As we celebrate this
year’s LGBT History month, we should commemorate an important milestone in the
struggle for gay rights. 2014 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the setting up
of the Wolfenden Committee—or, to give it its full title, the Departmental Committee
on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, chaired by Sir John Wolfenden, Vice
Chancellor of Reading University. In 1954, Winston Churchill’s Conservative
government was worried about homosexuality for numerous reasons. These included
a recent spike in prosecutions for homosexual offences thanks to more vigorous
policing; greater public awareness of homosexuality spread by the popular
press; increased medical, scientific and religious questioning of sexual
deviance over the previous decades; public order concerns about the state of
London’s streets, and the prevalence of cruising and prostitution, especially
around the time of the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953; ripples from the
Cold War, equating homosexuality with espionage and treason in the wake of
McCarthyism in America and the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to
the Soviet Union in 1951; and the high profile trial and imprisonment in 1954
of three prominent men—landowners Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and Michael
Pitt-Rivers and the Daily Mail journalist
Peter Wildeblood—for having sex with men in private.
The Wolfenden Committee, which consisted of fifteen
Establishment figures—twelve men and three women—heard evidence over the next
three years. The testimonials and written statements of witnesses before the
committee, all of which can be consulted at the National Archives at Kew, provide
by far the most complete and extensive array of perspectives we have on how
homosexuality was understood in Britain in the middle decades of the twentieth
century. Those giving evidence, individually or through their professional
associations, included: police chiefs, policemen, magistrates, judges, lawyers
and Home Office civil servants; doctors, psychiatrists, psychotherapists and biologists
(including Alfred Kinsey, the author of the famous Kinsey Reports into male and
female sexuality in the US); prison governors, medical officers and probation
officers; representatives of the churches, morality councils and progressive
and ethical societies; schoolteachers and youth organization leaders;
representatives of the army, navy and air force; and three self-confessed homosexuals
(two of them anonymous): Peter Wildeblood, Patrick Trevor-Roper (a
distinguished eye surgeon) and Carl Winter (Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum
at Cambridge).
The range of opinions varied between those (mainly in the
law enforcement community) who favoured continued criminalization of gay sex,
and those (mainly in medical, religious and ethical ranks) who tended to
believe that homosexuality was a medical, not a legal, problem, that it was
either innate (as sexologists like Havelock Ellis would have it) or acquired at
some stage during childhood development (the Freudian perspective). In addition
to these pronouncements, there is much fascinating information in the Wolfenden
archive about the multifarious attempts at discovering aetiologies and
prescribing treatments, and about the policing of public sex and of cottaging—even
a set of instructions on how to conduct physical examinations for sodomy in the
Royal Navy. There are also many case studies of homosexuals and how they lived
their lives. The focus is on men since the law was silent on sex between women,
but occasionally some of these expert commentators shared their thoughts on
lesbians as well.
The Wolfenden Report came out in 1957. It
recommended that homosexual sex between two males over the age of 21 in private
be decriminalized, drawing a very firm public/private distinction, and that (female)
street prostitution be more strictly regulated. The latter was acted upon
swiftly, but it took another decade before the gay sex suggestions were
enacted, in the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. Regardless, Wolfenden has long
been recognized as a landmark in moves towards gay law reform. But scholarly
opinion has been divided. Some see the report as merely opening up a limited
space for respectable, domesticated, straight-acting homosexuals, clamping down
upon public expressions of homosexuality and a diverse array of queer acts and
identities. Others see it, in spite of its limitations, as helping enable the radical politics of the Gay
Liberation Front and the flourishing of a vibrant gay commercial culture in the
1970s. So the debate surrounding Wolfenden is still intense. But, whatever
one’s perspective, its significance for British Queer History is beyond doubt.
Brian Lewis
Professor of History
McGill University
Montreal
Canada
