12. The ‘spotting a homosexual checklist’: masculinity, homosexuality and the British Foreign Office, 1965–70*

James Southern

In July 1991, Paul, a mid-ranking diplomat at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), told his employers he was gay. It was, of course, a critical moment in his personal life, but it was even more profound, considering the fact that, since the partial decriminalization of same-sex acts between men in 1967, it had been against the rules of the British diplomatic service to be openly gay. Days earlier, the then Prime Minister, John Major, had announced that the bar on homosexuality would be lifted, and Paul claims to have been the first diplomat subsequently to come out. In an interview in 2015, he described the day the FCO allowed him to keep his job:

I got a phone call from the Head of Security’s PA … and it was quite simply ‘[He] will see you at 9.30 tomorrow morning’. And then, forgive the language, ‘Oh fuck, what’s going to happen?’ So I duly went … and he was very pleasant and said ‘We’ve looked through your file and thank you for being open and we are able to grant your DV certificate’ … So I went home for the evening and I stopped off at a gay bar that I’d been to a few times and I was in my suit and tie … and I said ‘Can I have a pint, please?’ and the guy said ‘Excuse me, but do you know that this is a gay bar?’ and I said ‘Yes, I’m gay’ and do you know those first words [were] quite astonishing and amazing, liberating and wonderful that I no longer had to hide the fact that I was gay. It was only a small step, but a really significant step for me.¹

Paul’s ‘coming out’ was, in a sense, a microcosm of a phenomenon widely experienced by gay men and lesbians in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century.² Yet it was also, on another level, a historically unique personal experience. Throughout his career, before and after the bar had been lifted, Paul had to reconcile his sexuality with his professional identity as a diplomat, and his autobiographical trajectory is inextricably linked with the history of the British diplomatic service. Well aware of the emotional labour he had expended in coexisting as a gay man and a diplomat, he admitted in retrospect that ‘it was probably quite damaging to me as an individual to have to hide a fundamental part of my being’.³ Nonetheless, he considered the benefits of his Foreign Office career as having ‘outweighed the inconvenience … of having to hide my sexuality’.⁴ In other words, his desire to be a diplomat clashed with, overrode and shaped his identity as a gay man. What enabled Paul to frame his professional identity and sexuality in this way?

This chapter sets out to analyse the relationship that Paul negotiated: between the professional identity of British diplomats and the sexual identity of gay men and lesbians. It returns to the origins of the FCO bar on homosexuality, when the 1967 Sexual Offences Act forced British diplomats to decide whether or not homosexuality was, despite its partial decriminalization, inherently incompatible with what Iver Neumann has termed diplomatic ‘scripts’ – the basic performative requirements of ‘being’ a British diplomat.⁵ Using documentary material from the FCO archive in Hanslope Park, it conducts a discursive analysis of the process by which British diplomats defined, identified and developed a policy on homosexuality in the 1960s. It argues that the construction of ‘homosexuality’ at the Foreign Office was a creative process, the aim of which was the maintenance of strict codes for group identity and the foundations of which reveal that the definitions applied were culturally, historically – and institutionally – specific.

In doing so, this chapter seeks to intervene in debates about the construction of sexual identities in early post-war Britain. Historians have shown that the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were an era in which new sexual identities were cultivated and established within both hetero- and homosexual paradigms.⁶ Such interpretations, however, while insightful, can tend to obscure the particular mechanisms by which the acutely individualized process of sexual identification was experienced and performed in different social and cultural environments. Harry Cocks has argued convincingly that sexual identities are forged in individual ‘“sites” of modernity’ as ‘localized phenomena dependent on specific practices of class and the structure of life in a particular place’.⁷ Building on Cocks’s claims, this chapter argues that British diplomats had to envisage and create a specifically Foreign Office version of homosexuality in order to keep gay men and lesbians out of the diplomatic service, and thus one of its key contentions is that the construction of sexual identity may be understood only through careful analysis of the sites and chronological contexts in which it was constructed.

Following Timothy Mitchell’s injunction that there is no boundary between the ‘state’ and that which lies outside of it but rather an imaginary internal boundary drawn ‘within the network of institutional mechanisms through which a social and political order is maintained’, this chapter is an exploration of the methods by which ‘deviant’ forms of sexuality were identified, isolated and carefully partitioned off from the realm of government employment.⁸ It builds on insight from Harold Perkin’s classic text, The Rise of Professional Society (1989), in which he argued that the twentieth-century British economy was defined by a rise in ‘professions’:

Where pre-industrial society was based on passive property in land and industrial society on actively managed capital, professional society is based on human capital created by education and enhanced by strategies of closure, that is, the exclusion of the unqualified.⁹

Perkin’s argument about the changing operations of social class in a society defined as much by unequal access to ‘merit’ as by hereditary status is a compelling one – so compelling, in fact, that its echoes continue to be clearly discernible in analyses as masterly and comprehensive as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014).¹⁰ What this chapter argues is that the Weberian techniques of social closure to which Perkin and Piketty allude were much more versatile than their critiques of class may suggest: British diplomats used those same techniques to exclude homosexuality from their institution.¹¹ At a time when Britain’s international status was unstable, increasingly fluid definitions of sexuality became a currency of legitimacy through which diplomats attempted to shore up, as they perceived it, the integrity of their profession. Paul’s story is one in which one part of his identity – the ‘diplomat’ – was sanctioned and encouraged by the organization for which he worked, while another part – his sexuality – was excluded. This was social closure of a profession in which the boundaries were within, rather than between, individuals.

Sexual identity does not present itself at a strictly somatic level (like, say, gender or race) and thus always carries with it the potential for concealment. Any boundaries drawn by Foreign Office recruiters to keep gay men and lesbians out of the diplomatic service could not, therefore, be drawn on the perimeter of the organization; rather, they had to be drawn within the conceptual parameters of diplomatic identity itself. The urgent historical questions to be asked, then, are not concerned with the morality, legality or practice of sexualities in 1960s Britain. Instead, how did homosexuality come to be bound up with ideas considered relevant – indeed essential – to diplomatic identity, such as trustworthiness and stability? How was homosexuality deployed as a legal and moral concept within an institution that straddled functions as representatives of the British state and as an actor in the international political community during the Cold War? What did it mean to be gay and a British diplomat after the legislative revolution of 1967? It is these questions that this chapter seeks to address, beginning with an analysis of the origins of the bar on homosexuality, followed by a close reading of the discursive process by which it was constructed.

The history of the diplomatic service bar on homosexuality is inseparable from the cultural development of the Foreign Office in the political milieu of early Cold War Britain. Positive Vetting (PV), the practice of identifying characteristics or information believed to put individuals at risk of blackmail or make them unsuitable for access to secret information, was introduced in Britain in 1951 amid concerns about possible communist infiltration of the Foreign Office and security services.¹² The British government, however, conducted no anti-communist purges reasonably comparable to those in the US; its effort was so lacklustre contemporary campaigners dubbed it ‘silent McCarthyism’.¹³

The formal templates generated by the introduction of PV, however, were to prove versatile instruments for the policing of government employees on other criteria. Concomitant with the development of PV, a number of high-profile scandals involving Foreign Office personnel began to suggest – to the public mind at least – that there were links between sexuality, diplomacy and treason.¹⁴ In the summer of 1951, homosexual Guy Burgess and (alleged) bisexual Donald Maclean defected to the Soviet Union – a scandal that damaged heavily the reputation of the Foreign Office. The revelations instigated a long-running narrative in the popular press about the ‘Cambridge Five’ spies (of whom Burgess and Maclean were two), who passed on state secrets to the Soviet Union during the 1940s and were closely associated with the Foreign Office. Far less attention was paid – both in government and in the popular press – to the ideological sympathies of the Five than to their personal lives. The tabloid press sensationalized every disclosure: Burgess’s promiscuity; claims that Maclean had ‘put it about that he was homosexual’; Kim Philby’s notorious womanizing; John Cairncross’s passion for polygamy.¹⁵ By the early 1960s, the mysterious disappearance of Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb had been linked to sexual ‘perversion’ and gay junior diplomat John Vassall had been photographed having group sex with other men by Soviet operatives and blackmailed.¹⁶ The panic received official endorsement in 1963, when Lord Denning declared in his report into the Profumo affair that he ‘would normally regard homosexual behaviour … as creating a security risk’.¹⁷

The Foreign Office incorporated criteria relating to sexuality into its vetting procedure in 1955, but tabloid sensationalism about upper-class sexual deviancy and susceptibility to treason had ignited a cultural problem that would require more than administrative reform if its consequences were to be contained.¹⁸ Henry Fairlie’s 1955 article for the Spectator magazine, in which he popularized the metaphor ‘the establishment’ in Britain, was an excoriation of the failure at the Foreign Office to deal with Burgess and Maclean.¹⁹ Two years later, journalist and Burgess’s friend Goronwy Rees wrote a scandalous series of articles in the People in which he seemed to capture eloquently the Foreign Office’s problem. As Frank Mort summarized:

[Rees] went on to claim that Burgess’s thirst for sexual adventure had even compromised the inner sanctum of the Foreign Office itself. Taken by Burgess into the Victorian splendour of the Foreign Secretary’s suite, Rees was amazed to find that Burgess kept his personal copy of Kinsey’s Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male in Ernest Bevin’s safe!²⁰

Rees described a ‘secret society’ of homosexuality and treason, where ‘[m]en like Burgess’ maintained social networks by practising ‘the same terrible vices’.²¹ His unmasking as the author of the articles precipitated not only the end of his academic career but also his resignation from the Wolfenden Committee, which had recommended decriminalization of homosexuality between consenting individuals in private in 1957. Rees became personally emblematic of the growing cultural problem the Foreign Office now faced: each revelation in the 1950s and 1960s strengthened in the public mind the assumed interconnections between the state, sexuality, espionage and British elites.

However, the damage to the Foreign Office’s reputation in Britain was arguably less of a concern to officials than the damage to its reputation in the international diplomatic milieu in which it operated. The close political relationship between Britain and the US, developed during the Second World War and carefully cultivated by Labour and Conservative Foreign Secretaries in the late 1940s and 1950s, was jeopardized almost immediately.²² An FBI report disparagingly linked the treachery of Burgess and Maclean to their being ‘a pair of pansies’ in an official report produced in the aftermath of the revelations, and the then secretary of state, Dean Rusk, exploded at the thought that Maclean ‘knew everything’ about the atomic, economic and intelligence secrets shared between London and Washington. Indeed, both Burgess and Maclean had previously been posted to the US capital, and the former, who had been sent to Washington partly to help restore bilateral trust following the nuclear spy scandals involving Klaus Fuchs and Alan Nunn May, had exacerbated the situation by giving full expression to his voracious appetite for alcohol and sexual orgies, compounded by his flamboyant disregard for diplomatic niceties.²³ At a crucial alliance-building stage of the early Cold War, British institutions looked like places in which treachery and enemy espionage could flourish.

However, what concerned the US more was the apparent antipathy – or inability – on the part of their allies to deal with what seemed like inherent problems with the Foreign Office and the security services.²⁴ The main tangible outcome of the Burgess and Maclean revelations was the formation of the Cadogan Committee in 1951, which, although recommending a tightening of PV rules, failed to consider the recruitment practices that Fairlie and others were to critique to such devastating effect.²⁵ Senator Joseph McCarthy’s ‘Red Scare’ across the Atlantic highlighted the scale of British inaction: between 1948 and 1982, over 24,000 American civil servants suspected of communist sympathies were either moved or dismissed altogether. In the same period, the total for the British civil service was just 133.²⁶

Indeed, the fact that the Foreign Office appeared to have a problem with homosexuality was particularly concerning in the US, where, alongside his ‘Red Scare’, McCarthy was orchestrating the so-called ‘Lavender Scare’: a radical attempt in the 1950s and 1960s to purge the US Foreign Service of anyone suspected of homosexuality. Republicans and conservatives were concerned that, as they perceived it, years of New Deal administration had established a large army of bureaucrats in the US civil service who were broadly sympathetic to the politics of the Democratic Party.²⁷ Seeking to regain political influence in an environment in which anti-communist witch hunts were flourishing, conservatives took steps to frame the political uncertainty surrounding the early Cold War in ways that could be exploited in their interests. As Robert Dean put it: ‘Driven by a sense of their own political impotence, conservatives depicted the foreign service as a bureaucracy staffed by effete “cookie-pushing” Ivy League internationalist homosexuals and “pinks”.’²⁸ At a time when biologist Alfred Kinsey controversially claimed in print that as many as one in ten American men might be gay, the narrative that the effeminacy and ungoverned emotions associated with homosexuality posed an internal, destabilizing threat to Western civilization mirrored perfectly the perceived external threat from the communism of the Soviet Union.²⁹

Like its anti-communist counterpart, the so-called ‘purge of the perverts’ was mercilessly prolific. During the two-term Eisenhower presidency, over 400 US diplomats were forced out of their jobs for ‘real or imagined’ homosexuality, and efforts were intensified in 1950 when the State Department hired two ‘full-time “expert” homosexual-hunters’ who sent detailed memoranda to each US mission to help officials to spot a homosexual.³⁰ An eruption of innuendo in popular print media fed on the sheer scale of the operation. By the time Britain changed its laws in 1967, and at a time when only one US state (Illinois) had decriminalized same-sex relations, it is estimated that as many as 1,000 people had been dismissed from the State Department for ‘alleged homosexuality’.³¹ So comprehensive was its reach that the Lavender Scare ironically contrived to smear Joe McCarthy himself, ending his career.³²

When Leo Abse’s Sexual Offences Bill became law in 1967, its effect at the Foreign Office was to illuminate the relationship between British diplomats, the politics of the country they represented and the diplomatic community in which they operated. At home, diplomats had to decide whether partial decriminalization removed the threat of blackmail for gay men; if they could be open with the law, on what basis could they be threatened by hostile intelligence agencies? Overseas, diplomats had to prove to their new close allies, in the context of an increasingly bipolar international order, that they could be trusted to contain Soviet influence.

When it became clear that Abse’s bill was on its way to eventual royal assent, it was this unique institutional quandary that shaped the actions of British diplomats. In December 1965, the head of the British diplomatic service security department travelled to Washington to conduct a full inquiry into policy on homosexuality in the US Foreign Service. Although he did not include a list of his interlocutors or engagements in his final report, it is clear from his findings that this was not an attempt to assess the trustworthiness or capabilities of openly gay diplomats: this was tactical reconnaissance on behalf of a Foreign Office that had decided what to do about openly gay diplomats but had yet to decide how to do it. Aping the methods of the superpower the British government urgently needed to impress seemed, evidently, a wise strategy.

The officer returned to London with high praise for the State Department diplomats with whom he had spoken. He described a ‘very high rate of detection’ at the application stage and added that for those allegedly gay officers already working for the Foreign Service ‘the figures of 43 detected cases last year and about 60 the year before speak for themselves’.³³ Significantly, he noted that the structure of the US system was designed so that the Foreign Service itself, rather than a centralized body like the Civil Service Commission, controlled recruitment. In Britain, because a member of the department to whom a candidate had applied always sat on the so-called Final Selection Board, the last stage in the Whitehall recruitment process, it was quite conceivable that Foreign Office representatives might do more to weed out suspected homosexuals.

The head of security went on to describe American policy in more detail, writing that they ‘have no magic formula’ but instead focused on conducting extensive research into individuals’ backgrounds, using in-house psychiatrists to help interpret their findings. He explained the process:

Great stress is laid upon the building up of detailed background information by neighbourhood inquiry … particular attention is paid not only to any clear signs of sexual aberration … but also to more general indicators – effeminacy, solitariness, psychological quirks of any sort.³⁴

Were British diplomats to establish a clear case that homosexuality constituted a security risk despite its changed legal status, they would have to argue that the risk persisted regardless of whether an individual had ‘come out’ to their family and social network. The above passage indicates that British officials were beginning to develop the notion that homosexuality and diplomatic identity were inherently incompatible.

The official elaborated further, explaining that American methods involved building up

the most complete and detailed picture possible of friends, contacts of all sorts, recreational and drinking habits, bars frequented … This information is kept in a central homosexual intelligence bank and has proved of great assistance in cross-checking on other homosexuals and in developing material on which to conduct an interview.³⁵

Again, the idea of a ‘central homosexual intelligence bank’ from which individuals’ profiles could be cross-checked against set criteria is suggestive of a belief that homosexuality could be essentialized with reference not to sexual intercourse but to character traits relevant to the professional identity of a diplomat.

Indeed, the growing body of research about the Lavender Scare in the US illustrates the extent to which the meanings attributed to an imagined ‘homosexuality’ allowed it to be manipulated so as to exclude gay men and lesbians from government professions. At a time when ‘scientific and popular awareness of the pervert exploded on the American continent’, policy-makers in American institutions quickly equated homosexuality with deficient masculinity in men or excessive masculinity in women.³⁶ Communist sympathies entailed a deliberate choice to switch Cold War allegiance and were presumed to be predicated on at least some intellectual basis, but homosexuality represented a defect of character which made individuals susceptible to lapses in security in the same way alcoholism or loquaciousness might do.³⁷ The relationship between heterosexuality and homosexuality was conceptualized by American civil servants as binary, and an insufficient display of masculinity meant switching from the former to the latter category. As Margot Canaday put it:

The homosexual was … a perverted type whose perversion was defined primarily by gender inversion (mannishness in women and effeminacy in men) rather than by sexual behaviour per se.³⁸

The head of security at the Foreign Office returned from Washington convinced that ‘general indicators’ such as ‘effeminacy’, ‘solitariness’ and ‘psychological quirks’ helped to manage the exclusion of gay men from the US Foreign Service. He had, evidently, internalized a way of defining homosexuality, predicated on an idea of inadequate masculinity, that in his own view was commendably efficient in dealing with a problem he and his colleagues now faced directly. The question, of course, was whether such an approach could be transferred to an international organization representing a different nation state. British diplomats would not only have to define homosexuality in such a way as to link it inherently to security risks; they would have to do so in the political and social context of a nation state which was slowly coming to terms with – and indeed had (partially) legalized – homosexuality.

The report from the head of security met with the initial approval of his diplomatic colleagues, who within months began to devise ways of importing the American methods to Britain. The chief medical officer at the Foreign Office (who also served the civil service more generally) was given a document used by US investigators and asked, with the help of advice from State Department doctors and contemporary psychiatric research, to produce what one official termed a ‘spotting a homosexual checklist’.³⁹ The American list on which he based his counterpart version had been written in 1950, and the British result bore hallmarks of the scale of the panic in the State Department at the height of the Lavender Scare:⁴⁰

Sleep (good, bad. Vivid dreamer).

Appetite (good, bad, indifferent. Interested in food; gourmet).

Eating habits

Smoking habits

Interest in Arts (Theatre, Music, Painting, Literature, Crafts, others)

Practice of arts (as above)

Interest and practice of sport (attainments)

History of:

Temper (judged by candidate himself, and by others)

Depression

Anxiety due to excessive worry

Loss of memory or Amnesia

Bed wetting

Nervous disorder of any sort

Long term use of medicines, tablets, tranquillisers and sleeping drugs.

Drinking habits

Detailed amount of drink, type of drink consumed.

Emotional attachment to:

Mother

Father

Sister(s)

Brother(s)

Schoolfriends

Schoolmasters

Tutors

Men friend(s)

Girl friend(s)

Fiance(e)(s)

Wife (wives)

Describe briefly (maximum 200 words each):

My three greatest emotional experiences

Summary: A happy-go-lucky; meditating; slightly

depressed temperament; Independent – dependent.⁴¹

The most significant feature of the ‘spotting a homosexual checklist’ is that it encompasses individuals’ private lives in their totality. Every aspect of daily life is accounted for: sleeping, eating, personal relationships, emotional experiences, interest in sport or theatre. Lacking is any concrete guidance on particular characteristics that may indicate homosexual tendencies; instead, the checklist served as a psychological search warrant, giving officials the freedom to explore the emotional and personal make-up of individuals and to interpret their findings as they thought appropriate. The function of the policy on homosexuality, at least according to this checklist, was to expand the licence of investigating officers to identify supposed character defects which left applicants, as one diplomat put it, ‘subject to other pressures which render them no less susceptible to approaches from a hostile intelligence agency’.⁴² Clearly, individuals’ personalities and lives in their totality were considered relevant to their ability to perform work on behalf of the state, but what diplomats at the Foreign Office required was a framework through which to ascertain who of their (prospective) colleagues betrayed an untrustworthy character via suspected homosexuality or deficient masculinity.

Just as the State Department had in 1950, the Foreign Office appointed its own ‘homosexual hunter’: a military colonel who had retired as director of personnel at the War Office in the early 1960s. The colonel, who had a ‘security service background’, joined the team of PV investigators, with a special jurisdiction over cases of suspected homosexuality. He would operate as an ordinary investigator but be called upon ‘when a special case is under investigation’.⁴³ The Foreign Office planned to send him to the US to learn about the detection of homosexuality in an environment of ‘much greater professionalism’ in the State Department, after which he would be given the resources to facilitate ‘the formation of a small elite division within the P.V. Section for handling difficult cases’ in London.⁴⁴ The fact that the Foreign Office appointed a military colonel who had worked in intelligence to oversee its bar on gay men and lesbians working for the diplomatic service, combined with the fact that more than one conspicuous research trip had been taken to the State Department, revealed much about the logic and motives behind the policy.

Attitudes to the relationship between the individual and the state across the Atlantic were fundamentally different, however, and the Lavender Scare grew out of a political context which contrasted with that in Britain. As Robert Dean explained:

Though sharpened in the context of the Cold War, both the Red and Lavender Scares were outgrowths of a broader campaign led by members of Congress to halt the expansion of a bureaucracy they had neither the expertise nor the power to control.⁴⁵

The ‘purge of the perverts’ in the US was part of a broader political project to gender federal bureaucracy (and the welfare state it underpinned) so that it could be manipulated and attacked. Conservatives were attempting to redefine political debate along identity lines, where masculinity was equated with moral superiority, and where intellectual ‘cookie-pushing’ liberals were jeopardizing the masculinity required to fight the coming Cold War through an elitist obsession with welfare and bureaucracy.⁴⁶ In Britain, no such political project existed and almost immediately the attempt to construct a system for the identification and eradication of homosexuality ran into difficulties as it was hastily transferred to an immensely dissimilar environment.

The head of the diplomatic service security department, whose praise for the methods of the American Foreign Service had inspired the ‘spotting a homosexual checklist’ and the proposed appointment of the specialist vetting team, was also the first to raise concerns about the viability of the policies he observed in Washington. His report contained serious warnings about the ‘after-care of homosexual cases’ at the State Department, because of the ruthlessness with which careers were ended – often on the basis of minimal evidence. Indeed, his report even suggested the possibility that the American approach was ‘so black-and-white … as to be of little help to us’.⁴⁷ His initial doubts were echoed increasingly by his colleagues, and a year later another official complained that ‘to question in considerable depth a suspect’s sex life’ was unacceptable in Britain, and that in general the proposed ‘methods would not be tolerated in this country to the extent they are in America’.⁴⁸ Two years after his trip to Washington, the head of security was even less convinced of the approach:

[T]he American approach to this business is radically different from our own and the extraordinary degree of probing into people’s private affairs which they evidently undertake as an established routine would be repugnant in this country and would certainly not be tolerated by either candidates for the Diplomatic Service or established members of it …

He would, he added, ‘prefer to avoid unnecessary formality in our arrangements in this peculiarly sensitive sphere’.⁴⁹ Initial enthusiasm for the American approach, then, quickly became a negotiation over the levels of scrutiny necessary to enforce the bar on homosexuality. Diplomats’ reservations did not provoke a change in policy but rather a series of open questions about which aspects of an individual’s life and character could be considered relevant to the PV process. The Foreign Office was now engaged in devising its own nationally, chronologically and institutionally specific archetype of the homosexual it wanted to debar.

Having attempted to build a policy on the basis of making a statement to American allies about an attitudinal shift, after which tighter controls on recruitment would be imposed, British diplomats were now engaged in a conversation among themselves about the type of statement they, as representatives of the Foreign Office and of the British government, were willing, and indeed able, to make. In February 1967, less than six months before the passage of the Sexual Offences Act, the head of personnel wrote to complain about the ‘degree of subjectivity which I have noticed in one or two Field Investigators’ reports’. He acknowledged his colleagues’ ‘strong views on this’, but argued that ‘we are not concerned with the moral angle, only the security one … Assessment of homosexual tendencies is a skilled matter’.⁵⁰ Writing on the eve of the passage of the Sexual Offences Act, his caution around morality illustrates the peculiar sensitivities associated with homosexuality as it took on new social and cultural meanings at the end of the 1960s.

The head of personnel’s arguments in favour of impartial formality were quickly contested. One official replied that it ‘is often very difficult to decide where a moral issue in a case becomes a security problem’,⁵¹ while another stated flatly that ‘I do not agree … that in homosexual cases we are concerned purely with the security and not with the moral aspects of the case’. He went on:

In security terms there is a considerable difference between the homosexual who admits his perversion and is prepared to discuss it as a moral issue and the man who will not admit that he is a homosexual even when confronted with evidence showing that he is.⁵²

In this passage, the diplomat in question began to adjust to a uniquely Foreign Office perspective on homosexuality: distancing himself from the type of judgement that would require evidence about an individual’s private life, he instead focused on the morality of the act of disclosure itself, equating it with the moral character required of trustworthy, loyal British diplomats. The challenge, as another official put it, was to ascertain ‘whether homosexuality in itself should raise a presumption of unfitness … or whether it was only the vulnerability of a homosexual to blackmail or pressure’ that mattered.⁵³

What now concerned diplomats was striking a balance: the admission to the service of individuals liable to duplicity had to be stopped, but at the same time the homosocial bonds of trust – which were easily frayed by excessive intrusion into private sexual habits – had to be maintained. It is tempting to draw parallels between the compromise to which British diplomats tentatively agreed and the bargain struck by soldiers in the US army in the 1990s about the acknowledgement of homosexuality in their institution. Bill Clinton’s administration introduced a policy in 1994 known as ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell!’ by which gay men and lesbians could technically serve in the military (a key campaign promise of Clinton’s) under the tacit agreement that their sexuality was never discussed, acted upon or revealed. Slavoj Žižek offers a reading of the dynamics of this policy that is particularly pertinent here:

One should ask a naïve, but nevertheless crucial question here: why does the Army community so strongly resist publicly accepting gays into its ranks? There is only one possible consistent answer: not because homosexuality poses a threat to the alleged ‘phallic and patriarchal’ libidinal economy of the Army community, but, on the contrary, because the libidinal economy of the Army community itself relies on a thwarted/disavowed homosexuality as the key component of the soldiers’ male bonding.⁵⁴

British diplomats’ unwillingness to adopt intrusive American methods, and their further inability to separate sexual behaviour and its implications from the moral character of individuals, reveals that the bar on homosexuality was at root an exercise in the construction of group identity. Male bonding at the Foreign Office was much more nuanced and elusive than the latent homosexuality described by Žižek in the US army: in Britain, homosocial bonding was predicated on the presumed links between trustworthiness and membership of the diplomatic community, and much less about a specific intolerance of same-sex intercourse itself.⁵⁵

Nowhere is the real crux of the Foreign Office bar on homosexuality better exposed than in diplomats’ discussions about lesbianism. The legislation of 1967 applied only to same-sex relations between men, but while there has never been legislation in Britain explicitly criminalizing relations between women, lesbianism has periodically been invoked as a tool with which to shape legislation concerning sexuality.⁵⁶ The diplomatic service was an overwhelmingly male-dominated hierarchy still coming to terms with its official acceptance of women applicants in 1946, and the construction of female same-sex relations was evidently considered peripheral and is barely mentioned in the archives.⁵⁷ Where it was discussed, however, it served as a foil against which male homosexuality was defined; it served, in fact, as the clearest framework officials were able to construct to guide recruiters and vetters on what was problematic, and therefore unacceptable, about male homosexuality.

Having done no research (at least of which there is surviving evidence) on lesbian identities or lifestyles, diplomats projected imagined characteristics on to imaginary women in order to help make sense of the moral implications, as they saw them, of non-normative sexuality. The first mention came in mid-1967:

I have not specifically mentioned lesbians in this report, but I include them in the term ‘homosexual’ and take it that appropriate action would apply to them equally whenever they come to notice. There is, of course, less likelihood of lesbians coming to notice in the course of P.V. enquiries.⁵⁸

Formally, then, the same bar that applied to men would apply to women. Already, however, the official writing this minute had made a crucial distinction, asserting that lesbianism was more easily concealed than male homosexuality and, although forbidden, was therefore less likely to present itself as a problem in the PV process.

What was it, then, that allowed such a distinction to be made? Put simply, while diplomats were unable to countenance intrusion into their colleagues’ private lives, they were more than comfortable with the idea that only when it manifested itself as personality and lifestyle was homosexuality unacceptable. In this way, moral judgements about sex lives were unnecessary; attention was focused instead on the compatibility of an individual with the basic requirements of diplomatic professional identity. For British diplomats, there were important differences in the ability of gay men and lesbians to comply with such requirements. ⁵⁹

Twelve months after the security department had proclaimed lesbianism less of a risk to the integrity of the PV system than male homosexuality, officials were beginning to elaborate on exactly what was meant by this claim. One senior diplomat wrote that while the possibility of blackmail could not be discounted, lesbians ‘tended to be less promiscuous than male homosexuals, more stable in their relationships, and therefore on the whole less vulnerable to pressure’.⁶⁰ In 1974, a First Secretary in the security department wrote to ask for clarification on what policy had been agreed upon in previous discussions: ‘How seriously, in a security context, do we regard practising Lesbianism as opposed to male homosexuality?’⁶¹ A colleague assured him that in the case of lesbians, ‘in general her vulnerability is probably less than that of the male homosexual’, because lesbians were ‘less promiscuous’, ‘more emotionally stable’, and ‘less likely to give rise to gossip’ than gay men.⁶² The key admission, however, read as follows:

if, for example, the individual has a stable relationship about which she is perfectly open, both at work and among her friends and family, it may be possible, all other things being equal, to consider her employment on classified work in the UK.⁶³

Here was a plain concession that neither same-sex relations, nor the supposed social stigma they entailed, were the core driver of Foreign Office policy on homosexuality. Rather, the stability of an individual’s relationships and the openness with which they were conducted both at work and among friends was the issue. Their assumptions about lesbianism, then, allowed diplomats to convince themselves that while all private life was the business of the state, only some manifestations of it – and here lesbianism was the boundary – were relevant to whether an individual could successfully conform with diplomatic identity.

The passage of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967 forced British diplomats to confront a number of questions about their collective professional identity. Was it compatible with homosexuality? If not, what was it specifically about same-sex relations that made gay men unsuitable for work at the Foreign Office? To what extent could the state be permitted to go in policing the types of people it employed? And how could any of these questions be answered effectively within an institutional context shaped and limited by the society it represented and recruited from, and the dynamics of the Cold War geopolitics in which it operated? The solutions to these questions came in two phases: first, an attempt to demonstrate competence to wary American allies by aping State Department techniques of associating homosexuality with weakness of character and deficient masculinity; second, an assertion that character, not sexuality, was the relevant factor in PV assessments and that diplomats themselves would have to negotiate which aspects of character could, and should, be measured.

The creative process in which diplomats had to engage to organize a set of meanings around the idea of homosexuality so that it could plausibly be debarred demonstrated something of the nature of the social and political transitions that Britain faced at the end of the 1960s. Yet more than this it demonstrated in microcosm the construction of an idea of sexuality: a diplomatic ‘moral panic’ inculcated an urgent need to define homosexuality, and those definitions were then shaped by cultural and moral assumptions thought essential to British diplomatic identity. As this chapter has shown, those assumptions were unique to the institutional history of the Foreign Office.

There can be no general history of sexuality without first building, from the ‘bottom-up’, a genealogy of its associated terms and concepts. The geographical, social, cultural and historical contexts in which meanings are attached to sexualities are neither incidental nor tangential, they are fundamental to the development of the politics and culture of sex in post-war Britain. Homosexuality, as a concept, was qualitatively different in the US State Department and the British Foreign Office. Ideas about sexualities therefore exist as a vast kaleidoscope of subtly different assumptions and meanings, and only through a critical examination of the particular can historians understand better the general picture.

Thus, this chapter prompts a number of questions for future research. How should historians write the history of institutions, like the Foreign Office, the BBC or private companies, if they are to pay due attention to the role they play in the cultural construction of sexuality and other similar concepts? What would a general history of, say, lesbianism look like, were a range of varied institutional histories considered? What is the relationship between such institutional histories, and how should historians approach the subtle parallels and discontinuities between them? Or a history of the Foreign Office itself, as an elite institution, and the role it plays in shaping histories of class, gender and race? The bar on homosexuality in the British diplomatic service lasted just twenty-four years, from 1967 to 1991, but its impact and legacy are as yet far from understood.