AIDS, Mass Observation, and the Fate of the Permissive Turn

The Mass Observtion Project (MO) was initiated in Great Britain in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet Charles Madge, and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings as an independent radical social research experiment. It aimed to garner accounts of the daily lives, thoughts, and feelings of "ordinary" people. A self-selecting panel of Mass Observers (MOers) were asked to comment on questions and themes set out in regular "directives" (as MO called them) on, for example, the abdication of Edward VIII, conditions in wartime, Christmas, food, homelessness, and much more. MO ran in this first phase until the early 1950s, leaving an archive now held at the Keep archive center (a collaboration between the University of Sussex and the East Sussex Council). It was relaunched in 1981, the year of the first known AIDS-related death in Britain. It has since been supported by the University of Sussex and funded additionally through a patchwork of grants and donations, including, in the period I am looking at here, a major award from the Nuffield Foundation (1986–90). As with the early cohort of MOers, the new 1980s group typically tacked back and forth, comparing the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to their present and what already felt to many like a new era. Several mentioned AIDS in passing in response to earlier directives, but it was not until May 1987 that the panel of 1,333 people were asked directly for their views. Of those asked, 637 responded (449 women and 188 men) with 1,386 largely handwritten pages in which they tried to make sense of the escalating crisis, in part by trying to track what had changed socially, culturally, and morally. The 1960s emerge repeatedly in these accounts as MOers mulled over what they saw as the consequences and fate of the putative permissive turn of that decade. In this piece I survey this extraordinary collection of responses to AIDS and explore the attachments to, refusals of, and moves beyond that mythologized sixties shift.

"More than a few of you have written in on this topic already," the directive of May 1987 began in MO's usual chatty tone. "May I ask you now to direct your attention to the campaign in the press, on television and through public meetings. If you have attended any of the latter it would be very useful if you would report on attendance, questions asked, comments heard afterwards etc. There are, in addition and inevitably, rumours and, no less inevitably 'jokes' which should be recorded. Have you noticed changes of any sort in your local circle which could be related to knowledge or fears about AIDS? Has your own behaviour been affected at all in any way?"¹ MOers responded more and less directly to these themes and questions and also expounded on others. They suggest the impact of escalating and sensational press coverage. They also reflect (and reflect on) the tenor of the public health campaigns of 1986 and 1987 and the direction of health policy on AIDS and HIV in the UK.² But what emerges especially powerfully, and what I focus on here, is the way these responses to the AIDS crisis expose an uneasy moral compromise on homosexuality—a compromise that was now further troubled. The 1967 Sexual Offences Act had partially decriminalized sex between men over twenty-one in private (a space newly and narrowly defined in the act). In this legislation and the surrounding debate, homosexuality was deemed loosely tolerable if it could be kept out of sight. Lord Arran famously asked homosexuals to show their gratitude by "comporting themselves quietly and with dignity."³ Arran, a strong proponent of the measure, was signaling as clearly as the act itself the limits of permissiveness and the conditions of acceptability. Many gay men and lesbians moved against such conditions and the wider social and cultural positioning of homosexuals vocally and visibly in the 1970s. In the Thatcherite 1980s, however, and in the context of AIDS, the stakes were higher. Of necessity because of the health crisis and as a result of a...