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G&S Typesetters PDF proof Chapter 21 From Wolfenden to Stonewall As in the United States, so too in western Europe, and with particular significance in England, the conventional wisdom about homosexuality , like the taboo on the public discussion of it, began to erode in the 1950s. That England, with its long—and recent—history of persecuting homosexuality and the near total absence of organized opposition to that persecution, should have emerged as the leader among European nations in advancing the rights of homosexuals is, to say the least, surprising. Ironically, it was the virulence of the official campaign of suppression that began to turn the tide. Like the press fascination with the Beats and the gay subculture in San Francisco, public interest in the British spy scandals of the early 1950s opened the door to press coverage of homosexuality. The publicity was, of course, negative, often sensational. The tabloids led the way with lurid expos és such as the Sunday Pictorial’s series “Evil Men” in 1952. Purportedly objective book-length studies such as They Stand Apart, published in 1955, were scarcely less alarmist, and even scholarly treatments of the subject— Society and the Homosexual (1952) by Gordon Westwood (pseudonym of Michael Schofield) and D. J. West’s Homosexuality (1955)—reiterated the prevailing view of homosexuality as a mental illness, although less dogmatically than their American counterparts. Nonetheless, even this kind of coverage was better than no coverage at all, if only because it prepared the ground for serious consideration of the legal persecution of homosexuals. The turning point was the Croft-Cooke and Montague-Wildeblood cases in late 1953 and early 1954. So outrageous were the actions of the police and the prosecution in the gathering of evidence, the hounding of defendants, and the use of selective prosecutions that opinion within the social and political establishment began to shift, not yet toward greater sympathy or understanding for homosexuality itself, but against some 314 | 21-V2660 6/19/03 6:51 AM Page 314 G&S Typesetters PDF proof aspects of the laws that punished it. Immediately after the convictions of Lord Montague, Michael Pitt-Rivers, and Peter Wildeblood in late March, one of the leading weekly newspapers, the Sunday Times, lashed out editorially at the government’s handling of the case and at its wider implications in undermining the rule of law and in eroding public confidence in the administration of justice. Other newspapers and magazines across the political spectrum followed suit, questioning the methods employed in enforcing the laws against homosexuality and, beyond that, the laws themselves, which seemed to encourage, indeed perhaps inevitably entailed, such methods. “The case for a reform of the law as to acts committed in private between adults is very strong,” the Sunday Times concluded. “The case for authoritative inquiry into it is overwhelming.” Other voices within the establishment were raised even before these sensational trials. In 1952 the Church of England Moral Welfare Council sponsored a study of homosexuality. Its report, released at a critical moment early in 1954, carefully distinguished between immoral conduct and criminal conduct and recommended reform of the law. Calls for similar changes, or at least for an official inquiry, were echoed by Britain’s leading penal reform society and by a number of members of Parliament. Increasingly on the defensive, the government, which had initially resisted demands even for a reexamination of the law, finally gave way and in mid-April created a departmental committee to inquire into the laws relating to homosexuality (and to prostitution, which, as so often before, was regarded as a parallel problem, at least in the official mind). The Home Secretary appointed Sir John Wolfenden, the vice-chancellor of a provincial university, to chair the committee. It was an odd choice since, as Wolfenden acknowledged, he knew little of either subject and also because his son Jeremy, then twenty years of age and a student at Oxford, was actively and, by the standards of the mid-1950s, openly homosexual. According to Jeremy, following the news of the appointment of the committee, his father wrote to him: “You will probably have seen from the newspapers that I am to chair a committee on Homosexual Offenses and Prostitution. I have only two requests to make of you at the moment. 1) That we stay out of each other’s way for the time being. 2) That you wear rather less make-up.” Sir John was equally forthright in assessing the prospects...

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