The credit for decriminalising male homosexuality in 1967 — for those over 21 in England and Wales at least — goes to Harold Wilson’s government, the Labour MP Leo Abse, and the Conservative peer Arthur Gore, 8th Earl of Arran.
Yet more than a decade before the Sexual Offences Act received royal assent, a journalistic campaign to overturn an unjust and unworkable law had begun in the pages of The Spectator. After the dust had settled in post-war Britain, disparate MPs held the sincere but mostly tacit belief that the law criminalising homosexuality desperately needed amendment, if not scrapping entirely. The Spectator was swift to champion the cause, in particular the key recommendation of the Wolfenden Report of 1957 that homosexuality in private be legalised between adults over 21.
A leading article in September 1957 set out the magazine’s position: ‘Whatever feelings of revulsion homosexual actions may arouse, the law on this point is utterly irrational and illogical. It is impossible to argue that homosexual actions between consenting males are more anti-social than adultery, fornication, or homosexual actions between consenting females, none of which are crimes.’
The article referred to the so-called Montagu Case, the most prominent of thousands of criminal trials for homosexual activity brought each year. In 1954, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu was imprisoned for 12 months for ‘consensual homosexual offences’ with some guests on his private estate; two of his friends received 18 months. The verdict so outraged The Spectator’s editor and proprietor, Ian Gilmour, that he wrote a 2,500-word broadside under his own name, which asserted that the trial was prejudiced by police malpractice. Gilmour subsequently opened up the pages of The Spectator to frank discussion of the issue and campaigned for a Royal Commission.
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