by Alwyn Turner
The main reason we want the age of consent lowered to 14 is that, with the exception of rape and assault, and very young girls, we believe that the law has no place in the bedroom. The present law does not stop young people going to bed together. It does stop them getting contraception.
Patricia Hewitt (1977)
RIGSBY: In my day, it meant prison.
ALAN: We live in more enlightened times, Rigsby. Parliament’s made it legal.
RIGSBY: I’m not surprised, with that lot. We’re lucky they didn’t make it compulsory.
Eric Chappell, Rising Damp (1977)
At the beginning of 1978 the Tom Robinson Band, having reached the top five with their debut single ‘2-4-6-8 Motorway’, issued their second release, a four-track EP titled Rising Free. It was a record that had been long awaited, for it included the already famous anthem ‘Glad to Be Gay’, an overtly polemical account of homosexuals under attack from the police, the press and queer-bashers. With a singalong chorus and a tone of weary irony in the lyrics, it came on like the great lost Kinks song:
Lie to your workmates, lie to your folks,
Put down the queens and tell anti-queer jokes.
Gay Lib’s ridiculous, join their laughter:
‘The buggers are legal now, what more are they after?’
Unsurprisingly, Radio One declined to play the song, even though it was clearly the primary selling point of the record, and instead opted for another track, ‘Don’t Take No for an Answer’, which duly became the officially approved incarnation of the release. Indeed, according to the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles, the self-proclaimed ‘Bible of Pop’, that was the hit song (making #18 in the charts), and it was listed as such with no indication that it came from an EP, nor what the other tracks were, despite this being standard practice elsewhere in the book. Like ‘God Save the Queen’, which many high-street retailers refused even to list in their charts, leaving instead a gap where it should have been, and which was announced in the Top of the Pops chart rundown as being ‘a record by a band calling themselves the Sex Pistols’, ‘Glad to Be Gay’ was the hit that dare not speak its name.
Such treatment was probably inevitable in the context of a BBC establishment that fought shy of any explicit sexual references in pop music. In 1979 the Gang of Four were invited onto Top of the Pops to perform their single ‘At Home He’s a Tourist’ but were told they’d have to change a line about ‘Rubbers you hide in your top left pocket’; when they declined to accept the proposed alternative (‘Rubbish you hide . . .’), they were dropped from the show. (The following year, however, the Vapours were happily allowed to perform their million-selling hit ‘Turning Japanese’, presumably because no one spotted that it was celebrating masturbation.) In such a world ‘Glad to Be Gay’ clearly went too far in its espousal of sexual politics, and particularly in its allegations of police violence, but eighteen months earlier an explicit tale of queer-bashing had received BBC approval and had reached #2.
Rod Stewart’s self-penned ‘The Killing of Georgie’ was, he was later to claim, the record that had given him the most satisfaction in his career: ‘I’m very proud of this,’ he said, ‘because it was a subject that no one had ever tackled.’ Actually he was wrong; by coincidence, it was released almost simultaneously with ‘Under One Roof’ by the Rubettes, a group still primarily associated with a bubblegum take on pre-Beatles pop. For this single, however, they created an authentic Nashville country sound that would have been perfectly at home on a Don Williams album, save for the fact that – like ‘Georgie’ – the lyrics told the tale of a man being beaten to death because of his sexuality. And, raising the stakes a little, it’s the man’s father doing the killing. Evidently this was one gay song too many, and it was largely ignored by the media, barely making the top 40; had Stewart’s record not come out at the same time, it might perhaps have received wider coverage and been better remembered. (It did, however, do much better in Europe, reaching #3 in Germany, whilst a cover version, ‘Raymond und Freund’ made it to #1 there and in Switzerland.)
These records were rare occurrences. Homosexuals, even more than black people, were virtually invisible in the mainstream of 1970s Britain. The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 had made male homosexual acts legal in England and Wales (Scotland followed in 1980, with a parliamentary bill proposed by Labour MP Robin Cook, and Northern Ireland in 1982), so long as they were between consenting adults over the age of twenty-one and were conducted in private, which was interpreted to mean in a domestic setting, that there were only two people in the house, not merely in the room. Even with this limited dispensation, there was no rush on the part of gay men to make their presence known. David Bowie announced that he was bisexual just before he became famous, and Elton John followed suit in 1976, though in his case it was something of a compromise: he acknowledged later that he was exclusively homosexual. Until the emergence of Robinson, who, as the least flamboyant of rock stars, did much to challenge social perceptions of gay men, that was as far as British rock music got.
Even so, it was progress at a level that was difficult to find elsewhere. The only major British sports star to come out in the decade was the ice-skater John Curry, who won Olympic gold in 1976 and was promptly voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year by a viewing public too enthralled by his extraordinary ability to care about his sex life. The fact that he had a two-year affair with the actor Alan Bates was a secret only because the latter concealed his bisexual proclivities. Bates had also had a long relation ship with Jason King star Peter Wyngarde, which again was concealed, though Wyngarde’s career later suffered when he was prosecuted in 1975 for gross indecency in the lavatory of Gloucester bus station. The same hesitancy was to be found elsewhere in the acting profession. Ian McKellen, for example, starred in the premiere of Martin Sherman’s play Bent in 1979, but despite the subject matter – the treatment of gay men in the Third Reich – he had not then come out as homosexual, and did not do so until 1988. For though the theatre was widely known to be a tolerant world for gays, it was seldom acknowledged in public: John Gielgud was fined in 1953 for importuning, yet his sexuality was never mentioned in his later press coverage.
This was also the case in the world of light entertainment, where camp had long been established, while its roots in homosexuality remained unspoken. Larry Grayson got his big break on television in 1972 with appearances on ATV’s Saturday Night Variety that made him an overnight star at the age of nearly fifty, and that led on to his own series, Shut That Door!, and ultimately to replacing Bruce Forsyth as the host of The Generation Game. But despite his anecdotes about dubiously named friends like Everard, Slack Alice and Pop-It-In Pete, and despite his catchphrases ‘What a gay day’ and ‘Seems like a nice boy’, Grayson was keen to distance himself from the suggestion that any of it might be personal. ‘I’m not really a queer or a homosexual,’ he told the press. ‘I’m just behaving like one. That’s the big difference.’
It was, of course, untrue. He was gay, as was John Inman, who became a huge family favourite as the ultra-camp Mr Humphries in Are You Being Served?, though in public Inman denied even that the character was homosexual. Both were the ’70s inheritors of a tradition that had previously produced the likes of Frankie Howerd, Charles Hawtrey and Kenneth Williams, none of whom were out, but who brought elements of gay culture to a mass audience happy to connive at the pretence that it was all play-acting. The mainstream public didn’t really believe their public disavowals of homosexuality, but chose not to ask too many questions, largely because their talent was irresistible, whilst for many young gay men ‘they were a light in the dark’, in the words of Matthew Parris. ‘If our oh-so-modern, who-gives-a-damn, 21st-century gays, of whom I am one,’ he wrote on the death of Inman, ‘suppose that these men were not brave, that they were not trail-blazers, not part of the struggle, then we don’t know the half of it.’
The one major field that bucked the trend of apologetic self-denial was that of the visual arts, wh
ere Francis Bacon, David Hockney and Gilbert & George made no attempt to conceal their sexuality, perhaps benefiting from the lack of interest that the popular media took in their work. But if there was a single person who stood out as an exception, a man who became famous primarily because he was homosexual, it was Quentin Crisp. Born Dennis Pratt in 1908, Crisp became a familiar figure in the demi-monde of gay London in the 1930s, but it was not until he was sixty that he reached a wider audience with the publication of his autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant. And even then the book sold just 3,500 copies until it was adapted for television by Philip Mackie. Rejected by the BBC, the play was picked up by Thames Television and, with John Hurt (‘my representative on earth’) in a BAFTA-winning performance as Crisp, it became one of the most talked about programmes of 1975.
Here, for the first time, was a depiction of a gay man that made no concessions to orthodox sensibilities, that refused to countenance apology. Crisp was an effeminate homosexual and he had never made any bones about the fact. He knew that he was not the first, that this was a recurring and eternal part of humanity, and he had the courage to present himself as such throughout his life, whether enduring hostility and violence on the London streets of the 1930s, or celebrating his position as ‘one of the stately homos of England’ in 1975, a time when ‘The symbols I adopted forty years ago to express my sexual type have become the uniform of all young people.’ This was not a performance that asked the viewers to accept a gay man as being cosily the same as a heterosexual, but rather one that celebrated the diversity of human nature and faced down its detractors, that imposed dignity and decency on pure camp. As Julian and Sandy would have said in Round the Horne, it was bold, very bold. And when the sales of the original book were boosted by the TV adaptation, tens of thousands of readers discovered that Crisp was also amongst the most original and challenging thinkers of the time, as well as being a gifted epigrammist in the manner of Oscar Wilde and Joe Orton; the one line that was cut from the play shortly before transmission was his comment that ‘sexual intercourse is a poor substitute for masturbation’, curiously one of the few jokes that was not specifically gay.
Tom Robinson and Quentin Crisp represented, in their very different ways, the most unabashed, open face of homosexuality in the ’70s, pointing the way forward to a less censorious world. A more depressingly familiar image surfaced in 1976 when Norman Scott, universally described as ‘a former male model’, alleged in court that he had been the lover of Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal Party. It was a story that was to rumble on for over three years, and that had its roots way back in the early 1960s. Scott was then working as a stable boy whilst Thorpe was an unmarried backbench MP with, it was claimed, an active gay sex life; the physical relationship, it was said, had been brief, but Scott had continued to call on favours to a point where he was considered a threat to Thorpe’s exalted public position. The alleged affair pre-dated legalization (though both men were at the time over twenty-one) and if there had been a relationship, it was certainly over by 1967 when, shortly before the passing of the Sexual Offences Act, Thorpe was elected to succeed Jo Grimond as party leader, but only after rumours concerning his private life had been firmly denied. No word of the story reached the press, which instead celebrated the arrival of this youthful, colourful figure on centre stage: ‘Politics and the Liberal Party will be gayer for his leadership,’ declared the Daily Mirror.
The eruption of Scott into national prominence came in 1975 when he was walking a friend’s Great Dane on Exmoor and encountered an armed man named Andrew Newton, who shot the dog and threatened Scott. The gun, however, failed to fire a second time, and Newton was subsequently tracked down by the police, prosecuted and sentenced to two years in jail for having an automatic pistol with intent to endanger life. It was at his trial, in March 1976, that Scott first made public his allegations about Thorpe, insisting that the attempt on his life was made in order to silence him, that Newton was a hit man hired by the Liberal leader and his inner circle. The case revealed much about the existing stereotypes of gay men. They had ‘a terrifying propensity for malice’, said Newton’s defence counsel. ‘Were you taken in by him? It was a little Uriah Heep act, and at the crucial moment there came the tears. Were they real or crocodile?’ he asked the jury in reference to Scott’s appearance in the witness box, and he concluded: ‘This type of man is dangerous.’
Though Thorpe was not directly involved in the trial, the accusation was crippling, however much colleagues such as Cyril Smith tried to laugh it off in what must have been the most tiresome fashion: ‘“Shot any dogs, lately?” I would say when I saw Jeremy, hoping that a ribbing might help him throw off a mood of quiet desperation that seemed to have settled on him.’ The story was so sensational that it filled the papers and by May, his position having become untenable, Thorpe resigned as leader.
Was this ‘the action of a politically motivated Fleet Street, aware and afraid that Jeremy Thorpe was leading a party which was threatening the cosy, if ineffectual, two-party system?’ wondered Smith. ‘Furthermore had they realized that the success of the Tory Party could be achieved by destroying the Liberal Party – a cause for which a few newspaper proprietors would prostitute the British press.’ He was not alone in drawing such conclusions. ‘Nobody in the Tory press has pointed out the clear political advantage the Tory party stands to gain from the collapse of the Liberals, who have always taken more votes from the Tories than from Labour,’ noted Kenneth Tynan in his diary. And Tony Benn shared the same sentiment: ‘I think the press have decided to destroy the Liberal Party because it is now an embarrassment to the cause of building up Mrs Thatcher.’
Whether it did do any lasting damage to the Liberals is unclear, particularly since the party elected David Steel to be the new leader, its one figure who looked like a professional politician rather than a misfit without a home in either of the major parties. But certainly Thorpe was finished. When Newton was released from jail a year later, the stories began again, and in 1978 Thorpe, along with three others, was formally charged with conspiring to murder Scott. The case was scheduled to be heard at the Old Bailey the week after the 1979 general election and, though Thorpe was of course considered innocent until proved guilty, in the grand tradition of British justice, he was duly removed from Parliament by the voters in his Devon constituency, amidst widespread sniggering. ‘What’s the similarity between Jeremy Thorpe and William the Conqueror?’ ran a contemporary joke, recorded by Michael Palin. ‘They’re both fucking Normans.’
The trial was notable primarily for the performance of the judge, Mr Justice Cantley, whose grip on modern mores was not renowned; in a 1970 case where a man was suing for damages, having suffered injuries that adversely affected his sex life, Cantley was plainly baffled, arguing that, since the plaintiff was not married, ‘I can’t see how it affects his sex life.’ His summing-up in the Thorpe trial was equally eccentric and was instantly celebrated as a master class in establishment bias. ‘He is a fraud. He is a sponger. He is a whiner. He is a parasite,’ he said of Scott, before shrugging: ‘But, of course, he could still be telling the truth. It is a question of belief.’ Or, in the words of Peter Cook’s famous parody, he was ‘a scrounger, parasite, pervert, a worm, a self-confessed player of the pink oboe, a man or woman who by his or her own admission chews pillows’. It required some effort to remember that Scott was the injured party here, the man who had come within a whisker of being shot dead. Even with the judge’s words ringing in their ears, it took the jury fifteen hours to come up with a verdict of not guilty on all the defendants. For Thorpe, however, it was a pyrrhic victory; thereafter doors were politely but firmly shut in his face, as the ranks of society closed against him. At the age of just fifty, a man who should have had a glittering political career was effectively destroyed.
Thorpe himself denied not only the charge of conspiracy but also the allegation that he had ever had a sexual relationship with Scott. If the tales of this and other relat
ionships were indeed true, however, he would hardly have been the only MP to engage in gay sex, nor the only one to conceal it. It was an open secret in Westminster, for example, that Tom Driberg, who died shortly after he retired from Parliament as a Labour MP in 1974, was particularly promiscuous, but not even he was out; it took the posthumous publication of his autobiography, Ruling Passions, to put his previously private life into the public domain. There was, in fact, just one openly acknowledged homosexual in the 1970s House of Commons, and that was Maureen Colquhoun.
Elected in 1974 as the Labour member for a Northampton constituency, Colquhoun was on the left of the party and attracted little media attention until, in 1976, it was revealed that she had left her husband of twenty-six years and moved in with another woman. Soon thereafter she committed a further sin in the eyes of Labour activists by suggesting that Enoch Powell was not necessarily a barking-mad racist. It was that supposed support of Powell, as it was portrayed, that became the primary charge laid against her when her constituency party began the process of deselecting her as their candidate for the next election. ‘It is increasingly difficult to talk intelligently about the race issue within the Labour Party,’ she commented. ‘They prefer to attack Powell rather than attack the real problems of racial conflict.’ She was convinced, however, that this, and the other charges laid at her door, were little more than convenient covers for those who objected to her living arrangements, and she remained unrepentant. ‘I am gay and proud of it. I am glad that in my private life I have love and care from someone,’ she declared. ‘This is an underlying issue here and I am astounded by the hypocrisy and prejudice of my opponents. My sexuality has nothing to do with my ability to do my job as an MP.’ The protests were in vain, and delegates to the Liberal Party assembly, acutely sensitive to anti-gay sentiment, sent her a message of condolence when she lost the support of her local party, ‘apparently because you are open and honest about being a lesbian’.
