"The Sexual State": Sexuality and Scottish Governance, 1950-1980

In recent years historians and social scientists have engaged in extensive research on the role that medical, legal, and moral discourses have played in shaping the social politics of sexual health and the regulation of "dangerous sexualities" in post-1945 Britain. Some authorities have considered sexual governance within the broader story of changing sexual mores and associated moral panics.¹ Several have studied the ways that the raft of so-called permissive legislation of the 1960s redefined the relationship between the legal authority of the state and the moral domain of the private citizen.² Others have investigated the connection between sexual governance and the alleged breakdown in moral consensus in Britain between 1950 and 1980, evidenced by the subsequent, contentious politics of sexuality and citizenship in the Thatcher era.³ In addition, some researchers have focused upon specific areas of policy making such as abortion, censorship, contraception and family planning, homosexuality, sex education, and sexually transmitted diseases.⁴ Others, often within a Foucauldian framework of analysis, have examined the ways that sexual pathologies were reclassified and increasingly defined by the language of legal and medical regulation rather than that of moral hygiene and vigilance.⁵ The history of sexual-offense and sexual-health policy making has also attracted a more specifically feminist interpretation of events, according to which legislation encapsulated patriarchal ideologies of sexuality and sexual behavior.⁶

However, the bulk of this scholarship on sexual-offense and sexual-health policy in the period between 1950 and 1980 has centered primarily on the policy-making process in Westminster and Whitehall. Largely missing from it are regional and local studies of the interface between sexuality and the state. The absence of a devolved focus is particularly serious in the case of Scotland, given its separate traditions of law, local government, and medical practice, as well as, arguably, its distinctive civic and sexual culture. As a number of studies on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Scottish society suggest, the ideology of Scottish law officers and administrators, the content of local Burgh Police Acts and bylaws, the prejudices of local presbyteries and purity activists, and the whims of local magistrates and police commissioners were as effective as any national legislation in regulating sexual behavior and the spaces deemed harmful to sexual hygiene and racial health, whether they be ice cream parlors, cinemas, parks, or public conveniences.⁷ Such studies suggest that, in Scotland at least, the local state has played a critical role in shaping the nature of sexual governance.

This article seeks to furnish a regional perspective by exploring three central strands of sexual governance in Scotland from 1950 to 1980: female prostitution, male homosexuality, and sex education. In so doing, it will seek to discover just how innovative Scottish policy makers actually were. How far, for example, did the mindset of policy makers shift from a moral to a social scientific approach toward sexual issues and from a legal to a sociomedical approach when they defined sexual offenses? How much did policy makers actually acknowledge and empower a broader range of sexual behaviors and identities? To what degree, if any, did they moderate the traditional employment of surveillance and censure to target female sexuality?

Female Prostitution

Female prostitution and soliciting was a central issue exercising British policy makers in the years after 1950: one that was highlighted by the Wolfenden Committee of 1954–57. Yet a reader of the standard accounts of the debates culminating in the celebrated Street Offences Act of 1959, which greatly increased the penalties for public soliciting, would be unaware of the fact that the act did not apply to Scotland.⁸ Scottish statutes, bylaws, and "rescue" strategies that were in place prior to the Second World War simply continued as before until the 1980s.

Within Glasgow's city center in the 1950s, prostitution was well established. James Adair, former procurator-fiscal...