![]() ![]() The age of consent for gay men was 21, which meant the law was being broken on a regular basis. There was a lot to be angry about in the mid-80s. In today's Guardian, our esteemed pal and "gay rights spokesman", Polari host Paul Burston takes up the baton - from the perspective of someone who, like me, came out in the mid-80s when things were still far from "reformed": In fact, it seems to have reflected a general prejudice that homosexuals were even more simple-minded than girls.It took ten years before the findings of the Wolfenden Report were finally passed into law with the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. The weedy reasoning behind this was that young men left the control of their parents for university or national service. The age of consent should, in the committee's view, be set at 21 (it was 16 for heterosexuals). Setting the tone for the discussion about law reform that would follow, it made no attempt to argue that homosexuality wasn't immoral, only that the law was impractical. The Wolfenden Committee sat for three years and recommended that homosexual acts between consenting adults in private should no longer be illegal. (Certainly, its remit covered both its findings were popularly referred to as The Vice Report.) That would make sense of the choice of chairman, although it is also possible that, given the secretive atmosphere of the time, Maxwell-Fyfe didn't know Wolfenden had a son who wore make-up. Allan Horsfall believes homosexuality was tacked on very late in the day to the business of a committee that had already been set up to look into the legal status of prostitution. Antony Grey told me that when Wolfenden accepted the job, he wrote to Jeremy saying "it would be better if he weren't seen around him too often in lipstick and make-up". Perhaps he assumed Wolfenden would find against, in which case, he chose a curious chairman, because Wolfenden had a gay son, Jeremy. Perhaps he thought, by handing over to a committee, to shelve the issue. Their trial in 1954 probably played into the decision of the Home Secretary, David Maxwell-Fyfe, to establish the Wolfenden Committee to consider whether a change in the law was necessary.Īs Lord Kilmuir, Maxwell-Fyfe led the opposition to law reform in the Lords, so it was ironic that he started the process. ![]() ![]() Two of his friends, Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood, got 18 months. Edward Montagu, later Lord Beaulieu, contacted the police over a stolen camera and ended up in prison for a year for gross indecency. And then there was another high-profile case in which the police were called on one matter and ended up prosecuting another. MPs on both sides of the House began to demand action. I sent for the vicar and told him to come to me if they approached him again." I sent for one of the criminals and told him if I had another cheque from this man, I'd get him sent down for 10 years. He investigated and found he was "a poor vicar. Leo Abse, who eventually piloted the Sexual Law Reform Act through Parliament, recalls that, as a lawyer in Cardiff, his fees from criminals suddenly all started coming from the account of one man. In the mid-1950s, there was an atmosphere of a witch-hunt (probably not unrelated to what was happening in America with McCarthy), with consequent opportunities for blackmail. As we are all too well aware, "celebration" is perhaps not necessarily the right way to approach the subject, given the fact that there were many decades of strife to follow that one momentous Act of Parliament, and the fact that this ground-breaking piece of legislation had such a long and drawn-out birth that began a decade earlier.įrom a Guardian article by Geraldine Bedell in 2007: Of course, it's all because of a small matter that happened fifty years ago - the (partial) decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales. ![]()
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