Male homosexuality had been decriminalized in 1967 thanks to years of pressure from groups like the Homosexual Law Reform Society, supported by such eminent figures as Clement Attlee, A. J. Ayer, Isaiah Berlin and J. B. Priestley, as well as numerous Anglican bishops and Nonconformist ministers. Of course a homosexual subculture had existed long before that, centred on particular London pubs and clubs, but the disappearance of legal sanctions meant a dramatic change in the lives of gay men and women – although obviously prejudice did not disappear overnight. By the end of the 1960s the word ‘gay’, which had had sexual connotations for centuries, was being increasingly used as a synonym for ‘homosexual’, and in October 1970 two students at the LSE, impressed by the progress of the American gay rights movement, set up the Gay Liberation Front. The GLF had three core principles – the validity of the homosexual orientation (‘Gay is Good’); the importance of being frank and open (‘Coming Out’); and the importance of working with ‘brothers and sisters’ to bring change – and within weeks it had almost 200 members. At its first demonstration, held on 27 November, some 150 people assembled to protest against the arrest of a young man for gross indecency on Highbury Fields, and the movement rapidly acquired a national reputation. In February 1971, the GLF even joined the mass march against Heath’s Industrial Relations Bill, although the content of its leaflets – ‘nearly one million trade unionists are homosexual’ – and the slogans on its placards – ‘POOF TO THE BILL’ – meant that its members were told to march at the back, where they would attract less attention. In the next day’s Evening Standard, a cartoon showed a group of sturdy middle-aged union leaders studying the press cuttings. ‘Well, I make it eighty to one hundred and fifty thousand,’ one says worriedly, ‘depending on whether you include the “Gay Liberation Front”, or not!’53
Predictably enough, many people refused to take the GLF seriously. Private Eye ran a long feature on ‘Poove Power’, complete with a merciless but admittedly very funny statement from the group’s president, Trevor X. It was time for ‘ACTION NOW, SWEETIES!’ Trevor insisted, to win ‘equal rights with women’, ‘free use of the Pill’, a ‘squeaky voice in Parliament’ and the establishment of nationwide ‘Poove Guidance Councils’. If these demands were ignored, he warned, Poove Power would take drastic action, from a ‘Gay Moratorium’ (‘all of us will just put on some nice clothes and go and walk about’), to a ‘Pretty Candlelight Demo’ and a ‘Mass Mince-In in Hyde Park’. ‘We pooves,’ he concluded, ‘are on the march … We shall overcome, sweeties!’54
Despite the scorn of the Eye, the GLF initially went from strength to strength. By the spring of 1971 it had so many members that meetings had to be held in the vast Middle Earth club in Covent Garden. But then its decline was swift. As in so many of the radical protest movements of the late 1960s, its members soon fell out among themselves, and within a year it had effectively collapsed, although it left in its wake all sorts of gay groups and communes, especially in London, Meanwhile the paper Gay News, which was first published in the summer of 1972 to mark the first Gay Pride march from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park, was selling more than 20,000 copies a fortnight within four years. Crucially, the GLF also bequeathed an unprecedented spirit of assertiveness among young gay men, manifested in support groups, helplines, professional and trade union associations, theatre groups and so on. And thanks partly to this new mood, but also simply to the fact that homosexuality was no longer a crime, gay men and women were far more visible on the streets of London. In Earl’s Court, for instance, Jonathan Raban watched men gathering every evening in ‘the varied uniforms of the gay ghetto: in their leathers, in peacock gear of wool and velvet, or, transformed for the night in drag, titupping on high heels in Jayne Mansfield shirtwaists, their faces looking like spoiled gouache paintings with rouged lips and powdered cheeks’.55
Homosexuality certainly enjoyed unprecedented visibility in the 1970s, from the explicit sexuality in Angus Wilson’s novel As If By Magic (1973), which shocked some readers and earned him hate mail, to John Inman’s mincing Mr Humphreys in the sitcom Are You Being Served?, and from John Hurt’s pioneering performance as Quentin Crisp, ‘one of the stately homos of England’, in the BBC play The Naked Civil Servant (1975) to Tom Robinson’s catchy singalong ‘Glad to Be Gay’, written for the Gay Pride march a year later. Even recent history acquired a pinker tone, thanks to books like Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage (1973), which exposed the bisexuality of his parents Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. In some ways, therefore, it did seem that Britain had turned a corner. ‘What a satisfactory life his must seem now,’ the New Statesman’s reviewer wrote after watching the portrayal of Quentin Crisp:
And to think too how many ex-colonial governors, retired generals, and remaindered judges and statesmen and commissioners of police must have sat biting their knuckles in fury as The Naked Civil Servant unreeled. Once in palmier days they might have anticipated that one day a grateful nation would be bestowing on them the kind of affectionate, graceful tributes that they now saw being lavished on this frightful pansy. Changed, utterly changed. For them now the long years of neglect and debilitation in Surrey or Wilts, the slow descent into the unlauded grave. And for Quentin Crisp at last a place in the sun. A lovely transformation.56
But this was surely going too far. Many gay men and women still felt compelled to conceal their homosexuality, such as the ice skater and Olympic gold medallist John Curry, who had a long-running affair with the actor Alan Bates (who also had an affair with Peter Wyngarde), or Larry Grayson, presenter of Shut That Door and The Generation Game. Above all, of course, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe went to enormous lengths to hide his homosexual past, including allegedly plotting to murder his erstwhile lover Norman Scott. As the Sunday Telegraph put it after Thorpe had gone on trial in 1979, his story was a ‘cautionary tale on the dangers of going out in the world with a time-bomb strapped to your chest’.57
But what it also suggested was that public suspicion of homosexuality – at least as Thorpe perceived it – died hard. Perhaps people were less ready now to agree with sentiments like those voiced by Charlotte in Stephen Poliakoff’s play Strawberry Fields (1977), who thinks that ‘they’re worse than rats, those sort of people’. But an NOP poll of almost 2,000 people in 1975 found that only four out of ten approved of gay couples living together openly, while half thought that they should ‘never’ be allowed to become teachers or doctors. Two years later, Gallup found that most people felt that while it was all right for gay men to work in ‘sales, staff or the armed forces’, they should be banned from becoming ‘teachers, doctors or prison officers’, and that fewer than three out of five thought that homosexuality should be legal. Indeed, outright hostility to homosexuality remained a powerful element in British social life, especially outside London. When the novelist Angus Wilson came out in the mid-1970s, he was bombarded with hate mail (‘Why don’t you take a long rope, find a tall tree and hang yourself by the neck until you are dead – YOU DEPRAVED FAGOT [sic]’), not least because he was a key figure in the protests against British Home Stores in 1976, which had forced a trainee manager to resign after he was shown kissing his boyfriend in an ITV documentary. Prosecutions of gay men for indecency actually went up, not down, in the early 1970s, although convictions no longer had such a devastating impact on people’s lives. And gay men still ran the risk of being attacked by ‘queer-bashers’, like the gang of teenagers who killed Michael de Gruchy, a solicitor’s clerk, on Wimbledon Common in 1970, or the building workers who killed Peter Benyon, a 32-year-old librarian, in 1978.58
Of course traditional versions of masculinity – strong and silent, gruff and gritty – endured, too. The skinhead craze, for example, first emerged on the estates of East London between 1968 and 1970, at precisely the moment when the hippy look was invading the high street, the Gay Liberation Front was organizing its first campaigns, and sensitive viewers were averting their eyes from Jason King’s kaftans. ‘Stylized
hardness’, as one account puts it, was central to the skinhead ethos: in their ‘violent masculinity, their community loyalty and collective solidarity, their violent opposition to outsiders and any males who looked “odd” ’, they ostentatiously looked back to a decaying version of working-class manhood. Skinheads have often been discussed in the context of racism or football hooliganism, but at a time when middle-class radicals and feminists were much in the news, they made no secret of their hatred of ‘dirty’ hippies, ‘pampered’ students and, above all, ‘queers’. It takes no great imagination to see that the symbols of skinhead identity – the cropped hair, the steel-capped workmen’s boots, the straight-leg Sta-Prest trousers and button-down shirts – were adopted as diametrical opposites of the ‘effeminate’ fashions of middle-class bohemians. And while students were earnestly proclaiming their solidarity with feminists and homosexuals, skinheads prided themselves on their moral conservatism, their attachment to tradition, their affiliation with their working-class territory. ‘If you live up on the Leys,’ remarked one football hooligan from an Oxford council estate, ‘then you have to fight or else people piss you about and think you’re a bit soft or something.’59
And while it was easy to dismiss this young man, and others like him, as mindless thugs, the truth is that there were probably far more skinheads in the early 1970s than there were gay liberationists. By 1972, one book even argued that they constituted ‘by far the biggest single group among this country’s teenagers’, even though their aggressive working-class identity repelled middle-class critics. Asked what they were all about, one skinhead gave a wonderfully revealing reply. ‘What are we for? Nothing really,’ he said. ‘We’re just a bunch of blokes.’60
For many men, young as well as old, the transformation in traditional gender roles in the early 1970s was at once ridiculous, bewildering and threatening. The sexist joke in Trevor Griffiths’ play Comedians (1976) – ‘I’m in a pub down town and this liberated woman person collars me, she says, You’re a brutal, loud-mouthed, sadistic, irrational, sexist, male chauvinist pig. I said, I suppose a quick screw is out of the question?’ – was one of many circulating in the mid-1970s, reflecting anxieties about the pace of change. Of course such jokes were nothing new, but they seemed to acquire a more bitter edge in the 1970s, as though reflecting the insecurity and hostility of the determinedly old-fashioned male. And as women moved into new arenas, so they had to put up with a great deal of ribaldry and ridicule, which sometimes deterred all but the most thick-skinned. Women who went onto the Stock Exchange floor, for instance, had to be careful what they wore: wearing all-red, for example, invited the nickname ‘Pillar Box’, while trouser suits were definitely beyond the pale. ‘I was the Night Nurse,’ one newcomer, still in her teens when she went onto the floor in 1975, later recalled; ‘there was Sweaty Betty, Super Bum, the Grimsby Trawler, the Road Runner, Stop Me And Pick One. They were very cruel. Stop Me And Pick One was because she had acne.’ Even the highest echelons of government were not safe. When Barbara Castle wore a trouser suit to a strategy meeting at Chequers in August 1975, her Cabinet colleagues reacted with childish excitement. ‘She is just the size of my first girlfriend,’ Denis Healey said, as a group of male ministers gathered to admire Castle’s outfit. ‘I can tuck her under my armpit!’ – and he proceeded to do so. It is hard to imagine many of Edward Heath’s ministers treating Margaret Thatcher in quite the same way.61
In many ways, old attitudes died hard. Advertisements traded on old stereotypes in ways that feminists found unacceptable: a famous photograph taken in 1979 showed a Fiat billboard with the slogan ‘If It Were a Lady, It Would Get Its Bottom Pinched’, below which someone had spray-painted ‘If This Lady Were a Car She’d Run You Down’. Even the Yorkshire Miner, the Pravda of Arthur Scargill’s empire, ran Page Three pin-ups, provoking the journalist Anna Coote to challenge him to a public debate in the spring of 1979. Hilariously, the paper’s editor Maurice Jones, who was also on the platform, chose the occasion to launch a bitter tirade against the outrage of dungarees, which he clearly regarded as a sign of dangerous lesbianism. Given that the audience mainly consisted of feminists, this was a bold gambit, although, in a nice refutation of the stereotype, none of them was actually wearing the offending garment. But the Yorkshire Miner was hardly alone in its defiantly anachronistic stance. The Guardian women’s page, running a story about the first woman principal probation officer in 1973, treated her husband as a hero because he was content to eat ‘casseroles from the freezer which she prepares when time permits’. ‘Women’s Lib could do worse than pin a medal on him!’ the piece concluded, surely rather missing the point that women’s lib was meant to be about more than men settling for frozen dinners.62
Publications for the next generation were no better. When Shoot introduced its teenage readers to the 1970 ‘Goal Girl Finalists’ – ten ‘dolly birds’ in their underwear who had entered a contest to find ‘the best-looking fans in football’ – it was not exactly striking a blow for women’s liberation. And as the academic Angela McRobbie pointed out in a famous essay, the emblematic girls’ magazine of the 1970s, Jackie, was hardly a feminist bible. In almost every Jackie story, the teenage heroine is defined almost entirely by her good looks and her quest to find a boyfriend; the only other things that matter are pop music, make-up and fashion. It was, however, a highly successful formula. By 1976, Jackie was selling more than 600,000 copies a week, and was easily Britain’s bestselling teenage magazine. Its popularity was yet another sign that, despite the supposed revolution of the 1960s, many people, young as well as old, still had strikingly conservative tastes. ‘I was addicted to Jackie,’ one woman said later. ‘The stories were all the same, and either had a happy ending when the boy and girl got together for ever, or a sad ending, in which case the last two drawings were the boy walking off into the sunset and the girl sitting with tears in her eyes saying, “Red was a loner.” I’d feel sad all through Maths.’63
It does not take a radical feminist to work out that one reason Page Three proved so successful in the 1970s, apart from its obvious aesthetic attractions, was that it represented a way of putting women back in their box, showing them as unthreatening sex objects rather than as assertive, independent subjects. This was a theme not just of the tabloids, but of popular culture in general: for every cheap thriller or television show that featured a strong female character, there was another that revelled in old-fashioned male chauvinism. The notoriously lecherous exploits of Benny Hill’s television persona – forever panting with a mixture of exhaustion and excitement as he chases some pneumatic beauty in a tiny bikini – were merely the most obvious example. In the enormously successful 1971 film version of On the Buses, the story follows the efforts of Stan and Jack to frustrate the despicable Blakey’s attempt to bring in female bus drivers, who will clearly ruin the roguish, masculine atmosphere of the depot. We are meant to sympathize with the men when they attack the newcomers with spiders and laxatives, just as we are meant to laugh when they torment Stan’s ugly sister Olive, whom one writer calls ‘the most abject female figure in British comedy’. To call the film unreconstructed would be an understatement; a more brutal onslaught against women’s liberation would be hard to imagine.64
Enraged by the feminist opinions of Anna Coote and the impending arrival of Jean Rook, Giles calls for ‘Men’s Lib’ in the Daily Express, 2 May 1972. The style is pure Molesworth; the sentiments are pure Kingsley Amis.
But other, less aggressively reactionary shows were not much better. In The Persuaders!, Roger Moore and Tony Curtis are gentlemen adventurers of the most outrageously predatory kind: as early as the title sequence, they are shown admiring the bottom of a passing bikini-clad nymph, ‘more like a pair of middle-aged, medallion-wearing sex tourists than the debonair playboy crime-fighters they are supposed to be’, as one critic put it. Women are either mindless sex objects or diabolical villainesses; there is no middle ground. No doubt the heroic couple would have got on well wit
h Jason King, who, despite his extraordinarily effeminate attire, might have been a parody of male chauvinism. ‘You’ve been yapping all day about women’s liberation and the equality of the sexes,’ Jason tells his female companion, a photographer, in one particularly painful exchange. ‘What contribution has your sex made, apart from the obvious, to, say, photosynthesis?’ ‘Just give me a drink, will you?’ she says wearily. ‘Navigation?’ he asks pointedly. ‘I bet I know more about navigation than you do,’ she replies hotly. ‘Well,’ says Jason nastily, ‘then you can find your own stumpy way to the drinks table.’65
What is really remarkable, though, is how often the films of the 1970s revelled in showing male violence towards women, often without making even the feeblest attempt to condemn it. In Dennis Potter’s BBC play Double Dare (1976), the central character, a writer, almost overflows with sexual frustration, insecurity and simultaneous lust for and hatred of women. In the final scene, fantasy and reality collide as, during a meeting with an actress in a London hotel, he thinks he can overhear a man attacking a prostitute: ‘ “You stinking whore,” he’s saying. I can hear it. He hates her. Hates her! She’s biting and kicking and – that’s it! I knew it would happen! I knew! Hands round her throat! Squeezing the life out of her, the sex out of her, the pretence out of her.’ By this stage, he has reached a paroxysm of aggression and excitement. Only as the ecstasy dies down does he realize that he was only imagining it – and that in a terrible twist he has vented his feelings on the actress he was with, who now lies strangled and lifeless on the bed.66
State of Emergency: the Way We Were Page 54
