United Kingdom II: 1900 to the Present

by Richard G. Mann

Encyclopedia Copyright © 2015, glbtq, Inc.

By the end of the nineteenth century, a visible gay male subculture and a somewhat less visible lesbian
subculture had emerged in the United Kingdom, but almost all expressions of male homosexual desire were
illegal, and both gay men and lesbians were regarded as pariahs. Moreover, with the medicalization of
same-sex desire, many manifestations of same-sex affection, which had previously been regarded as
benign, had become suspect.

During the twentieth century, efforts to reform the law and public opinion in regard to homosexuality met
with mixed success, each apparent advance seemingly followed by reactions of oppression and persecution.
However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, somewhat surprisingly given its history of resistance
to glbtq demands for equality, the United Kingdom emerged as a leader in recognizing the human rights of
its homosexual citizens.

Sexual/Gender Liberation Movements in the Early Twentieth Century

The suffrage movement attracted the support of women-identified women through varied political efforts
to remove many different kinds of barriers to women's full participation in society. Among the women
openly involved in the suffrage movement was composer Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), who composed the
suffrage anthem, The March of the Women. Also open about her identity, Ciceley Hamilton (1872-1952)
wrote the lyrics to Smyth's anthem, as well as numerous feminist treatises and plays for performances at
feminist events, including the highly successful, humorous Votes for Women (1909).

Yet, despite the significant involvement of lesbians, feminist organizations generally did not encourage
explicit public discussion of lesbian issues. Among the few published discussions of homosexuality in the
context of the feminist movement was a series of articles that appeared in the progressive Freewoman in
1912. Although notable for its sympathetic treatment of the topic, the series was focused on male
homosexuality and included only one specific reference to women's relationships.

Scholars are only beginning to reconstruct the emotional lives of lesbian women of the era, but some
attention has been given to a few notable couples, such as Christopher St. John (1873-1960; name legally
changed from Christabel Marshall, before 1899) and Edy Craig (1869-1947), who lived together for forty-
eight years, beginning in 1899. Although each had separate careers (St. John as a theater designer and
Craig as journalist), they collaborated together on several writing projects. Their relationship was public
knowledge, and it was even noted in St. John's obituary in the Times.

Unifying their personal and professional lives, Agnes Hunt (1867-1948) and Emily Selina Goodford (b. 1856)
founded in 1911 Baschurch Hospital for Cripples, which offered innovative, comprehensive care to disabled
individuals.

Despite such notable examples, many lesbians felt isolated and lonely in the first decades of the twentieth
century. A surprising number of them wrote for advice and emotional support to Edward Carpenter,

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especially after the publication of his Intermediate Sex (1908), in which he discussed lesbian relationships
positively. His interest in lesbianism and his endorsement of women's suffrage distinguish Carpenter from
many male homosexuals of the era, who seem to have been at best indifferent to women's causes.

Male Homosexual Subculture before World War I

Concern about the moral threat of male homosexuality intensified in the years leading up to World War I.
Thus, the Vagrancy Act of 1898 was revised by the 1912 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which established a
mandatory sentence of six months imprisonment upon conviction of male-male sexual solicitation, whether
cash exchange was involved or not; flogging was mandated for a second offense.

Fear of punishment and social disgrace continued to encourage furtiveness in homosexual liaisons. Full of
explicit details, the diaries of Sir Roger Casement (1864-1916), a prominent Irish patriot, describe extensive
but secretive sexual encounters with working-class youths, who were usually remunerated financially by
him. After executing Casement for treason, the British government deliberately leaked the contents of his
diaries in a successful effort to tarnish his reputation. Implying a connection between homosexual acts and
treason, the revelation of the diaries reinforced among homosexual men an awareness of the need for
secrecy in the conduct of their personal lives.

According to Jeffrey Weeks, Casement was typical of British upper-class homosexual men, who tried to
retain public respectability by confining their homosexual dalliances to anonymous (often paid) encounters.
The fascination of upper-class homosexuals with crossing social class barriers through casual sexual
encounters is also evidenced in writings by J. R. Ackerley (1896-1967), E. M. Forster (1879-1970), and other
prominent British literary figures throughout much of the twentieth century.

In the years between 1900 and 1914, the home of Carpenter and Merrill served as a meeting place for many
involved in progressive political movements. Carpenter's optimistic vision of the fusion of the personal and
political in an egalitarian society was appealing to many involved in the labor and feminist causes.

From the perspective of queer history, Carpenter's effort to incorporate sexual issues into the labor
movement is of special significance. Both in the United Kingdom and abroad, he fostered groups of workers
dedicated to the discussion of sexual matters. Carpenter's ability to gain support within labor organizations
for sexual reform was exceptional; for the most part, the labor movement in Britain allied itself with
conservative moralizing positions.

In 1913-14, Carpenter helped to found and served as the first president of the British Society of Sex-
Psychology, the first public forum in Britain for the scientific discussion of sexual matters. The Society
sponsored an ambitious series of lectures and pamphlets for the general public and also tried to encourage
medical professionals to deal more objectively with sexual matters. Because the British Library would not
allow access to materials with controversial sexual content, such as Carpenter's publications, the Society
established a small library of fundamental works for members.

Including many ardent feminists in its membership, the Society emphasized the links between the
oppression suffered by homosexuals and by women. To avoid attracting police investigations, the Society
prefaced its publications on homosexual themes with extensive notes of caution, but these nonetheless
made clear the compelling scientific rationale for reform.

Others worked more secretly to promote the concerns of homosexuals. By 1897, Charles Cecil Ives
(1867-1950) had founded the Order of Chaeronea (named after a battle of 338 B. C. E. in which the Sacred
Band of Thebes was slaughtered), which became an international organization by the beginning of the
twentieth century. Inspired by Masonic practice, this underground society utilized elaborate rituals and

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codes to prevent outsiders from penetrating its activities.

As proclaimed in the Commentary on the Rule, members pledged to work surreptitiously to improve legal
and social conditions for homosexuals, and it is known that some utilized their social positions to advocate
the "Cause" to politicians and to influence positive images of homosexuals in the arts. Although its specific
achievements are hard to reconstruct in detail, the Order is historically significant as the first organization
advocating the position that reform of homophobic laws could only be achieved by a cohesive organization,
composed solely of homosexuals.

While providing an emotionally supportive environment for its largely upper-class members, the society
officially discouraged use of meetings for sexual contacts. Many of the known members, such as writer and
artist Laurence Housman and architect-designer C. R. Ashbee, seem in any event to have preferred sexual
affairs with working-class men, rather than with members their own social class. Such relations were
justified by Ives as means to a fundamental transformation of society.

Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury group challenged the restrictive gender and sexual categories that otherwise seemed to
dominate British society in the early twentieth century. Beginning in 1906 and continuing until about 1930,
this influential circle of writers, artists, and intellectuals met regularly in the houses of Clive and Vanessa
Bell and of Vanessa Bell's siblings, Adrian and Virginia Stephen (known as Virginia Woolf after her marriage
to Leonard Woolf in 1912). Many of the male participants in the group had been members of the Apostles
while at Cambridge, including novelist E. M. Forster, writer Lytton Strachey, and economist John Maynard
Keynes. Other prominent figures involved in Bloomsbury included the painters Dora Carrington and Duncan
Grant, art critic Roger Fry, publisher Leonard Woolf, and hostess Ottoline Morell, among others. Many of the
individuals in the group made significant contributions to twentieth-century culture.

No single political or intellectual creed dominated the group, which was suspicious of political dogmas,
whether of the left or right. In deliberate opposition to restrictive Victorian morality, members of the group
exuberantly discussed all kinds of sexual matters. The openly homosexual members of the group--Strachey,
Forster, Keynes, and Grant--found strong support from other participants.

Many of the members of the group developed relationships that defied simplistic categories of homo/
heterosexual. For instance, Strachey had an affair with Grant between 1905 and 1906, but after that
relationship ended he developed a close and supportive (though not sexual) relationship with Dora
Carrington, while remaining avowedly homosexual. By 1917, Strachey and Carrington began to live
together, and they continued to do so until Strachey's death in 1932, even after Carrington married the
heterosexual Ralph Partridge in 1921. During her marriage to Partridge, Carrington had affairs with both
men and women, and she began to identify herself as a lesbian by 1923. Despite her other involvements,
Carrington committed suicide after Strachey's death because she could not envision life without him.

After his affair with Strachey, Grant developed a relationship with Keynes, which lasted until 1912. After
many years as an active homosexual, Keynes fell in love with and married dancer Lydia Lopokova in 1925.
From 1913 until 1961, Grant shared a house with Clive and Vanessa Bell. Though openly homosexual, Grant
was seduced on one occasion in 1918 by Vanessa Bell, who became pregnant with his daughter, Angelica.

The fluidity of gender and sexual categories manifested in these relationships was explored in the writings
of Virginia Woolf. Dedicated to Vita Sackville-West, with whom Woolf developed a passionate relationship,
Orlando narrates the life of a character who changes from man to woman over the course of three hundred
years from Queen Elizabeth's reign to the time of the publication of the book (1928). After becoming a
woman, Orlando continues to dress as a man, though s/he marries and gives birth to a child. In Mrs.

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Dalloway (1925), Woolf dealt with the life of a married woman who recollects her lesbian love.

During the years of his most intense involvement with Bloomsbury, Duncan Grant most often publicly
exhibited abstract works, and, in 1913, with Bloomsbury critic Roger Fry, he founded the Omega Circle,
which emphasized the importance of good design in objects used in everyday life. However, throughout his
career, Grant also produced homoerotic figurative sketches and paintings.

Grant's private drawings were his most graphic works, but he exploited major public commissions as
opportunities to glorify the strength and beauty of the male body, as he did, for example, in his murals
Football and Bathing (1911) for the dining hall of the Borough Polytechnic in South London. The Byzantine
stylizations of the figures and background may have made the homoeroticism palatable. Although the
Spectator praised Grant's evocation of the joys of athleticism, the Times worried that the murals could
have a degenerate influence on working-class youths. During the 1950s, in murals created for a chantry in
Lincoln Cathedral, he based the handsome, bare-chested figure of Christ on his young lover, Paul Roche.

World War I: Queer Men in Battle

Strongly contradictory attitudes toward homosexuality were revealed during the Great War. On the
battlefront, brutal conditions helped to bring out protective and romantic feelings between men that would
have been condemned in other contexts. The homoeroticism that infused the experiences of many soldiers
on the battlefront was glorified in poetry by Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) and others who served in the
war.

Despite their intensity, most of the erotic impulses felt by the soldiers may not have been realized
physically. Certainly, the lack of privacy must have hindered engagement in sexual acts. The military code
mandated prison sentences for homosexual acts that ranged from a minimum of ten years to life for anal
intercourse and two years for oral sex. During the war, 22 officers and approximately 270 soldiers were
court-martialed for sodomy.

The Black Book

On the home front, the British public became obsessed with the perceived threat of homosexuality to
national security. Working to enflame mass hysteria, Independent politician Noel Pemberton Billing claimed
in an article published on January 26, 1918 in his newspaper Imperialist (subsequently renamed Vigilante)
that the Germans had knowledge of a Black Book with the names of 47,000 British male and female
homosexuals. According to Pemberton, the Germans planned to use that source to obtain sensitive military
information from homosexuals in high positions.

In an article published in February 1918, Billing further maintained that several thousand of the people in
the Black Book were members of the private Independent Theatre Society, which was planning to stage
Oscar Wilde's banned Salome. Fearing that she was, at least implicitly, exposed as a lesbian, prominent
Canadian actress Maud Allen, who planned to star in the production, sued Billing for libel. During the highly
publicized trial, held in May, Allen was given little opportunity to present her case. Instead, under the
direction of homophobic Justice Darling, attention was focused primarily upon testimony of defense
witnesses who claimed to have read copies of the Black Book. It is indicative of the mood of the times that
it took the jury less than an hour to exonerate Billing of the charge of libel.

Women during the Great War

The outbreak of World War I provided women with opportunities that were not available to them in
peacetime. Thus, in 1914, Mary Allen (1898-1964) helped to found the first police force for women in
Britain, the Women Police Volunteers. Among the many other lesbians who made significant contributions to
the war effort, Barbara Lowther and Norah Desmond Hackett established in 1917 a corps of volunteer

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ambulance drivers in France. Their correspondence from the 1930s reveals that they were lovers while they
undertook this adventurous initiative.

Like some other publicly visible lesbian women of the era, Allen and Lowther revealed their lesbianism by
incorporating male signifiers into their public personas, including short, cropped hair, a monocle, and a
police uniform worn on all occasions. In appropriating these stereotypically male elements, lesbians
affirmed their sexuality by acting out the implications of the conception of homosexuality as the inversion
of biological gender. Working-class women who adopted more thorough male drag in an effort to enlist in
the armed forces were arrested and often imprisoned.

Policing Queer Desire in the Interwar Years

By the 1920s, many queer men had congregated in London, Birmingham, Glasgow, and other major
metropolitan centers. In these cities, local authorities consistently emphasized their dedication to
enforcing laws against homosexual offenses, but the level and intensity of surveillance of homosexual acts
fluctuated. Patterns of policing in London have been studied in greatest detail, but they correspond
generally with trends throughout the United Kingdom.

In London between 1922 and 1927, over eighty men were arrested per year for homosexual solicitation, but
arrests dropped to fifteen in 1928 and ten in 1929. The notable decrease in arrests probably was a
consequence of the resolution of the case brought against national war hero Frank Champain, arrested in a
public urinal in London in 1927. After a widely publicized trial, Champain was acquitted because the jury
was disgusted with the methods that the police had used to entrap him. For the next two years,
Metropolitan Police were reluctant to engage in surveillance of public urinals and other cruising spots.

Angered by the decline in cases against homosexuals, moral crusader and eugenicist Mrs. Neville-Rolfe
instituted a public campaign that encouraged the police to reinstitute surveillance of homosexual
activities. As a result, there were 113 arrests for homosexual acts in London in 1930, and there continued
to be a similarly high number of arrests for the remainder of the decade.

Police efforts tended to be concentrated primarily on certain locations and on certain types of individuals.
In the interwar years, over half of the arrests in London for homosexual acts were made in just nine public
urinals in the West End. Social class was a factor, as working-class men were more likely to be arrested than
men of middle and upper classes. In particular, police focused their attention primarily on effeminate men.

Moving to London in 1931, Quentin Crisp (1908-1999) was one of the working-class men who challenged
rigorous gender conventions by adopting effeminate manners, hennaed hair, lipstick, and unconventional
clothing. Supporting himself through a variety of jobs (illustrator and commercial artist, tap-dance teacher,
and prostitute), he often hung out with friends at the Black Cat on Compton Street in Soho, a cafe that
tolerated camp young men. However, outside this supportive environment, he was often subject to abuse.
Crisp's experiences became widely known through his autobiography, Confessions of a Naked Civil Servant,
published in 1968.

Awareness of police "blind spots" undoubtedly served to encourage middle-class queer men to cultivate a
conventionally masculine public persona to avoid detection. Within certain sophisticated upper-class circles
(for instance, at the universities at Oxford and Cambridge), a degree of tolerance was extended to
homosexuality as long as it was kept implicit and not visibly expressed.

Despite the potential dangers of arrest by police and of "poof rorting" (queer bashing), many men of all
social classes found sexual encounters in latrines and "cottages" (public washrooms) exciting. To protect
themselves against arrest, men developed a complex system of coded gestures and phrases, and they

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collaborated in shielding sexual acts from view by patrolling washroom entrances and other means. Open
spaces, such as Hyde Park and Hampstead Heath in London, also served as major centers of queer public
life. Although police made significant efforts to reduce homosexual activity in these open spaces, men
generally were able to elude detection by retreating into secluded areas, especially at night.

Those who could afford to do so took advantage of tearooms, taverns, nightclubs, and other commercial
establishments that catered primarily to homosexual clients. In the Criterion in Piccadilly and other bars
that were recognized as gay friendly, many men flirted and chatted with others. Among other
establishments, the Lyon's Coventry Street Corner House was particularly famous throughout Britain as a
welcoming venue.

During the 1920s and early 1930s, police in London tended not to harass landlords of gay-friendly
establishments, especially those who paid bribes. However, following strong complaints by the Canadian
Military and Admiralty in 1936, the Metropolitan Police invoked a neglected licensing act of 1839 to raid
establishments with homosexual clients and held proprietors legally responsible for the "obscene" behavior
of their customers. The crackdown on gay-friendly establishments intensified in the later 1930s, although
some prominent venues, such as Lyon's Coventry Street Corner House, remained largely unhindered in their
operations until the 1950s.

The increasingly inhospitable climate for homosexuals in the United Kingdom in the 1930s was a
contributing factor in the decision of several leading young writers--most notably, W. H. Auden and
Christopher Isherwood--to emigrate.

The Law and Lesbians in the Interwar Years

In 1921, a Criminal Law Amendment Bill was introduced that would have classified any "act of gross
indecency between female persons" as a misdemeanor, punishable in the same manner as comparable male
acts under the Labouchère Amendment. On August 4, 1921, the House of Commons passed the measure by a
vote of 148 to 53. However, the bill was rejected by the House of Lords on the grounds that insufficient
evidence had been presented to indicate the necessity of the act.

Although sexual acts between women were not criminalized, the obscenity trial of 1928 concerning the
distribution of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness in the United Kingdom indicated the limits on the
public expression of lesbianism. Clarence Dane and other authors who dealt previously with lesbian themes
avoided prosecution for obscenity by emphasizing the suffering of lesbian characters. From the beginning,
Hall intended Well to present lesbianism to the public sympathetically, and, to this end, she arranged for
Havelock Ellis to write a preface, emphasizing the sociological worth of the book.

Although The Well of Loneliness was banned in the United Kingdom, copies printed in France and the
United States became available, and, in the short interlude before the obscenity trial, favorable reviews
appeared in a number of publications, including the Sunday Times. Although it affirmed the ban on the
book, the trial helped to call public attention to lesbian issues, and it established the Well in the queer
canon. Further, Hall took great pride in the letters that she received from other women (up to 10,000 per
year, according to her account), who emphasized that publicity about the novel helped them to become
aware that their own homosexual inclinations were shared by other women.

Opportunities for Women's Socialization

The role of a husband in enabling women to attain economic security and social respectability made it
difficult for many middle-class and lower-class women to realize (or perhaps even to conceive of) lives
structured around lesbian relationships. Nevertheless, diaries, letters, and other documents reveal that

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some women of all classes established emotionally intense friendships with other women. During the
interwar years, most of the women who engaged in sexual relationships with other women probably did so
secretly, juggling these with their commitments to husbands.

In contrast to the situation for gay men, there were no public commercial spaces catering primarily to
lesbians. Nevertheless, wealthy lesbians found a welcome during the 1920s in bohemian nightspots such as
London's Cave of Harmony and the Orange Tree. By 1921, Enid Chambers had developed detailed plans for a
lesbian center in London, but, despite the help of Carpenter and other friends, she was unable to secure
sufficient funding for the project.

In mid-1930s, Alice Williams (1863-1957) attempted to redress the lack of a lesbian social center through
the foundation of the Forum Club. This socially exclusive establishment at Hyde Park Corner in
Knightsbridge provided its members with many of the functions of traditional men's clubs: accommodation,
food services, and opportunities for intellectual discussions on a variety of topics. Although not advertised
as a lesbian club, it was widely perceived as such, and a very high percentage of its members self-
identified as lesbians, according to Emily Hamer.

For women of the middle and working classes, the Women's Institutes (established 1915), the National
Union of Townswomen's Guild (NUTG, established 1928), and other women's organizations were important in
fostering unity and in keeping alive the spirit of feminism, even after suffrage had been achieved. At least
some of the women involved in these organizations, such as Alice Franklin (1885-1964), honorary secretary
and treasurer of NUTG, were relatively open about their sexual orientation and their distrust of men.

Increasing Oppression of Homosexuality at Mid-century

During the fifteen years following the outbreak of World War Two, the number of recorded indictable
homosexual offenses increased dramatically. In 1938, the police in England and Wales dealt with 134 cases
of sodomy; in 1952, 670; and in 1954, 1043. Arrests for homosexual assault increased from 822 in 1938 to
3,305 in 1955. Furthermore, in 1955, there were 2,322 recorded instances of "gross indecency" in England
and Wales, in comparison with 316 in 1938.

According to accounts of queer veterans, the difficult and exceptional circumstances of military duty
helped to foster a certain degree of tolerance within the ranks for casual same-sex acts, as long as there
was no explicit indication of homosexual identity. Nevertheless, military authorities became increasingly
concerned about homosexual activities as the war progressed. During the first twelve months of the war,
1939-40, forty-eight men were court-martialed for "indecency between males"; in the final twelve months,
1944-45, the number of court-martials for homosexual acts had increased to 324. During the course of the
war, there were more British men court-martialed for homosexual acts than for any other category of
offense.

Among the prominent military personnel accused of sodomy was Sir Paul Latham, a wealthy Conservative
Member of Parliament, who, though exempted from service, joined the army of his own accord. In 1941, he
was tried and convicted of "improper behavior" with three gunners and a civilian while serving as an officer
in the Royal Artillery. Convicted of ten charges of indecent conduct, he was discharged dishonorably,
imprisoned for two years, and forced to resign his seat in Parliament.

During the course of the war, tabloids increasingly featured stories claiming that military personnel
stationed in British communities were in danger of corruption by predatory homosexuals. In response to the
public outcry incited by these accounts, police utilized the Defense Regulations and Emergency Powers Acts
to close "disorderly" premises without following standard legal protocol. Thus, for example, under authority
of this Act, Sam's Café in Rupert Street, London, was closed between 6 P.M. and 6 A.M. in 1941. Further, in

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1944, several prominent gay-friendly pubs (including Swiss Hotel in Old Crompton Street) were cautioned
for harboring "sodomites." As the new regulations were enforced, many pubs and cafes voluntarily began to
exclude homosexual patrons in order to avoid possible harassment by the police.

The intensification of the prosecution of homosexuals coincided with the appointment in 1944 of Sir
Theobald Mathew as Director of Public Prosecution (a post he held until 1964). Disturbed by the recorded
increase in homosexual incidents during the war years, Mathew made the suppression of homosexuality a
primary goal of law enforcement agencies.

Specific targets for arrests of homosexuals were established by local police authorities, who also devised
the means used to arrest homosexuals. By the late 1940s, the Metropolitan Police offered detailed training
courses, preparing officers to go "underground" in homosexual milieus. Entrapment became common, and
men were often arrested after performing sexual acts with policemen.

In 1951, the defection to the Soviet Union of the spies Guy Burgess and David Maclean, both known
homosexuals, solidified the public impression that sexual deviance was detrimental to the well-being of the
nation. In response, the British government instituted policies to weed out homosexuals in sensitive
government positions.

In 1952, during this atmosphere of hysteria, Alan Turing, one of the most gifted scientists of his generation,
who had cracked the German Enigma machine code during World War II and who had pioneered in the
development of the modern computer, was arrested and prosecuted for "gross indecency" when he reported
a burglary at his home. As a show of leniency toward someone who had contributed greatly to the war
effort, Turing was given a choice between prison or "organo-therapy," a kind of chemical castration. He
chose the latter, but grew depressed when the "treatment" left him impotent and caused him to grow
breasts. In 1954, like many homosexuals before him who ran afoul of prejudice and stupidity, he committed
suicide.

Appointed Metropolitan Police Commissioner in 1953, Sir John Nutt-Bower intensified efforts to clamp down
on homosexuals with little regard for established legal procedures. Courts generally supported his
endeavors, frequently overlooking infringements on the rights of individuals who had been indicted for
homosexual acts.

Emboldened by the mood of intense homophobia, police did not hesitate to arrest even very prominent
figures for homosexual acts and indecent behavior. Among the many men arrested in 1953 were William
Field, a well-known and popular Labour Member of Parliament (MP); Ian Harvey, Tory Junior Minister; Ian
Horrabin, Tory MP; and Sir John Gielgud, the prominent actor.

Convicted in October of soliciting sex in a public lavatory, Gielgud was fined ten pounds and encouraged to
seek counseling. However, many men were given much more severe punishment. For instance, famous
author Rupert Croft-Cooke was imprisoned for nine months after being convicted for sexual offenses with
two sailors. Others were forced to undergo medical regimens, including hormone therapy and aversion
therapy, as a part of their sentence or as a condition of parole or probation.

Announced on October 16, 1953, the arrest by Scotland Yard of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and his friend film
director Kenneth Hume for "serious offenses" with boy scouts provoked a frenzy of media coverage. Because
of suspicion that the police had tampered with some of the evidence, the jury of the trial in December
dismissed one charge and left a second unresolved, awaiting retrial. Before that could occur, Lord Montagu
was arrested in January 1954, along with his cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers and friend Peter Wildeblood, a
prominent journalist, for conspiring to commit unnatural acts with two members of the Air Force. The
servicemen were exempted from all charges in exchange for their testimony. Found guilty at their trial in

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March 1954, the three accused were sentenced to prison: Montagu, for 12 months; Pitt-Rivers and
Wildeblood, for 18 months each.

Disturbed by the heavy sentences given to these highly respected public figures, the Sunday Times and
some other leading newspapers published editorials questioning the wisdom of imposing such penalties for
homosexual acts. Outside the courthouse, Wildeblood was cheered by a large crowd that clearly regarded
him as a martyr. Thus, the trial of Montagu and his associates contributed to an impetus for reform.

To consider revisions to the existing laws regulating sexual behavior, the government established later in
1954 a Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offenses and Prostitution, usually called the Wolfenden
Committee after its chairman, Sir John Wolfenden. The Committee consisted of fourteen men and three
women, including, among others, a Member of Parliament, a psychiatrist, a Presbyterian minister, two
judges, and others of impeccable moral reputation. Although copious testimony was taken from declared
homosexuals, none served on the Committee.

On September 4, 1957, the Committee finally issued its report, which recommended that homosexual acts
in private between two consenting adults should be decriminalized. However, the Committee made clear
that it regarded homosexuality as a debilitating condition, which should be treated, if possible, with
medical means (though it declined to classify homosexuality as a mental illness). Further, the Committee
opposed decriminalization of public homosexual acts and recommended stiff penalties for male
prostitution. The age of consent for homosexual acts was to be established at 21 rather than 16 as it was
for heterosexual or lesbian sexual acts.

Given the lingering homophobia and the dynamics of the parliamentary system, which permits a recall
election if a government-backed measure is defeated, it is not surprising that leading politicians delayed
acting on the most significant Wolfenden recommendations. However, in 1959, Parliament enacted its
proposals to make male prostitution and street solicitation (by both men and women) illegal.

To campaign for the Wolfenden proposals, a small group of straight and gay supporters of reform discreetly
founded the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS) in London in 1958. By 1959, the HLRS had begun to
launch a nationwide campaign, although its headquarters remained in London.

Women during the 1940s and 1950s

In 1956, the pervasive official silence about lesbian sexuality was broken when the sexual assault of a
woman by another woman was added to the Sexual Offenses Act. While it did not criminalize lesbianism per
se, this revision of the legal code did serve to publicize the threat that lesbians were thought to pose to
heterosexual women. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, lesbians were subjected to significant social
prejudices.

Although exact statistics are unavailable, recent feminist historians have suggested that lesbians were more
impacted than other women by government regulations instituted in 1942 that required all single women to
register for war work. In response to rumors of lesbianism, government publicity emphasized that women
engaged in war work retained both their femininity and their interest in men.

A government commission established in 1941 investigated sexual immorality in the women's armed forces
and expressed great concern about lesbianism among military personnel. However, discharges for female-
female sexual acts were relatively rare. Usually, women suspected of engaging in lesbian activities were
separated from their supposed partners through reposting. Despite official efforts to suppress lesbianism,
many women veterans maintained that it had been relatively easy to be a lesbian during the war if one
were discreet.

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During the 1950s, the dominant sociological theory of functionalism provided justification for renewed
emphasis on "traditional" heterosexual family roles for women. Even the Women's Institute and similar
organizations diluted their political programs through a focus on conventional femininity.

During the 1950s, lesbianism was generally regarded as a curable, but potentially debilitating, psychological
illness. The Maudsley Hospital, London, and other leading medical institutions used aversion therapy to
treat lesbianism.

In 1949, Falcon Press issued the first British edition of the Well of Loneliness since the 1928 ban, and that
book continued to provide many women with awareness that many others shared their lesbian desires. The
cropped hair and mannish attire, favored both by Radclyffe Hall and her fictional character Stephen,
remained the most obvious public indicator of lesbianism. "Butch" and "femme" camps predominated at the
Gateways, a bohemian bar in Chelsea (London) that had effectively become a lesbian club by the 1950s.
However, as Hamer has noted, it is difficult to know the extent to which these categories applied to most
lesbian women, who maintained discreet public profiles.

Despite the dominance of heterosexual values, some prominent lesbians publicly revealed their
relationships with other women. For example, the surgeon Louisa Martindale (1873-1965) discussed the
significance of her partnership with Ismay Fitzgerald in her autobiography (1951). A popular middlebrow
cultural critic and radio personality, Nancy Spain (1917-1964) conducted public flirtations with gay men, but
she also made public, sexually-charged references to her partner, Jonnie Werner.

1960s: The Push for Legal Reform

More than 1,000 people attended the first public meeting of the HLRS held on May 12, 1960 at Caxton Hall
(near Westminster). A substantial majority of those in attendance endorsed a resolution calling on the
government to implement the Wolfenden proposals. Supporting the HLRS, Labour MP Kenneth Robinson
introduced on June 29, 1960 a motion asking the House of Commons to enact the Wolfenden
recommendations. Even liberal newspapers opposed the motion, which was defeated by a vote of 213 to
99.

In subsequent years, the HLRS undertook many different kinds of activities, ranging from advocacy of legal
reforms to psychological support services for gay men. Because homosexuality was illegal, it was difficult
for the HLRS to raise money openly. Therefore, in 1958, Antony Grey (pseudonym of A. E. G. Wright)
founded the Albany Trust, a public charity that could channel funds to the HLRS. Despite Grey's fundraising,
the HLRS often found it difficult to meet its expenses.

In 1958, the Lord Chamberlain's office lifted the ban on the treatment of homosexual topics in public
theaters, and, by the early 1960s, a number of plays and films dealt with homosexual issues. Particularly
important among the films that helped to promote reform was Victim (1961), which starred Dirk Bogarde as
a barrister whose career and marriage were threatened by a blackmailer aware of his homosexual
activities. In 1964, the BBC TV program This Week presented a sensitive, full-length documentary that
compared the lives of homosexual men in the UK and the Netherlands.

Despite sympathetic films on homosexual themes, polls indicated that public opinion remained largely
opposed to homosexual law reform. Newspapers consistently characterized gay men as pathetic creatures
even when they acknowledged the need for the reform of oppressive laws. In the fall of 1962, public
attention was focused on the blackmail of homosexuals through the highly publicized trial of William
Vassall, a Foreign Office clerk, accused of providing classified information to a KGB agent who had taken
compromising photographs of him.

Many local agencies devised new methods to entrap homosexual men. For example, in Hertfordshire, police

Page 10
removed floor boards from the main floor of Baldock Town Hall so that they could spy on the men's room
below. The recurring prosecutions of homosexual men prompted Allan Horsfall to found the North Western
Homosexual Law Reform Society (NWHLRS) in 1964. Under the direction of Colin Harvey, the NWHLRS
attracted many openly homosexual members in the Manchester area.

In July 1964, the Director of Public Prosecutions asked that all Chief Constables obtain consent before
bringing charges for sexual acts between men in private. Rather than an attempt to improve the lives of
gay men, however, this change probably was intended to deflect activists' objections to the uneven
application of existing law.

Following Labour's victory in the 1966 general election, Richard Crossman, Leader of the House of
Commons, arranged the legislative schedule to insure consideration of a homosexual law reform bill. After
a great deal of political maneuvering, the Sexual Offenses Bill finally was passed shortly after dawn on the
morning of July 4, 1967. By continuing debate on the bill without interruption from July 3 into the morning
of July 4, Crossman managed to wear down the will of opponents. At the time the final vote was taken,
significant numbers of exhausted members had left the House. In fact, by this point, there were present
only a few more than the minimum of one hundred members, required for a parliamentary vote. This
circumstance explains the rather curious tally of 101 to 16 votes by which the hotly contested Act was
passed. With the granting of royal assent on July 28, the bill became law.

The Sexual Offenses Act instituted one of the primary recommendations of the Wolfenden Report: the
decriminalization of homosexual acts between adult men in private. Also in accord with the Wolfenden
recommendations, the Sexual Offenses Bill established 21 as age of consent for homosexual acts, in
contrast to 16 for heterosexual and lesbian acts.

Furthermore, the Bill established additional restrictions on homosexuals. The mandatory prison sentence
for consensual sex between an adult and a person aged between 16 and 20 was increased from two to five
years. In addition, prison sentences of two years were established for homosexual acts involving more than
two adult males and for any male-male sexual acts in a public place. The new law applied only in England
and Wales, and it specifically exempted all members of the armed forces. All male homosexual acts
continued to be illegal in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Despite passage of the Act, antagonism against homosexuals remained widespread. The commercial bars
and clubs that began to solicit the business of gay men more openly risked police harassment. Thus, the
popular Baton Rouge Club in Manchester was raided and shut down in 1969. The government prohibited the
NWHLRC from establishing a network of social clubs.

The MRG and Lesbian Political Organization in the 1960s

On January 1, 1963, Esmé Langley and Diana Chapman founded the Minorities Research Group (MRG),
intended to promote understanding of lesbianism. Seeking to improve the lives of lesbians throughout the
UK, the MRG offered counseling and tried to foster contacts among isolated women.

Before establishing the MRG, Langley had sought to increase awareness of lesbian history through articles
on various famous personalities, and she continued that endeavor in Arena Three, the magazine published
by the MRG and distributed by private circulation. Consisting of approximately twelve typed sheets stapled
together, each issue of Arena Three contained articles and letters on a wide variety of topics of interest to
lesbians.

By March 1964, the MRG had only 36 paid members, but its impact far exceeded the small size of its paid-
up membership. By 1964, MRG held regular meetings in London, which featured lively and sometimes

Page 11
heated debates. At these sessions, the appropriateness of "mannish" clothing was a frequent topic and
provoked a great deal of controversy. The middle-class women who predominated in the MRG membership
often expressed discomfort with "butch" clothing, but they refused to endorse a prohibition on male drag at
meetings, as was proposed by some members.

Responding to the need for more social opportunities for women, Cheri Ager, on behalf of the MRG, began
in 1965 to try to establish a system of regional organizations. This effort was most successful in London,
where the London Volunteer Committee organized lesbian groups for sports, music, and other activities.

Maintaining that Langley was socially elitist, Christina Reid and other members of the Volunteer Committee
withdrew from MRG in July 1965 and established an alternative lesbian social organization, KENRIC, named
after the London boroughs of Kensington and Richmond, where many of the members lived. Distancing itself
from political activism, KENRIC focused primarily on social activities for women. In general, KENRIC tended
to attract younger members than MRG, and many women who became involved in KENRIC found the articles
in Arena Three dull and irrelevant.

By the end of the 1960s, there were small but viable lesbian associations established in various parts of the
UK, including Norfolk and Suffolk, the Midlands, and Hampshire and Dorset. Initially established in 1965 as
the Lancashire and Cheshire branch of the MRG, the Manchester-based New Group was the largest lesbian
organization outside London, with more than 60 members in 1968.

The Gateways in Chelsea remained the preeminent lesbian venue throughout the 1960s, although several
other clubs were established for women in London during the decade. By 1969, this members-only club had
literally thousands of members, primarily lesbians but also including some gay men. Consisting only of a
single room and a bar, the Gateways actually only had room for about 200 people, so it was very crowded at
most times of the day. Maureen Duffy's popular novel The Microcosm (1966), concerned with women who
frequent a lesbian club, is clearly based upon Gateways. The club became widely known to the general
public when it was used as the setting of Robert Aldrich's highly successful film, The Killing of Sister George
(1968), starring Beryl Reid. The lesbian couple that owned the Gateways and various patrons appeared in
the film.

1970s: the Era of Gay Liberation

According to Home Office figures, convictions in the early 1970s for homosexual solicitation were at the
same level that they had been before the passage of the Sexual Offenses Act, and police continued to
utilize entrapment and similar tactics in order to arrest gay men. Yet, despite police harassment of gay-
friendly establishments, the Gay Guide, published in 1970 by John Stamford's magazine Spartacus,
described 60 gay venues in London and over 200 in the rest of the UK.

Inspired by developments in the United States, especially the Stonewall Riots and the New York-based Gay
Liberation Front, the Gay Liberation Movement held its first meeting November 13, 1970 in a classroom at
the London School of Economics. Young homosexual men and women were quickly attracted to the
movement, and on November 27, the newly founded Gay Liberation Front (GLF) held its first public event,
a torchlight demonstration protesting the arrest of a gay activist for solicitation on Highbury Fields.

By spring 1971, the lively GLF meetings routinely attracted several hundreds, and the GLF also sponsored
popular social events and discos. Police raids on GLF events and arrests of its leaders served to solidify
support for the organization among younger homosexuals. Over 2,000 people participated in the UK's first
Gay Pride March, held in London in July 1972.

By mid-1973, the GLF had fragmented into distinct factions, and it collapsed by the end of the year. Despite

Page 12
its short existence and its naive political stances, the GLF radically transformed gay life in Britain through
its strong advocacy of the positive aspects of gay life and its insistence that significant social reforms were
both necessary and inevitable.

Also helping to promote gay consciousness, the fortnightly newspaper Gay News, established in 1972,
published a wide range of articles intended to appeal to a broad spectrum of the community. By mid-1975,
Gay News had a paid circulation of over 7,500, even though most news agents refused to stock it. In
contravention of a House of Lords ruling that advertisements for sexual acts between men were illegal, Gay
News also published personal ads, insisting not very convincingly that these were strictly non-sexual in
intent.

As the influence of GLF declined, membership in more solidly established gay political organizations
increased significantly. In November 1970, when HLRS was renamed Campaign for Homosexual Equality
(CHE), it had over 500 members in 15 local groups. By April 1973, when it held its first annual conference at
Morecambe, CHE had more than 2,000 fully paid members.

Inspired by the radical stance of GLF, leaders of CHE now encouraged men to hold hands in public and
otherwise make their sexual orientation visible. Encouraged by the return of Labour to power in 1974, CHE
systematically worked with the Scottish Minorities Group (SMG) and the newly founded Northern Ireland gay
rights group to achieve significant legal reform.

Founded in 1969, the Scottish Minorities Group campaigned against the criminal penalties that still applied
to male homosexual acts in Scotland. Although its explicit defiance of the law put its existence in jeopardy,
the SMG had more than 200 members in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and St. Andrews by the end of
1971.

Although hindered by their country's devastating sectarian conflicts, gay men in Northern Ireland
determined to organize to defend their rights. They founded the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform
(CHLR) in 1974, with the goal of achieving extension of the 1967 Act to their country. In 1975, CHLR was
dissolved and replaced by the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association (NIGRA).

To support their plea for immediate legal reform, CHE, SMG, and CHLR jointly sponsored a number of
demonstrations, including one held in Trafalgar Square on November 2, 1974, which was attended by more
than 2,500 people. Determined to influence Parliament, the three organizations publicly launched a draft
Homosexual Law Reform Bill on July 3, 1975. In response, the government established the Criminal Law
Revision Committee (CLRC) to review all laws relating to sexual consent. Although activists hoped for quick
action, CLRC took more than six years to fulfill its brief.

In 1975, the television broadcast of the dramatization of Quentin Crisp's autobiography, The Naked Civil
Servant, helped to foster discussion of homosexual issues. The film was produced by Thames Television
after the BBC turned it down. John Hurt won several awards for his performance in the title role, and the
show enjoyed great popular acclaim. According to a survey by the Independent Broadcast Authority, only
three percent of viewers said they were shocked by the broadcast, and eighty-five percent maintained that
they enjoyed the show.

In the second half of the 1970s, the gay community endured several significant political setbacks. Despite
organized opposition by SMG, the House of Commons on November 3, 1976 enacted a bill that consolidated
all homosexual offenses in Scotland into a single law, intended to expedite prosecutions. In 1977, the House
of Lords overwhelmingly defeated a proposal to lower to 18 the age for male-male sexual acts. After
extensive debate begun in March, the House of Lords passed on July 7, 1977 the Sexual Offenses Scotland
Bill, which decriminalized sexual acts between two adult men in private. Unfortunately, the Scotland Bill

Page 13
lapsed and did not become law because opponents in the House of Commons successfully prevented
debate.

In January 1976, the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Belfast raided the homes of 23 gay men involved in
reform issues, holding and interrogating them for several hours and seizing NIGRA materials as evidence of
criminal activity. One of the men targeted in the raid, Jeff Dudgeon, submitted a case to the European
Court of Human Rights, asserting that the British government was invading his privacy by refusing to
legalize homosexuality.

In July 1977, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission recommended legalization of homosexual acts
between consenting adults. However, despite a declaration of support, the Government did not act on this
proposal, which was vociferously opposed by the Democratic Unionist Party.

On July 11, 1977, Denis Lemon, editor of Gay News, was found guilty of blasphemy for publishing a poem by
James Kirkup that characterized Jesus Christ as a homosexual. The prosecution of Lemon had been initiated
by conservative moral reformer Mary Whitehouse, who referred to an archaic and virtually forgotten law.
Readers of Gay News donated over £21,000 to Lemon's unsuccessful legal defense.

Worsening the situation, established gay political organizations, such as CHE, had increasing difficulty
attracting and retaining members during the later 1970s. A variety of factors contributed to this situation,
including the emergence of highly specialized interest groups within the gay movement and the hedonistic
distractions readily available in the expanding commercial gay scenes in large metropolitan areas.

Lesbianism and Feminism in the 1970s

Although actively involved in the founding of GLF, many lesbians came to believe that feminist
organizations had more relevance to them than gay rights groups dominated by men. Initially, major
feminist groups were reluctant to address lesbian causes, but members of the GLF introduced lesbianism as
a topic of discussion at the Women's Liberation Conference held at Skegness in October 1971. Subsequently,
most British feminists came to regard lesbianism as a politically sound alternative to heterosexuality, and
many women came out in the context of feminist organizations.

Despite their historic contributions to the formation of lesbian identity, both the MRG and Arena Three
were in dire straits by 1970 as membership levels declined. Founded in 1970, the Press Freedom Group
sought to promote circulation of Arena Three and to radicalize its content. With the winter 1970 issue,
Arena Three began to publish erotic fiction and images, but the magazine collapsed at the end of 1971,
when Langley appropriated its remaining financial assets and moved abroad.

In 1972, Jackie Foster and other women involved in the Press Freedom Group founded Sappho, a politically
committed feminist magazine, linked to a program of social activities, including support groups for lesbian
mothers and lesbian teachers. Furthermore, Sappho coordinated and paid for the legal defense of
servicewomen accused of lesbianism, and it helped to establish the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard in
1974.

In 1977, Maureen Colquhoun, Labour MP for Northampton, became the first publicly "out" British politician
when she acknowledged the truth of widespread rumors about her relationship with another woman.
Despite efforts by her local constituency to withdraw endorsement from her, she ran as the Labour
candidate in the next election (May 1979), in which she was defeated by a Conservative.

An Era of Moral Retrenchment

Page 14
The Conservative government, headed by Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister, 1979-90), systematically
sought to prevent further homosexual law reform and to restrict the existing rights of homosexuals. Upon
taking office in May 1979, the new government announced that it would not extend the Sexual Offenses Act
of 1977 to Northern Ireland, claiming that the measure was opposed by that country's elected
representatives and religious organizations. On March 6, 1980, the government rejected an amendment to a
Housing Bill that would have given gay and lesbian couples the security of tenure already accorded to
heterosexual couples.

In April 1980, national attention was drawn to anti-gay discrimination by the case of John Saunders, who
was dismissed because of his sexual orientation from his job at a Scottish residential camp for children.
Following the rejection of his appeal by the Employment and Appeal Tribunal, an ad-hoc group of labor and
business leaders submitted in June a petition to the House of Commons requesting that discriminatory laws
be reformed.

Subsequently, Labour MP Robin Cook introduced an amendment to the Criminal Justice Scotland Bill that
would decriminalize consensual sexual acts between adult males. Although every Conservative Scottish
representative voted against it, the amendment was passed 203 to 80.

In a celebratory article, Gay News characterized Cook's amendment as an "orgy law" because it did not
include restrictions regarding location or numbers of men involved. As a result, the Presbyterian Church of
Scotland and other religious organizations instituted a successful campaign to persuade the House of Lords
to restrict legal homosexual acts to private situations with no more than two men.

Responding to the reluctance of the Conservative government to reform sexual laws in Northern Ireland,
the European Commission unanimously ruled in September 1980 that the UK violated the European
Convention through its intervention in the private lives of homosexual men. However, the government
refused to change the laws in Northern Ireland until the case of Jeff Dudgeon was reviewed by the full
European Court.

In October 1981, the Court ruled that the UK violated Dudgeon's privacy, but it also declared that Dudgeon
was entitled only to a minimal payment for legal fees because a certain (unspecified) degree of
discrimination against homosexuals was permitted. On October 25, 1981, the House of Commons voted to
extend the Sexual Offenses Act of 1967 to Northern Ireland.

Finally issued in 1981, the long awaited Report of the Criminal Law Reform Committee largely rejected
expansion of individual sexual freedoms. However, the Report proposed that the Sexual Offenses Act of
1967 should be extended to servicemen and that the age of consent for private sexual acts between two
men should be lowered to 18. However, no action was taken on these proposals.

In October 1982, the Government announced its intention to intensify prosecution of homosexual acts
outside the scope of the 1967 Act. In that month, the Metropolitan Police raided a private party in West
London and arrested 37 men, who were charged with engaging in homosexual acts that were "not in
private."

After her landslide victory in June 1983, Thatcher emphasized her determination to secure passage of the
Police and Criminal Evidence Bill (enacted 1984), which extended police powers of arrest in matters
involving perceived affronts to public decency. In May 1984, a clause added to the Act specified that
touching another man's genitals in a public washroom constituted an arrestable offense and that anyone
even suspected of this offense could be detained for up to four days without access to a lawyer.

Even as the Bill was being debated, there was a notable increase in police activity against gay men. For
example, on March 11, 1984, over 50 officers raided The Bell, a popular and cruisy gay pub in Camden
(London), for a supposed infringement of the licensing laws, regulating hours of service and other aspects

Page 15
of pub operations. On April 10, 1984, Customs and Excise agents raided Gay's the Word, London's only gay
bookstore, and confiscated thirty percent of its stock. Police held the store's directors and manager for
questioning without access to lawyers. Later in April, a similar raid was conducted against Lavender
Menace, Edinburgh, then Scotland's only gay bookstore.

In November, the eight directors and the assistant manager of Gay's the Word were indicted for conspiracy
to distribute obscene material, despite the fact that virtually all the titles submitted in evidence were also
available in mainstream bookstores. However, all charges against the bookstore were dropped in 1985
following a high-profile campaign by civil liberties groups.

As the Conservative Party shifted to a repressive moral stance, London Mayor Ken Livingston committed the
Greater London Council (GLC) to opposing discrimination against homosexuals. In 1984, the GLC affirmed
gay rights as part of its anti-discrimination policy and established the London Lesbian and Gay Centre.

Labour-dominated councils in other cities, including Manchester, Southampton, and Birmingham, instituted
programs similar to those of the GLC. Incensed, the Thatcher Government secured passage in Parliament of
the Local Government Act of 1985, which abolished the GLC and other councils, effective March 31, 1986.

Influenced by the policies of the councils, Labour Party conferences of 1986 and 1987 supported motions to
commit any future national Labour government to outlaw discrimination against gay men and lesbians. In
the 1987 General Election, Conservative candidates routinely attacked Labour's pro-gay policies. Although
Conservatives retained control of the government, the re-election of prominent gay activist Chris Smith as
representative of South Islington and Finsbury (London), despite a lavishly subsidized smear campaign, gave
hope to gay activists.

At the Conservative Party Conference held in October 1987, Thatcher expressed concern that children were
being taught that gay lifestyles were acceptable. In December 1987, Conservative MP David Wilshire
introduced an amendment--Clause 28--to the Local Government Bill that would prohibit government-
supported institutions from teaching the normalcy of homosexuality and from making available any
materials depicting homosexual relationships positively. The text of Clause 28 was written by Jill Knight,
who had proposed the previous year a similar motion, which was defeated. Subsequently, Knight openly
assumed leadership of the effort to pass Clause 28.

Stung by defeat in the recent election, Labour leaders initially refused to challenge this proposal, but the
Party affirmed its opposition to the amendment by the beginning of March. By January 1988, the
Association of Art Historians and other arts organizations expressed their opposition to Clause 28. Coming
out in the course of a BBC radio interview, prominent Shakespearean actor Ian McKellen emerged as a
leader of the opposition to the amendment.

Reacting to the homophobia underlying Clause 28, gay men and lesbians throughout the UK evinced a
renewed commitment to political activism. Over 10,000 lesbians and gay men participated in a march in
London on January 9, two days before the House of Lords debated the measure. Even larger protests were
held in subsequent weeks. For instance, on February 20, a demonstration sponsored in Manchester by the
Northwest Campaign for Gay and Lesbian Equality attracted a crowd estimated between 13,000 and 20,000.
After the House of Commons passed the legislation on March 9, protests against Clause 28 continued,
including one held on April 30 in London that attracted more than 30,000 people.

By establishing as a principle of British law the belief that homosexuality was a detriment to society, Clause
28 constituted a powerful symbol of the second-class status of gay and lesbian citizens. Nevertheless, in
practice, it was easy for local agencies to circumvent the Clause because its wording was so vague. Thus,
on May 25, the Department of Education issued an official policy statement advising all schools that it

Page 16
would not prevent the objective discussion of homosexuality in the classroom.

Lesbian Feminism

Produced in 1981 by the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists, the book Love Your Enemy? has been characterized
as the first major public declaration of lesbian-feminism in Britain. During the 1980s, the number of
lesbian-feminists in the UK probably did not exceed 10,000, but they had a strong impact on the popular
conception of lesbian identity because the media utilized stories about them as a means to attack all
lesbians and feminists.

According to Hamer, throughout the 1980s, British lesbians heatedly debated a range of issues, including
the morality of pornography, which proved to be particularly divisive. While some lesbian-feminists
regarded the explicit depiction of sexual acts as inherently oppressive to women, others asserted that
positive depictions of lesbian sexuality could be liberating.

Angered by the apparent willingness of some lesbian-feminists to work with the religious right to suppress
erotic material, Elizabeth Wilson and other lesbian activists formed Feminists Against Censorship. Among
other young British artists, queer activist Tessa Boffin (1962-93) created a notable ensemble of photographs
and performance pieces that celebrated lesbian sexual freedom. By the late 1980s, London and other major
cities had a significant number of clubs appealing to various groups of lesbians as diverse as "lipstick
lesbians" and leather women.

Clause 28 probably contributed to the strong sense of solidarity apparent among queer women towards the
end of the 1980s. Perhaps more significantly, opposition to the Clause also promoted awareness of the
causes that linked gay men and lesbians, who began to work together more systematically to fight
oppression.

HIV/AIDS

The first British case of Kaposi's Sarcoma was diagnosed in December 1981. By the end of 1983, there were
29 documented cases of AIDS in the UK. By April 1989, over a thousand individuals had died from
complications of the disease. Numbers of individuals affected continued to grow; by early 1993, over 8,000
cases of AIDS had been documented. Disturbing as these statistics are, the incidence of AIDS during the
1980s and the early 1990s was considerably lower in the UK than in Spain, France, and many other western
European countries, to say nothing of the United States.

Statistics tell only part of the story of AIDS. The illness and death caused by HIV and AIDS in the British gay
male community during the mid-1980s created conditions resembling a wartime emergency. Intensifying the
oppression of gay men during the era were smear campaigns directed against them by right-wing politicians
and religious leaders, who emphasized the link between homosexuality and devastating disease. There
were increasing instances of discrimination against gay men, who, for example, were refused service by
taxi firms and pubs.

Faced with government inaction, members of the gay community developed volunteer organizations to deal
with the HIV/AIDS crisis. Named after the first British man known to have died of AIDS, the Terrence Higgins
Trust (THT), founded in November 1982, devoted its initial efforts to fund-raising for research but later
developed a comprehensive range of medical and support services. Campaigning in gay discos and leather
clubs in London, the Trust had developed a safe-sex education program by 1983, as did such other groups as
Gay Medical Association. Outside of London, locally based self-help groups of gay men emerged in many
cities by 1984.

Page 17
In January 1985, Jill Knight, Chair of the House of Commons Health Committee, demanded that AIDS be
made a notifiable disease and that legal steps be taken to confine AIDS patients. Reacting to a public
relations campaign launched by the newspaper Capital Gay, Health Minister Kenneth Clarke on February 20
abandoned the proposal to make AIDS a notifiable disease, but he established powers to detain patients in
hospitals. In September, THT successfully appealed to the High Court to rescind the powers that had been
used to confine a man with AIDS against his will in a Manchester hospital. Appointed Health Minister in
1985, Barney Harvey, who had coordinated the raid against Gay's the Word, supported increased police
powers against homosexual activities in a supposed effort to protect young people against disease.

Established in 1987, the Health Education Authority encouraged "mainstreaming" of AIDS information and
help services, effectively distancing them from the gay organizations that had pioneered these activities.
As HIV/AIDS service providers became increasingly dependent on government funding in the late 1980s and
the 1990s, they tended to downplay services directed specifically at homosexual men. Thus, for example,
many service centers stopped displaying and distributing explicit safe-sex materials geared to gay and
bisexual men.

Feeling that many gay organizations had become less effective in dealing with HIV/AIDS through
collaboration with government mainstreaming programs, a group of queer AIDS activists established a
British version of ACT-UP in January 1989, and a number of new organizations emerged to encourage
prevention. For instance, the MESMAC Project (Men Who Have Sex With Men Action in the Community)
sought to establish a variety of outreach programs, including some directed to men who avoided labeling
themselves as gay, which is particularly the case in minority communities.

The UK now has one of the highest rates of HIV/AIDS in western Europe. There has been a forty-five
percent increase in infection rates among gay and bisexual men since 2000. In 2004 and 2005, men who
have sex with men accounted for 79 percent of cases of HIV/AIDS acquired in the UK.

Preliminary results of research conducted by clinics in London, Brighton, and Manchester attribute this
development to an increase in unprotected anal intercourse among men. To combat the spread of HIV/AIDS,
gay activists are calling for safe-sex campaigns and other support services explicitly targeted to gay men, in
imitation of those that were so successful in the early years of the plague.

Towards Greater Freedom

Continuing into the 1990s, concern about Clause 28 inspired numerous celebrities to come out, in emulation
of the example of Ian McKellen. In May 1989, McKellen and other celebrities joined with gay and lesbian
activists to found the Stonewall Group (now Stonewall UK), a professional parliamentary, legal, and media
lobbying organization. One of the primary goals of Stonewall was to establish an all-party parliamentary
working group to monitor gay and lesbian issues in legislation and to draft a homosexual equality bill in
consultation with both politicians and gay and lesbian organizations.

From the time of its foundation, radical gay and lesbian groups have criticized Stonewall for its efforts to
attract celebrity support and its willingness to compromise with the political establishment in order to
achieve specific goals. Another organization, OutRage!, founded in May 1990, has opposed Stonewall on
many issues. Led by activist Peter Tatchell, OutRage! often engages in civil disobedience to attract
attention to gay rights causes.

Despite their differences, most queer political groups shared the common goal of further legal reform in
response to the significant increases in the arrests of homosexual men in the late 1980s. In 1989, police in
England and Wales recorded 2,022 arrests for "indecency between males," a number almost equal to the
level of arrests made during the 1950s.

Page 18
Coinciding with the rejuvenation of gay political organizations, the commercial network of cafes, bars, and
clubs has been increasingly prominent in London, Manchester, and other major cities since the early 1990s.
Catering to the "pink pound," trendy establishments have rejuvenated run-down neighborhoods, including
Soho in London's West End and the so-called Gay Village in the vicinity of Canal Street in Manchester. In
contrast to earlier British gay and lesbian venues, which tended to be discreetly closed off from the street,
the new bars and cafes often have large plate windows that expose their patrons to view.

As some critics have emphasized, the bars and clubs exclude those who cannot afford to patronize them,
and they often favor the young and attractive. Nevertheless, some of the businesses contribute significantly
to the social and charitable organizations based in surrounding neighborhoods. Furthermore, the increased
visibility of queer businesses probably contributed to the assertiveness of the queer community as a whole.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, but accelerating under the Labour government of Prime Minister Tony Blair, a
series of steps towards the achievement of equality for gay men and lesbians was achieved. In February
1994, Parliament, with the support of Conservative Prime Minister John Major, voted to reduce the age of
consent for male homosexual acts from 21 to 18. Some activists derided this reform because it still left the
age of consent higher for male homosexuals than for heterosexuals and lesbians. Nevertheless, Major's
approval of this policy marked a notable shift from the aggressively anti-gay stance of his predecessor,
Margaret Thatcher.

On September 28, 1999, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously ruled that the United Kingdom's
ban on gay men and lesbians serving in the military constituted a violation of the basic human right to
privacy. The case before the court concerned three men and a woman, who had been discharged during the
mid-1990s after their sexual orientation became known. Despite their outstanding records, their appeals for
reinstatement were turned down by British courts, and they initiated a joint suit before the European Court
in 1996. Utilizing arguments similar to those still endorsed by the United States government, the British
government unsuccessfully tried to convince the court that the presence of gay men and lesbians depressed
morale in the military and made it difficult for others to do their jobs.

In response to the decision, the British government in January 2000 ended the ban on gay men and lesbians
in the military. The new code of conduct instituted at that time emphasized that same-sex (as well as
male-female) sexual acts between members of the military were strictly forbidden.

Especially in the past few years, Stonewall's strategy of collaborating with mainstream political groups has
proved effective in securing specific legal reforms, although leftist groups continue to oppose any
compromise with mainstream perspectives.

Angela Mason, Director of Stonewall from 1992 to 2002, was instrumental in helping to secure
Parliamentary support for the Adoption and Children Bill (2002), which provided same-sex couples full
parental rights. In 2000, Scotland quietly abolished its equivalent of Clause 28 by an overwhelming vote. In
2003, after repeated attempts by Prime Minister Blair to repeal Clause 28 had been stymied in the House of
Lords, the offensive bill was finally repealed. Also in 2003, gay hate crimes were added to the Criminal
Justice Bill.

Perhaps the Blair government's most significant piece of gay rights legislation is the Civil Partnership Act
2004, which came into force in December 2005. The Act provided same-sex partners with virtually all of the
rights of married heterosexual couples, including automatic legal recognition as next of kin, inheritance,
and pension rights.

The most significant differences between civil partnerships and marriages are religious. Since the United

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Kingdom's official state church does not approve of same-sex marriage, the government made civil
partnership an entirely secular process and even restricted the places where civil partnerships could be
executed to non-religious venues. In addition, non-consummation and adultery are grounds for ending a
marriage but not for ending a civil partnership.

At the time of the passage of the Act, the government estimated that 22,000 couples would take advantage
of the law by 2010. However, over 15,500 couples had established civil partnerships by December 5, 2006.

While the civil partnerships were regarded positively by most gay men and lesbians, some queer activists,
including Peter Tatchell, emphasized that separate legal classifications (civil partnership for same-sex
couples and marriage for heterosexual couples) are inherently unequal.

The British government recognizes same-sex marriages, registered partnerships, civil unions, and domestic
partnerships from other countries, including Canada, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, South Africa, and
the states of Massachusetts, California, Vermont, Connecticut, and New Jersey, among others, as legally
equivalent to civil partnerships. A High Court decision of July 31, 2006 specifically ordered that same-sex
marriages performed in other nations be classified as civil partnerships rather than recognized as
marriages.

The Gender Recognition Act 2004 gave transgender individuals legal recognition and rights under the law.
However, many advocates for transgender rights believe that these rights are not vigorously enforced.

Taking effect in 2007, Sexual Orientation Regulations are intended to insure equal treatment of gay men,
lesbians, and bisexuals and to outlaw discrimination against them in employment and accommodations.
Although the provisions of the Sexual Orientation Regulations are uniform throughout the United Kingdom,
these were developed through separate processes for England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.
Thus far, the government has resisted efforts by the Catholic Church and other religious organizations to
secure exemptions from the Regulations throughout the United Kingdom.

Marriage Equality

By 2014, when marriage equality became a reality in England, Wales, and Scotland, glbtq citizens had
achieved equal rights under the law in all parts of the United Kingdom except Northern Ireland.

The battle for marriage equality received impetus from the 2010 general election, when Tory Shadow
Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said that a Conservative government would be happy to
"consider the case" for ending the ban on same-sex marriage. On May 4 2010 the party published a "Contract
for Equalities," which included the promise to consider possible marriage equality legislation.

During the campaign Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg emphasized unambiguously that his party
supported marriage equality.

Hence, after Conservative Leader David Cameron, who was intent on redefining his party as "modern" and
to erase its history of homophobia, turned to Clegg to form a coalition government, it was no surprise
when, in September 2011, the government announced that it would launch a consultation on how to
implement equal civil marriage for same-sex couples with the intention of any legislative changes being
made before the next general election.

In December 2012, the Minister for Women and Equalities, Secretary of State Maria Miller announced that
the government planned to bring forward same-sex marriage legislation for England and Wales in early 2013
and that the legislation would include provisions to allow religious organizations to "opt into" performing
same-sex marriages if they wish, but that there would be a "quadruple lock" of measures to prevent the

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compulsion of religious organizations to marry same-sex couples.

After a frequently rancorous debate in the House of Commons, the legislation was passed on its second
reading by a vote of 400 to 175. On May 21, 2013, it passed its final reading in the Commons by a 366-161
vote. Although more Conservative MPs voted against the legislation than voted for it, the measure received
overwhelming support from the Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs.

After surviving several "wrecking amendments" in the House of Lords, the marriage equality bill was
overwhelmingly approved in the Lords on July 15, 2013. It was granted Royal Assent on July 17, 2013.

Although the new law was supported by the leaders of all three major parties, the passage of the marriage
equality law was a personal triumph of Prime Minister David Cameron, who bucked the history of the
Conservative Party to fulfill promises he made to the glbtq community.

In an op-ed he published in the (London) Evening Standard on July 18. 2013 entitled "Commitment,
Responsibility, and Family," the Prime Minister wrote, "I am proud that we have made same-sex marriage
happen. I am delighted that the love two people have for each other--and the commitment they want to
make--can now be recognised as equal."

He declared, "I have backed this reform because I believe in commitment, responsibility and family. I don't
want to see people's love divided by law."

Because the new law affected other laws, regulations had to be promulgated before the Act could be
implemented. The Same-Sex Marriage Act of 2013 officially went into effect on March 13, 2014, and the
first new weddings took place soon after midnight on March 29.

The progress toward marriage equality in Scotland also had a surprisingly smooth passage. After an
extensive consultation, Scotland's marriage equality legislation was approved by overwhelming votes. On
February 4, 2014, after a debate of more than three hours in which a number of "wrecking" amendments
were decisively rejected, Scotland's Parliament voted in favor of the marriage equality bill by a margin of
105 to 18.

The Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Act came into force on December 16, 2014. On that date
couples in Scottish civil partnership could covert their partnerships into marriages. Because Scotland
enforces a 15-day notice for weddings, new same-sex marriages were first performed on December 31,
2014.

Much still needs to be done to achieve genuine equality for glbtq people in Great Britain. Nevertheless,
there has been a truly remarkable advance in the legal and social status of glbtq people in the United
Kingdom, which culminated in the arrival of marriage equality in England and Wales and Scotland in 2014.

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About the Author

Richard G. Mann is Professor of Art at San Francisco State University, where he regularly offers a two-
semester multicultural course in Queer Art History. His publications include El Greco and His Patrons and
Spanish Paintings of the Fifteenth through Nineteenth Centuries.

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