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KEN PLUMMER 6 The Lesbian and Gay Movement in Britain Schisms, Solidarities, and Social Worlds Social movements may be viewed as collective enterprises to establish new orders of life. Herbert Blumer, "Collective Behaviour" A SHORT history of lesbian and gay life in Britain in the post-World War II period can be depicted as six sedimented layers. Each emerges anew but leaves its continuing traces. The foundation layer-the 1950s and the 1960s-included some press scandals and notorious spy and court cases involving homosexuals such as Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Peter Wildeblood, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, and John Gielgud (Hyde 1970); a major government commission recommending (limited ) decriminalization of male homosexuality (Wolfenden Report 1957); a campaigning pressure group (the Homosexual Law Reform Society set up in 1958); a law to enact the proposed changes (the 1967 Sexual Offences Act); and a proliferation ofgay and a few lesbian bars (Gray 1992). The year 1970 marked the arrival of the next layer: the much more radical Gay Liberation Front (GLF). This increased gay visibility, as many people came out of their closets, and political debates moved from liberal and apologetic to radical and critical. But the GLF was short-lived. It was paralleled by the emergence of second-wave feminism, and by 1973 most of the lesbians had left the Gay Movement. A third layer thus appeared around this time: the growth of a lesbian feminist movement and, along with it, the quiet expansion ofa host of new gay and lesbian institutionsself -help groups like Friend and Switchboard, media forms like the Gay News, larger and more extravagant clubs like Heaven and Bang's, and campaigning organizations like the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE). It also marked the emergence of a more masculinist look among gay men-the clone zone-which coincided with a period generally sensed as marking a decline in the good fortune of the Movement (Palmer 1995: 34). A fourth layer was ushered in with AIDS circa 1983. Less concerned with gay politics per se, it heralded a proliferation of new and more 133 Copyrighted Material 134 LESBIAN AND GAY MOVEMENT: BRITAIN professional groupings, often with government backing-the Terrence Higgins Trust in the forefront. For a short while other matters of gay and lesbian life settled into the background. But in 1987 a fifth layer appeared: with the introduction of the Conservative government's internationally notorious Clause (later Section) 28 to outlaw the "promotion of homosexuality " in local government, a renewed activism returned. Seen by some as the British equivalent of Stonewall in a period commonly sensed to be a backlash, men and women started to work together, and briefly there was a very clear repoliticization of the movement (Annetts and Thompson 1992: chap. 18). A sixth sediment appeared in the late 1980s: the simultaneous queering of the younger gay and lesbian world along with a significant commercialization of the "scene." More or less corresponding to a new generation of gays and lesbians, this continues today. Significant widespread acceptance was symbolized in 1997 by out gay MPs (members of Parliament), an out gay cabinet minister, and an out Elton John singing at Princess Diana's funeral. Because this description of layers is clearly oversimplified, what follows is an attempt to highlight some of the critical developments in more detail. My aim is to chart the workings of a movement (hereafter Movement ) in Britain during this period. Centrally, I have two images to help me see this Movement, both drawn from a symbolic interactionist theory :1 social worlds and schisms.2 The Movement must be seen as a highly fluid, emergent series of overlapping social worlds3 that make competing claims for change and employ diverse dramatic strategies to accomplish their goals. These worlds have differing styles, agendas, political rationales , goals, and organizational forms. And they are characterized centrally by schism, change, fluidity, weak hierarchical structures, little formal organization, minimal resources, ambiguous frames, and claimsmaking activities.4 WOLFENDEN, THATCHERISM, AND THE WIDER CONTEXT OF THE MOVEMENT Lesbian and gay social movements ebb, flow, and mesh with the ongoing political, religious, economic, and cultural institutions. To trace the ongoing emergence of the Movement in Britain within the sociocultural history of modern Britain would take several books. Some have already started this task (Durham 1991; Jeffery-Poulter 1991) but two key themes need clarifying: the Wolfenden Report of 1957, which has proceeded throughout the second half of the twentieth century to redefine the relation between public and private moralities in the...

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