marksimpson.com

On the for­ti­eth anniver­sary of the reform that (par­tially) decrim­i­nalised male homo­sex­u­al­ity Mark Simp­son argues Wolfenden would have been hor­ri­fied by what hap­pened to het­eros 

(The Guardian, 30/7/07)

Some­times you can esti­mate the pop­u­lar­ity of a thing by its ille­gal­ity. Ille­gal drugs, for exam­ple are extremely pop­u­lar, even with Cab­i­net Min­is­ters. In the Mid­dle Ages when hunger was com­mon steal­ing bread was pun­ish­able by death (star­va­tion was rather more com­mon­place back then than CCTV or elec­tronic tags). And before July 1967 all forms of sex­ual con­tact between males whether in pri­vate or pub­lic were com­pletely illegal.

But con­trary to the cur­rent depic­tion of that time as one of total per­se­cu­tion and hor­ror of man-lurve, there may have been even more of it around than there is now. Some­thing which may be dif­fi­cult to believe pos­si­ble, espe­cially if you live in Brighton.

Joe Orton’s and Tom Driberg’s diaries offer a glimpse of a pre ’67 world where homo­sex­ual encoun­ters were as avail­able and con­ve­nient as pub­lic lava­to­ries used to be. Matt Houlbrook’s recent his­tory ‘Queer Lon­don’ shone a Bobby’s torch behind the pre-Wolfenden bushes illu­mi­nat­ing an illicit (homo)sexual econ­omy that involved queers, queans and rather a lot of sailors, sol­diers, young work­ing­men — and sailors again — most of whom who were not them­selves queer.

Just a few years ago it emerged that the Navy hastily aban­doned a witch-hunt into sodomy in its ranks in the 1960s when it became appar­ent that ‘at least 50% have sinned homo­sex­u­ally.’ When ‘Dr Sex’ alias Alfred Kin­sey vis­ited the UK in the ‘repressed’ 1950s he found that one in five men admit­ted an adult same-sex expe­ri­ence — only a slightly lower fig­ure than those admit­ting vis­it­ing a female prostitute.

Male homo­sex­u­al­ity and female pros­ti­tu­tion may seem odd bed­fel­lows today, but it wasn’t always so: they were once the main­stays of recre­ational sex. Iron­i­cally, the word ‘gay’, today’s pre­ferred care­free term for ‘homo­sex­ual’, was in the Eng­land of Oscar Wilde a euphemism for ‘whore’. The Wolfenden Com­mit­tee set up to inves­ti­gate pos­si­ble reform of the impres­sive array of laws against male-on-male sex after the Mon­tagu Scan­dal of 1953 was also an enquiry into pros­ti­tu­tion (and actu­ally stiff­ened the laws against it). Wolfenden was effec­tively an enquiry into bet­ter ways of reg­u­lat­ing the ‘prob­lem’ of sex out­side marriage.

And in pre-Pill, pre-Beatles, pre-feminist, pre-alcopop Eng­land where good girls didn’t put out, the prob­lem with homo­sex was that it was free sex. Quentin Crisp and the Dilly queans excepted, queers gen­er­ally didn’t expect to be paid, nor, back then, given a white wed­ding. What’s more, in the 1950s they were likely the only enthu­si­as­tic play­ers of the hairy oboe in town. No won­der they were so pop­u­lar at clos­ing time.

Wolfenden didn’t dis­pute the ‘immoral­ity’ of homo­sex but argued that the Law should not crim­i­nalise ‘con­gen­i­tal inverts’ — homo­sex­u­als who couldn’t help their homo­sex­u­al­ity — so long as they con­ducted them­selves with domes­ti­cated dis­cre­tion. Instead the Law should focus its atten­tions more use­fully on the ‘real per­verts’ — the ‘oth­er­wise nor­mal men’ who took part in the semi-public homo demi-monde for cheap thrills and no-apron-strings sex.

This phi­los­o­phy was etched into law. When decrim­i­nal­i­sa­tion came in 1967, the ‘over 21′ stip­u­la­tion, the exemp­tion of the Armed Forces, the hygienic insis­tence on ‘in pri­vate’ — not in a locked pub­lic toi­let cubi­cle, not in a park at night, not in a hotel or board­ing room, not in a prison cell, not in your own house if some­one else was present (even if down­stairs watch­ing Songs of Praise) saw to it that most of the non gay men involved in gay sex would remain out­laws (includ­ing ‘at least half’ of the randy Royal Navy). Gay sex seems to have been con­sid­ered such an irre­sistible, inflam­ma­tory temp­ta­tion that it still had to be gen­er­ally proscribed.

Even the Mon­tagu scan­dal that orig­i­nally sparked the reform would still have been a scan­dal after 1967 as it involved Air­men and was not in pri­vate. Cot­tag­ing con­vic­tions also dou­bled in the decade after ‘decrim­i­nal­i­sa­tion’. In a sense, the Wolfenden reforms decrim­i­nalised being homo­sex­ual but not homosexuality.

Forty years on these pro­scrip­tions have been dropped and the law has lost inter­est in try­ing to quar­an­tine homo­sex­u­al­ity. But then, appar­ently, so have straight men lost inter­est in hav­ing sex with other men. Hardly sur­pris­ing though, since today even receiv­ing a drunken blow job from another male means you have to move to Soho and have your own float at Pride.

Nev­er­the­less, ‘gay sex’ is now clearly even more pop­u­lar with non-gays than it was in the illicit 1950s. In a devel­op­ment that would have hor­ri­fied Wolfenden, women have entered the pub­lic houses and, with gusto, the sex­ual fray. Sex out­side mar­riage and Biblically-sanctified ori­fices has become almost com­pul­sory. Men can now have ‘gay’ — no baby, no strings, no fee, no gag-reflex — sex with women. Often in club toilets.

In this met­ro­sex­ual world of straight gay­ness, dog­ging has replaced cot­tag­ing, swing­ing par­ties and ‘roast­ings’ have replaced a quiet night in the Dog and Duck, and fash­ion­able female bisex­u­al­ity has replaced syn­chro­nised swimming.

The ‘real per­verts’ of the 1950s, far from being beaten down, have taken over.

Copy­right Mark Simp­son 2007

This essay is col­lected in ‘Met­ro­sexy: A 21st Cen­tury Self-Love Story’