthrough. But instead of liberating homosexuality, the notion of protecting “privacy” became a legal container for public disgust. The committee also noted that by confining homosexuality to the bedroom, it could be zoned away to a space where the public would not have to bear the disgust of witnessing it. In fact, the committee emphasised the need to protect children from this “corrupting” vice; it recommended this be done by setting the age of consent for homosexual activity at 21, several years above the heterosexual boundary.</p>
<p>Ten years after the report, parliament gave effect to these recommendations when it passed the <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1967/60/pdfs/ukpga_19670060_en.pdf">Sexual Offences Act 1967</a> and partially decriminalised homosexuality in England and Wales. Criminal law still prohibited sexual activity between men aged under 21, and those who had (group) sex in the company of other adults. </p>
<p>Homosexuality, in short, was not cleansed of public disgust. Rather, legal notions of privacy allowed the state to contain homosexuality in a way that would avoid offending the moral sensibilities of a “normal” (read: heterosexual) public. Disgusting sex was safely confined to the private sphere.</p>
<h2>Happily ever after?</h2>
<p>Over the last 50 years, the British gay rights landscape has been dramatically reshaped. Same-sex couples have gone from being revolting “outlaws” to dignified “in-laws”. They can have anal sex at the same age as those who can have vaginal-penile intercourse; they can get married and have children. Many of us who are directly affected sentimentalise these as milestones on a march towards a happy ending – a world where we are no longer abused because of who we are or what we do.</p>
<p>That’s perfectly understandable, but we should treat this legalistic narrative of progress with caution. Disgust, after all, is still used to regulate sexual minorities.</p>
<p>Various laws still <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Homosexual_ity_of_Law.html?id=F-G8O95Yk2wC">police</a> public sex and sex work. Thanks largely to the judgment in the notorious <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/perverts-on-parade-for-the-right-to-practise-safe-sadism-1599215.html">Operation Spanner trial</a> of 1990, people who enjoy consensual sadomasochism <a href="http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKHL/1993/19.html">risk prosecution</a> when their kinky activities result in what the law deems “actual bodily harm”. Those who find kinship outside the conventional couple remain on the peripheries of legal recognition. </p>
<p>The law is still used to stigmatise and punish identities and forms of intimacy that don’t conform to the mainstream’s romanticised expectations. Yes, it’s right to celebrate the legal progress in this area over the last five decades; many of us who would once have been kept in the shadows no longer think of our desires as disgusting or shameful. But it must be remembered that this was made possible by changes in public emotion, not just the law – and if we want to see further progress, we must ask ourselves why some sexualities still disgust us.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79705/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Senthorun Raj does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Even the Wolfenden report cited the need to protect the public from that which disgusted them.Senthorun Raj, Lecturer, Keele Law School, Keele UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/795972017-07-24T04:04:30Z2017-07-24T04:04:30ZBuggery, bribery and a committee: the story of how gay sex was decriminalised in Britain<p>It was a summer evening in 1954 and the home secretary, David Maxwell Fyfe, was travelling on the Liverpool to London sleeper train. His accompanying security detail passed him a note from a man called John Wolfenden. Fyfe had been due to meet with Wolfenden the following week but Wolfenden – on seeing Fyfe on the passenger manifest – suggested that he might pop by his compartment and have the conversation now. A half-dressed Fyfe put on an overcoat and invited Wolfenden in.</p>
<p>The conversation that these two men would have – sat side-by side on the home secretary’s sleeping berth – would set in motion a series of events that would lead to <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1967/60/pdfs/ukpga_19670060_en.pdf">Sexual Offences Act 1967</a> and the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales. </p>
<p>Wolfenden, who recounted this story in his <a href="http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=moreTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=BLL01011327834&indx=1&recIds=BLL01011327834&recIdxs=0&elementId=0&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbrVersion=&frbg=&&vl(488279563UI0)=any&dscnt=0&scp.scps=scope%3A%28BLCONTENT%29&tb=t&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&srt=rank&tab=local_tab&dum=true&vl(freeText0)=turning%20points%20wolfenden&dstmp=1500524650531">1976 memoir</a>, discovered that night that he was being invited to chair a new committee to consider the law relating to both prostitution and homosexuality. Both areas brought together issues of morality, legality and debates about the role of the state in regulating sexual behaviour. </p>
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<p><strong><em>Listen to an <a href="https://theconversation.com/buggery-bribery-and-a-committee-the-story-of-how-gay-sex-was-decriminalised-in-britain-podcast-89422">audio version</a> of this article on The Conversation’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/in-depth-out-loud-podcast-46082">In Depth Out Loud</a> podcast.</em></strong></p>
<iframe src="https://player.acast.com/5e29c8205aa745a456af58c8/episodes/5e29c8365aa745a456af58d5?theme=default&cover=1&latest=1" frameborder="0" width="100%" height="110px" allow="autoplay"></iframe>
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<p>A review of the law relating to prostitution was prompted, Wolfenden subsequently wrote, by a growing visibility and persistence of soliciting (prostitution <em>per se</em> was not a criminal offence in itself but a number of 19th-century laws did serve to outlaw loitering or importuning) and a fear that the law was being brought into disrepute. Homosexual behaviour on the other hand was regarded as “unnatural vice” – a threat to individuals and society – but also a behaviour attracting a range of different police responses, including the use of <em>agent provocateurs</em>. There was also considerable scope to blackmail homosexual men. </p>
<p>The reason for Wolfenden’s selection to chair the committee remains unclear. Then vice chancellor of Reading University and a former Oxford don, he speculated that this academic independence perhaps enabled him to be a committee chair. But he was also careful to note in his memoirs that it “cannot have been because I was an expert in either of these two subjects [of prostitution and homosexuality]”.</p>
<p>Despite the historic public silence around homosexuality, it was increasingly breaking through into the public imagination. There were frequent arrests for public sex offences prior to the 1956 Sexual Offences Act drawing upon a combination of 19th-century laws and the common law. This legal landscape prompted a growing number of cases of men being threatened with extortion via fake or real accusations of homosexuality, along with the high-profile trial of journalist Peter Wildeblood and peer Lord Montagu in the 1950s.</p>
<p>In 1953, the actor John Gielgud would find himself in what he would later describe as “a disagreeable incident” in which he was <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/john-gielgud-when-england-hounded-a-hero-788459.html">arrested</a> for cottaging in London. The story of Gielgud soliciting in a public lavatory for sex would be covered in the press but would not ultimately harm his career. He was cheered as he appeared in a new play in Liverpool and then later in London. This suggested the public – albeit the theatre-going one – appeared rather more supportive than the media. </p>
<p>Into this mix, dropped the <a href="http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item107413.html">Wolfenden Report</a> in 1957, recommending that homosexual behaviour between consenting adult men in private should no longer be criminalised. The report also indicated that it expected gross indecency to continue to exist as an offence. The permanent secretary at the Home Office <a href="http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=moreTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=BLL01011327834&indx=1&recIds=BLL01011327834&recIdxs=0&elementId=0&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbrVersion=&frbg=&&vl(488279563UI0)=any&dscnt=0&scp.scps=scope%3A%28BLCONTENT%29&tb=t&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&srt=rank&tab=local_tab&dum=true&vl(freeText0)=turning%20points%20wolfenden&dstmp=1500524650531">told Wolfenden</a>: “don’t expect legislation quickly”. Ministers, upon being presented with the report, told Wolfenden that he was “way out in front of public opinion”. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">An ITN interview with Lord Wolfenden in 1957 after the publication of his report.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>The 1967 Act</h2>
<p>The civil servant’s prediction proved pretty accurate. It took ten years for legislation to transform the Wolfenden recommendations into law. In the meantime, the 1961 film <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/444107/index.html">Victim</a>, starring Dirk Bogarde and Sylvia Syms would depict – in a bold cinematic intervention – the very extortion of gay men that Wolfenden had been set up in part to tackle.</p>
<p>The reforming Labour home secretary, Roy Jenkins, would provide private encouragement in order to allow a backbench law to enact Wolfenden’s recommendations to gain parliamentary time and ultimately, support in the late 1960s. At the third reading, the Sexual Offences Bill 1967 was <a href="https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/relationships/collections1/sexual-offences-act-1967/sexual-offences-act-1967/">passed</a> by 101 votes to 16, overcoming a decade of debate and resistance since the Wolfenden report. </p>
<p>With just 11 sections, the 1967 Act was a relatively short piece of legislation. Its long title indicated that it was “an Act to amend the law of England and Wales relating to homosexual acts”. The first section would indicate that “a homosexual act” in private would no longer be an offence, provided that the parties were 21 years of age or older. The second section contained two further caveats that would signify a broader attitude to homosexuality. First, it would be offence when more than two persons took part or are present, and it would be an offence if an act took place in “a lavatory to which the public have or are permitted to have access, whether on payment or otherwise”.</p>
<p>It is worth noting that the legislation was focused on male homosexuality. Traditionally, the law had been preoccupied with acts of buggery and sodomy and conceptualised these acts as solely male-based. While lesbianism was also considered an “unnatural vice”, sex between two women was never actually illegal in the UK.</p>
<p>The 1967 Act was not a sudden embracing of homosexuality by the law. It was, at best, tentative. The law had found itself intervening when gay men were being either the victims of blackmail or being visible. This law was designed to put male homosexuality out of sight and end it being an issue of public debate. The law on public lavatories regarding the ongoing acts of “cottaging”, or seeking sex in public toilets, may perhaps seem a historic curiosity today. Yet, the section was restated as recently as 2003 and remains in force. Taken together with the common law on outraging public decency, the law continues to operate today: no two men may have sex in a public lavatory. </p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WVVUPMZ4eXY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Private Lives and Public Acts’, a film produced and directed by Dickie Beau for the British Library exhibition Gay UK: Love, Law and Liberty.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In February 2017, two men were arrested in a Newcastle shopping centre toilet, found <a href="https://www.gaystarnews.com/article/two-men-caught-sex-newcastle-shopping-centre-loo-6pm/">guilty</a> of sex in a public lavatory by local magistrates and fined £180 and £120 respectively. No reports indicated that any actual sex activity had been witnessed by the public or shopping centre workers but their public naming, shaming and, significantly for the future of both men, criminalising was evocative of an earlier age. It showed that this darker side of the 1967 Act continues to have a legacy today in determining what homosexual acts are acceptable under the law and which are not.</p>
<p>The Act described “homosexual acts” as being either buggery or “gross indecency”, a concept introduced into law in 1885 and restated in the Sexual Offences Act 1956. Gross indecency was designed to criminalise those men where buggery could not be proven and would be the offence that would lead to the criminal convictions of both Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing. The offence remained on the statute book until 2004 when the <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/contents">Sexual Offences Act 2003</a> came into force, repealing the 1956 Act offence. This was the same year that the Civil Partnership Act was passed. </p>
<p>Lord Arran, who had been the shepherd of the 1967 law in the House of Lords, famously <a href="http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1967/jul/21/sexual-offences-no-2-bill">stated</a> when the Act was passed that gay men should now “show their thanks by comporting themselves quietly and with dignity”. The quote is sometimes now seen as suggesting his words reflected a broad conservative sentiment. This is true, but Lord Arran, in a <a href="http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=moreTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=BLL01001467895&indx=1&recIds=BLL01001467895&recIdxs=0&elementId=0&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbrVersion=&frbg=&&vl(488279563UI0)=any&dscnt=0&scp.scps=scope%3A%28BLCONTENT%29&tb=t&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&srt=rank&tab=local_tab&dum=true&vl(freeText0)=lord%20arran%20writes&dstmp=1500528723026">collection</a> of his journalistic writing published in 1964, would offer jokes about infidelity and sex, noting that: “Sex is the greatest possible fun. But not something to be taken too seriously.”</p>
<p>Homosexuality was not just sex, it was in a different category and although it had been decriminalised, it was still very much something to be taken seriously. </p>
<h2>The rights era</h2>
<p>The 1967 Act only decriminalised homosexuality in England and Wales. It would take until the passing of the <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1980/62/pdfs/ukpga_19800062_en.pdf">Criminal justice (Scotland) Act</a> in 1980 for Scotland to come in line, and it would take the <a href="http://www.hrcr.org/safrica/dignity/Dudgeon%20_UK.htm">Dudgeon v United Kingdom</a> case before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in 1981 for the law to be changed in Northern Ireland in 1982. That case – which found that the continued criminalisation of homosexuality in Northern Ireland breached Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – would later be cited in the 2003 US Supreme Court decision of <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/02-102.ZO.html">Lawrence v Texas</a>, a case that struck down the sodomy laws of 14 states.</p>
<p>The first decade following the passing of the Sexual Offences Act was uneventful. It would be a conflict between the Thatcher government of the 1980s and a growing radicalism on gender and sexuality from Labour-controlled councils in the great cities that would lead to the next major spark in statutory reform.</p>
<p>Section 28 of the <a href="http://lgbthistorymonth.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/1384014531S28Background.pdf">Local Government Act 1988</a> set out to ban material or teaching that would “promote” homosexuality. The law, which we might today better associate with Putin’s Russia, was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/nov/17/uk.gayrights">repealed</a> in 2003. You would have to be currently aged 14 or under to have not been affected by this legislation. It contained two key provisions, stating: a local authority shall not (a) intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality; and (b) promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.</p>
<p>The law simultaneously sent out the government-mandated signal that homosexuality was not something to be “promoted” and that it could not constitute a “real” family, only a “pretend” one. </p>
<p>While the law was never used as part of a prosecution, it had a chilling effect on the freedom of expression relating to homosexuality. The National Council for Civil Liberties, the forerunner to Liberty, sought to catalogue this impact in its <a href="http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=moreTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=BLL01009781099&indx=1&recIds=BLL01009781099&recIdxs=0&elementId=0&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbrVersion=&frbg=&&vl(488279563UI0)=any&dscnt=0&scp.scps=scope%3A%28BLCONTENT%29&tb=t&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&srt=rank&tab=local_tab&dum=true&vl(freeText0)=liberty%20section%2028&dstmp=1500528785741">1989 guide</a> to the law. They noted plays cancelled and LGBT student groups banned from college premises as a result of the law. </p>
<p>The legislation was also significant for sparking the formation of the cross-party LGB (and later LGBT) campaign organisation, Stonewall. The organisation brought together Labour’s Michael Cashman with the Conservative Matthew Parris along with celebrities including the actor Ian McKellen. It would be this organisation that would be in the campaigning vanguard in the years that followed, often being a lead organisation for consultations between government and the LGBT “community”. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/contents">Human Rights Act 1998</a>, made law ten years on from the Local Government Act, was another turning point, signalling the start of a rights-based approach that would ultimately lead to the <a href="http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/marriagesamesexcouplesbill.html">Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013</a>. In the years following 1998, significant legal reform followed. The age of consent for same-sex would finally <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1047291.stm">be lowered</a> from 18 to 16-years-old in 2000, new employment protections would be passed in 2003, and goods and services protections would come in 2006. Civil partnerships were made law in 2004, the same year as the <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/7/contents">Gender Recognition Act</a>, followed by the <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/22/contents">Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act</a> in 2008 and subsequent laws to address historic wrongs.</p>
<h2>Militant dreams</h2>
<p>For some, the same-sex marriage law signalled the end of a journey that had begun in 1967. The then head of gay rights campaign organisation, Stonewall, Ben Summerskill, described the law as the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/nov/23/david-cameron-gay-marriage">final piece</a> of the legislative jigsaw.</p>
<p>Yet who decided that this was the final picture, the end-point of gay rights? There was no vote, or consultation on what gay rights should look like. In the march from 1967 to the present day, few stopped to ask “where are we going?”. In a sense, it speaks to the transformed legal landscape that there are now <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/24/opinion/24franke.html">growing</a> numbers of voices <a href="http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-michelangelo-signorile-conversation-20150419-story.html">asking</a> this question. </p>
<p>Shifting attitudes towards gender and sexuality, notably in the increased embracing of gender-fluid and queer identities is creating a social and political driver for re-evaluating our laws. During the passing of same-sex marriage the then MP, Gerald Howarth referred in Parliament to “aggressive” homosexuals, later amending it to “militant”, fearing that the Act would lead to further radical reforms. He would subsequently <a href="http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2013/05/23/sir-gerald-howarth-i-should-have-used-militant-rather-than-aggressive-to-describe-the-homosexuality-community/">justify</a> his remarks based on the activism of Peter Tatchell, and my own writing.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179018/original/file-20170720-24021-n7db0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179018/original/file-20170720-24021-n7db0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179018/original/file-20170720-24021-n7db0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179018/original/file-20170720-24021-n7db0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179018/original/file-20170720-24021-n7db0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179018/original/file-20170720-24021-n7db0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179018/original/file-20170720-24021-n7db0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Proud in London.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/danoliverm/35691503271/sizes/l">danoliverm/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This radical or militant agenda is activists and academics asking the questions that will shape our next steps following 1967. This shift to greater emphasis on the fluidity of gender and sexuality enables us to now shift the conversation surrounding how we seek to regulate both sex and gender rather than to continue with the previous narrative of “LGBT rights”. In doing so, it also shifts the attitude from something to be bestowed from the state via positive rights to a radical assertion of freedom; of liberation.</p>
<p>The Sexual Offences Act 1967 remains a major watershed in the legal status of homosexuals in the UK, which is why its 50th anniversary has been celebrated so widely in 2017. But it also signalled the start of a journey that has not, and arguably never will, end. A half-dressed home secretary and an academic would change the world from a shared bed. I need to take more rail journeys.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79597/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Ashford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The legacy of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which partially decriminalised male homosexuality 50 years ago.Chris Ashford, Professor of Law and Society, Northumbria University, NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.