Humanism And Sexual Freedom Collide

Andrew Copson 0:01

Welcome to Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage Podcast brought to you by Humanist UK. I'm Andrew Cobson, Chief Executive of Humanist UK.

Madeleine Goodall 0:09

And I'm Madeline Goodall, head of the Humanist Heritage Project.

Andrew Copson 0:13

We're the hosts of this new podcast series where we will be speaking with experts about Britain's humanist history.

Madeleine Goodall 0:18

Uncovering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped both humanist thought and our national life. Throughout modern British history, the movements for sexual freedom and freedom of belief have often converged, challenging moral orthodoxy and religious authority in the name of human dignity. From the first efforts of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee and the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology through the Ethical Union's Advocacy for Decriminalisation before the Wolfenden Committee, to the founding of the Gay Humanist Group after the Gay News Blasphemy trial, humanists have helped drive the struggle for equality. This episode explores how these fights for freedom of conscience and sexuality have been intertwined, revealing the shared values that shaped both movements. We're joined by Leslie Hall, historian and retired archivist who's written extensively on questions of sexuality and gender in 19th and 20th century Britain. And Peter Parker, cultural historian and biographer of gay life in modern Britain, along with my regular co-host, Andrew Cobson. Together we'll uncover how humanism and LGBT activism have often evolved side by side and what that legacy means today.

Andrew Copson 1:39

Maddy,

Introducing Lesley Hall - Waves Of Progress And Backlash

Andrew Copson 1:40

there's not a humanist organization in the whole world today, from Uganda to the Philippines, where humanists aren't active in the cause of LGBT rights. And I know that the more that we explored the Humanist Heritage Project, the more that we found that that has always been the case also in in Britain, certainly for the whole history of the organized humanist movement. But the historical interconnections between humanists or the humanist way of life and movements for LGBT rights or liberation or even just social acceptance are very much intertwined even before the formal humanist movement begins, so way back into the 19th century. Today we've got an opportunity to discuss those themes with two experts. And I'd like to start by just asking them both to tell us a little bit about their work and main interests. So, Leslie, let's start with you.

Lesley Hall 2:28

I've been working on the history of sexuality for since the 1980s. I was doing my PhD during the 1980s, and that was actually on straight men, problems of straight men, but that kind of proliferated into wider questions of British sexual culture in the 19th and 20th century. And in the early 90s, I had a fellowship from the Harry Ransom Centre in the University of Texas to go and explore the archives of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, which was absolutely fascinating and shows all these kind of interweaving intersections of a whole range of sex reformers in the early 20th century, and how these overlapped and how they influenced one another, and how they were involved with a whole range of other causes, kind of producing a new kind of society on a different moral basis, even if they weren't, as it were, explicitly humanists or secularists, though, of course, a lot of them were. A lot of them came out of 19th century free thought, particularly, you know, people like the Malthusians, you know, who had a very strong tradition that way, which goes way back to the beginning of the 19th century. But they all intermingled and they saw that they had strong common interests around the abolition of the censorship laws for obtenity and also interests in the rights of the individual to free sexual expressions. This was they were a small and very weird group. You could say they were queer in the kind of more general, ooh, he's a queer fellow, isn't he? But I think they had a more influence than you would think from being such a small and arcane group that they kind of were the yeast within the society, and people who were involved with it had a longer influence than you might think. In fact, one I always come back to is that Gerald Gardiner, who was the Lord Chancellor of the reforming Wilson government in the 1960s, as a young barrister, was a member of the society in the 1930s, and I think he was in contact with all these people who came from that early movement. And then I got kind of got into all these other small, weird groups who were reforming sexuality and all these individuals.

Andrew Copson 5:19

One of the things that you start to see when you look at both humanist history and LGBT history is the way that there are these waves and they carry things forward over time. They don't retreat and they do pass it on.

Lesley Hall 5:30

Yes, they come and they go, and it's sometimes you think they move forward and then there is a retreat because you look at the 20s and 30s and you think there were advances made then, or people's ideas changed in ways, and then you see the 50s and you think, oh my god, what a backlash! And I'm sure Peter can speak here about some of the ways the 50s saw a terrible backlash. I mean, I've read his book, I mean at the Some Men in Luns, and I've read the first volume, which is in many ways extremely depressing. Yeah, oh good. I'm I'm glad to hear that, you know.

Introducing Peter Parker - Housman Brothers, Forster & Other Key Figures

Andrew Copson 6:09

Let's answer your work, Peter, if we can, because if that's uh we've talked about this first wave of sort of utopian, slightly hand-mitted, handmade.

Lesley Hall 6:18

Yes, I think they are utopian.

Andrew Copson 6:21

And then if we come on to the what more second uh that hard-headed wave, Peter, you work mainly in the 20th century. Whereas uh Leslie said that there's a view at least of the mid-20th century, which is pretty grim.

Peter Parker 6:33

Yes, I started my writing career writing for the old gay news when it was a newspaper, and we're going to come on to that later. And at the time I was writing a book about the First World War and the English public school system, and of course, there was a great deal of discussion about God's place in the First World War and indeed homosexuality, or at any rate, men who suddenly wondered about the men under who were serving under them, people like Sassoon and Graves at that point, though he later changed his mind, and Owen. So there was quite a sort of theme there. I then went on to write a biography of J.R. Ackley, who was the long-serving literary editor of The Listener, the BBC's magazine, and a sort of crucial gay figure. He was Ian Forster's closest friend. And in fact, Ian Forster, who famously didn't believe in God and was very much humanist, features in most of my books. He's one of those sort of characters that pops up. And uh, here's dear old Morgan doing his cameo appearance. So I was very pleased to get him into my most recent book. But I also wrote other books about the First World War, and then I wrote a large, in the sense of vast and time-consuming biography of Christopher Isherwood, who famously converted or adopted Vedanta, the Indian philosophy, when he went to America in 1939. And so those were two key gay figures. And then I did a book on A. E. Houseman, also a rejector of God, and author of some of the most marvellous poems about God and his insufficiencies. And for him, as for Forster, losing religious belief at an early age was quite traumatic, but it was very much tied up with their own sexuality. And then my most recent book, which has just been mentioned, Some Men in London, which is chronologically arranged anthology starting on VE night in 1945 and going up chronologically arranged until 1967 when the Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalized homosexuality. And there there was a sort of because I was investigating everything, not just writers, but broadcasts and newspapers, police reports, court reports, psychiatric reports. And one of the things I discovered was we now forget because we're in such a secular society on the whole, that what a big part religion played in people's views of homosexuality in the 1950s. A director of public prosecution, Theobald Matthew, was a devout Catholic. And it was he who, with the home secretary and the director of the commission of the Metropolitan Police, pursued homosexual crime as it was known. And there was this witch hunt. Now, this has been disputed by more recent historians, but what I found was there was definitely a feeling that this was going on. But I think one of the things I discovered, people often ask me what surprised you when doing the research. And one of them was that most doctors and indeed psychiatrists, or not most, but a very large percentage of them, were regular church-going Christians. So a lot of what the arguments against legalizing homosexuality were to do with this was against God's law or it offended Christian sensibilities. So that was an unusual strand. And when you find even prison psychiatrists talking about how God should be involved in the cure or of homosexuality, and you think this is in, of course, in the House of Lords and House of Commons, there was a great deal of we are returning to the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah, the countries being overtaken, bishops fulminating. At the same time, I also discover, which will possibly come on to later, that a lot of those who fought for homosexual reform were in fact in the church. They were bishops or priests. But we'll talk about that later, I think.

Lesley Hall 10:25

Yeah. Just because you mentioned Hausmann, I feel I must be obliged to mention his brother Lawrence.

Peter Parker 10:32

Yes, indeed.

Lesley Hall 10:32

Who I adore. I adore Lawrence Hausman. I mean, he is my kind of gay, pacifist, male suffragist dead boyfriend, who was a pillar of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. He was Housman's brother, and he seemed to have been quite happy being gay. He was a friend of Edward Carpenter, he was a friend of George Ives, he knew everybody. And in fact, he thought George Ives was a bit too closeted and a bit too fearful of being arrested, and he was like, I am gay. Okay, he was in the theatre. That probably gave him a rather more kind of cheerful attitude towards the whole thing. But he didn't know about his brother A.E.

Peter Parker 11:14

I think they were uh surprisingly, well not surprising as Heisma's A.E. was quite difficult, but they weren't that close.

Lesley Hall 11:21

There was quite an age difference. Yeah, and he was editing A's papers after his death, and he writes to George Ives, he was one of us.

Peter Parker 11:30

Yes.

Lesley Hall 11:32

He publishes the late poems.

Peter Parker 11:34

Yes, and it's thanks to him we get the late poems, which are the most explicitly and also he published the famous article about whether or not Houseman had actually slept with Moses Jackson and possibly slept with Moses Jackson's brother. And this was an enormous sort of proper outing with some authority of A. E. Houseman, who would no doubt have been horrified, but at the same time might have been quite pleased in his way.

Lesley Hall 12:00

Yes, I don't know. I think there's something about Lawrence Houseman just going, and I think that it was something that was 19, early 20th century, that somehow shuts down in that 1950s period. Yes, these kind of flamboyant characters around the carpenter circle. There's George Ives, who is very kind of closeted and gets up secret organizations like the Order of Kironier.

Andrew Copson 12:26

If you think about someone like Lawrence Hausman, the Happy Hausman brother, and he obviously is very interesting to us because he was actually a very active member of Q Michikan vice president, like IM Forster, another good character that we'll probably come on to. What why do you said there, Leslie, something quite interesting, which is that he was well accepted by society, he had a great Times obituary that praised him to the rafters as uh maybe coded quite flamboyant in the way that they described him on his death, but nonetheless he was accepted. And then you

The 1950s clampdown

Andrew Copson 12:57

seem to imply that this was a higher level of acceptance than the reaction of the 1950s allowed. Is that right? I mean, both of you really, but starting with you, Leslie, is it true that, as you've already sort of alluded to, there's a more accepting culture developing as a result of these pioneers, and then it gets clamped down. That happens in other areas of British life in the 50s too.

Lesley Hall 13:17

I'm not sure whether it's about these pioneers or whether there is still a kind of we don't talk about that. It's a kind of don't ask, don't tell, he is a confirmed bachelor, he's flamboyant, but we don't talk about what he does in bed. I think there are codes there and different levels of society and different kinds of codes of speech. I know somebody who's working on the kind of the idea of the confirmed bachelor and what that actually means at the time, and sometimes it probably did just mean somebody who couldn't get married, but you know, that there are a whole lot of what do people mean when they say something and are there codes of silence and discretion? And because one of the things that the society that the SSSP was doing, these various people who were publishing works on inversion and the earning and the Iranian were doing, was breaking the silence because there was this whole thing we don't talk about that, it is not mentioned. Male homosexuality only appeared in kind of reports on criminal activity. We didn't talk about it aside from that, and of course, female homosexuality, we do not talk about that at all. There was the attempt to criminalize it in 1921, and God forbid we should put that in the laws. Women will find out about it, they might do it, they might go and explore. Let's keep that really quiet. Let's put the veil over that. So I think there were these ideas that not talking about it or allusing to it very codedly, so that only those who already knew would know what's going on.

Madeleine Goodall 15:11

I

The BSSSP And Breaking The Silence

Madeleine Goodall 15:12

don't want to interrupt the question because I know that Peter has written about this as well, the kind of who was almost tacitly acknowledged, but not outwardly. But just thinking because Leslie, you've mentioned the BSSP a couple of times now. And obviously, they were a really interesting organization that lots of people probably don't know about, and also were coming in behind groups like the Scientific Humanitarian Committee and also earlier proto-movements or early kind of movements towards shedding light on these things or massive sexuality, just talking about it. I just wonder if you could give a little pressy of that history.

Lesley Hall 15:49

Yeah, it starts in 1913 very informally with a meeting addressed by Magnus Hirschfeld. And they want of the famous German sex reformer and homophile advocate. I mean, I can assume everyone's heard of him, but of course they haven't. He is the guy whose institute in Berlin gets ransacked by the Nazis, and we've all seen the film of the library being burnt by the stormtroopers. So anyway, he addresses them in 1913, and they think, would it not be a good idea to have a society? And that's initially an all-male meeting, and they are, I think, all specifically interested in getting the subject of homosexuality discussed in a sympathetic fashion with an eventual view to law reform. But it expands beyond that. Hausman in particular has a very kind of I'm hesitant just to use this term in a humanist forum, but I want to say a broad church vision of sexual reform. I mean, he is a suffragist after all, and he's interested, you know, so they're getting in people who are interested in birth control, in the sexual rights of women, in divorce law reform, all these various interests, sex education of children, etc., etc. So they're getting in people who are interested in that. So all these people with a fairly broad vision of what a sexually reformed society would look like. And to some extent, there's a certain debate within the society, particularly people like George Ives, as to whether this is necessary. Do we want all these other interests? Are we not really about homosexual law reform and it getting people more interested in this? On the other hand, it's useful camouflage, it's kind of the tactical move to say we're not just about gay rights. But also, people at Hausman say it is not just this one thing, which is about getting rid of censorship, which of course is very interested in being a playwright, and stage censorship at the time was very heavy-handed. And also, people did have this image that it was actually all about homosexual rights. Maury Stopes certainly thought it was and was rather dubious about addressing the society on those grounds. So it had to maintain a fairly careful balance as to what it was really about. So it had kind of a certain amount of identity problems, I think. But I I think that was also to do with the fact that it had all sorts of fairly kind of contentious people who were members and constantly wrangling with one another. At one point, actually, Norman Hare, who is a distinguished, well, I'm not sure it's distinguished, I think the word that what comes to mind is actually notorious Harley Street specialist in sexual medicine, goes stomping off and forms the British chapter of the World League for Sexual Reform because he can't get on with the British society.

Andrew Copson 18:49

But this is our so this is our first real organized movement. Obviously, earlier in the 19th century, there's people like humanists like Bentham who are.

Lesley Hall 18:57

There's obviously people like Bentham who are writing in a somewhat covert way about this is should not be a crime. There are various elite people, elite men who are trying to get the death penalty for sodomy abolished. But that's very difficult. It has to be so covert, you just sneak it onto a bill for generally getting the capital penalty abolished. You can't do it at all in a very activist way. So that doesn't really happen until there's the big 1861 tidying up of the capital offences bill. But there is a that's a kind of a proto movement, but it's very much among the elite, and you feel it is driven by the fact that they had relatives or friends who were endangered by the existing laws. And it's not until the late 19th century that you get these movements, and you do get small groups, and you can't really pin them down because they're very badly documented, and you wonder are there discussions taking place in things like the Fellowship of the New Life and so on? And it is a mention that the free woman discussion circles are discussing abnormalities of desire as well as the suffrage. But again, it's difficult to say because these are small and informal groups. The other thing that's happening, you are getting discussions in again in elite male circles and things like the cannibal club. It's not extending to the wider circle, it is elite groups who are talking among themselves, like the medical profession. You could talk to other doctors, but God forbid you tell anyone else. The thing with the BSSP is that anybody over 25 who's interested in the subject can come along to the meetings. Anybody can write off and order the pamphlets. It's getting it out there in a way that had not previously been possible. And of course, a lot of the issue around works like sexual inversion was this is something anybody can read. It's not just, and there's a whole thing that's brought about among books publishers having to put this note on the page of front title page of sexological works that this is only for the medical and legal professions. This is not for your your common whores, you know.

Andrew Copson 21:31

You could

Sexual Inversion And The Obscenity Trial

Andrew Copson 21:32

just say when you just we'll come to Peter Mote. I'm not this isn't gonna be edited out, we'll come to Peter in a mote, and Peter, I'm gonna ask you about the activist organizations in the 20th century as a sort of follow-on from this. But Leslie, do you could you just say something like sexual inversion, which Havelock Ellis published in the 1890s? Was like just to explain what that book is.

Lesley Hall 21:50

Oh, yes. In the 1890s, sexual inversion was the book that Havelock Ellis wrote, which was intended to prove that homosexuality was not pathological, it was a lot. On the scale of, as it were, ordinary abnormalities that people have. I think the analogy he used was colour blindness. People have that and they are not pathological. It is just one of these curious things that happen to people. They are different from other people, but it is not a bad thing. So he wrote this book, Sexual Inversion, in collaboration with John Addington Simmons, who had already written two privately published and discreetly circulated works on the subject. And then Simmons died, and his extra said, no, you've got to rewrite the whole thing and need Simmons named out of it because of the family. And then there are all sorts of issues with trying to get it published because respectable publishers, respectable medical publishers, had very kind of, ooh, we're not sure we want to do that. So he publishes it with this rather dubious operation. And then it's being sold by somebody who is the secretary of a small organization which I have not yet mentioned called the Legitimation League, which is another small, weird body discussing matters around sexuality in the 1890s. And this is under observation by the police who think it's a hotbed of anarchists because they think anarchists are around and are plotting to blow up the houses of parliament and it's that they are weird. The police who have this kind of very weird vision of what it's doing and what it's like. So anyway, they buy sexual inversion from the Secretary who said it's not even being displayed for sale in the bookshop. He's selling it out of his sitting room. So that Chief Inspector Sweeney buys it and says, Okay, mate, you're nicked. We're gonna do you for obscenity. So there is a trial for obscenity, and there is quite a lot of discussion of this in the press. And of course, if it had just not been prosecuted, nobody would have heard of it because it is a very niche uh work and it it was done in published in a very low-key fashion, it was not much advertised, so it's it's all over the press because it's being prosecuted, and there's a certain amount of pushback about the prosecution, mostly in the rationalist and secularist press. And actually, I was looking over my notes on this the other day, and I've forgotten this. They're all saying we think this is a shocking thing, this book is being prosecuted, the freedom of the press, freedom of expression. Of course, we haven't actually read it yet.

Andrew Copson 24:36

So anyway, students don't need to read things to know that they shouldn't be banned.

Lesley Hall 24:40

Yeah, they should, but this sort of thing should be being discussed.

Andrew Copson 24:43

Exactly.

Lesley Hall 24:44

And of course, they know Ellis, they know he's a kind of good egg. He is the right sort of person to be discussing this. He's right on, you know, he's one of them. So anyway, the thing is that Bedborough, the chap who published it, finally caves and pleads guilty rather than doing a Bradlaw and Beasant and defending it. So it does actually get deemed obscene and cannot long be published in the UK. So every Ellis goes and publishes everything in the United States from then on, which the books are actually available in the UK fairly, you know, in libraries and specialist booksellers. But in fact, the publicity that he got from that trial was probably more than he'd ever got if it had not actually happened.

Madeleine Goodall 25:37

I was gonna say the Bradlaw and Beasant fruits of Fruits of Philosophy trial, in the sense that they that fruits of philosophy, a very interesting guide to some contraceptive measures, had been circulating for decades before they deliberately re-published it with a view to being prosecuted basically to talk to the law.

Lesley Hall 25:57

But he didn't actually want to be prosecuted. I think a better analogy is perhaps the well of loneliness. Except I don't I'm not sure James Douglas, when he did the whole vial of prussic acid column in the Sunday Express, thought he was going to give it quite so much publicity.

Andrew Copson 26:15

Coming

From Wilde to Wolfenden, via the World Wars

Andrew Copson 26:16

back to the question of organizations, Peter, when by the time we get into the 20th century where your work is particularly focused, people are organizing much more explicitly.

Peter Parker 26:27

Yes. I'd like to go back a bit because there was a question earlier about the idea of a flamboyant and what is actually the difference between some very effeminate or flamboyant person and someone who's actually gay. And as often in in discussions of homosexuality, we all go back to Oscar Wilde, who was all those things. And the idea that people floated around and were camp, we don't know anything about their sex lives. Of course, with the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895, we knew precisely what he did in bed because the various rent boys were rounded up to be prosecution witnesses. I think we were talking about the waves of this. Of course, homosexuality didn't really existed and there were laws against it, but the definition of homosexuality didn't really happen until the 1860s with uh Heinrich Ulrichs. And in the later in the century, you have people, there was a very interesting book called Queer Cambridge published earlier this year by Simon Goldhill. And this is about men who shuttled more or less between Eton College, the public school, and King's College, Cambridge. And a lot of those people, by our definition, would be gay or queer or homosexual, but they didn't necessarily identify, partly because homosexuality is an identity, had only very recently been formulated. So you had people like M. R. James, the famous Don who wrote The Ghost Stories, and AC Benson, the diarist, in fact, is a new edition of his diaries, were published earlier this year, who were clearly spent most of their time mooning after young men, but not thinking that they had anything to do with Oscar Wilde. So it was partly that what happens is you get people like Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany who actually started looking into it and saying, look, homosexuality is a worldwide phenomenon. It's not, as some people think, just a product of the English public school system or the universities. And it goes across the board. One of the things that I had trouble with when writing or compiling some men in London is this idea that kept cropping up, particularly in Parliament, and I regret to say by Labour members of Parliament in particular, that homosexuality was unknown amongst the working classes unless a hapless working class man had been corrupted by his elders and bettors. And the research I did showed that into court records shows this is completely false. But obviously, once homosexuality had been defined, then people started taking notice. And again, wild, a lot of people thought we really don't want this happening to anyone else, the people who wanted reform. And then, of course, you get the First World War. And because, as I said earlier, a lot of men in the First World War found themselves partly because of the circumstances, because if you're in a trench you're relying upon and your comrades and your comrades are being blown to bits about you, who obviously have very strong feelings about this, some of which have a sexual component, some of which don't. Therefore, after the First World War, it became a slightly tricky topic again, because although, as I said earlier, some of the First World War poets and many soldiers were clearly actually gay, and you know, there are a long lot of instances of people being court-martialed, uh, not least Vera Britton, famously her brother, was facing a court-martial for actual sexual relations with other soldiers, and he more or less it it's assumed he committed suicide. He walked into enemy fire, but he had no reason to do so apart from a court-martial was coming up. But that made it slightly tricky. Then we get the 1920s where everybody, everything hangs out, and like you look at the novels of Eve in War, which have many sort of gay characters of I mean, it's difficult. The terminology is tricky here, queer in the broadest sense, even if they weren't actually sleeping with people, though clearly some of them were. And so you then get the Second World War. And after the Second World War, because so many men were away from their families, it was felt that young men were being brought up with a without a positive male influence. And there was a perceived rise in juvenile delinquency after the war and homosexuality, and this was there was a moral panic about it. So this is why we get the sudden interest in homosexuality, and something must be done. So by the time you get to the 1950s, this is when there is a real clampdown on homosexuality that there hadn't really been, or not in the same way in the 20s and 30s. And then the government appoints the Wolfenden Committee under Sir John Wolfenden to look into homosexuality and prostitution. Quite an interesting combination. I think it gives you a fair idea of what people thought. And he gets the great and the good, and magistrates and policemen and Boy Scout leaders, army people, and people who supposedly know about these topics, including a couple of homosexuals. He was very reluctant to interview homosexuals. And they published their report in 1957, and that recommends that with considerable caveats, homosexuality should cease to be illegal as long as it is between consenting adults over the age of 21 in private, and it only would apply in England and Wales, so Scotland and Northern Ireland weren't, mainly because of religious objections to it, based within the Church of Scotland amongst the Catholic and Protestant communities in Ireland and Northern Ireland. And what had been something nobody discussed in polite society, between 1954 and 1957, there's this explosion of discussion about what homosexuality is, what causes it, how it can be cured or at any way tamped down. And you get everybody weighing in, whether it's a newspaper, columnists, or psychiatrists. One of the most shocking things about that I discovered while researching some men in London is how absolutely chaotic the psychiatric community was, had absolutely no understanding. People thought there was a real move in the right direction because the idea was that we should regard homosexuality no longer as a crime, but as an illness. Now, in today's thoughts, that obviously sounds grotesque, and it was because all the old Freudian stuff was trotted out young boys too close to their mothers, didn't have fathers around to beat homosexuality out of them, and so on and so forth. And the experts were always people who had absolutely clueless ideas or deranged ideas about what homosexuality was. Whereas, you know, back in the 19th century, the early 20th century, you had people like Magnus Hirschfeld actually saying, look, this occurs everywhere. It's not some sort of odd phenomenon and it occurs in the animal world. And because the government, when the first debate, it took the House of Parliament, the House of Commons, a year even to debate the Wolfenden report and its recommendations, and then they only took notice of it. And they said, our constituents would the general public won't stand for it, public opinion won't stand for a change in the law, with no this was just built on rhetoric and prejudice, had nothing to do with the facts at all. And we come to the probably the major campaigning body, which arrived in 1958, the Homosexual Law Reform Society. And this was formed largely to lobby parliament, to get them to take notice of the Wolfenden recommendations. And it was set up by a young academic called A.E. Dyson and a friend of his who was a married young clergyman called the Reverend Andrew Halliday Smith. Now, these are the sort of people that I was really wanted to get into the book in some considerable form, because we now live in a society where touch would, where we have all these homosexual rights. And I think a lot of young people in particular sort of somehow think they've always been there or they arrive by magic. And these people put themselves on the line. So it was very interesting that they did that. And one of the things they did was to get the great and the good, both heterosexual and homosexual, and from all walks of life, so including bishops, to sign a letter to the Times newspaper urging the government to change. And as they said in the letter, not only are all right-thinking liberal people in favour of a change in the law, but several bishops and several church leaders, certainly, Methodists from every walk of religious law. Also a lot of them were that said, of course, a lot of religious people were not in favour of a change in the law. There were a lot of bishops who were fulminating in the House of Lords saying it's like leprosy, it's spreading through society.

Andrew Copson 35:21

I think

Humanist Arguments For Decriminalisation

Andrew Copson 35:22

one of the the decriminalization became a core celebre for humanist organizations in the mid-20th century. And many of the people who signed that letter, as you say, and got involved, people like Bertrand Russell or Barbara Wood and Julian Huxley or A.J. Ayer himself, who was very involved in the humanist movement and had been for many decades. And I think probably, I mean, you can see it, Maddie might tell us a little bit about the humanist UK submission to the Wolfenden, the ethical union, as we were then called, submission to the Wolfenden Commission, but it's pretty uncompromising, and really along the lines that you've said, because obviously the way humanists came into this was to say, look, this is a natural phenomenon. You look around the world, you can see it. And if we based our social policy on facts and the experience of the world around us, we can see that. And then the second idea obviously being that it's also not harming anyone. This is a fundamental individual that people should enjoy. And I think really that was one of the reasons why decriminalisation became such a campaign for humanists from Leo Abser to, you know, AJ. Maddie, you read the submission to the Wolf and the Commission recently.

Madeleine Goodall 36:25

I think really it's yeah, as has been said, it was just some of the essentially least equivocal evidence to say, yeah, it should be decriminalised. And that this is common sense. As you said, it's if you look at it in the light of science, if you look at it in the light of compassion, these things are they tell us what is right to do. Which again, I think it's interesting looking back and thinking about the BSSP who saw themselves as that kind of note of interrogation and using the light of science to shine on these things. Which is not to say that there weren't any, you can find some fairly unimpressive opinions in the pages of, for example, the literary guide and things from people who had these slightly confused ideas along the lines of some of what Peter and Leslie have both said. But you also had people who, and lots of people, like, as you say, Eyer and Bertrand Russell and Dora Russell and all of these figures who were very much and very humanistically talking about the roots of why reform was needed, which was, yeah, it's common sense, it's rooted in science, and it's kinder and fairer and also more reasonable and more in line with what people actually want.

Peter Parker 37:44

I was quite struck by writing your book, Peter. I was just going to say that this humanist approach and to the Wolfenden Committee and the idea of science, the real trouble was that science, there was no the actual scientific evidence that they could produce, and Hirschfeld and various other people looked into. But the psychiatric community did not really believe in any of this. And when you see that a I just want to read this, a letter to the Wolfenden Committee from a senior medical officer and consultant psychiatrist at a prison, and he said Christianity is the only code of behavior that has unchanging and unvarying standards and values. And so he said that what should happen is that homosexual should be brought into the community, preferably the Christian community, which will be a very great step in overcoming their sense of inadequacy and inferiority. They are buttressed by the doctrine of the ability to do things at all faith, etc., etc. And he ends up by saying, if there is any other solution to the homosexual problem than belief in Christian doctrine and principles and faith, then I do not know it, nor do I find myself able to conceive one. Now, this is a leading psychiatrist. So you can see, and even worse than that, these comments were actually reproduced in the British Medical Association's submission to the Wolf and Report saying that these were the most valuable comments they'd ever read to an understanding of homosexuality. You have this extraordinary idea, whereas ages ago all the science had been there, and this is ignored, and it becomes this sort of extraordinary refusal, really. It's a refusal to even think straight, if I can use that expression.

Andrew Copson 39:25

Maybe

Psychiatry Religion And The Albany Trust

Andrew Copson 39:26

this is a good time to come on to the more formal LGBT humanist movement when it started in the 1970s. We'll talk about the Get News trial in in a moment. But uh I say we could should move on to that now because you've just reminded me, Peter, of the sort of things that the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, when it was formed in 1979 and through the 80s, we still happen to deal with from psychiatrists in relation to conversion therapy. This was one of LGBT humanist early campaigns which you're still working on now. But you've got exactly that same sort of misguided material coming from professionals even then, even very recently.

Peter Parker 39:58

And this is why the Homosexual Law Reform Society also had a branch called the Albany Trust. And this was set up specifically so that homosexual men and lesbians could actually go to psychiatrists who, rather than saying we can give you this therapy and that therapy, often shock therapy, the administrative LSD emetics and all sorts of things that seem to be totally unethical. Actually, what they will do is they will help you live with being homosexual, help you to accept yourself. And this was an enormous step forward and a complete move away from the more general psychiatric community and the British Medical Association under these bodies. It was very much needed, and there are some very interesting notes. They did a survey where people anonymously, it was sort of multiple choice questions and asked them what were their backgrounds, how did they come to see therapists, and what was the therapy and what was the effect. And most of the ones I read, and there were lots of them, but I did try and do a proper survey. A lot of them just said, I had all this therapy, some of it was very unconventional, and it made absolutely no difference to me at all, and I'm still gay. But in some cases, they said, actually, you know, I do feel better about it. So in some cases the therapy were, but often in the face of what they were being told by the psychiatrists.

Madeleine Goodall 41:22

Am I right in saying that Anthony Gray was involved in the Albany?

Peter Parker 41:26

Yeah, Anthony Gray was the long-serving secretary of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, and he then oversaw the Albany Trust. And it was called the Albany Trust because it was founded and met in Albany, the very posh residential. And it was where J.B. Priestley and his wife Jacetta Hawks, who are J.B. Priestley, had said some very untoward things about gay people in the theatre in the 20s and 30s, but he redeemed himself by actually being a sort of leading person in the Albany Trust and the Homosexual Law Reform Society. But it met in their chambers in Albany, and that's why it was called the Albany Trust.

Andrew Copson 42:00

The reason Nadie asked that question is because she spotted a humanist, haven't you?

Madeleine Goodall 42:04

Got a swoop on a humanist, yeah. And did a lecture for the Day Humanist Group fairly early on, which was just really interesting to read and very much talking about that, the kind of psychological impacts of these things.

Peter Parker 42:17

It would be very interesting to compare those lectures with Halady Smith, the married clergyman who obviously worked very closely with Gray, uh, actually wrote a sort of defense of homosexuality from a Christian viewpoint. So there were these sort of two uh they seem to get on very well. So I suppose there were both sides.

Mary Whitehouse And Gay Humanists

Andrew Copson 42:36

Listeners to this podcast can go and read the lecture that Anthony Gray gave to the Gay Humans Group in 1980. It was called Being Rational About Being Gay, and it was uh an excellent talk. Let's talk a little bit now about in fact, I think there's a printed version in our archive, isn't there, on bright pink paper, Mike?

Madeleine Goodall 42:51

Yeah, the beautiful that's also got the more in Duffy one as well. Let's talk about it as well.

Andrew Copson 42:58

So, yeah, so we get, although we've had this century or more of humanists supporting LGBT rights in various ways, making contributions to the formal movement for gay artists in the 20th century, it's not until 1979 that a gay humanist group actually sets up. And I remember when I was first getting involved in I chaired LGBT humans for a little while, but I first realized I first got involved in it 20 years ago, which seems like too much time then can exist in your life. But nonetheless, it did. And I found it such a wonderful experience because a lot of people who get involved in any movements of that kind, you know, it was just so wonderful to meet people 20 years ago who were then in their 80s, who had so much history and interesting involvement things to say. But I remember asked one of them, why did you set up a gay humanist group in the first place? Because surely it's automatic that humanists support the alliance. And they said, well, no, actually. Often when they went to humanist conferences, kindly older members would ask them, maybe they just hadn't met the right girl yet, or whatever. So there were still sort of casual people who were free thinking. And humanistically inclined reason for gay humanists to think they needed their own group. But of course, the actual trigger was Mary Whitehouse, wasn't it, Maddie?

Madeleine Goodall 44:08

Yeah, they considered themselves born of Mary because she argued that in the backlash after her successful prosecution of gay news for blasphemy after they published the James Kirkhop poem, that it was an intellectual gay humanist lobby who were firing up all of this furore against her. And uh a group of gay humanists thought that doesn't exist, but perhaps it should. And thus the gay humanist group was born in 1979 and launched a campaign of homosexual equality conference in Brighton in summer 1979. And very much, as Andrew said, they really did have this dual purpose of telling humanists about gay rights and gay issues, and also teaching or introducing gay people to humanism, particularly as a or as a kind of alternative or as a much more inclusive worldview and set of beliefs than they may have been raised in if they were from a kind of Christian background or even had experienced things like conversion therapy, which was a cause of the gay humanist group from the very beginning.

Andrew Copson 45:16

All of

After Section 28 and the Continued Struggle

Andrew Copson 45:17

this brings us to the late 20th century and the post-partial decriminalisation world of LGBT activism, in which obviously LGBT humanists was part, and there were many other groups fighting for many other causes, and not just the mopping up of rights, but of course things like employment discrimination, a company against, and then for the abolition of section 28 and so many other things like marriage rights as well. From looking, as it were, from the long view of history, Leslie and Peter, what's the flavor of the late 20th century for you, Leslie?

Lesley Hall 45:47

I think it's always dubious to say, oh, look, the battle is over, the struggle has won. Let's boogie. We don't need to fight anymore. We can close down the office, we can, you know, the organization is no longer needed. At least we can put our archives in a repository. At least there has been good archiving, I think. This is me being an archive nerd, okay? I've heard of people who ran campaigns and said, Oh, we've won the cause, we've shredded all the archives, you know, and I go and bag my head on things. But I my feeling is that mostly this struggle has been well archived. There is been a good deal of effort to record it, at least the record's there. But I feel that just because it looks like it's over, it isn't necessarily over. This is in the long juree of history. You think things get better for a bit, and it looks like, oh wow. We see this with so many causes in the suffrage movement, and yeah, everything. You think, oh wow, we've won this, and then you think we won that, and now look where we are. So don't give up the struggle, keep keep fighting. Make sure that you don't get complacent and keep an eye out where they're coming at you this time.

Peter Parker 47:01

Peter, what's your perspective on this? I think that the later decades of the 20th century gave no room for complacency at all. First of all, in the wake of the passing the Sexual Offences Act, which partially decriminalized homosexuality, those homosexual crimes that remained on the statute book, there were there was a rise in prosecutions. More people were prosecuted after than before. So that was a pretty firm idea of how things stood. That, you know, the battle was not won, and not even in England and Wales where it had been partially decriminalized. And you find things like that in private did not include hotel rooms, for example, so you could be prosecuted. And of course, the age 21, people were still being prosecuted. If you were 21 and you had sexual relationships with someone who was 20, you were still breaking the law. Then, of course, that was really why we needed the campaign for homosexuality and the gay liberation front, the first very British, the second coming from America, but then taken up here. And the whole atmosphere changed in in what I call my period, that's mainly 40s and 50s up into the 60s. If you wanted to get things done, you wrote letters to the Times and you got famous, well-known, liberal-minded people to sign it. By the 70s, when I came to London, we were on marches in the streets, and it was a very more confrontational, and that was much needed. We then got AIDS and clause 28, and all the homophobes came rushing out of their own closets. And I'm sure people remember that people thought that, or people claimed that AIDS was, you had senior police saying AIDS was brought on by gay people by their behaviour, they were swelling round. I think in their own sewage, where I think he was the head of the Manchester police said, We also got that the backlash, the again, religion came into it. There was the famous pulpit puffs, because there was the debate about homosexuality in the Church of England, and the sun ran that. And the AIDS, several people said this is God's punishment for being too liberal about homosexuality. So, in a way, it was a pretty dark period. I mean, there were moments of light, and there was certainly movement forward. And I think it's only really till we got to the 21st century that things did start to really move forward. But there was always this thing that, you know, one step forward, two steps back, things like clause 28. There were all these, we all thought, oh, we're moving forwards, but history isn't a smooth run. There are always steps backwards. And I think this definitely applied. And I end the introduction to the first volume of some men in London saying a lot of modern people, a lot of contemporary people be appalled and shocked and disgusted and dismayed by the sort of material I'm reproducing, much of it saying appalling things about homosexuality. But as I say, so they should be. And one of the reasons they should be is because to remind us what it was like and make sure we don't go backwards, which can easily happen. I mean, you only need to look around the world generally at other many countries in which homosexuality is still illegal, in some cases carrying a death penalty. So I don't think there's any room for complacency worldwide, but I also think there's not much room for complacency here. The battle is never really won. Or those rights that we enjoy can be stripped away or chipped away. And so I've I know Leslie said my book first volume was very depressing, and I tried to put in some lighter moments because I now sound as though I'm again being this voice of doom, which I'm not. I think we're living in a very good time, just we need to still be on our guard.

Andrew Copson 50:42

And that is a lesson from history, isn't it? Just as you were saying, and it's not just overseas, it's here too. Very recently, we saw Christian nationalists ranked up in old Compton Street, chatting about immorality and black shirted uniforms. And that's there's a lesson from history that we could we could learn too. But it's interesting what you say, this point about these moments in history where it's not the progress isn't linear. We spoke at the beginning about waves, and I think about something like the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, which we were talking about a moment ago, which in the 1980s, at the same time as it was campaigning against the religious backlash against gay people because of AIDS, was also organising the first televised affirmation ceremony between gay couples, same time as with Section 28 and the new prosecution, things happen at the same times, don't they? And that's been true throughout history as well, as we've discussed.

Madeleine Goodall 51:30

I think things that are joyful and um and celebratory and rooted in community because that's the real thing. And I remember when we first started looking into the archives at the Bishopsgate Institute of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, and somebody came to me and said, Oh, we were putting on plays by the way, and we were doing these, all these things that were, it wasn't just about fighting battles all the time. It was also about the real affirmation of being with other people, of yes, campaigning on these issues and championing rights, but also just having a good time and organizing film screenings and having kiss-ins and doing things that were deliberately fun and joyous. And I think that the two things do coexist. They have to, otherwise, how would we go on?

Peter Parker 52:18

I think um that even in the sort of 40s and 50s, when I gave a talk somewhere, a young man, not that young, in his 30s, I think, came up afterwards and said, This was so interesting. I had no idea there were gay pubs and clubs in the 40s and 50s. I didn't know that gay men had so much fun and so much sex. And it was slightly like looking back at the Victorians, think, oh no, they didn't have sex at all. These sort of histories are worth repeating just to remind people that there is a sort of continuity regardless of what's going on in in terms of law and civil rights and so on.

Favourite Figures And Where Next

Andrew Copson 52:50

We've asked our guests on this podcast, we started asking by accident, but now we're asking everyone who their favourite figure from the history we've been discussing is. Because it's a bit of a surprise, I'll give you a moment to think. But mine in all of this is AJ Eyre, he's my favourite humanist in this theme. Because when he was asked to take a more prominent role in campaigning for gay rights, he said he would. And then he joked that because he was a notorious womanizer, I'm sorry to say, in case any listeners realize it, he joked that he was very happy to do this, take a lead in this campaign, because at least no one could accuse him of doing so out of self-interest. It's a very sweet, humanist, straight ally line. Leslie, well, you've already said I've already said Lawrence Hausman.

Lesley Hall 53:33

Smooch, smooch. I suppose I've got to choose Stella Brown, who was, I guess, an ally. She was a passionate member of the BSSP. She was one of the first women to speak to it on lesbians. It's not a very good paper, but it's kind of opened up the discussion. And she seems to have been bisexual herself and was anyway. Read my biography of her.

Peter Parker 54:02

Always good advice.

Lesley Hall 54:05

I'm sure she was very much an ally.

Peter Parker 54:08

Excellent, Peter. I'm slightly torn, and this is really from queer history rather than necessarily humanist history. But two figures who I've already mentioned who both rejected Christianity, and it was partly because of their sexuality. So one is E. M. Forster, who is my sort of patron saint, and I sit at my desk with a photograph of him looking over my shoulder, the good angel. But I'm sorry to if this family is always coming in. But A. E. Houseman, I think the most unlikely, but not least for the poem which begins, The laws of God, the laws of man, he may keep, who will and can, not I. Let God and man decree laws for themselves and not for me. And if my ways are not as theirs, let them mind their own affairs. Their deeds I judge and much condemn, yet when did I make laws for them? And I think that is a very good, I'm surprised it wasn't actually taken up by the homosexual law reform society as a slogan. But I think what's interesting about that is it is the laws of God and the laws of men that were it shows what an influence religion had on making the laws and maintaining the laws, and his rejection of that I think is heartening.

Andrew Copson 55:15

They said in the mid-20th century that if Bertrand Russell was the head of the humanist movement, then Ian Forster was its heart.

Peter Parker 55:21

Yes, I think, and you know, Forster got into a lot of trouble for not publishing his homosexual novel, Morris. But actually, behind the scenes, he was giving vast amounts of money to the homosexual law reform society. He helped draft that letter to the Times. He was endlessly writing to the press about homosexual matters. So actually, I think he he was a quad, and I think in a very English way, he was a hero. I think Ishwood called him the perfect anti-heroic hero, and I think it's a very good definition. Imagine who's yours.

Madeleine Goodall 55:52

I think I might have been inclined to say Stella Brown if Leslie hadn't already, but I might say, because we didn't give well we didn't talk too much about her, but I do love Maureen Duffy. She's still with us, but I think as a both as a kind of figurehead within the wider movement, but then also for the early gay humanist group as their first honorary president giving lectures, being involved, lending her a name to them, and very much standing up for humanism and LGBT rights. I think she's just brilliant. She gets my vote this episode. Excellent.

Andrew Copson 56:24

Now tell us, Leslie and Peter, where can listeners find out more about your work?

Lesley Hall 56:28

You can try my website, which is if you look if you search under Leslie A. Hall, you should probably come up with my website, though goodness knows search engines these days are doing very weird things. We can put it in the show notes.

Peter Parker 56:42

And Peter. I also have a website which is www.peterperkawriter.com. And I suppose you could find out quite a lot about my interest by reading the uh Some Men in London, the two volumes, which contain a great deal of what we've been talking about, but much, much more.

Andrew Copson 57:00

Thank you both. Thank you for listening to Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage Podcast, brought to you by Humanist UK. To join, support, or find out more about Humanists UK's campaigns and services, visit humanists.uk or you can follow us on social media at Humanists UK. This podcast was produced by Humanize Live. Find out more about creating content for compassionate communities at www.humanize.live.

Madeleine Goodall 57:24

You can find out more about the rich history and influence of humanism on the Humanist Heritage website at heritage.humanist.uk