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Henry
VIII of England (c 1530-35) by
Joos
van Cleve; The Royal Collection
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Prior to this, same sex sexual behaviour had been dealt with in the ecclesiastical courts as a crime against the Will of God and against Nature. It was considered so appalling that it was only referred to obliquely, usually along the lines of "peccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum", or "that horrible crime not to be named among Christians".
The Buggery Act allowed the death penalty, which meant that the property of anyone executed could be confiscated by the Crown.
The first execution for buggery, along with treason, was of Walter Hungerford, 1st Baron Hungerford of Heytesbury in 1540, although it was probably the treason that cost him his life. Nicholas Udall, a cleric, playwright and Headmaster of Eton College, was the first to be charged with violation of the Act alone in 1541, for sexually abusing his pupils. In his case, the sentence was commuted to imprisonment and he was released in less than a year.
The last execution, on 17 November 1835, was of James Pratt and John Smith, two poor, married men caught in the act in a run-down boarding house in Southwark. Their appeals for clemency were rejected and they were hanged together before a crowd that was ‘excessive, but exceedingly decorous’, according to The Times.
1861 The Offences against the Person Act 1861 (under section 61, ‘Unnatural Offences’) dropped the death penalty. However, you still risked penal servitude for between 10 years to life.
1891 The Penal Servitude Act abolished the minimum penalty for sodomy.
Even then, the social consequences could be so appalling that:-
On 21 November 1891, at Newcastle Assizes (now the Crown Court), George Canham (28) and M Baker (31) were convicted of sodomy with each other and both sentenced by a Judge Wills to 10 years penal servitude. Baker committed suicide by taking poison in the police cell passage immediately after being sentenced.
1885 A late night amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 (referred to as the Labouchere Amendment, after Henry Labouchere, the man who put it forward) introduced the offence of "gross indecency", which made any remotely sexual act between men a crime. It ensured prosecutions might succeed where sodomy (in this case, specifically anal sex) could not be proved.
Most famously, it was used against Oscar Wilde, who was sentenced to two years' hard labour in 1895, and Alan Turing, who in 1952 agreed to have oestrogen injections (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison.
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Oscar
Wilde, one of the English language’s literary giants
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Alan
Turing, genius, mathematician, code
breaker, father of modern computing.
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John Wolfenden,
later Baron Wolfenden
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Despite some difficulty, the Wolfenden Committee were able to call three homosexual men to give evidence. What they said about the impact of the law on their lives affected the Committee’s recommendations.
It may also have helped that Wolfenden’s son, Jeremy, was homosexual.
Victim became a highly sociologically significant film; many believe it played an influential role in liberalising British attitudes towards homosexuality and made decriminalisation more likely. In retrospect, it is even more remarkable in that several of the actors were either themselves homosexual or closely connected to men who were. Among them were:
- Dirk Bogarde, who never came out but lived most of his adult life with Anthony Forwood.
- Alan McNaughton, who was a friend of actor Alec McCowen, who was homosexual.
- Hilton Edwards, who was partnered to the Irish actor, Micheál Mac Liammóir.
And finally...
2004 The Sexual Offences Act 2003 came into force, removing gay-specific offences and making all sexual offences gender neutral.
NOTE:
This post is based on a set of four posters created on behalf of Merton LGBT+ Forum for a display at Merton Civic Centre and Wimbledon Library during LGBT History Month 2017.
You can download the poster for this topic here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/24371157/Poster%202017%20-%20Gay%20Men%20and%20Law.pdf
Feel free to use them, if you wish.
