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This book demonstrates a fruitful cross-fertilisation of ideas between British queer history and art history. It engages with self-identified lesbians and with another highly important source for queer history: oral history. The book highlights the international dimension of what to date has been told as a classic British tale of homosexual law reform and also illuminates the choices made and constraints imposed at the national level. It embarks on a queer critical history, arguing for the centrality, in John Everett Millais's life-writing, of the strange-to-us category of unconventionality. The book aims to expose the queer implications of celebrity gossip writing. It offers a historical analysis of the link between homosexual men and gossip by examining the origins of the gossip column in the British tabloid press in the three decades after 1910. The book provides an overview of the emergence and consolidation of a number of new discourses of homosexuality as a social practice in postwar Britain. It explores a British variant on homophile internationalism before and immediately after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act by mapping Grey's cross-border connections while noting strain against transnational solidarity. The book focuses on evidence collected by the 1977 Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship to illustrate how gay men conceptualised the place of pornography in their lives and its role in the broader struggle for the freedom.
Odd Men Out is a social, cultural and political history of gay men living in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. It covers the period from the circumstances leading up to the appointment of the Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution in 1954 to the emergence of the British Gay Liberation Front in the early 1970s. It looks at contemporary public, political and legal attitudes towards male homosexuality and gay men. It also focuses on the emergence of gay identities, the opening up and limitations of social spaces and contacts, the operation of the law, and the legal reform process up to and beyond the partial decriminalisation of adult male homosexuality in 1967. The book draws on a wealth of source material from archives, newspapers, magazines, memoirs, diaries, oral histories, interviews, television broadcasts, radio programmes, films and plays. It also includes interviews with social and political commentators, writers, directors, actors and others about their recollections and experiences during the period.
internationalism realised by ICSE, the case of HLRS may help further to elucidate that culture’s possibilities and limitations. This chapter, then, explores a British variant on homophile internationalism before and immediately after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act by mapping Grey’s cross-border connections while noting strain against transnational solidarity. In charge of HLRS’s day-to-day operation during this period, Grey authored and received much of the correspondence on which this chapter is based, although his work more generally depended on HLRS’s Executive
2 Reporting change: law reform, homosexual identity and the role of counter-culture Revolt, my child, revolt is a quick axe cleaving dead wood in the forest, by night. The woodsman of the day is the executioner.1 Introduction When the Sexual Offences Act (SOA) of 1967 partially decriminalised homosexuality it also exposed the limits of reform. This chapter focuses on the choices made by homosexual men as new arenas of political and cultural activism instead. The Act was not a clear victory in the interests of homosexuals but was the product of pragmatic
that the Sexual Offences Act had happened: ‘I can honestly say that all through the ’60s I was totally unaware of anything to do with homosexual law reform. It might have been in certain newspapers, but I didn't read newspapers.’ 3 Trevor Thomas from South Wales was similarly ‘unaware of the political agitation, the campaign to change the [law]. It didn't seem to register much in my mind. I thought, oh well, it's legal now.’ 4 Law reformers such as Allan Horsfall
not an unalloyed good: it is part of Irish women's illiberal legal inheritance’. The fear around the female body, its legislation and regulation by patriarchal moral codes, are not easily consigned to the past. As Eilís Ward demonstrates in ‘Who is protecting whom and what? The Irish state and the death of women who sell sex: a historical and contemporary analysis’, the Irish state's passing of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act (2017) attempts to ‘disappear’ the embodied prostitute (without stopping the act of prostitution), thus ‘removing
until the 2003 Sexual Offences Act that the specific offences of ‘sexual activity with a child family member and inciting a child family member to engage in sexual activity’ were created. 16 As Judith V. Becker and Emily M. Coleman explain, ‘the social problem of incest has been clouded by many myths. Initially, it was believed that incest was limited to certain geographical areas (e.g. Appalachia) and to only lower socioeconomic families. Incest
the buying but not the selling of sex. 2 First taken up by the then Minister for Justice, Frances Fitzgerald, and homed in child protection law then pending, the SPB was adopted as part of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act enacted in 2017. As outlined in this volume's Introduction, Magdalen Laundries were manifestations of larger social attitudes, which viewed certain women as ‘morally suspect’: unmarried mothers, women who insisted on bodily autonomy, and sex workers. In this chapter, I wish
. Hartley’ under the supervision of John Bayley, who was the Thomas Warton Professor of English and married to Iris Murdoch. In a 2011 interview with Peter Terzian for the Paris Review, Hollinghurst speaks fondly, and even a little proudly, of his graduate work: It was quite a new subject then. The Sexual Offences Act had been passed in 1967 and changed what could be said about the private lives of gay people. ... A new freedom to talk about these things was very much part of the atmosphere of the seventies. I think, without wishing to blow my own trumpet, that my thesis
greatly disturbed law enforcers and social commentators. The supposed proliferation of private houses, flats and so-called ‘buggers’ clubs’ where homosexuality was allegedly practised in secret also added to a growing anxiety that ‘vice’ was on the rise and getting out of control. Such fears further influenced public perceptions of homosexuals as promiscuous, exhibitionist and anti-social. So did the fact that all homosexual acts were criminal offences. In 1956 the Conservative government passed the Sexual Offences Act, which consolidated previous