The government has announced it will pardon men convicted of having sex with other men. These men were convicted of crimes that couldn’t apply to men and women having sex with one another or women having sex together. They were crimes that only consenting adult men could commit. It’s a welcome development – even men who have died will receive a pardon; but does pardoning those men unlucky enough to get caught actually address the trauma to which the British state subjected LGBT people?
For centuries, LGBT people have been hounded in this country, but in the 20th century the full force of the state was used against homosexual men. Lesbians weren’t the victims of the criminal law, but they fared little better. The concept of a trans identity was simply rejected.
We were all despised.
I grew up in rural Devon in the 1970s, a gay kid at a local comprehensive. This was England, and even though homosexuality had been partially decriminalised the decade before, England remained a very hostile place to be gay. Homophobia was the norm. It was so normal, there wasn’t a word for it then.
In myself, I didn’t mind who I was, but I knew others did and that I couldn’t be known to be gay. There would be too many consequences. There was always the risk of violence, physical or verbal. They called me “poof”. How could they tell? I lived in genuine fear of being found out. My sexuality had to be stifled.
Of course, as I entered my late teens random sexual fumbling occurred; casual encounters with strangers. I told no one. On one level I was ashamed, but I adapted. I grew to relish the taboo. I had no idea that I was committing criminal offences. Homosexuality may have been partially decriminalised in 1967, but only if you were over 21 and the sex took place in private. I was under 21, and was not protected by the law. I still remember a few years later meeting a 19-year-old who’d been convicted of gross indecency. At least he can be pardoned now.
And then along came Aids. I went into a genuine state of anxiety. I could tell no one about it. Like so many young gay men of my generation, my future was shadowed by the spectre of Aids.
The story that I have just told will resonate with gay and lesbian people who are now 40-plus. From a tender age we learned to cope, to avoid, to control. Can bullying be managed? With so little experience of life, how do you avoid violence and the fear of it? How do you deal with rejection? And as for yearning, how is that suppressed?
In the years that followed 1967 the number of convictions for gross indecency, an offence that could only be committed by consenting gay men, doubled. Prosecutions peaked in the 1980s. Between 1967 and 2003, when the gross indecency law was finally consigned to history, it is believed that there were up to 35,000 convictions, although actual figures are unclear.
There was also something remarkably naive about the 1967 act. It didn’t address the reality of most gay men, for whom finding a private space was a near impossibility. How could they bring sexual partners home to their parents or wives?
So is the abuse of the LGBT community an unfortunate accident of history? Like apartheid, criminalising gay men distorted everything and its poison permeated every aspect of life. Who was not complicit in the torment of the LGBT community? By pursuing gay men, did the UK end up with a sexual offences regime that was not fit for purpose and that could be easily manipulated by others, which in turn left the most vulnerable exposed?
And what about Aids? Did the pre-existing and ongoing persecution of gay men exacerbate the crisis? To what extent were safe sex messages for gay men hampered because in the early years of the Aids crisis there was no experience of dealing with this widely criminalised underclass?
We all lost too many to Aids. None of us were equipped or prepared. Our anger and sadness will always live with us. But was our loss intensified by those who should have protected us? Why in the midst of the Aids crisis, for example, did the government introduce legislation banning the so-called promotion of homosexuality? At a time when we most needed the pastoral care of the state, it turned on us and magnified our pain.
My story is just one of many. We now live in a world that is unrecognisable to that in which I came of age. But should we feel resentment and anger that our generation and the countless generations before us were subjected to treatment that, if meted out to others, would be described as persecution?
British government policy relating to LGBT people destroyed lives. We may still be living with the mental health consequences of those policies, and if you take just one issue, LGBT suicide, its full extent has never been acknowledged. We also know there is extensive alcohol and drug addiction within the LGBT community. We are entitled to question why this is, and we deserve answers.
Pardoning those who were convicted for seeking intimacy is a decent gesture, but it is only a gesture and gives no answers, explanations or real remedies. Nor does it capture the experience of every single one of us. The state made us outsiders, and for many this included being an outsider from their families – those they loved the most. The human spirit is indomitable, and the LGBT spirit is no less so. We survived, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t entitled to the truth, to have our stories heard and to a fully reasoned explanation and apology for our persecution. We need more than pardons for those convicted. What’s needed is an independent investigation in to how the British state could have treated us as it did.