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Law and Justice in the 1950s: 9. The Wolfenden Report, homosexuality and women

Law and Justice in the 1950s
9. The Wolfenden Report, homosexuality and women

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Notes

table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Series
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Contents
  6. Notes on contributors
  7. Introduction
  8. 1. Shaking up the Savoy
  9. 2. The Great London Smog of 1952: its consequences and contemporary relevance
  10. 3. Direct line to Beeching and beyond? The failure of the 1950s railway modernisation plan
  11. 4. Professor Gower, complacent academics and legal education
  12. 5. A university in (or of) Wales? Vaisey’s folly and St David’s College, Lampeter
  13. 6. Radio, The Listener and The Times: lessons from the 1950s in the public understanding of law
  14. 7. Divorce law reform and feminism in the 1950s
  15. 8. Mrs Gladys Hutchinson, Lord Upjohn and the case of the bankrupt ‘spendthrift … ne’er-do-well and … waster’
  16. 9. The Wolfenden Report, homosexuality and women
  17. Index

Chapter 9 The Wolfenden Report, homosexuality and women

Caroline Derry

Introduction

In 1957, the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, better known as the Wolfenden Committee, published its report.1 That publication retains a higher profile than many other legal developments of the 1950s thanks to its cultural as well as legal effects. Although the two cannot be separated, the primary focus of this chapter is on the legal consequences in England and Wales. In considering these, it argues that the story of the Wolfenden Report is one of silences: broken, created or maintained.

Silence might not seem the most obvious lens through which to view the Wolfenden Report since it is credited with introducing new language and a new approach to the law of sexual offences. Most obviously, legislation implementing the committee’s recommendations created offences which remained in force for the remainder of the century. More profoundly, the Wolfenden Report encouraged the shift to a liberal approach for sexual offences law which remains influential in the Sexual Offences Act 2003. However, this chapter will establish that the report was not a singular moment of rupture but part of a much longer story. That history diverges from another liberal legal narrative: one of legal history as a story of inevitable progress. This is not the reality; indeed, the report’s own liberalism was partial and inconsistent. Rather than being straightforwardly progressive, it established a model of law reform which depends overtly on liberal principles while covertly maintaining heteronormativity and the sexual double standard. In doing so, it helped prepare the ground for subsequent backlash as well as advances in lesbian and gay rights. Its contribution to the law on prostitution represented no progress at all.

When Wolfenden reported, prostitution was not illegal but surrounding activities such as soliciting and brothel-keeping were. The legal landscape for sexual offences was highly gendered and highly discriminatory. Sex between men was completely illegal, whatever form it took. It occupied an ambiguous position in legal culture as both expressly prohibited (and therefore publicly prosecuted), and subject to a judicial performance of silence. Sex between a man and a woman or two women was legal provided there was consent, and consent was only legally valid if given by a person over sixteen. Within that general rule there were various subtleties: penis-in-vagina sex was given special status in terms of both factual consent and age of consent through specific offences of rape and unlawful sexual intercourse respectively. Sex between women was regulated not only by an indecent assault offence but also by a determined legal silencing of its possibility, a centuries-old approach which had reached its apogee under the Victorians. It depended upon a sharp differentiation between active, desiring masculine sexuality and submissive, undesiring female sexuality. The latter left little space for women to discover lesbianism for themselves but made criminalisation a dangerous source of publicity for this forbidden knowledge. Despite some apparent cracks in the wall of silence in the 1920s, courts and legislators had been quick to reinforce it and it was still standing in the 1950s.

In this context, John Wolfenden was seen as a safe choice to chair the committee: he was vice-chancellor of Reading University and with a ‘reputation as a diligent public servant’. (Probably unknown to those who appointed him was that his own son Jeremy was openly homosexual.)2 Wolfenden was joined on the committee by fourteen colleagues, a mixture of lawyers, doctors, theologians and politicians. Only three were women: Mary Cohen, vice-president of the Scottish Association of Mixed Clubs and Girls’ Clubs; Kathleen Lovibond, chair of Uxbridge Juvenile Magistrates’ Court; and Lady (Lily) Stopford, ophthalmologist and magistrate.3 In keeping with the continued silences around homosexuality in particular, the committee was a departmental one meaning that unlike a Royal Commission, its proceedings were held in private.

The Wolfenden Report’s recommendations on prostitution were soon given effect in the Street Offences Act 1959. This chapter considers them briefly but focuses primarily upon the part of the Report addressing homosexual offences, especially its implications for women. The Report is well-known for its recommendation that sexual activity between men should be partially decriminalised; this was eventually given legal effect by the Sexual Offences Act 1967. Academic analysis has also established its importance in importing the concepts of (male) ‘homosexuality’ and ‘the homosexual’ into the law of England and Wales. Its significance for legal understandings of women’s same-sex relationships is less obvious, since it made no recommendations on these, and statute law governing sex between women was not changed. Indeed, ‘female homosexuality’ receives only passing mention in the Report. Nonetheless, this chapter argues that Wolfenden was a watershed moment for the regulation of sex between women, responding to as well as helping shape the changing public perceptions of it. Lesbianism had previously been understood as a distinct phenomenon but ‘female homosexuality’ was now reconceptualised as parallel to, but less prevalent, less troublesome, and less sexual than, male homosexuality. Silencing did not disappear, but it took on a new socio-legal flavour. The Wolfenden Report was therefore a key moment of transformation in the wider approach of courts, Parliament, and broader campaigns whose repercussions continue to be felt today in both law and wider culture.

Prostitution

The Wolfenden Committee had originally been established to consider the law on prostitution. Its recommendations in this area took a straightforward approach: prostitution was to be regulated as a matter of public nuisance. That neatly addressed the reasons for government concern which had prompted the report: perceptions that visible street prostitution was increasing; lobbying from local authorities as well as moral reformers; and sensationalist coverage in the press which reached its height in what Julia Laite has termed the 1953 ‘Coronation year panic’.4 Indeed, the Wolfenden Committee’s recommendations corresponded with the wishes of the government which had commissioned it.5

The formulation of law’s role as being the prevention of harm in the public realm, not the policing of private morality, was a new development here as it was for homosexuality. However, the existing law had not been based upon a single approach.6 Prominent and influential campaigns had challenged the sexual double standard which condemned women for extra-marital sex, commercial or not, while condoning it for men. Organisations led by Josephine Butler in the later nineteenth century and Alison Neilans in the first half of the twentieth opposed state regulation of prostitution while favouring proper age of consent protections for young women.7 They achieved notable legislative successes including the raising of the age of consent for sexual activity with girls to sixteen, and the 1886 repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts 1864, 1866 and 1869 which had allowed police in military towns to order women to undergo forcible examination and treatment for sexually transmitted infections (STIs).8

To achieve reform, these feminist organisations worked alongside ‘social purity’ associations which favoured a moralistic, even punitive approach to sexual immorality among both men and women. Legal coercion, however, was not always based upon moral justifications. The Contagious Diseases Acts had been rooted in medical justifications, while twentieth-century enthusiasm for eugenics generated new public health anxieties even as two world wars revived concerns about the effects of STIs upon the armed forces. And the notion of prostitution as a public order issue was inherent in legal terminology such as ‘disorderly houses’,9 latterly perpetuated by police evidence that ‘brazen’ street prostitution had increased since the Second World War.10

In fact, the Wolfenden Report shows the continuing influence of all these approaches. Liberalism hardly prevailed but made intermittent and uneven appearances. It emerged most clearly in the presentation of prostitution as women’s free choice, made on liberalism’s ‘level playing field’, rather than the result of economic necessity or coercion.11 By contrast, the harm principle was watered down to encompass conventional morality: ‘the right of the normal, decent citizen to go about the streets without affront to his or her sense of decency’.12 The report recommended that the derogatory terminology of ‘common prostitutes’ was maintained.13 Its insistence that women, not men, were ‘cluttering up the street’ and needed regulation ensured the sexual double standard remained intact.14 Feminist representations from the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene and others had been heard by the committee, but not listened to.15 Women in prostitution were not only legally but literally silenced by the committee’s activity: of all their many and varied witnesses, not one had worked as a prostitute.16

The report’s conformity with established approaches, and the willingness of a male-dominated Conservative government to locate women as the root of the ‘problem’ of street prostitution, meant that the recommendations were relatively quickly enacted as the Street Offences Act 1959.17 This legislation made soliciting easier to prove and punishable by higher penalties. The consequence was a legal regime which policed and punished women who sold sexual services, but not the men who bought them. The Wolfenden Report had presented this as a liberal proposal which did not criminalise private immorality but focused upon public nuisance. In reality, it cast at most a liberal veneer over longstanding and deeply problematic approaches. Laite goes further and suggests that it ‘facilitated a crack-down on prostitution in the street, which directly involved the overturning of long-standing liberal principles that had prevented such legal changes … in the past’.18 The offensive terminology of ‘common prostitute’, the empowerment of policemen to impose cautions without due process protections, and the focus upon women who loitered rather than the men who approached them would have been familiar to the Victorians. In summary, it meant a retrenchment of the sexual double standard which feminists had been fighting since the nineteenth century.

Homosexuality

The proposals on homosexuality were more obviously novel than those on prostitution. They were on their face models of post-war social liberalisation. The Wolfenden Report’s main recommendation in relation to homosexual offences was for limited decriminalisation of sex between men. A popular interpretation of this is that it was a liberatory moment, a harbinger of the swinging sixties, and the start of the law’s liberal approach to sexual offences. Indeed, it did help end a long history of complete prohibition – and it based its recommendations in part upon the liberal harm principle, which has become the guiding principle for sexual offences today. In that sense, it was the starting point of a legal liberalisation which culminated in the Sexual Offences Act 2003’s commitment to non-discrimination.

However, academic research has for some time taken a more nuanced and critical view of the Wolfenden Report.19 In fact, the report’s recommendations did not so much mark sustained progress in the law’s development as herald a shift in direction. And that direction was not a straightforwardly progressive one – for either men or women.

Male homosexuality

Sex between men had occupied a legally paradoxical position for centuries. It had been explicitly criminalised since the Buggery Act 1533;20 yet prosecutions emphasised its supposed unspeakability as a crime ‘not to be named amongst Christians’.21 Law reform had occupied an equally awkward position. It was not a twentieth-century innovation: Charles Upchurch has demonstrated that both the death penalty and the existence of the offence itself were live issues in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, several MPs drew upon the work of Jeremy Bentham among others to campaign (albeit discreetly) to mitigate the severity of the law.22 Their arguments were distinct from those of the wider movement to reduce the number of crimes punishable by death. They were not successful, and indeed the definition of the offence was widened in 1826 when the need to prove emission of seed was removed. As Upchurch emphasises, these events also show that the history of law reform is not one of ‘ “Whiggish” advance toward greater toleration’ but a more complex, contingent process dependent upon factors including ‘reformist momentum, familial affection, elitist politics, class privilege, Enlightenment philosophy, and personal desires’ (a summary as true for the Wolfenden Report and its consequences as for the events of the early nineteenth century).23 The death penalty for sodomy was finally, and quietly, abolished in 1861 having already gone unused since 1835,24 but at the cost of new minimum sentences for sodomy and attempted sodomy.25

The nineteenth-century parliamentary debates on sex between men were not made fully public; the records in Hansard are brief and without detail.26 That has caused its own confusion which persists into recent historical work, not least around the infamous Labouchere amendment of 1885.27 This provision created the offence of gross indecency between males, punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment. It has been seen as a repressive move which criminalised any sexual touching between men. In fact, such conduct had already been prosecuted throughout the nineteenth century as assault or attempted sodomy.28 The maximum penalty for these offences had been raised by the 1861 Act to ten years’ imprisonment. Given that context, Upchurch persuasively argues that the Labouchere amendment was an attempt to return the law on non-penetrative activity to the pre-1861 situation, where the maximum penalty was two years’ imprisonment.29 Further support for that argument comes from an 1888 consultation on sentencing for unnatural offences: the covering memorandum notes this issue was originally raised by Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt in 1882.30 While the consultation was mainly concerned with bestiality, at least one judge supported substantially reducing the minimum sentence of ten years’ imprisonment for buggery between men where the defendant was young.31 Yet the century ended with the prosecution of Oscar Wilde for gross indecency in 1895 and new enthusiasm for repression. The reforms of the nineteenth century therefore cannot be simplistically reduced to part of a steady history of progress leading through the Wolfenden Report and to the present: they were more complex than that.

The genesis of the Wolfenden Committee was equally complex. There had been drastic increases in post-war conviction rates for gross indecency. A wave of high-profile defendants (including actor John Gielgud and MP William Field in 1953 and Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, his cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers, and journalist Peter Wildeblood in 1954) had attracted significant press attention. The ruling-class response was to seek to silence such cases: either by press censorship, as favoured by Winston Churchill,32 or by partial decriminalisation to keep them out of the courts and press.33 Unable to treat this issue as less of a ‘problem’ than prostitution, the Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe reluctantly added homosexuality to Wolfenden’s terms of reference.34 The choice to make the Wolfenden Committee a departmental one whose proceedings were private is a further reminder that the silencing impulse remained powerful.

The report itself introduced the terminology of homosexuality, homosexual acts and homosexual offences into the law. In that sense, it breached the silence around homosexual identities. Indeed, as Leslie Moran argues, it went further and created a legal identity for ‘the homosexual’.35 Yet its rationale for doing so was rooted in the idea that liberalisation of the law would make homosexuality less, not more, visible: in other words, it was a silencing strategy. Blanket criminalisation had created noisy scandals; by decriminalising such behaviour in the private domain, homosexuality could be removed from the public sphere. It would then go unseen and unheard by the wider public.

To achieve this, the report recommended a cautious decriminalisation, whose version of the harm principle hardly amounted to a ringing endorsement of gay liberation: ‘there must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business’.36 The proposed relaxation of the law was highly constrained in scope and hedged with justifications, aiming to allow homosexuality to be treated and contained rather than to proliferate. Accordingly, the harm principle itself was highly qualified: the criminal law could intervene to ‘preserve public order and decency’ and should ‘protect the citizen from what is offensive or injurious’.37 That conceptualisation of offence as a relevant harm pervaded the recommendations. In common with the proposals on prostitution, this part of the Wolfenden Report aimed to silence what was immoral or offensive in the public domain.

The publication of the report, which sold in considerable numbers, might have seemed to shatter rather than support silence around homosexuality. The reality was that the subject continued to occupy an ambiguous position in legal discourse: publicly condemned and performatively silenced, often in the same breath. There was much governmental coyness about promoting reform in parliament, meaning that legislation implementing the Wolfenden Committee’s recommendations took a decade to be passed. In 1967, Labour MP Leo Abse’s determination met support from a Labour Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, although both support for and opposition to law reform crossed party lines.38 Abse’s Freudian-inspired motivation, described as ‘eccentric’ by Kate Gleeson, was converted into strategic arguments resonating with Wolfenden’s: partial decriminalisation would allow the focus to be on prevention rather than punishment.39 As Abse urged fellow MPs, ‘Surely, what we should be preoccupied with is the question of how we can, if it is possible, reduce the number of faulty males in the community.’40 Even put in such terms, reform met considerable opposition – not least from the man who commissioned the Wolfenden Report, David Maxwell-Fyfe, who now sat in the House of Lords as Lord Kilmuir.

The consequence was that the limitations on decriminalisation proposed by Wolfenden were enthusiastically embraced and elaborated by legislators and courts. That is apparent in the reinterpretation of the recommendation that homosexual acts between men were only to be decriminalised if performed in private. In the Wolfenden Report, ‘private’ was not defined but assumed to have the same meaning as for heterosexual behaviour (which is legal unless public decency is outraged, requiring the existence of potential witnesses and permitting many public displays of affection).41 In the subsequent law, ‘private’ was exceptionally narrowly defined, effectively limited to a situation where only two men were present in the premises and there was no real prospect of their being joined or observed by anyone else.42 This version of privacy was very different to that of classic liberalism’s public/private divide, where the whole of the domestic sphere was to be protected from legal interference. The law therefore assumed (as the notorious section 28 would later make explicit) that homosexuality was incompatible with family and the domestic.43 Decriminalisation was effectively a new method of silencing: homosexual acts were to be kept strictly out of public view and, provided that that condition was met, the high-profile prosecutions seen in the 1950s would be avoided.

This emphasis upon decriminalisation as containing rather than liberating gay men was given a medical rationale by the Wolfenden Report, although that was apparently largely strategic. There was certainly no consensus among witnesses to the Wolfenden Committee – or parliamentarians – on key medical features of homosexuality such as its causes or curability. Nonetheless, medical evidence was used in the report to suggest that decriminalisation would encourage gay men to seek treatment, and indeed to recommend a shift from punishment to the development of treatment programmes: an aspect not adopted by parliament.44 (The courts did sometimes pass individual sentences requiring medical treatment to be obtained.)45 They were more enthusiastic about the use of medical arguments to justify imposing an age of consent of twenty-one, substantially higher than the age of sixteen for other sexual activity. This higher age limit was embraced by parliamentarians and remained part of the law, actively supported by a significant proportion of MPs and peers, until equalisation in 2000.46 Wolfenden, then, shaped the law on sex between men for the remainder of the century – although only after a slow start and significant parliamentary innovations.

Female homosexuality was used as a comparator in Parliament in the years that followed publication of the Wolfenden Report, with some parliamentarians even suggesting fuller decriminalisation of male homosexuality so that it could take ‘its dreary place side by side with lesbianism or adultery’.47 However, such arguments were unsuccessful and the eventual legislation broadly matched Wolfenden’s recommendations. Since one necessary concession would be a higher age of consent, the female comparator was allowed to quietly disappear when the appropriate age for sex between men was debated.48 Silence descended once more for the female homosexual and took on a new form for the male. Legislators made it clear that even this partial and grudging decriminalisation was not an invitation to openness but to public silence:

I ask one thing and I ask it earnestly. I ask those who have, as it were, been in bondage and for whom the prison doors are now open to show their thanks by comporting themselves with dignity. This is no occasion for jubilation; certainly not for celebration. Any form of ostentatious behaviour now, or in the future, any form of public flaunting, would be utterly distasteful and would, I believe, make the sponsors of the bill regret that they have done what they have done.49

The criminal justice system took this request to heart. Prosecutions for offences in public rose considerably in the years after the Sexual Offences Act 1967.50 The courts enthusiastically enforced the silence Wolfenden demanded, reviving and expanding the offence of conspiracy to corrupt public morals.51 Repressive silence was being quickly and firmly reasserted by the criminal justice system.

The Sexual Offences Act 1967 remained in force for the remainder of the century. (It was however amended in 1994 to lower the age of consent to eighteen, and in 2000 to equalise it.)52 Wolfenden’s effects were, then, somewhat mixed in this context. Although some sexual activity between men was decriminalised, the limitations suggested by the report and then enshrined in law had lasting consequences. First, the narrow scope of decriminalisation left many men engaging in sex with each other vulnerable to prosecution. For example, many working-class men lived in shared accommodation or as lodgers so did not have access to wholly ‘private’ premises within the stringent terms of the law. Second, the reforms were founded upon, and therefore reinforced, a rationale of fundamental inequality which entrenched the presumed inferiority of homosexual to heterosexual acts.

Female homosexuality

The deeper silence which had been legally imposed upon sex between women was hardly disturbed by the Wolfenden Report. Rather, it was to continue as before although its underpinning conceptualisation was somewhat troubled. Women’s sexuality, hitherto depicted as opposite to men’s (submissive to men’s dominance, undesiring except in response to male desire) was treated in the Wolfenden Report as awkwardly parallel to it. That shift was incomplete and clumsy since the report portrayed female homosexuality not as fully equivalent to its male counterpart but as a pale shadow of it. Indeed, the report’s liberalism was fundamental to this, achieving significantly gendered effects through its emphasis upon the public/private divide. In classic liberalism, the private was not only the realm of the family but also specifically feminised as women’s sphere of action and responsibility. By contrast, men’s activity was normatively in the public sphere, with home a space of refuge and retreat. In the absence of the normative wife and children, it was more: a place of secrecy where the public world of law and politics should not intrude. Wolfenden’s association of privacy with concealment resonated with the report’s – and the wider criminal justice system’s – approach to regulating sex between women.

They were supported in this by the lesser social visibility of women’s same-sex relationships. The line between close friendship and a lesbian relationship was generally not easy for outside observers to discern.53 There were social and legal pressures to prefer the former interpretation;54 Agatha Christie, for example, included a sympathetic lesbian couple in her detective novel A Murder is Announced, but the nature of their relationship was never overtly mentioned.55 When such careful unknowing proved impossible, the ‘unnatural’ lesbian was viewed through the lens of heterosexuality as a ‘marriage-breaker’.56 That was a particularly damaging representation given the reassertion of women’s domestic role in the post-war years.57 Explicitly lesbian activism was barely beginning to emerge: the leading group would not be formed until 1964 under the deliberately vague name of the Minorities Research Group.58 Cultural change was already happening, though: ‘pulp’ novels depicting a ‘twilight world’ of lesbian relationships became available in the 1950s,59 and clubs including the famous Gateways in West London existed for women who were able – and brave enough – to visit them.60

However, in creating a new legal category of ‘homosexuality’ with both ‘male’ and ‘female’ variants, the Wolfenden Committee fundamentally altered the way in which sex between women was understood by the criminal justice system. While its recommendations were focused entirely upon male homosexuality, the committee had been careful to assert that female homosexuality also fell within its remit. The Home Office had supplied a list of offences relevant to its terms of reference, all involving sex between men,61 but the committee itself added indecent assault of a female by a female to the list.62 That decision and its consequences were a crucial moment in the regulation of lesbianism since for the first time it was being officially treated as parallel to male homosexuality.

Nonetheless, the report silenced the female homosexual as soon as it had constructed her. It asserted that there was no need to make recommendations for her regulation, since she was already relegated firmly to the innermost spaces of the private realm. Indeed, the Wolfenden Report went further than simply not recommending changes to regulation of sex between women. Female and male homosexuality were equated only to immediately be carefully distinguished, with the female variant effectively dismissed. It was barely mentioned in the body of the report. A brief reference to convictions of women for indecently assaulting females suggested that they were less ‘libidinous’ in nature than men’s offences, ‘due in the main to the practice of including in the figures relating to any particular offence not only those convicted of the offence itself, but also those convicted of aiding and abetting the commission of the offence’.63 While that was a reference to most convictions of women being based upon accessorial liability for men’s sexual acts, it left the impression that women lacked much in the way of sexual agency: the Victorian model of sexuality which underpinned the sexual double standard was being reasserted. Despite the implication that a minority of cases involved women as principal offenders, nothing more was said about them. In consequence, the law on same-sex activity between women remained unchanged: that is to say, there was no specific prohibition, but it was governed by other provisions including the law on indecent assault as well as the repressive socio-legal effects of silencing.

The committee’s proceedings show that the report’s dismissal and subsequent silence were neither inadvertent omissions nor due to a lack of interest or information. The evidence heard by the committee is preserved in the National Archives: boxes of transcripts, memoranda and letters which not only provided the material for the committee’s report but also complicate its account. They show that a significant proportion of witnesses discussed the prevalence, nature, or legal position of lesbianism, either of their own volition or in response to questions from committee members.64 Two key elements to such evidence are apparent. First, the committee members were keen to ask professional witnesses – doctors and criminal justice professionals, for example – about how prevalent they thought lesbianism was and how it compared to male homosexuality. They solicited memoranda from the War Office and the British Medical Association (whose section on lesbianism was written by the Medical Women’s Federation).65 The underlying concern was whether female homosexuality could be sufficiently distinguished from male homosexuality to justify its very different legal position. It seemed that it could not: evidence was contradictory, with witnesses variously asserting that female homosexuality was less prevalent and less problematic;66 similarly prevalent and harmful;67 or even more harmful.68

Second, witnesses themselves frequently drew a parallel between men and women, invoking the unfairness of their different legal positions. Co-authors Hugh Klare of the Howard League and prison visitor F.E. Baker highlighted that this injustice was not only well known to homosexual men (‘every single one of them who came up to us – and some of them were guilty of other offences, they were not just homosexual offenders – brought this point out’),69 but was a barrier to their rehabilitation because ‘if it is presented to the homosexual that there are moral reasons for ruling out homosexual conduct that completely falls to the ground if it is applied to only one sex and not the other’.70 Committee members were unsympathetic to such arguments, pointing out that parity could also be achieved by criminalising acts between women.71

That rejection of equality as a rationale for reform was crucial to the report’s approach. Most obviously and pragmatically, complete decriminalisation would have been politically impossible to achieve at that point. Even the more conservative and limited reforms proposed in the report took a decade to win parliamentary acceptance. In order to advocate for these without admitting the inequality which underpinned them, a distinction had to be drawn between male and female homosexuals. The evidence offered to the committee did little to support such a distinction so the report instead evaded it by downplaying lesbianism.

In doing so, it drew upon wider legal approaches of legal silencing. Thus the complicated manipulation of silence took on another manifestation. Women prostitutes were to be silenced in the public sphere but remain available to men in private. Male homosexuality was to be controlled and contained through silence in the public sphere which, proponents insisted, would equate to lower prevalence: a modern variation on the old legal claim to be punishing a crime ‘not to be mentioned’. Female homosexuality was already silenced; the proceedings of the committee as well as their final report were based on an insistence that it was to remain in the private realm.

In order to achieve this, the Wolfenden Report acknowledged the existence of lesbianism, but immediately dismissed its significance and sexual nature. Lesbianism therefore became briefly visible simply to be rendered invisible again. Wolfenden thus executed a sort of double manoeuvre, tying lesbianism to male homosexuality – which had not been the previous legal position – while simultaneously differentiating it as a less troublesome, less sexual sort of homosexuality than the male variety.

The consequences of women being silenced in this way have persisted long past the Wolfenden Report’s direct influence, as discussions of sexual offences law have continued to focus upon sex between men while sex between women is treated as a milder version of it or simply ignored. That can be dangerous. For example, there has been an age of consent for sexual activity between women since 1880, set at sixteen since 1922. However, the myth that there was no age of consent between lesbians persisted into the twenty-first century, including in some apparently authoritative sources.72 Young women were thus unknowingly exposed to the risk of prosecution, which was by no means hypothetical.73 Only in the later stages of the campaign to lower the age of consent for sex between men, when equality became a dominant and achievable aim, did the existence of a lesbian age of consent also become taken for granted – since it fell within ‘sixteen for everyone’ rather than getting any consideration in its own right.

Subsequently, the passage of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 involved little consideration of sex between women. The consequences included that, for example, the initial sentencing guidelines suggested very high sentences based on a rather mechanical analysis of sexual acts which was ill-suited to such cases.74 The lack of explicit discussion of lesbian equality has also left judges able to treat lesbian desire as a problem when faced with it in the courtroom. That is apparent, for example, in the awkward approach to ‘gender fraud’ cases where someone legally female is accused of deceiving a woman into sexual activity. Defendants have expressed often complex and confused identities, with confusion around sexuality and gender identity, while complainants have described a range of harms. Nonetheless, the courts have focused upon treating these events as occurring between women and thus threatening the complainant’s heterosexuality. Further, they have established them as forming one of the rare situations where a deception will vitiate consent. The rationale for this is that the difference between lesbian sex and heterosex – even where the specific physical acts are identical – is more significant than the differences between almost any heterosexual encounters.75 Lesbian sexuality is thus treated as dangerously inferior to heterosexuality. That was implicit in R v. Lee, where the defendant was accepted to be a trans man: the judge emphasised that Lee’s motivation being to save the relationship rather than ‘a ruse to practise lesbian behaviour’ was significant mitigation.76

Conclusion

In summary, the Wolfenden Report was at least as concerned with imposing and maintaining silences as with genuine liberalisation. It did indeed secure some relaxation of the law on sex between men but at a high price. The harm principle was compromised to encompass affronts to normative moral or social attitudes as relevant harms, and the law on sexual offences has not entirely shaken off that inconsistency.77 Homosexuality became a fixed identity defined by doctors and courts. For gay men, their inferior legal status was explicitly confirmed and embedded for another half century. The price of decriminalisation was the reframing of male homosexuality – and by implication, lesbianism – as a medical issue for which treatment should be sought, or a matter of pity and toleration. There was little scope in this imaginary for bisexuality, fluidity or, indeed, coming out in later adulthood. For lesbian women, there was a shift from earlier efforts to keep lesbianism entirely invisible to a grudging acknowledgement of its existence – but in a context where homosexuality was coded as male. Female homosexuality was brought into official being only to be immediately dismissed as a paler, less sexual, less significant version of male homosexuality in which the subjectivities, needs and experiences of lesbians needed no separate consideration. In other words, it was no longer wholly silenced but a near-silence was nonetheless achieved by ensuring that it was overshadowed by the male. That overshadowing of women’s sexuality has persisted into the present: for example, Matthew Waites has demonstrated that the notion of a ‘lesbian age of consent’ arose only as a comparator in debates around the age of consent for sex between men.78 It continues to make the disadvantages and discrimination experienced by women in same-sex relationships invisible in many of the contexts where our rights are determined.

Women also suffered the consequences of Wolfenden’s superficially liberal approach to prostitution offences. The focus upon public harms rather than morality did nothing to address the sexual double standard. Instead, it defined women’s soliciting as a problem for public order without doing the same for men’s importuning. That was not novel: some of the most repressive policing of women had been done under the guise of protecting the public from sexually transmitted infections. The Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s were effectively repeated during the First and Second World Wars when Regulation 40D and Regulation 33b respectively allowed compulsory examination and treatment of women accused of spreading sexually transmitted infections.79

Wolfenden was not a clean break with the past, then; nor have we broken away from it in the twenty-first century. Certainly, some of its distinctive features have been reformed. The complex differentiations between heterosexuality and homosexuality, heterosexual privacy and homosexual privacy, and male and female sexuality upon which its recommendations depended no longer shape the various sexual offences. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 shares the Wolfenden Report’s commitment to classic liberalism tinged with moralism, but takes formal equality rather than the public/private divide as its central mechanism. Thus gender neutrality is one of its key principles, meaning most offences can now be committed by and against people regardless of their sex. The age of consent is uniformly sixteen regardless of the sex of those involved (although it rises to eighteen in certain situations involving breach of trust).

The silences around sexuality that the Wolfenden Report maintained, adjusted or established are no longer a socially tenable aim but they persist in subtler forms. The emphasis upon heteronormative privacy is subtly reasserted through the offence of sexual activity in a public lavatory, which criminalises conduct already illegal but associated primarily with sex between men.80 Sex between women, having gone from forcibly silenced to formally equal, is present in law only ‘implicitly’.81 It has still not entered legal consciousness as something of significance in its own right: lesbian subjectivities were not considered in the passage of the Act.82

Similarly, the law on soliciting has lost its overtly discriminatory terminology of ‘common prostitutes’. Offences which criminalise those buying rather than selling sexual services have been introduced.83 Nonetheless, law enforcement – and social censure – fall disproportionately upon women who sell sex rather than men who buy it, even if there is now an emphasis upon ‘routes out of prostitution’ rather than prosecution.84 The use of civil or quasi-civil measures such as anti-social behaviour injunctions perpetuates Wolfenden’s emphasis upon public nuisance as the decisive factor.

It would, however, be a mistake to consider the effects of the Wolfenden Report in terms of the criminal law alone. Contrary to the intentions of those involved, it did in fact provide encouragement for lesbian and gay activism. In the 1960s, many campaigners’ aims shifted from cautious reform to substantive equality. By the 1970s, the Gay Liberation Movement and Women’s Liberation Movement were overtly and effectively countering the silencing of same-sex relationships and challenging heteropatriarchal norms.85 John Wolfenden himself, writing in 1976, noted that his recommendations of twenty years earlier now seemed ‘Victorian’ to young people.86

In the latter part of the twentieth century, the Conservative government’s attempt to reimpose silence through the notorious section 28 did significant harm but also reinvigorated liberation movements. Yet some of the most prominent campaigners on issues such as age of consent reform drew upon notions of fixed and immutable sexual identity which even the Wolfenden Report had not fully embraced.87 In the twenty-first century, assimilation became the preferred way of containing threats to heteronormativity when, echoing Wolfenden’s offer of respectability in return for discretion, a different Conservative government legislated for marriage equality.88 Same-sex couples were now able to marry provided that they conformed to normative expectations of respectable monogamy – and did not quibble at the subtle indicators of different status such as the embarrassed statutory silence about what might constitute consummation or adultery. The Wolfenden Report’s legacy has become more subtle, but it has not disappeared.

Notes

  1. 1. Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1957).

  2. 2. Brian Lewis, Wolfenden’s Witnesses: Homosexuality in Postwar Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 7.

  3. 3. Lewis, Wolfenden’s Witnesses, 7–8.

  4. 4. Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960, Genders and Sexualities in History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 185.

  5. 5. Kate Gleeson, ‘The Timeless Aberration: Wolfenden and the Making of Modern Prostitution’, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 16 (2007): 69–83.

  6. 6. For a full account, see Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens.

  7. 7. The organisations’ names and composition changed but their best-known incarnations were the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts and the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH).

  8. 8. Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 1885; Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 1922.

  9. 9. For example the Disorderly Houses Act 1751.

  10. 10. Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens, 174–5.

  11. 11. Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution; and see Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens, 197–8.

  12. 12. Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, 140.

  13. 13. Originating in section 3, Vagrancy Act 1824.

  14. 14. John Wolfenden, Turning Points (London: Bodley Head, 1976), 142.

  15. 15. Gleeson, ‘The Timeless Aberration: Wolfenden and the Making of Modern Prostitution’, 79–82.

  16. 16. Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens, 186.

  17. 17. There was considerable criticism of the Bill from the Opposition as well as backbench Conservatives, and a lack of wider social consensus: Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens, 199–201; Gleeson, ‘The Timeless Aberration: Wolfenden and the Making of Modern Prostitution’.

  18. 18. Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens, 191.

  19. 19. See for example Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981); Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 2016); Leslie Moran, The Homosexual(ity) of Law (London: Routledge, 1996); Justin Bengry, ‘Queer Profits: Homosexual Scandal and the Origins of Legal Reform in Britain’, in Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years, ed. Heike Bauer and Matt Cook (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 167–82; Derek McGhee, ‘Wolfenden and the Fear of “Homosexual Spread”: Permeable Boundaries and Legal Defences’, Studies in Law, Politics and Society 21 (2000): 65–97; Harry Cocks, ‘Conspiracy to Corrupt Public Morals and the “Unlawful” Status of Homosexuality in Britain after 1967’, Social History 41, no. 3 (2016): 267–84, https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2016.1180899.

  20. 20. An Acte for the punysshement of the vice of Buggerie (25 Hen 8 c 6). There was a short-lived interruption from its repeal in 1553 to re-enactment in 1563.

  21. 21. Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London: Thomas Basset, 1681), 58; Edward E. Deacon, A Digest of the Criminal Law of England; as Altered by the Recent Statutes and the Consolidation and Improvement of It (London: Saunders and Benning, 1831), 125.

  22. 22. Charles Upchurch, ‘Beyond the Law’: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain, Sexuality Studies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021).

  23. 23. Upchurch, ‘Beyond the Law’, 3.

  24. 24. Section 61, Offences Against the Person Act 1861.

  25. 25. Upchurch, ‘Beyond the Law’, 190–92.

  26. 26. See for example the debate on the Labouchere amendment: HC Deb 6 August 1885, vol. 300, cols 1397–8.

  27. 27. Section 11, Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 1885.

  28. 28. Charles Upchurch, Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Harry Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010).

  29. 29. Upchurch, ‘Beyond the Law’, ch. 8.

  30. 30. The National Archives, HO 144/216/149134 ‘Unnatural Offences Cases: Memo of Mr Lushington’ (February 1888).

  31. 31. The National Archives, HO 144/216/A49134 ‘Unnatural Offence Cases: Opinions of certain judges on sentences’.

  32. 32. Lewis, Wolfenden’s Witnesses: Homosexuality in Postwar Britain, 6.

  33. 33. ‘A Social Problem’, The Times, 1 November 1953; Church of England Moral Welfare Council, ‘The Problem of Homosexuality’ (London: Church of England, 1954); Matthew Grimley, ‘Law, Morality and Secularisation: The Church of England and the Wolfenden Report, 1954–1967’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 60, no. 4 (2009): 725–41.

  34. 34. Lewis, Wolfenden’s Witnesses: Homosexuality in Postwar Britain, 5; Bengry, ‘Queer Profits: Homosexual Scandal and the Origins of Legal Reform in Britain’; Chris Waters, ‘Disorders of the Mind, Disorders of the Body Social: Peter Wildeblood and the Making of the Modern Homosexual’, in Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–19641, ed. Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999), 137.

  35. 35. Moran, The Homosexual(ity) of Law; and see Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800.

  36. 36. Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, 24 (emphasis added).

  37. 37. Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, 24 (emphasis added).

  38. 38. For a fuller account see for example Kate Gleeson, ‘Freudian Slips and Coteries of Vice: The Sexual Offences Act of 1967’, Parliamentary History 27, no. 3 (2008): 393–409.

  39. 39. Gleeson, ‘Freudian Slips and Coteries of Vice’, 398.

  40. 40. HC Debates, 19 December 1966, col. 1078.

  41. 41. Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, 25.

  42. 42. Section 1(2), Sexual Offences Act 1967; Gleeson, ‘Freudian Slips and Coteries of Vice: The Sexual Offences Act of 1967’, 406–9.

  43. 43. Section 28, Local Government Act 1988.

  44. 44. McGhee, ‘Wolfenden and the Fear of “Homosexual Spread”: Permeable Boundaries and Legal Defences’.

  45. 45. Tommy Dickinson, ‘Curing Queers’: Mental Nurses and Their Patients, 1935–74, Nursing History and Humanities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), ch. 5.

  46. 46. Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000.

  47. 47. Earl of Arran, HL Deb, 12 March 1965, col. 77.

  48. 48. Caroline Derry, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: Three Centuries of Regulation in England and Wales (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 202–5.

  49. 49. Lord Arran, HL Debates, 21 July 1967, col. 1078.

  50. 50. Cocks, ‘Conspiracy to Corrupt Public Morals and the “Unlawful” Status of Homosexuality in Britain after 1967’, 279.

  51. 51. Knuller [1973] AC 435 (HL).

  52. 52. Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill 1994; Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000

  53. 53. The distinctions between these – or indeed the extent to which such distinctions can or should be made – have been extensively discussed in lesbian history from its earliest moments: the first comprehensive book on lesbian history (Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (London: The Women’s Press, 1981) was already able to draw upon existing literature and make its own interventions into the debate.

  54. 54. See the divorce case Spicer v. Spicer (Ryan intervening) [1954] 3.

  55. All ER 208, discussed in Derry, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law, 215–16.

  56. 55. Agatha Christie, A Murder Is Announced (London: Collins Crime Club, 1950).

  57. 56. Derry, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law, 212–18.

  58. 57. Pat Thane, ‘Population Politics in Post-War British Culture’, in Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964, ed. Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999), 114–33; Marie Blanche Smith, The Single Woman of Today: Her Problems and Adjustment (London: Watts & Co, 1951); Laura Hutton, The Single Woman: Her Adjustment to Life and Love (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1960).

  59. 58. Derry, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law, 220.

  60. 59. D.M.C. 1964. More Thoughts on the ‘Public Image’. Arena Three, September.

  61. 60. Rebecca Jennings, ‘ “The Most Uninhibited Party They’d Ever Been to”: The Postwar Encounter between Psychiatry and the British Lesbian, 1945–1971’, Journal of British Studies 47, no. 4 (2008): 898.

  62. 61. The National Archives HO 345/7.

  63. 62. Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, 59, table (a).

  64. 63. Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, 38 (emphasis added).

  65. 64. See memoranda, TNA HO 345/8; and the transcripts of witness evidence, e.g. TNA HO 345/13, questions 1164, 1342, 1375–6, 1760–64, 1960, 2396–9, 2607, 2630, 2912–16, 2936, 3024–5, 3084, 3111–21, 3223–4, 3336–9.

  66. 65. War Office, Memorandum, TNA CHP/47, para 1; British Medical Association, ‘Homosexuality and Prostitution’ (London: TNA HO 345/9, 1955).

  67. 66. Dr J. A. Hobson, Royal Medico-Psychological Society, at TNA HO 345/13 question 3335.

  68. 67. Drs Kelnar and Dick, Tavistock Clinic, at TNA HO 345/13 question 2912.

  69. 68. Rev Sherwin Bailey, Church of England Moral Welfare Council, at TNA HO 345/13 question 1376.

  70. 69. Hugh Klare, TNA HO 345/13 question 1761.

  71. 70. F.E. Baker, TNA HO 345/13 question 1764.

  72. 71. For example, TNA HO 345 13 questions 1760, 2396–2399, 3224, 3339.

  73. 72. Stonewall, ‘Age of Consent’, http://www.stonewall.org.uk/information_bank/ criminal_law/66.asp, accessed 13 December 2006.

  74. 73. Derry, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law, 230.

  75. 74. Sentencing Guidelines Council, ‘Sexual Offences Act 2003 Definitive Guideline’ (London: Sentencing Guidelines Secretariat, 2007); Derry, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law, 258.

  76. 75. R v. McNally (Justine) [2013] EWCA Crim 1051.

  77. 76. R v. Kyran Lee (Mason) (unreported, 16 December 2015, Lincoln Crown Court).

  78. 77. See for example the moral pronouncements in R v. Brown [1994] 1 AC 212.

  79. 78. Matthew Waites, ‘Inventing a “Lesbian Age of Consent”? The History of the Minimum Age for Sex between Women in the UK’, Social & Legal Studies 11, no. 3 (2002): 323–42.

  80. 79. Regulation 40D, Defence of the Realm Act 1914; Regulation 33B, Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939.

  81. 80. Section 71, Sexual Offences Act 2003.

  82. 81. Sexual Offences Review, ‘Setting the Boundaries: Reforming the Law on Sex Offences, Vol 1’ (London: HMSO, 2000), para. 6.2.2.

  83. 82. Derry, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law, 252–3; Carl F. Stychin, Governing Sexuality: The Changing Politics of Citizenship and Law Reform (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2003), 36.

  84. 83. Sexual Offences Act 1985, replaced by section 51A Sexual Offences Act 2003; section 53A Sexual Offences Act 2003.

  85. 84. For example, Crown Prosecution Service, ‘Prostitution and Exploitation of Prostitution’ https://www.cps.gov.uk/publication/prostitution-and-exploitation-prostitution, accessed 23 September 2024.

  86. 85. Rebecca Jennings, A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex between Women since 1500 (Oxford: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007), 169–85.

  87. 86. Wolfenden, Turning Points, 146.

  88. 87. Rosemary Auchmuty, ‘Feminist Approaches to Sexuality and Law Scholarship’, Legal Information Management 15 (2015): 6, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1472669615000055; Matthew Waites, ‘Equality at Last? Homosexuality, Heterosexuality and the Age of Consent in the United Kingdom’, Sociology 37, no. 4 (2003): 644–8.

  89. 88. Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act 2013.

Selected bibliography

  • Auchmuty, Rosemary. ‘Feminist Approaches to Sexuality and Law Scholarship’. Legal Information Management 15 (2015): 4–7. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1472669615000055.
  • Bengry, Justin. ‘Queer Profits: Homosexual Scandal and the Origins of Legal Reform in Britain’. In Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years, edited by Heike Bauer and Matt Cook, 167–82. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
  • British Medical Association. ‘Homosexuality and Prostitution’. London: TNA HO 345/9, 1955.
  • Church of England Moral Welfare Council. ‘The Problem of Homosexuality’. London: Church of England, 1954.
  • Cocks, Harry. ‘Conspiracy to Corrupt Public Morals and the “Unlawful” Status of Homosexuality in Britain after 1967’. Social History 41, no. 3 (2016): 267–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2016.1180899.
  • Cocks, Harry. Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century. London: I.B. Tauris, 2010.
  • Coke, Edward. The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England. London: Thomas Basset, 1681.
  • Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1957.
  • Deacon, Edward E. A Digest of the Criminal Law of England; as Altered by the Recent Statutes and the Consolidation and Improvement of It. London: Saunders and Benning, 1831.
  • Derry, Caroline. Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: Three Centuries of Regulation in England and Wales. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
  • Dickinson, Tommy. ‘Curing Queers’: Mental Nurses and Their Patients, 1935–74. Nursing History and Humanities. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.
  • Gleeson, Kate. ‘Freudian Slips and Coteries of Vice: The Sexual Offences Act of 1967’. Parliamentary History 27, no. 3 (2008): 393–409.
  • Gleeson, Kate. ‘The Timeless Aberration: Wolfenden and the Making of Modern Prostitution’. Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 16 (2007): 69–83.
  • Grimley, Matthew. ‘Law, Morality and Secularisation: The Church of England and the Wolfenden Report, 1954–1967’. Journal of Ecclesiastical History 60, no. 4 (2009): 725–41.
  • Jennings, Rebecca. A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex between Women since 1500. Oxford: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007.
  • Laite, Julia. Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960. Genders and Sexualities in History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
  • Lewis, Brian. Wolfenden’s Witnesses: Homosexuality in Postwar Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
  • McGhee, Derek. ‘Wolfenden and the Fear of “Homosexual Spread”: Permeable Boundaries and Legal Defences’. Studies in Law, Politics and Society 21 (2000): 65–97.
  • Moran, Leslie. The Homosexual(ity) of Law. London: Routledge, 1996.
  • Sentencing Guidelines Council. ‘Sexual Offences Act 2003 Definitive Guideline’. London: Sentencing Guidelines Secretariat, 2007.
  • Sexual Offences Review. ‘Setting the Boundaries: Reforming the Law on Sex Offences, Vol 1’. London: HMSO, 2000.
  • Stonewall. ‘Age of Consent’. Accessed 13 December 2006. http://www.stonewall.org.uk/information_bank/ criminal_law/66.asp.
  • Stychin, Carl F. Governing Sexuality: The Changing Politics of Citizenship and Law Reform. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2003.
  • The Times. ‘A Social Problem’. 1 November 1953.
  • Upchurch, Charles. Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
  • Upchurch, Charles. ‘Beyond the Law’: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain. Sexuality Studies. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021.
  • Waites, Matthew. ‘Equality at Last? Homosexuality, Heterosexuality and the Age of Consent in the United Kingdom’. Sociology 37, no. 4 (2003): 637–55.
  • Waites, Matthew. ‘Inventing a “Lesbian Age of Consent”? The History of the Minimum Age for Sex between Women in the UK’. Social & Legal Studies 11, no. 3 (2002): 323–42.
  • Waters, Chris. ‘Disorders of the Mind, Disorders of the Body Social: Peter Wildeblood and the Making of the Modern Homosexual’. In Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–19641, edited by Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters, 134–51. London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999.
  • Weeks, Jeffrey. Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. London: Quartet Books, 2016.
  • Weeks, Jeffrey. Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800. London: Longman, 1981.
  • Wolfenden, John. Turning Points. London: Bodley Head, 1976.

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