A Gay History of Great Britain

Paul Knobel

A gay history of Great Britain

Sydney: Burke and Wills

Copyright Paul Knobel 2020

This work form part of the author’s A gay history of the world. No person named is to be considered homosexual or gay unless specifically stated to be.

Great Britain

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as the country’s official title is, is frequently held up, especially in the Anglo world, as an example of democracy and fairness in law making. But as far as male homosexuality goes this is not the case.

Male homosexual acts are legal in Great Britain and have been since 1967 when the legal age of sexual consent was set at 21 for homosexuals (against 16 for heterosexuals). However, from being one of the most homophobic nations on earth, where for hundreds of years gays were legally murdered by the state until the death penalty for homosex was abolished in 1861, Great Britain is now one of the most gay affirmative nations. Prime Minister David Cameron even threatened to suspend aid to African countries which do not support gay rights. The legal age of sexual consent in Great Britain is currently 16. Britain has anti-discrimination laws protecting gays and in 2014 same-sex marriage became legal.

The history and influence of British antigay laws

British law criminalizing male homosexual sex spread to all countries colonized by Britain, over 50 countries in the world. The British empire was the largest empire ever and at its height covered one quarter of the earth’s surface. It has therefore been highly influential. Laws did not only cover gay sex but operated (and still do in many countries) in other areas, such as censorship.

The history of gay persecution in Britain is complex and it should never be forgotten that before 1967 when the law changed homosexuals were detested in Great Britain as in other Anglo countries. Sadistic behavior towards gay and bi men also comes from a country where Christianity, supposedly based on love of neighbor and kindness, has been the main religion for over 1600 years.

Male homosex acts were crimes under Christian church law from the 4th century AD. King Henry the eighth transferred Church law into the civil realm and made anal sex a civil crime in the Buggery Act of 1533. The main word used for anal sex from this time until the late 20th century was sodomy from the Latin word sodomia and after the Old Testament trope of Sodom and Gomorrah. The word sodomite loosely equates to the modern wordhomosexual and now gay and queer. Sodomy is first dated in English in the Oxford English Dictionary (1989) from 1300 appearing definitively in print from about 1380. Buggery (also spelt buggerie), from a French word referring to Bulgarians but also to a heresy in the south of France, was also used, though to a much lesser extent. It was illegal to have sex with girls below the age of 12. This legal age of sexual consent of 12 went back to 1275 and King Edward the second and canon law (the law of the Catholic church which provided the basis of law in the area of morality). Ultimately it went back to ancient Roman law and accorded with puberty occurring around this time (people also died at much younger ages than today). Sodomy obsessions in church law and the law promulgated by Henry the eighth raise the issue: why were the makers of such laws so obsessed with anal sex? The death sentence applied for sodomy until 1861 when the penalty for anal sex was reduced from 10 years to life. Seizure of property also applied in some periods. Even as late as the 19th century lifetime imprisonment applied.

In 1875 when amendments were made to the Offences against the Person Act of 1861 the legal age of sexual consent for heterosexuals was raised from 12 to 13 for girls due to agitation by women against girls being forced into prostitution. In 1885 it was raised to 16, the present legal age of sexual consent which now applies for both heterosexual and homosexual sex: below this age even consenting sex is statutory rape or sexual abuse.

In 1954 after several sensational gay legal cases an enquiry into homosexuality by Lord Wolfenden, Vice Chancellor of Reading University, was initiated (in the US the sexologist Alfred C. Kinsey’s reports into male and female sexuality, the first detailed analysis in any country of sexual practices, were published at this time in 1948 and 1953). The report was released in 1957 and is known as The Wolfenden Report. However it took a further 10 years to legalize gay sex which became legal in 1967 as noted above (180 years after it had been legalized in neighboring France and nearly 100 years after it had become legal in Italy).

The new law made homosexual sex legal for consenting adults in private with a legal age of sexual consent being set at 21 (sex in any public place, even if not visible to any other party, was still illegal). However the initial legalization did not apply in Scotland or the province of Northern Ireland but only in the states of England and Wales. Decriminalization did not occur in Scotland until 1980. The legal age of sexual consent was lowered to 18 in 1994 and in 2001 the legal age of sexual consent was lowered to 16 in England, Wales and Scotland, the same age as for heterosexuals: so only in 2001 was the legal age of sexual consent for homosexuals and heterosexuals equalized. Only in 2009 was the legal age of sexual consent in Northern Ireland lowered from 17 to 16.

Until 1861, as noted above, the death penalty could be applied for males convicted of anal sex (after this it was reduced to 10 years to life); in this year the provision of indecent assault was also introduced into British law. In 1885 the Labouchère Amendment, passed in parliament late at night and, named after the man who had introduced it, Henry Labouchère, introduced the offence of gross indecency with another male person which basically related to sexual acts which did not involve anal sex. The maximum penalty was 2 years with or without had labor. Also criminalized were the actions of any person who procures or attempts to procure… any act of gross indecency. Until 1885 that is, basically only gay anal sex (sodomy, buggery) was illegal. Under the 1885 statutes the Labouchère Amendment led to a great gay tragedy, the trial, conviction and jailing of one of Britain’s most famous gay authors and most famous gay personality: the Irish born playwright and writer Oscar Wilde. He was sentenced to 2 years hard labour, the maximum penalty and financially ruined: an auction of the contents of his house was held in the street outside it. The trial was to have repercussions in the Anglo world and beyond. But the law was further tightened: in 1898 cruising in streets, parks and public toilets was criminalized under the Vagrancy Act as the offence of opportuning and in 1912 homosex was further extended into law under the Criminal Law Amendment Act.

OTHER ANTI GAY LAWS Other laws have been used to harass gays. Especially important are British censorship laws. A licence was needed for plays to be performed in the Elizabethan period. This licensing requirement probably explains why gay references in Shakespeare are included only in coded ways (eg women who dress as men) as distinct from the more open Greek and Roman theater where homosexuals were portrayed and referred to openly. From 1737 the Licensing Act applied to plays. It was only abolished by the Theatres Act in 1968 from which time more sexual works could be performed on the stage. However even so prosecutions continued: one famous one involved a man being anally raped in Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain (1980) which was unsuccessfully prosecuted by morals crusader Mary Whitehouse (she went on to another gay prosecution where Britain’s then most prominent gay magazine Gay News was ruined).

Censorship of sorts existed in Christianity where homosex was the sin not to spoken about between Christians. Book censorship existed from 1727. For instance the novel Fanny Hill (1748), where the main character Fanny participates in an orgy involving 3 women and 4 men and sees two men having anal sex through a keyhole, was banned. Such censorship also eventually involved visual images eg photographs. In 1897 the first printing in Britain of the first modern book dealing with homosex, Sexual Inversion, was banned. Censorship in books lessened following the unsuccessful prosecution of the British author D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960. Published in 1928 in Italy it had never been published in the author’s own country due to its descriptions of physical sex and use of four letter words such as fuck and fucking which appeared over 30 times. In the 20th century censorship applied also to film, radio and television (only in 1971 did a gay kiss appear in a film Sunday, Bloody Sunday and then a fumbling one). The word homosexuality was not allowed to be used on the BBC, Britain’s public radio and television service, until the last half of the century. Strict libel laws meant that calling someone gay would have had serious legal consequences (this has recently lessened under common law: for example following a common law decision by Justice Virginia Bell, now of the Australian High Court, ruling that calling someone gay was not libellous). It is safe to say that before the 1960s any work even referring to homosexuality faced issues of censorship. Censorship today operates in respect of the internet and gay men have even gone to jail for watching porn (erotica) involving children on the internet.

Even as late as Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, laws were introduced specifically targeting gays. Section 28 introduced by her in 1988 made it illegal for any public authority and school to promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality (for instance any children’s novel with gay characters such as the 1989 Heather Has Two Mommies). Section 28 was repealed in Scotland in 2000 and the rest of Britain in 2003. Knowledge of erotica was limited: what comes up on the internet today when the words: gay orgy: for instance, are searched was unimaginable before 2000. However at the same time sex between 12 and 16 is illegal in Britain (which it was not until 1875 for heterosexuals). As far as gays go, this is possibly the greatest age of persecution so far in Britain (and in other countries) since so many pederasts (wrongly called pedophiles) have gone to jail for consenting sex. (Pedophile is a word that has come to mean those who engage in sexual consent below the legal age of sexual consent, though sex with prepubescents is its generally accepted meaning amongst scholars: see the extensive discussion in the Wikipedia entry (with bibliography). The word pederasty is an older word dating from ancient Greek which means sex with post pubescent teenagers.)

The result of all this is that for most of the history of Great Britain ftom the 5th century gays were denied our history through censorship and penalized for having what is basic to the human condition: consenting sex with another person.

International aspects of British law

British law was transferred to all British colonies on colonization under British common law (eg the United States, Canada, India, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and many other countries such as Uganda and Kenya) and thus has been internationalized. In some countries such as Australia British law overerruled customary tribal law which dated back up to tens of thousands of years. In India after the final British takeover of the country in 1859, British laws were introduced in 1860—overruling native Indian laws— when the Indian Penal Code was introduced by Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay. Today over 40 of the 54 countries of the British Commonwealth have laws prohibiting gay sex as a result of the introduction of British law.

In 1951 Great Britain signed the European Convention on Human Rights, which descends from the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 formulated after the horrors of World War Two which cost 50 million lives. In 1966 the right to petition the European Court of Human Rights was allowed. Since 1966 over 271 cases have been held relating to laws in Britain which are in conflict with the treaty (British parliamentarians had been creating laws without fully referencing them to the Convention). This includes the Dudgeon Case which resulted in the decriminalization of gay sex in the province of Northern Ireland when Jeffrey Dudgeon appealed to the European Court of Human Rights. When he won his case in 1982, the law in Northern Ireland was brought into alignment with that in Scotland where the then legal age of sexual consent was 18 (the part of Britain with the lowest age; it was till 21 in England and Wales at the time). In 1998 the Convention was formally incorporated into British law under the Human Rights Act.

International aspects of law are nothing new. In the middle ages the Roman Catholic church’s laws were international: Canon Law (the name for the Christian church’s legal code) applied in all the lands where Roman Catholic Christianity prevailed, that is basically western Europe, though there were also the laws of local synods (church parliaments). The full ramifications of United Nations treaties such as the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights in relation to civil laws in the countries signing them remain to be worked out. However it is a simple axiom of law that if two parties sign a contract it is binding on them.

Special note. The official title of Great Britain is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. However the country is frequently referred to as Great Britain (the term used here) or the United Kingdom. Though it is common in France and Germany as well as the Anglo world to use the word England for the country this is incorrect, since England is only one state of Great Britain. Use of England for Great Britain, that is, privileges English culture, excluding Scottish, Welsh and Irish cultures which are all part of British culture. In some cases in the text below England, Scotland or Wales are used to refer to these states of Great Britain, especially before the Act of Union of 1707 when Scotland was joined to England and Wales. (Wales was conquered in 1284 but not formally joined to England until 1536 when English law replaced Welsh laws.) Ireland was largely conquered by the 16th century.

Facts

Great Britain consists of two large and over 1,000 small islands to the west of the European mainland (called in Britain the continent). On the largest island are the states of England, Scotland and Wales and on the northern third of the island of Ireland is the province of Northern Ireland. The Atlantic Ocean lies to the west beyond the island of Ireland (on the other side is Canada and the United States now easily reachable by plane). On the east across the North Sea are, from north to south, Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium and France. France is only 48 kilometers (30 miles) away at the closest point, the town of Dover, and is now connected to Britain by a railway line through the Eurotunnel. To the southeast lies Spain and Portugal. In size Great Britain is 230,977 square kilometers (89,181 square miles) and the population was 63,200,000 in 2011. The capital, London, had a population of 8,174,000 in 2011 and is noted for its cosmopolitanism. English, in the Indo-European language family, is the national language, with the Celtic languages of Welsh, Irish, Scots and Scots Gaelic also being spoken (there are small numbers of Cornish and other indigenous languages). The 2011 census found that over 100 languages were spoken in London with 49 languages having more than 15,000 users. Polish, spoken by workers allowed to work in Great Britain under European Union rules, is now the second most spoken language in England at 546,000 speakers (in contrast there are 562,000 Welsh speakers in Wales). In 2012 a survey found that in Britain’s second largest city Manchester 153 languages were spoken.

By the beginning of the 21st century the 2001 census showed the population of Great Britain was 92.1% white with 4% being South Asian, 2.5% Blacks and lesser percentages other ethnic groups. There were 1,053,000 Indians from India, 977,000 Pakistanis and over 1 million blacks from both the Caribbean and Africa and there were 247,000 Chinese. Christianity was the largest religion with 26 million declaring themselves Church of England (Anglicans), a form of Protestant Christianity (62% of the population in the 2001 census); however less than 1 million attend church. There were 5 million Roman Catholics (13.5%), the second largest Christian denomination while lesser numbers are members of Protestant churches, including Presbyterians (6%) and Methodists (3.4%), the next largest Christian groups after Roman Catholicism. There were 1,500,000 Muslims and 1 million each of Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs. Great Britain is a monarchy which is a parliamentary democracy. There are two houses of parliament, the House of Commons which is elected and the House of Lords where some 760 people are eligible to sit in the house, the majority life peers (formerly it consisted only of hereditary peers who had inherited ancient titles). The Economist magazine in 2012 estimated that the average family income in 2013 was 22,000 British pounds, $US 34,170 (many people following the 2008 world economic crisis have only part time jobs). Per person nominal GDP in 2013 as measured by the World Bank was $US 39,567 making Britain the 23rd listed nation in descending order of income.

History

Archaeology shows that Great Britain has been inhabited by humanoids for over 700,000 years (flint tools in Happisburgh in Norfolk found in 2010 are dated to this time). Celtic peoples were the inhabitants of the country when it was invaded by the Latin speaking Romans in 43 AD led by the gay Julius Caesar (Wales was conquered but not Scotland). Ireland came under Roman influence but was also not conquered. With the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, the country was invaded by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, Germanic peoples from the western coast of the continent of Europe. Later the Vikings from Scandinavia (from Denmark, Norway and Sweden) made raids on the country from the 8th to the 11th century and controlled large parts of the country. From the early Christian centuries Celtic forms of Christianity existed in the west in Wales and Ireland and in the north in Scotland. After a decline Christianity was reintroduced to England in 597 by St Augustine of Canterbury. The Norman French invaded in 1066 and for 400 years French was the language spoken by the upper classes. Since 1066 Britain has not been invaded again. Local churches (parish churches) were a focus of British life from before 1066.

RELIGION: A MAJOR FACTOR IN BRITISH LIFE The Christian religion in one form or another and especially from the Renaissance on has been a crucial focus of British life for 2000 years. The Renaissance brought humanism to Britain and a new form of Christianity when Henry the eighth broke with the Catholic church and founded the Church of England with himself as its head (unusually, the British monarch is still the official head of the church). Henry also nationalized the church’s lands and in particular its monasteries which had huge land holdings after nearly a thousand years of existence; these lands were either sold or given to his supporters, many of whom became the British aristocracy. All the Catholic churches and cathedrals (the churches of the bishops) were seized.

The Church of England was part of the reform of Catholicism called Protestantism (after protest). Reading the Bible and sermons (crucial to Protestant beliefs) became a focus of Protestantism. After