Wolfenden50: Sex/Life/Politics in the British World 1945–1969 (review)

Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Wolfenden Report, ‘Wolfenden50’ was organized by the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne and the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at King’s College, London, to consider the report’s international impact and subsequent debates. The conference attracted scholars, archivists, independent authors and postgraduates from across the ‘British World’ to discuss the church, the press, domesticity, the law, medicine and changing identity positions. In this report I will draw together some of the papers presented so as to illustrate the overall concerns of scholars of gay and lesbian history and the directions their work suggests for future study.

The government-appointedWolfenden Committee was formed in 1954 to address the ‘problems’ of homosexuality and prostitution in Britain. Between 1954 and 1957 the committee, chaired by Sir (later Lord) John Wolfenden, heard testimony from medical and legal professionals, religious and voluntary groups, homosexuals and other experts and interested parties. In the final report, issued in 1957, the committee sought to reconcile liberal beliefs, which valued individual liberties, the sanctity of private space and the desire to limit government interference in one’s life, with concerns over public morality, sexual ‘deviance’ and ultimately popular and electoral support. It advocated the decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting men in private over the age of twenty-one, a position enacted into law ten years later by the Sexual Offences Act of 1967.

Wolfenden50 covered a critical period in the mid twentieth century when the state, church, media, and homosexuals themselves were all contributing to discussion about the place of the homosexual in society and the state of the law. Among its highlights were opening remarks by Jeffrey Weeks (London South Bank University), which framed many of the debates and questions for the remainder of the conference. Weeks identified three ‘fateful moments’, or paradigmatic shifts which disrupted understandings of sexuality in this period. The ‘Wolfenden Moment’ offered a new moral and legal framework to understand homosexuality, and saw the legal identification of the homosexual. The ‘Moment of Identity’ came next, a period from the late 1960s characterized by grassroots activism, feminism and the interrogation of sexual identities and their construction. Finally, the ‘Moment of Citizenship’ has seen the normalizing and routinizing of homosexuality, as well as the modernization of the law, including equal protection, human rights and marriage legislation. This model so influenced the remainder of the talks that most scholars either situated their own work within one of these ‘moments’ or described how their work could complicate Weeks’s model.

Most emblematic of the tensions and competing interests of the Wolfenden Moment was the Wolfenden Committee itself. The committee comprised a variety of legal, medical, political and religious ‘experts’. But this meant that committee members brought different priorities, specializations and backgrounds to deliberations, often encouraging vastly different responses to testimony and divergent conclusions. Judith Allen (Indiana University) found these ‘Wolfenden Wars’ particularly striking in her research into the testimony to the committee of American sexologist Alfred Kinsey. In the end committee members offered eleven pages of reservations on the final report, and this for Allen indicated the need to re-evaluate the Wolfenden Moment and the characterization of the report itself as a great liberal-progressivist document.

Of course, interest in reform didn’t begin with the government-appointed Wolfenden Committee, as Lesley Hall (Wellcome Institute, London) pointed out. Organizations like the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology (est. 1914) and the World League for Sexual Reform (est. 1928) had long sought more dialogue on sexual matters to educate and encourage society in a reformist direction. Through the first half of the century relatively moderate groups were encouraging the dissemination of ideas that would influence the generation later to produce the Wolfenden Committee. The Church too was already publicly discussing the ‘Problem of Homosexuality’ in a 1954 pamphlet, and calling for a greater toleration of private acts. While this apparently liberal position startled many, Matthew Grimley (Royal Holloway) noted that for...