Odd men out: Male homosexuality in Britain from Wolfenden to Gay Liberation: Revised and updated edition

By John-Pierre Joyce and Simon Callow

From government ministers and spies to activists, drag queens and celebrities, Odd men out charts the tumultuous history of gay men in 1950s and 60s Britain. It takes us from the earliest tentative steps towards decriminalisation to the liberation movement of the early 1970s. Along the way, it catalogues shocking repression, including laws against homosexual activity and the use of brutal medical ‘treatments’. Odd men out draws on medical data and opinion polls, broadcast recordings, theatrical productions, and extensive interviews with key players, as well as an in-depth analysis of the Wolfenden Report and the circumstances surrounding its creation. It brings to life pivotal moments in gay mens’ cultural representation, ranging across the West End and emerging writers like Joe Orton, the British film industry, the BBC, national newspapers, fashion catalogues and music magazines.

Celebrating the joy of gay lives as well as the hardships, Odd men out preserves the voices of a disappearing generation who revolutionised what it meant to be a gay man in twentieth-century Britain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Sep 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526162434

Book preview

Odd men out

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Odd men out

Male homosexuality in Britain from Wolfenden to Gay Liberation

Revised and updated edition

John-Pierre Joyce with an introduction by Simon Callow, CBE

Manchester University Press

Copyright © John-Pierre Joyce 2022

The right of John-Pierre Joyce to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 62441 1 paperback

First edition published 2019 by The Book Guild Publishing Ltd

This edition first published 2022

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image ©

Joseph McKeown / Stringer / Getty

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Contents

List of tables

Note on language

Foreword by Lord Taverne

Preface

List of abbreviations

Introduction by Simon Callow

1 Huntleys

2 The doctrine of Saint Wolfenden

3 The germ inside

4 A huge homosexual kingdom

5 Do I look like a bloody pansy?

6 A wind of change

7 It's legal now

Afterword by Nicholas Wright

Select bibliography

Index

Tables

1 Homosexual offences in England and Wales, 1956–67

2 Homosexual offences in Scotland, 1956–80

3 Offences and maximum sentences proposed by the Wolfenden Report

4 Press reaction to the Wolfenden Report

5 Results of medical treatments, 1957–71

6 Comparison of homosexual offences in England and Wales, 1956–67

Note on language

I have avoided using the word ‘queer’ to denote homosexual men. During the period with which Odd Men Out is concerned the word was (and still is to many) a form of insult and abuse rather than a badge of identity, difference and pride. I only use it in direct quotations from contemporary historical sources. The word ‘gay’, on the other hand, was used by homosexual men to refer to themselves from at least the mid-1950s, although it was not well known among the general public or referred to in the media until much later. I have therefore used the word ‘homosexual’ in Chapters 1–3, which cover the early part of this history, and ‘gay’ in Chapters 4–7, which deal mainly with the mid-to-late 1960s.

Foreword by Lord Taverne

Odd Men Out is an impressive survey of the changing attitudes towards homosexuality in the second half of the twentieth century. Here, I will add a few comments on the political background, since I was a junior minister in the Home Office when Roy Jenkins, who played a crucial part in the change of the law, was home secretary.

Hopes of reform were first raised by the Wolfenden Report of 1957, which recommended the decriminalisation of homosexual conduct between consenting adults. But one home secretary after another, including the relatively liberal Rab Butler, refused to implement its recommendations because public opinion was supposedly not ready for the change. In fact, public and political opinion, as Odd Men Out shows, was already changing. A private member's bill in the House of Commons in 1966 passed by a significant majority, and by an even bigger margin in the House of Lords. But, as happens with most private members’ bills, it got nowhere. Without Roy Jenkins, the Sexual Offences Act 1967 would not have been passed.

I first got to know Jenkins in 1958 when I was a member of a group of young Labour-supporting graduates and we invited him to speak to us. I was immediately struck by his sharp political acumen, but also by his honesty and sense of principle. The first post in the cabinet he was offered in 1964 was as secretary of state for education. He refused the offer and told Harold Wilson, the prime minister, that he was not well qualified and prepared for that job. But he also told him that the position for which he had made very careful preparations, after a lifetime of interest in reform, was at the Home Office, and he hoped that if the incumbent home secretary Frank Soskice retired, he would be considered for that post. It was – and still is – most unusual for a promising politician to refuse the offer of a major cabinet post. Fortunately, Soskice, who was, like his predecessors, opposed to Wolfenden, did retire shortly afterwards. Jenkins then became the most liberal, radical, reforming home secretary in 238 years, and promptly proceeded to carry out a massive series of reforms which Wilson's biographer Ben Pimlott described as the major achievement of the Labour government of 1964–70.

Despite the changing public mood, there was still strong political and religious opposition to Wolfenden, especially in the Labour Party. As one MP put it, ‘Why spend valuable time in parliament discussing buggery instead of unemployment?’ There was no cabinet support for a government bill. When Jenkins proposed that there should be legislative time and a free vote on a private member's bill promoted by Leo Abse, Wilson was unenthusiastic, while Callaghan, the chancellor, was strongly opposed. However, Jenkins’ influence in the cabinet was so dominant that he achieved what was virtually unprecedented. He persuaded cabinet colleagues to allow both time and Home Office support to see the private member's bill passed. Speaking as home secretary on the second reading and at every stage of the bill, he made his own views quite clear. Homosexuality was a fact of life, not a matter of choice. It was not concentrated in any particular social classes or occupational groups. The majority of homosexuals were ordinary citizens who did normal jobs and deserved legal protection, not legal oppression.

Odd Men Out reveals, perhaps surprisingly, that the change in the law did not bring about a diminution of police persecution of homosexuals. Prosecuting acts involving non-adults or those in public lavatories frequented by homosexuals – known as ‘cottages’ – was an easy way to increase the number of convictions. But there was another explanation. Even before the law changed, Jenkins had tried to change police practice. As his junior minister, I was present at a meeting he arranged with the head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Joseph Simpson, to whom he suggested that the police should stop wasting valuable time and public money on pursuing homosexuals in cottages. Simpson said he would investigate. He duly did so with his deputy Jack Waldren. Simpson and Waldren were both impressive figures, over six foot five, and obvious policemen. They must have created quite an impression in the cottages they visited. Roy and I later speculated about who received the most advances! After his investigation, Simpson said he would cease the practice. However, soon afterwards Jenkins was appointed chancellor of the exchequer (where I was also moved) and was succeeded by Callaghan, a former adviser to the police and no fan of Wolfenden. The increase in prosecutions would never have happened if Jenkins had still been in charge.

Did the change in the law make any difference? I think so. The 1967 Act did have an effect on attitudes towards the subject among the general public. It also made a great deal of difference that people were no longer breaking the law. The fact that homosexuality (at least in private) had previously been a criminal offence was something that affected a lot of people. The law can change attitudes. The drinking and driving laws, for example, were very unpopular when they were first introduced, but they were soon almost universally accepted. Without a change in the law, would public figures now openly declare themselves to be gay? I doubt it. In fact, reading Odd Men Out makes me wonder why it took so long.

Preface

In the days of single and LP records, when an electronic turntable and diamond-sharp needle could produce a quality of sound unsurpassed today, my parents would occasionally unsleeve, dust and play a vinyl disc, reminiscing about ‘the good old days’ of the 1960s, when music (Beatles, Stones, Dusty etc.) was ‘proper music’ and life was good. I was born in late 1969 – at the very end of the decade, and too late to have experienced it. But sometimes, if I tried, I could feel a time otherwise only glimpsed in family photos and in the shaky cinefilms my parents occasionally reeled out.

Many years later, when considering issues of sex, sexuality and the place of homosexual men in history, my thoughts turned back to that time, and the question formed in my mind: What was it like for gay men in the so-called ‘swinging sixties’? Of course, I knew and had read about the 1957 Wolfenden Report and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. But there was scant information about gay men's lives between those dates. The 1950s and 1960s were largely glossed over as a time of slow but inevitable legal change, accompanied by a gradual tolerance of, and freedom for, gay men. Despite a crop of books on gay history published in the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a dearth of material on the subject. This prompted me to find out more about the British gay male experience in the mid-twentieth century.

Odd Men Out covers the years 1953 to 1971, from the circumstances leading to the appointment of the Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution in 1954 to the emergence of the Gay Liberation Front in the early 1970s. Chapter 1 reveals something of the lives of gay men in the early to mid-1950s. It looks at the social, legal and personal challenges they faced, and at perceptions of homosexuals among contemporary observers and commentators. Chapter 2 delves into the Wolfenden Report, analysing its main recommendations and casting an eye over some of its lesser-known points. It also looks at the development of a distinct homosexual ‘type’ – what I have called the ‘Wolfenden Man’ figure, whom law reform campaigners presented as the socially acceptable face of homosexuality. Chapter 3 looks at the medical treatments meted out to gay men, and at the medical theories that underpinned them. Chapter 4 examines the everyday lives of gay men in the early to mid-1960s, tracing the development of a proto-‘gay scene’, and considering the extent and severity of legal repression. Chapter 5 pays attention to representations of gay men in the broadcast media, films, theatre, literature and the press, and assesses the contribution of these portrayals to a growing public understanding of homosexuality. Chapter 6 examines the law reform process between 1960 and 1967, the shift in public attitudes towards homosexuality and the emergence of a ‘gay’ identity. Chapter 7 takes the story forward to 1971, examining the limited freedoms granted by the 1967 Act, and asking to what extent gay men's lives had improved at the start of the new decade.

I hope to show that, contrary to traditional narratives of gay history, there were significant variations in degrees of repression and liberation during the 1950s and 1960s. Repression was not always as concentrated or as severe as has often been assumed. Likewise, eventual liberation was minimal and, in many respects, more conditional and restricted than before. I also try to show that the construction and adoption of a gay identity was a necessary means of achieving a measure of social and legal acceptance, but that the establishment in the public mind of a recognisable (but still only partially understood) homosexual ‘minority’ resulted in new dangers and dilemmas. Some gay men found themselves more exposed and vulnerable to exploitation and abuse than before. Others grappled with the question of where, how and with whom they fitted in. By the early 1970s traditional concepts of ‘odd’ and ‘normal’ had, in some respects, been reversed. The ‘obvious’ homosexual of the 1950s and early 1960s had become the recognisable, legally sanctioned and normalised sort of gay man who one might ordinarily encounter in the street, in the community or in the workplace. On the other hand, the once seemingly ‘ordinary’ man who had sex with other men but concealed (or at least did not display) his sexuality became a non-conformist, difficult-to-place and somewhat suspect odd man out, distrusted by gays and straights alike.

Odd Men Out makes some interesting discoveries which I hope will clarify and reset some aspects of gay history. The first ever mention of the word ‘homosexuality’ in the broadcast media, for example, was on the Behind the News radio programme in 1953, not on Woman's Hour in 1955, as has previously been claimed. The lord chamberlain's lifting of the ban on depictions of homosexuality on stage in 1958 was not prompted by the publication of the Wolfenden Report. Instead, a change in the rules had been under consideration for some time and was finally hastened by the dilemma of what to do about drag queens in a show called We're No Ladies. An in-depth analysis of medical cures in the 1950s and 1960s reveals that many hundreds of men were the victims of appalling treatments which doctors knew were ineffective and, in some cases, lethal. This remains a scandal that has never been fully acknowledged or investigated. Just as scandalous was the government's underhand reintroduction of oestrogen therapy in English and Welsh prisons in 1958. An examination of opinion polls and surveys, as well as anecdotal evidence, also shows that the British public was never decisively hostile to homosexual law reform – despite what politicians said. Sympathetic views on the issue were frequently expressed, especially by women. Large sections of the British establishment were also in favour of legal change. If the Conservative government had not lost its nerve, limited decriminalisation of homosexual behaviour might have occurred in 1958 rather than 1967. The Sexual Offences Act, when it did come, was no landmark of permissive legislation. Rather, it was a grudging (and already out-of-date) tidying-up of legal anomalies highlighted by the Wolfenden Report a decade earlier. Coupled with the police reforms of the late 1960s, the Act opened the door to a new era of injustice and oppression.

It is interesting to note that at this time homosexual law reform was not a left/right or party-political issue. Rather, it was an open question, and politicians were left to decide for themselves how to deal with it. For some, such as Roy Jenkins, it was a question of justice, humanity and turning Britain into a civilised, modern European society. It is significant that in the parliamentary debates of the mid-1960s comparisons with countries such as France, Sweden and Norway were often made, while fears of what the United States or Commonwealth nations might think were brushed aside. Politicians’ personal experiences also informed their approach to the issue. One can only speculate what convinced the likes of Enoch Powell, Nicholas Ridley and Margaret Thatcher to support homosexual law reform – although a belief in the right of the individual to responsibly practise what they wished to do in the privacy of their own homes, free from state intervention, doubtless had much to do with it. Lord Arran and Leo Abse had personal contacts with homosexual men. Norman St John-Stevas and Humphrey Berkeley were both gay. John Page learned about the cruelties of the law the hard way when he was arrested for importuning and attempted gross indecency in 1956. He was acquitted, buried that part of his past and went on to vote four times for Abse's and Berkeley's reform bills.

I hope that readers of Odd Men Out will encounter moments of humour and compassion, as well as surprise and even shock. I have tried to preserve the voices of a generation of gay men and others who are beginning to disappear from our lives and our collective memory. Recording and remembering their words and deeds is vital to educate younger generations, who are often woefully ignorant of the not-so-distant past. We need to know our history if we are to preserve our liberties and guard against old and new forms of prejudice, discrimination and persecution. As Antony Grey, the long-serving secretary of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, pointed out in 2008 (at about the time I started my research): ‘I think it's very important that people should remember how it was and how it could be again in the future, because I think things can go backwards as well as forward. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.’

¹

Notes

1 The BBC and the Closet, BBC Radio 4, 29 January 2008.

Abbreviations

The emotional development of the homosexual has not kept pace with his bodily and intellectual growth. Where this is irreversible, the proper attitude of society should be to accept the fact, just as it accepts the existence of, say, the congenitally blind.

Eustace Chesser, Odd Man Out: Homosexuality in Men and Women, Gollancz, 1959

I'm a born odd man out Farr, but I've never corrupted the normal.

Victim, Allied Film Makers, 1961

We shall always, I fear, resent the odd man out. That is their burden for all time, and they must shoulder it like men – for men they are.

Lord Arran, House of Lords, 21 July 1967

Introduction

Simon Callow

When John-Pierre Joyce was born, in 1969, I was just getting into my stride as a homosexual. That makes me sound a little more confident than I actually was. But I had, only a couple of years earlier, landed on my feet – sexually speaking. I got a job in the box office of the Old Vic, where Laurence Olivier's brand-new National Theatre had taken up temporary residence, and I suddenly found myself in contact with a species I had, for lack of concrete evidence, begun to think of as mythological: homosexuals – homos, queers, poofs, nancy boys. At the National they seemed to be everywhere, freely roaming unashamed throughout the building: backstage, onstage, front of house; happily grazing, frolicking and, I enviously assumed, fornicating as soon as they got home – or even before. It was here that for the first time I heard the word ‘gay’ as a description of a homosexual man, and it seemed entirely apt and joyously celebratory.

There had never been any doubt in my mind as to my own inclinations. I had long been acutely aware of my desires for my fellow students at my London Catholic grammar school, at my Jesuit boarding school in South Africa during the three years my mother and I lived in Central Africa, and even before that at the junior school in rural Berkshire where my mother was secretary. All these years I was more or less continuously in the grip of lust. I somehow knew, however (not, I think, from any instruction; simply by osmosis), that these desires were not on. No recognised conduit for them existed. Nothing ever happened between me and the objects of my longing. In my teens I read that at public schools there was a culture of love affairs between boys, but no such thing existed at any educational establishment I attended. I was quite open about my inclinations and, indeed, about my crushes, which, surprisingly, elicited no opprobrium from my fellow students – nor, alas, any uptake. Maybe the heavy hand of Catholicism inhibited any such expressions on their part. Or maybe I just wasn't attractive enough. One of the teachers at my grammar school – the games master – was widely assumed to be gay. He was a sadistic brute. Not an encouraging role model.

Then I had an extraordinary stroke of luck. At the same school, in my fifth year, I encountered a teacher to whom I owe an incalculable debt – Nic Frizelle, a Frenchman who had fought during the Second World War with the Free French and was parachuted again and again into the occupied territories. This remarkable man, head of French and then of history, identified in me some sort of sympathetic sensibility, and he regularly (but clandestinely) invited me to his house near the school, where he would give me supper and wine and, stepping away from the narrow school curriculum, exposed me to Mozart, Baudelaire and Plato, and to serious, intense philosophical discussions on, it seemed, every subject under the sun and the stars. I was 16, and I date my adulthood from these encounters. Nic was entirely open about his own life. He admitted to me that he was homosexual, but his Catholicism prevented him from surrendering to his nature. I found this a curious concept – that God could have created a person with loving instincts that must never be obeyed. This exceptional, brave, brilliant, wise man had elected to lead a sort of half-life – as had, I was beginning to realise, so many of his contemporaries.

By now I was rapidly moving away from my Catholic God – from any god, in fact – and took refuge in the past; not always encouragingly so. The same fire I felt in my loins had clearly not been much approved of across the course of human history, with only occasional bursts of acceptance – the classical Greek world in the fourth century BC being a rare and short-lived exception. Leaping ahead, I hungrily read the story of Oscar Wilde, rejoiced in his wit, his flamboyance, his antinomianism, but was plunged into depression as the dismal trajectory of his life came clear. Even then, seventy years after the scandal that had brought him down, he stood as a dreadful warning. I managed to find books that openly celebrated love between men. They did exist (a few), such as the novels of Mary Renault. But most of them, with quaint titles such as Quatrefoil, were only to be discovered under brown paper wrappings in bookshops in and around London's Charing Cross Road. And they were arch about the very things one needed to know: who does what to whom, and how?

I was beginning increasingly to feel as if I were part of a mutant species – a species with a population of one as far as any actual sightings were concerned. In the real world, meanwhile, homosexuality was a hot topic. Gay scandals erupted at regular intervals, and I obsessively followed them. Lurid though the coverage was, I felt that the love that had hitherto not dared to speak its name was at least being acknowledged, however censoriously. The newspaper reports were graphic in the extreme, notably those of the trial of John Vassall, the hapless junior official at the British embassy in Moscow, conned by the Russians into a sexual encounter and thereafter blackmailed into handing over classified documents. The Express and the Mail sniffed pruriently around, bluntly describing the medical tests which established his homosexuality – the anal probes which proved that he had engaged in sodomy. I read these reports with excitement, combined with fear and dread. The photographs of his journeys to and from the court revealed a curiously insipid-looking fellow, limp and palely sweating – not anyone that one might want to resemble. Nonetheless, he was a real, live homo with an actual sex life. But sordid; horribly sordid. From Oscar Wilde to Roger Casement to Edward Montagu to Peter Wildeblood to John Vassall, the long and dreary procession of jailbirds stretched out all the way to the horizon.

There was, it is true, another public face of homosexuality: Showbiz! There were entertainers who were known to be queer. But they were so clever, funny and flamboyant that their existence was indulged, even when (especially when) their work teetered on the brink of outrageousness. Noël Coward, Ivor Novello and John Gielgud occupied the more respectable end of the spectrum. Dougie Byng, Danny La Rue, Frankie Howerd and – hair-raisingly risquée – Mrs Shufflewick occupied the other. They were embraced by a large public – many, perhaps most of them, women. The audience loved the transgressiveness of these artistes, the sting having been taken out of their naughtiness by their homosexuality. Like the court jesters of old, they were felt to be afflicted, struck by lightning, deformed, to be pitied and laughed at. Having taken the bad luck of the universe on to themselves, they had diverted the lightning away from their auditors, who felt pretty damn good about being normal. Despite being defined by their sexual inclinations, these professional gays were strangely neutered. I don't believe that for one moment the public thought of them as having actual sex lives. Which was also not terribly encouraging.

This is why the joyously permissive world of the Old Vic was such a relief and a revelation to me, encompassing as it did homosexual people of all shapes and sizes – a whole extraordinary spectrum of campness, from zero to a million. Slim-hipped youths with dyed hair and groin-hugging jeans, through to distinguished, besuited, middle-aged thespians whose sexual inclination was only readable through a roguish twinkle in the eye. Young working-class lads in their ushers’ uniforms who, their moist lips slightly parted, looked you directly in the eye in a way no heterosexual man ever did. There were of course plenty of heterosexual men at the Vic. The thing that was so striking was that everyone rubbed along together without any self-consciousness or anxiety. It was, to my 18-year-old eyes, Edenic. But I noted that away from the building none of these men betrayed by a single word or the slightest gesture their sexual inclinations. Because, of course, those inclinations – if acted on – could put them in prison.

There was a safety valve – at least in the cities: those establishments behind whose doors it was safe to be ourselves – a phrase I began to hear an awful lot. They were convivial, high-energy places, more than a little daunting if you didn't know the patois; if you didn't, in fact, know how, or indeed who, to be. I marvelled at young lads, 16 or under, who seemed to have mastered the entire repertoire of gay behaviour and had its vocabulary on the tip of their tongues. How, and from whom, had they learned it? I was riveted by these aviaries, filled with exotic species shrieking at the considerable tops of their voices. There were astonishingly beautiful men there, along with raddled, dyed-and-gone-to-heaven old gents being themselves – selves that they couldn't be by day. The scene was slightly grotesque, sexually charged but not actually sexy. Drag acts were often featured in which the largely amateur performers, dolled up to the nines, mimed rather brilliantly to classic tracks.

It was a scene from the last days of the Roman Empire or the heyday of the Weimar Republic. A fascinating spectacle, but one in which I sensed that there was no role for me. Drag had no erotic charge for me, nor, even at the age of 18, was I an ephebe around whom men might have clustered like moths to the flame. And the high-level camp banter was completely out of my range. Anyway, I was looking for something quite different: deep, thrusting manly passion, as in the novels of Miss Renault; or a relationship based on Art, like that of Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten; or high romance, such as had raged between Piers Gaveston and Edward II. I wanted to meet someone in Real Life, not on this highly lit stage with its raucous soundtrack. I wanted, in fact, to be able to be myself, and to find love and sex on those terms. I wanted, I told myself, to be normally gay. That, however, was not to be easily obtained; that, in fact, was the very thing that the forces of reaction wanted at all costs to prevent: the acknowledgement that being gay was perfectly normal. As long as we could be confined to more or less approved-of ghettoes, we could be controlled.

There was another alternative which had even less appeal for me: the activity known by the bizarre name of cottaging – sexual encounters in public lavatories. In Stephen Frears’ 1987 film Prick Up Your Ears there is an extraordinary, lyrical scene in which Joe Orton engages in sex with a number of men in the then notorious underground public convenience on Holloway Road in North London (filmed, in fact, in the toilets on Tower Bridge Road). As the straight public passes by, its feet visible through the glass paving tiles high in the ceiling, Orton glories in the subversiveness of what he's doing: gay sex as delicious transgression; a gorgeous V's-up to the straight majority.

Alas, the reality bore scant resemblance to this idyll, as I discovered one evening when I went to get my suburban train at Victoria Station and needed to have a quick pee beforehand. The gents was below the concourse: huge, brightly lit, with rows and rows of urinals and a number of cubicles at the back. In addition to the expected aromas of micturition and defecation was another odour, unknown to me then but which I later learned was amyl nitrate. There was also the fainter, but insistent, smell of seminal fluid. At every urinal men were agitating their penises – men of all ages and sizes dressed in every variety of garment, from jeans to Savile Row suits; some wearing bowler hats, some caps; some in brogues, some in navvy boots; some trying to make eye contact with their neighbours, others ostentatiously avoiding it, though still self-stroking. Occasionally a cubicle door would open, and someone would emerge, often followed after a brief pause by another man, sometimes even by a third. The prevailing atmosphere, despite the bright, all-illuminating lights, was of furtiveness and desperation. I was hypnotised by the spectacle, but by the time I got to the urinal (people would stay there for a good long time) I was unable to pee, much less to become aroused. I went home dismayed and deflated, wondering what sort of a life I was going to have.

All this time I had been largely oblivious of a growing political movement on both sides of the Atlantic: a refusal to accept society's condemnatory view of homosexuality and a determination to reform the law – the only possible guarantee of change. Nor was it only homosexuals who started to feel that the law must be changed. A growing percentage of heterosexual liberals were convinced that its provisions as they stood were barbaric. Wrapped up in my personal drama, I was barely aware of the name of Sir John Wolfenden, and I knew little of the extraordinary and protracted parliamentary tug o’ war, described so vividly and in such distressing detail in the following pages by John-Pierre Joyce, which finally resulted in the passage of the groundbreaking – though in reality severely limited – Sexual Offences Act of 1967. I at last sat up and took notice, not so much because of the freedom from fear that it might eventually usher in, though that, of course, would be deeply welcome, but because of the shocking virulence of the opposition to it in parliament and in the press. I thought then, as I thought again when in July 2013 the House of Commons debated the Gay Marriage Bill and MP after MP stood up to express in the most lurid terms their deep loathing and fear of homosexuals, ‘Hold on, hold on. This is me you're talking about.’ Noël Coward had the same reaction during the passage through parliament of Humphrey Berkeley's Sexual Offences Bill in February 1966. While rehearsing his new play A Song at Twilight, in which he played a distinguished author who had been sexually closeted all his life and is finally compelled to come to terms with the truth about himself, Coward wrote in his diary:

Really some of the opposition speeches were so bigoted, ignorant and silly that one can hardly believe that adult minds, particularly those adult minds concerned with our government, should be so basically idiotic. However, now all will be well apparently and the law will be changed at the next session. Nothing will convince the bigots, but the blackmailers will be discouraged and fewer haunted, terrified young men will commit suicide.

¹

The passage over the following decades of a succession of parliamentary bills which largely reversed the ages-old and savage history of legislation concerning homosexual men has resulted in a profound change in the experience of being gay. In addition to Coward's noting of the elimination of blackmail and its trail of suicide, the long-delayed change in the law heralded a general decline in homophobia. It is now infinitely more possible for us all to be ‘ourselves’. There are and always have been as many different kinds of homosexual men as there are heterosexual. The old stereotypes which we adopted in order to achieve a sense of identity, solidarity and community have now become a matter of choice, not of necessity. We have retained the sense of community without having to don masks. A hundred gay flowers have bloomed.

Wolfenden was hard-won – gingerly ushered in by people (not least Wolfenden himself) who were nervous of the possible implications of their work. It turned out that the British people were ready for a world in which sexual difference was openly expressed. Some people, they discovered, were gay, and they got over it. Indeed, they not only got over it, they welcomed the admission to our collective experience of a whole strand of human life that had been hidden or forced underground. John-Pierre Joyce admirably describes the oppression from which we were so narrowly rescued and the courageous and unflagging determination that made the present dispensation possible. Let us take good note of the past and learn its lessons, lest we be condemned to repeat it.

Notes

1 Graham Payn and Sheridan Morley (eds), The Noël Coward Diaries, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982, Sunday 13 February 1966.

1

Huntleys

Most ordinary people had never heard of homosexuality; and of those who had, the great majority regarded it with something nearer to disgust than to understanding.

John Wolfenden, Turning Points: The Memoirs of Lord Wolfenden

When members of the Home Office and Scottish Home Office Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution sat down for the first time on 15 September 1954 to consider ‘the law and practice relating to homosexual offences and the treatment of persons convicted of such offences’, they were, quite literally, lost for words.¹ As the committee's chairman John Wolfenden later pointed out, the word ‘homosexual’ either had no meaning to most people or else evoked feelings of horror and revulsion. In order to spare the supposed embarrassment of the committee's female secretaries, Wolfenden even suggested adopting the terms ‘Huntleys’ and ‘Palmers’ – after the biscuit manufacturer in Reading where he was university vice-chancellor – to refer to the homosexuals and prostitutes of the committee's joint inquiry.

²

The committee began its inquiry by trying to determine what homosexuality was. With little else to go on, it decided to use the dictionary definition: ‘a sexual propensity for persons of one's own sex’. It also adopted the seven-point ‘heterosexual-homosexual rating scale’ devised by sexologist and biologist Alfred Kinsey in the United States in the 1940s to determine different degrees of homosexuality.

0. Exclusively heterosexual

1. Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual

2. Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual

3. Equally heterosexual and homosexual

4. Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual

5. Predominantly homosexual, but incidentally heterosexual

6. Exclusively homosexual

³

Kinsey himself met some of the committee's members during a trip to London in October 1955, and his rating scale continued to be used as a measure of homosexuality until at least the late 1960s.

Other doctors and scientists submitted evidence to the Wolfenden Committee, and their definitions and classifications of homosexual men informed the views of law enforcers, politicians and the general public for years to come. The psychiatrist Peter Scott, for example, presented research in which he identified five groups of homosexuals he had observed in hospitals, prisons and remand homes.

1. ‘Adolescents and mentally immature adults’ who were ‘uncomfortably aware of their attraction to both sexes’ but did not know ‘how to resolve their quandary’

2. ‘Severely damaged personalities’, such as ‘the very effeminate, self-advertising, female-impersonating individual who talks in an affected manner, walks with a mincing gait [and] wears make-up and frilly underclothes’

3. ‘Relatively intact personalities’ who accepted their sexuality and had adjusted themselves to it

4. ‘Latent and well-compensated homosexuals’ who were either unaware of their homosexuality or else suppressed it

5. Homosexual men with a ‘serious mental disability’, such as ‘organic brain damage and the extremes of personality defects’

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In 1954 the family doctors’ journal The Practitioner published its own classification guide. Doctor C. G. Learoyd divided homosexual men into three types.

1. ‘Puppy prurients’ who were in an ‘adolescent, exploratory phase’.

2. ‘Emotionally immature’ men who were living ‘some strange fantasy life of their own’ caused by ‘an inability to develop emotionally beyond the adolescent’. They might exhibit other ‘sexual abnormalities’, such as masochism, sadism, exhibitionism, transvestism and ‘all the doglike interests in excretion and excretory products’.

3. ‘Regressors’ who may have indulged in homosexual practices in their youth and sometimes returned to them after consuming too much alcohol.

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In the same journal, psychiatrist W. Lindesay Neustatter pointed out that the ‘nancy-boy’ type was also common, although ‘masculine-looking men’ could also be homosexual. He added that homosexual men were ‘unable to whistle, and have a strong preference for the colour green – a favourite colour in children’.⁶ The British Medical Association also thought that homosexual men could be ‘virile and masculine’, while others had ‘a tendency to self-display in dress and hair styles and in the use of scent and make-up’. These ‘effeminate’ types, the BMA thought, had a ‘certain softness which is difficult to describe but easy to sense. The voice may be high-pitched and facial hair scanty.’ Homosexuals in general were ‘charming and friendly people’, and ‘well known to be of artistic temperament’.

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As well as claiming to be able to recognise certain types of homosexuals, doctors also thought it was possible to scientifically diagnose the condition itself. T. G. Grygier, a psychologist at Banstead Hospital in Surrey, researched various methods for ‘measuring the psychological characteristics of the homosexual and the direction and intensity of his impulses’. These included the ‘selective vocabulary test’, in which patients had to define lists of words. Homosexuals, Grygier noted, used words that were more commonly used or understood by women. In the ‘Szondi test’, patients were shown photographs of ‘a homosexual, a sadist, an epileptic, a hysteric, a catatonic schizophrenic, a paranoid schizophrenic, a manic-depressive depressive and a manic-depressive manic’, from which they had to choose those they liked and disliked the most. In the ‘thematic apperception test’ homosexuality could be detected through the stories patients made up using pictures. The Rorschach and ‘draw-a-person’ tests were, Grygier thought, especially useful in diagnosing homosexuality. In the former, patients interpreted inkblot patterns on cards. In the latter, patients drew pictures of men and women. According to Grygier, homosexual men showed ‘particular emphasis in their drawings on ears, hips and buttocks’. They also drew large eyes and eyelashes,