Homosexual Law Reform Research Articles

Counselling for connection: making queer relationships during Britain’s sexual revolution

This article examines the creation and mobilisation of counselling services by British LGBTQ+ activist organisations during the 1960s and 1970s, focusing especially on Britain’s first ‘homophile’ organisation, the Albany Trust,...

Māori Issues

Māori Issues Margaret Mutu (bio) When the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (covid-19) pandemic reached New Zealand, Māori moved quickly to avoid the loss of life we had experienced with previous introduced diseases, especially the 1918 Spanish flu. We assumed from the outset that we would be marginalized and that we would have to rely on our wits and our own resources. Our oral traditions about the Spanish flu informed us of what lay ahead. We wasted no time in taking all the necessary steps to keep the disease out of our communities. The rest of the country also took precautions, although not as stringent as ours, and to date, like many other Pacific nations, we have been spared the huge loss of life suffered in other countries. We joined in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter protests, urging New Zealand yet again to examine and remedy its own racism, especially in government departments. We hit a low point this year when the police ran a trial of armed response teams. A property tycoon suing a Māori filmmaker presented an opportunity for the High Court to address racism. A decision from the Court of Appeal took us by surprise with its strong support for Māori tikanga (law), and the Waitangi Tribunal continued to berate the Crown for refusing to comply with its obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The government has still not returned the sacred sites confiscated from the hapū (grouping of extended families) at Ihumātao to its rightful owners, but it has said that teaching New Zealand history in schools will be compulsory from 2022. We did have some bright spots, including sporting achievements and winning an Oscar. However, before we consider each of these, I need to acknowledge some of those we have lost. Among the many leaders we lost was Pita Paraone of Ngāti Hine in the North. He passed away on 26 August. He was a senior public servant working in the Ministry of Māori Affairs and was well-known in Auckland and Northland Māori communities. He served for twenty-two years on the Waitangi National Trust, including eight as the chairperson, organizing events for Waitangi Day. He was a member of Parliament for the New Zealand First party from 2002 until 2017. The day after Pita’s passing, we received news that we had lost Tahu Pōtiki of the South Island iwi (nation), Ngāi Tahu. Tahu championed the revitalization of Ngāi Tahu’s dialect and the preservation of Ngāi Tahu whakapapa (genealogies) and history. He was well-known as an orator and was the chief executive of Ngāi Tahu’s representative body, Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, for several years. Among the many positions he held, he was a director of Ngāi Tahu Tourism, of the Ngāi Tahu Fund, and of the Māori Television Service (Stevens 2020). In September, it was the shearing legend Koropiko Mullins of Te Arawa. For many years he ran the well-known shearing business Paewai Mullins with his wife, the Māori business leader Mavis (Paewai) Mullins of Rangitāne, Te Atihaunui-a-Paparangi, and Ngāti Ranginui. As a shearing commentator, Koro was considered the voice of shearing for his presentations of the Golden Shears, the world’s premier shearing and wool-handling champion ship(rnz 2019a). In October, Lee Smith of Ngāti [End Page 206] Kahungunu left us. He was a fierce advocate for gay rights and a stalwart of the Māori language. He helped establish the Māori Language Society in 1969 and in 1972 led a contingent of Māori rights activists to present a thirty-thousand-signature petition calling for Māori language to be taught in schools. His efforts, and that of the Māori Language Society, led to the establishment of Māori Language Day, which later extended to Māori Language Week in 1975. Lee also fought for Homosexual Law Reform in 1986 (rnz 2019b). In November, it was Nancy Brunning of Ngāti Raukawa and Ngāi Tūhoe, the well-known actor and writer. She leaves a lasting legacy of...

Jeffrey Dudgeon, H. Montgomery Hyde: Ulster Unionist MP, Gay Law Reform Campaigner and Prodigious Author

Jeffrey Dudgeon, H. Montgomery Hyde: Ulster Unionist MP, Gay Law Reform Campaigner and Prodigious Author

Cold War Pavlov: Homosexual aversion therapy in the 1960s

Homosexual aversion therapy enjoyed two brief but intense periods of clinical experimentation: between 1950 and 1962 in Czechoslovakia, and between 1962 and 1975 in the British Commonwealth. The specific context of its emergence was the geopolitical polarization of the Cold War and a parallel polarization within psychological medicine between Pavlovian and Freudian paradigms. In 1949, the Pavlovian paradigm became the guiding doctrine in the Communist bloc, characterized by a psychophysiological or materialist understanding of mental illness. It was taken up by therapists in Western countries who were critical of psychoanalysis and sought more ‘scientific’ diagnostic and therapeutic methods that focused on empirical evidence and treating actual symptoms. However, their attitude towards homosexuality often played a decisive role in how they used aversion therapy. Whereas Czechoslovakian researchers cautioned readers about low success rates and agitated for homosexual law reform in 1961, most of their anglophone counterparts selectively ignored or misrepresented the results of ‘the Prague experiment’, instead celebrating single-case ‘success’ stories in their effort to correct ‘abnormal’ sexual orientation. In histories of queer sexuality and its pathologization, the behaviourist paradigm remains almost entirely unmapped. This article provides the most detailed study to date of aversion therapy literature from both sides of the East/West border. In doing so, it contributes to the project not only of ‘decentring Western sexualities’, but of decentring Western sexological knowledge. Given its Pavlovian origins, the history of homosexual aversion therapy can be fully understood only in the context of Cold War transnational sexological knowledge exchange.

Buggery and Parliament, 1533–2017

AbstractOver nearly five centuries the UK parliament, and its earlier incarnations, frequently legislated to ensure the regulation and punishment of buggery, a form of sexual conduct once generally accepted to constitute one of the most serious criminal offences known to law. In the early 21st century, parliament abolished the offence of buggery and, subsequently, granted pardons to certain individuals previously convicted of it. While some aspects of the history of parliament's approach to buggery are well known – particularly in respect of homosexual law reform – much of this history remains obscure. This article provides an in‐depth consideration of the making of statute law in parliament relating to buggery that reveals the dramatically changing attitudes of legislators towards this aspect of sexual conduct and highlights the significance and importance of the pardons granted to those convicted of the offence.

The Church of England, Homosexual Law Reform, and the Shaping of the Permissive Society, 1957–1979

AbstractThis article re-examines existing narratives of British permissiveness and secularization through a discussion of the Church of England's role in shaping the 1967 Sexual Offences Act and ongoing debates on homosexuality in the 1970s. It suggests—contrary to existing narratives of religious decline and marginalization—that the views of church commentators, and the opinions of the Established Church more generally, remained of real cultural and political influence in the years leading up to the 1967 Act. Religious authorities were thus more responsible for the moral landscape of the permissive society than historians previously assumed. Nevertheless, British permissiveness was full of contradictions, not only in terms of the unexpected ways in which reform was shaped and brought about, but in terms of the constraints of the new moral settlement which decriminalized homosexual behavior within modest boundaries. Such contradictions were not confined to the opinions of religious commentators—they were the genuine essence of the position on which the moral consensus in favor of homosexual law reform was based. Through a consideration of the final collapse of this moral consensus in the years after 1970, this article reassesses questions of the nature and timing of British secularization. It considers how the Church of England, although anticipating and shaping earlier developments in approaches toward sexual morality, unintentionally left itself out in the cold in the years after 1970, as progressive opinion began to move away from the consensus on which the 1967 Act had been based.

Buggery and Parliament, 1533-2017

Over nearly five centuries the UK parliament, and its earlier incarnations, frequently legislated to ensure the regulation and punishment of buggery, a form of sexual conduct once generally accepted to constitute one of the most serious criminal offences known to law. In the early 21st century, parliament abolished the offence of buggery and, subsequently, granted pardons to certain individuals previously convicted of it. While some aspects of the history of parliament's approach to buggery are well known – particularly in respect of homosexual law reform – much of this history remains obscure. This article provides an in‐depth consideration of the making of statute law in parliament relating to buggery that reveals the dramatically changing attitudes of legislators towards this aspect of sexual conduct and highlights the significance and importance of the pardons granted to those convicted of the offence

Sex With Neighbors: Canada and Canadians in the U.S. Homophile Press

ABSTRACTThis article examines U.S. homophile magazine contributions from and representations of Canada from 1953 to 1964. Drawing on 240 articles, letters, and other items that were published in ONE, Mattachine Review, and The Ladder, the essay first reviews Canadian-authored materials and then shows that U.S. gay and lesbian movement periodicals depicted Canada as more sexually conservative than the United States in three ways and more sexually liberal in one way. The magazines presented Canada as more sexually conservative in its failure to develop an organized gay and lesbian movement, its policies and practices of sexual censorship, and its opposition to progressive homosexual law reform. They portrayed Canada as more sexually liberal in the ways that its mainstream media covered homosexuality. The essay argues that U.S. homophile representations of Canada participated in the ongoing construction and reconstruction of U.S. nationalism. In demonstrating that the magazines generally represented Canada as more sexually conservative than the United States in the years from 1953 to 1964, the essay also shows that more recent depictions of Canada as more sexually liberal are relatively new.

Scottish Churches, Morality and Homosexual Law Reform, 1957–1980

The role of Scottish Churches in the decision not to include Scotland in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act requires scrutiny. This article examines the role of the Church of Scotland, and other Churches, in debates regarding homosexuality in the years following publication of the Wolfenden Report. It argues that although Scotland's Churches appeared steadfast in their determination to prevent homosexual law reform during the 1950s and 1960s, there was much ambivalence, contradiction and debate and that, in fact, Scotland's two main Churches played a significant role in the development of Scotland's foremost homosexual rights organisation, the Scottish Minorities Group.

Barbara Wootton (1897–1988): pioneering social scientist, feminist and policymaker

This article briefly surveys the life and work of Barbara Wootton, who made an outstanding contribution to the social sciences and to public life, and to the connection between the two, between the 1920s and 1980s, but is too little remembered now. She campaigned for the parliamentary vote for women, for equality in public life when women had the vote, for equal pay, abortion, abolition of capital punishment, homosexual law reform, reform of the criminal justice system to encourage rehabilitation in place of punishment, for social equality more broadly and for policy changes to be underpinned by sound research. She deserves to be remembered.

Sexual politics: sexuality, family planning, and the British Left from the 1880s to the present day

INTRODUCTION: 'YOUR SEX LIFE IS POLITICAL' 1. Beginnings: Socialism and Sexual Reform, 1880s to 1920s 2. Clash: The Labour Party and Birth Control in the 1920s 3. Writing and Living New Worlds: Socialism, Sex and Emotions 4. Abortion and Working-Class Politics in the 1930s SECTION II: ROADS TO 1967 5. A 'Silent', 'Modern' Revolution'? The Family, Femininity and Reproductive Politics in the 1940s and 1950s 6. Labour and the 'Liberal Hour', 1956-67: Abortion, Family Planning and Homosexual Law Reform SECTION III: ROADS FROM 1967 7. Second Wave Feminism, Labour and the Defence of the Abortion Act, 1967-90 8. A Thirty Years War? Gay Rights and the Labour Party, 1967-97 Conclusion: Endings or Beginnings: New Labour, Sexuality and Reproductive Politics, 1997 to 2010 Archival Sources and Select Bibliography Index

Rainbow Blindness: Same-Sex Partnerships in Post-Coalitional Australia

Rainbow Blindness: Same-Sex Partnerships in Post-Coalitional Australia

Resisting Homosexual Law Reform in Britain in the 1950s: the Passions of Earl Winterton*

The Sixth Earl Winterton was an eccentric who is too easily dismissed as a homophobe and bigoted critic of the reforms proposed in the Wolfenden Report. But his outbursts in the Parliament against homosexuality point to his personal concerns for British masculinity and to an alternative understanding of masculinity that has received scant attention in the assessment of gay law reforms initiated by Wolfenden. Sociologists insist that the main function of homophobia is the maintenance of heterosexuality and patriarchal homo‐society. In this article I examine Winterton's arguments in their historical context, not to understand “homosexualism” which affronted him, but for what they say between the lines about British manliness, identity, intimacy and friendship. Winterton's is one version of a masculine self that experienced being cut adrift and betrayed by the cultural and political shifts which the Wolfenden Report both signified and embodied.I think now, after studying the history of sex, we should try to understand the history of friendship, or friendships. That history is very, very important (Michel Foucault, 1982).1

Families of Choice? George Ives, Queer Lives and the Family in Early Twentieth‐Century Britain

This article argues that the stark post‐Second World War understanding in which ‘straight is to gay’ came to be seen as ‘family is to non family’ has tended to obscure the historical complexity of family life and the ways in which queer men have interacted with and created their families in the past, and used the language of family to conceptualise emotional bonds ‘beyond blood’. Using the well‐heeled early campaigner for homosexual law reform, George Ives (1867–1950), as a case study, I show how different rhetorics, ideas and experiences of family allowed for the assertion of gender and sexual identity, gave a framework for campaigning work and provided a means of conceptualising intimacy and companionship. Though family was the cause of considerable angst for Ives, it was, I suggest, something he valued not in spite of his homosexuality but at least partly because of it. It was fundamental to the ways in which he understood and articulated who he was, and how he related to others.

The Church of England and the Origins of Homosexual Law Reform

That the Church of England was an active and public supporter of homosexual law reform during the long debate on the issue in England between 1957 and 1967 is reasonably well known. It released reports and documents justifying and arguing for decriminalisation, and its bishops in the House of Lords were among those voting in favour in 1965. In this article, relying upon archival materials that have been only rarely used, I demonstrate that the Church's support went much deeper than is often assumed. Beginning in 1952, a process of theological reconsideration and behind the scenes lobbying lead by a relatively small group of thinkers made the Church an initiator in the reform process. Relying upon Rochon's notion of a “critical community,” I offer a description and explanation for the Church's role.

Law, Morality and Secularisation: The Church of England and the Wolfenden Report, 1954–1967

The role of the Church of England in the permissive reforms of the 1960s has been neglected. This article examines the Church's part in the campaign for the legalisation of homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s. It shows that the Church of England Moral Welfare Council played a key role in setting up the Wolfenden Committee in 1954, and in later campaigns culminating in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. In advocating the separation of crime and sin, senior Anglicans were promoting the secularisation of the criminal law, but many church members opposed this reorientation of Church and State. The importance of the Church of England in homosexual law reform suggests that existing narratives of secularisation and the permissive society need to be revised.

Lessons from the Wolfenden Report

The article traces the recent history of homosexual law reform in the UK and the countries of the Commonwealth of Nations, using as its point of departure the Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, 1957 (‘Wolfenden Report’). In light of the Wolfenden principle – that certain matters of private morality are not the law's business and especially not the proper business of punishment under the criminal law – the article proposes a methodology for law reform in those countries of the Commonwealth that inherited the penal offences but have not yet acted to repeal them.

Rhetorically self‐sufficient arguments in Western Australian parliamentary debates on Lesbian and Gay Law Reform

Western Australia's Acts Amendment (Lesbian and Gay Law Reform) Bill 2001 delivered a measure of legal equality in such areas as property transfer, superannuation, inheritance and discrimination, and more controversially, adoption, lesbian access to IVF, lowering the age of consent for sex between men from 21 to 16, and incorporating information on homosexuality into high school sex education classes. This paper examines the use of various moral principles within parliamentary speeches supporting or opposing the legislation, and the extent to which they were treated by members as beyond question, or 'rhetorically self-sufficient'. The resources of 'equality', 'human rights', 'democracy', 'the interests of the majority' and 'the interests of children' were given a kind of beyond-question, self-sufficient status, but their use was able to be undermined in a number of ways, relating to members' management of what the Bill was 'about', and the flexibility of these social constructs. It is argued that rather than pitting one set of resources against another, members on both sides of the debate faced a rhetorical pressure to adopt and mobilize all of the same self-sufficient moral resources, due to the flexible, constructed and non-hierarchical, yet often rhetorically self-sufficient nature of common-sense moral principles.

Greg Weir

How do political activists begin? What is their motivation? For quiet Greg Weir, just graduated as a trainee school teacher from Kelvin Grove College of Advanced Education in 1976, it was being refused employment by the Queensland government because he was a spokesperson for a gay student support group. Minister for Education Val Bird said in Parliament that ‘student teachers who participated in homosexual and lesbian groups should not assume they would be employed by the Education Department on graduation’. With his future as a teacher destroyed, Greg became one of Queensland's best-known political activists. His cause was taken up by the Australian Union of Students and he became a catalyst in developing awareness of gay and lesbian issues all over Australia. Greg was then employed as a staff member in the office of Senator George Georges and later Senator Bryant Burns, and became a Labor Party activist, influential in the peace, anti-nuclear, education and civil liberties movements in the 1970s and 1980s. He also helped set up HIV/AIDS awareness groups in the 1980s, and went on to become one of the central organisers of the campaign for gay law reform in 1989–90, which culminated in the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in 1990. In 1991 Greg was involved in campaigns to include homosexuality as a category in new antidiscrimination legislation.

Sexuality and the State: the Campaign for Scottish Homosexual Law Reform, 1967–80

The historiography of homosexual law reform in late-twentieth-century Britain has mainly focused on the sexual politics surrounding the Wolfenden Committee and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act (applicable only in England and Wales). Using a range of government archives and the papers of the Scottish Minorities Group (SMG), this article explores the campaign to introduce law reform for Scotland in the period 1967–80. It focuses on the interface between the SMG and Scottish governance and how it shaped the fortunes of a succession of measures designed to advance the legal status of homosexuals north of the Border. It concludes that the achievement of limited decriminalisation in 1980 was a pyrrhic victory and that the main reason for the partial and protracted process of reform was less the tactics of the SMG, or the lack of Scottish legislative autonomy, than the continuing homophobic culture within Scottish politics and society.